Christina Elizabeth Firpo's latest monograph provides a thoroughly researched account of the black-market sex industry in colonial Tonkin. As of 1921, the French government legalized and regulated prostitution to protect the empire's military troops from venereal diseases. As Firpo argues, the government's surveillance of prostitutes inadvertently fostered an underground sex trade, while failing to curb the spread of venereal diseases. Sex workers went underground to avoid the surveillance system's consequences, including registration and subsequent public shaming, mandatory gynecological exams, and prison-like time in dispensaries. Often a part of ả đào singers and bar girls’ work, colonial-era prostitution was never as straightforward as the colonial government perceived or legislated it. The historical research of an informal, hidden sex trade poses challenges due to the dearth of state and personal records. Yet, Firpo has combed through newspapers and literary works, interpreted official statistics and reports, consulted secondary materials, and compared prostitution and human trafficking in other contexts to assemble an archive and narrative that convincingly reveals this underworld to us.
The French government's policing unjustifiably targeted Vietnamese sex workers. Vietnamese prostitutes operated on the margins of society and were more vulnerable to violence, exploitation, and poverty. As discussed in chapter 2, colonial officials, along with some Vietnamese administrators and journalists, labeled Vietnamese female sex workers as the primary source of venereal contagion. They pathologized prostitutes along the lines of race, gender, sex, and class. Consequently, the colonial government ineffectively policed women's sexual activities, rather than directly addressing the spread of venereal disease.
The implications and interventions of Black Market Business go well beyond the French government's failures of public health. Firpo illustrates how Vietnamese women's experiences in the clandestine sex market provide a more capacious and accurate picture of colonial modernity's complexities and contradictions in Indochina. Colonial Tonkin's underground prostitutes had to navigate the economic conditions, political geography, as well as a radically changing culture.
The incapacities of French capitalism pushed women into black-market sex work. Economic conditions and structures in the Red River delta region pulled Vietnamese families into extreme poverty, which forced many daughters to migrate, often to urban areas, in search of economic viability. The French accumulation of land forced Vietnamese farmers into landlessness, sharecropping, and debt bondage. Colonial imposition of taxes and monocrop farming for export also contributed to peasants’ economic decline. These causes of poverty were compounded by a fragile economy's downturns, which caused the price of crops, such as rice and rubber, to plummet. The region also experienced overpopulation and extreme food shortages. Therefore, the French economy intensified extant practices of debt bondage in Southeast Asia and networks of human trafficking in the north delta region and the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands. In chapter 3, Firpo elaborates upon the history and conditions of debt bondage and human trafficking that trapped illicit sex workers in penury. Chapter 4 examines the most extreme consequence of this poverty: the trafficking of adolescent sex workers.
As detailed in chapter 1, sex workers eluded authorities by ducking in and out of areas under direct and indirect French colonial rule. The city of Hanoi, for example, fell under French legal code, but its suburbs were technically part of a protectorate, in which the Vietnamese emperor, located in Hue, had sovereign power over domestic affairs yet remained subordinate to the French. With the different laws for adjacent jurisdictions came the inconsistent enforcement of legal and public health policies. Sex workers took advantage of these fissures to attract clients from the city, yet at the same time managed to avoid authorities and the law. The women's negotiations of these borders remind us of colonialism's patchwork jurisdictions and inconsistent rule.
Chapters 5 and 6 explore how the illicit sex trade was part and parcel with the radical transformations of the interwar period. Chapter 5 tracks illicit prostitution in ả đào singing houses, a space of lyrical music and performance dating to the fourteenth century. By the interwar period, this art form had become associated with mandarin patrons, whose social and political significance had been displaced by the French authorities. Attracting an exclusively Vietnamese and Chinese clientele, the traditional art form often doubled as a cover, exceeding the legal parameters of prostitution. Conversely, chapter 6 focuses on European-influenced dance halls that appealed to the new Vietnamese and Chinese urban classes, as well as an array of travelers and troops from the far reaches of the French Empire. Mostly from impoverished rural areas, the women who worked in the clubs sold sex on the side. But like their ả đào counterparts, they resisted the state's label and regulations of a prostitute. These two chapters contextualize clandestine prostitution within the radical transformations of urban areas. Taken together, the six chapters of Black Market Business effectively show how the French government's policing of prostitution abetted a parallel economy that preyed on women.
