By The Financial District
Nov 30, 20202 min
In her five years as an escort, 24-year-old Ashley Chan (not her real name) has learned several tenets, including how to be absolutely discreet and why you should never fall in love. Welcome to the life of a high-end escort in Singapore, Yu Kang reported for South China Morning Post (SCMP).
In Chan’s new memoir, “Scarlet Harlot: My Double Life,” published by Epigram Books, the undergraduate and sex worker pulls back the veil on the sex industry in the squeaky-clean city state, revealing a sordid underbelly where men pay in the thousands for the hourly companionship of Chan and her peers – and what they do in the hours they’ve bought. Chan was actually forced to the sex trade by a father who separated from her mother and did not want to support her after high school.
“I’m proud to call myself a whore,” she says coolly in an interview. During her work, the escort and business studies undergraduate has been paid to kick a man in his genitals, choke a man wearing a hood, and ingest a nightly cocktail of drugs as a professional “party girl.” There were, of course, the garden-variety sex calls that were more uncomplicated: Chan would show up at a hotel and let her client do “whatever they wanted” to her for two hours.
In her book, Chan goes into prosaic detail about the world of sex work. She speaks of different tiers of sex workers (at the bottom of the food chain are “KTV girls” who work in karaoke lounges and in the Geylang red-light district, with escorts like herself on the top rung), of clients that have flown her around the world, and just how large a role race and nationality plays in determining a sex worker’s financial worth. “Escorts from Vietnam and Thailand are more beautiful, but they’re not as intellectual in their companionship,” she says candidly. “They’re beautiful in a ‘trophy wife’ or ‘bimbo’ sort of way – but they lack the ability to interact because of the language barrier.”