Xiaohui (小慧), now 20, hails from a village in Fujian Province, China, where she used to work as an assistant in a local clinic. That was until a year ago, when she came to Taiwan expecting to see a country of wealth and freedom, and hoping to earn some extra money for herself and her family. Instead, she's spent the past year as a prisoner -- first of the people-smuggling group she paid to get to Taiwan and then as a prisoner at a government detention center in Hsinchu.
The Hsinchu Detention Center For Mainland Chinese (大陸地區人民新竹處理中心), or so-called Chinlu (靖廬), is Xiaohui's temporary home, along with 900 other girls from China. Most share a similar story about their journey to Taiwan: First they were tricked to get on the boat to Taiwan. After reaching Taiwan, they were forced to become prostitutes. A few months later, they were caught and sent to detention centers.
At the detention center, the women wait for boats to deport them back to China. But it can be a long wait, delayed by paperwork and the vagaries of cross-strait relations. As people-smuggling and trafficking of prostitutes has become rampant, the detention center has turned into an overcrowded women's prison.
PHOTOS: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
Xiaohui lives in a cell for 30 people with 15 iron-frame bunk beds. When we visited Xiaohui, the detainees were reading on their beds or chatting in low voices. At lunch time, four detainees from the cell, including Xiaohui, went on their weekly duty to get lunch boxes for everybody.
Retrieving the lunch boxes is one of the few times in a day that detainees are allowed out of their cells. They're also led outside twice a day for morning and evening exercises.
"Because we have a big group of people here in the center, we had to adopt a military-style management," said Peng Ching-chin (彭鏡琴), deputy director of the detention center.
In each of the stainless steel lunch boxes are rice, stir-fried vegetables and egg. Each woman also gets an apple or orange.
"We found out in surveys that the women gain on average 2kg to 3kg here before they are sent back to China," said Peng with a proud smile.
According to Peng, the proportion of male and female detainees has undergone a drastic change in the past five years.
"Before, the majority here were men who'd stowed away from China to take odd jobs in Taiwan. ... The demand in the sex industry for cheaper labor is still strong. In the past two or three years, we have been receiving more and more women," Peng said.
Apart from the Hsinchu detention center, there are detention centers taking in illegal Chinese immigrants in Ilan and on Matsu, accommodating 2,800 people in total. According to the National Police Administration, 84 percent of the detainees are women.
An offer too good to refuse
Xiaohui said that one day, a year ago, she was in Fuzhou, China, drinking with friends. She was told that she could earn four times her salary at the time by working as a babysitter in Taiwan. "My family is very poor, so I thought it would be good to take a job for one to two months for the family," she said.
After two days huddling with two dozen girls in the hold of a boat, she reached Taiwan and was immediately taken to a "dormitory" arranged by the "agent." The agent asked her: "Weren't you told what you're going to do in Taiwan?"
The agent said he had spent NT$200,000 to buy her, so she had to do the job to at least pay the money back. "Otherwise, he said he would beat me up and inform my family that I was a prostitute," she said.
Xiaohui was uncooperative for two weeks, as the agent tried soft and hard tactics to get her to become a prostitute. He first took her to restaurants and tea houses, offering drinks and cordially chatting with her. When that didn't work, she was driven to the mountains and tied to a tree.
"They poured sugar water on me and ants were crawling all over my body," she said.
Xiaohui was in the mountains for a whole day, and then taken to a factory where she was blindfolded and raped by two men.
No pleasure tour
Xiaohua (
Every day, drivers sent the girls to Taipei city to work. Mostly they went straight to motel rooms. After a motel, they maybe went to another hotel or a client's apartment. "Sometimes we made seven to eight trips a day, and then they sent us back to the dorm," Xiaohua said.
Both Xiaohui and Xiaohua had been looking forward to seeing Taipei, watching movies and going shopping. But all they saw was the inside of motels. Less than three months after arriving, Xiaohui was caught in a client's house and sent to the detention center.
The Women's Rescue Foundation (婦女救援基金會) has been conducting research on women in the three detention centers for the past two years. Of its 200 case studies, the foundation found that more than 90 percent of the women were sold by people-smuggling groups and were forced into the sex industry. "Even for those who engage in prostitution with consent, there are serious situations of exploitation," said Chen Wan-hui (陳婉惠), deputy chief executive of the foundation.
"Compared with those who weren't smuggled into Taiwan, such as those who arrived on fake travel visas or through fake marriage with Taiwanese men, the people-smuggling is a business with low or almost no cost. There's a guarantee of profit," Chen said.
Living in the detention center, things have gotten better for Xiaohui. "But I just don't know when I can really go home," she said, adding that she's been there for eight months.
Peng, deputy director of the center, said the deportation procedure is based on the Kinmen Agreement, which was a working guideline dealing with smuggling cases, signed in 1990 by the Red Cross societies in both Taiwan and China.
"When we receive a group of people, we make a list recording their birth dates, origins and assign numbers to them. At the same time we fax this list to our Chinese counterpart. Theoretically, China will fax back a list telling us the people they have recognized and are ready to receive. We will then send the people to Matsu to wait for the Chinese Red Cross boat The Strait (海峽號) to pick them up," Peng said.
This seemingly simple process should take only one or two months. But during the current chill in cross-strait relations, it's taking more than six months for the detainees to be sent home. And during the six months following the presidential election in March, the detention centers did not receive any faxes from China, even after constant inquiry letters, Peng said.
As the repatriation process drags on, the detainees have become victims twice over -- first of the people-smuggling rings and then of the political tensions across the strait.
"We hope that both sides can put politics aside and take care of these women's rights. They should be seen as victims of people-smuggling, not just golddiggers coming to Taiwan. All they want is to be sent back as soon as possible," Chen said.
"Last week, I called my father in Fujian and he told me he worried about me a lot and felt that he has become much older. I feel really sad," Xiaohui said with tears falling from her eyes.
Taking the lunch boxes back from the kitchen to her cell, Xiaohui passed the gate over which a slogan reads: "Freedom, Democracy and Equal Distribution of Wealth."
Ironically, Xiaohui has seen little of those in her Taiwan experience.
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