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Niall Fraser

LAN LI is just the kind of person the enclave would be better off without.

 The 23-year-old's working day begins as night falls and by the time she clocks off 12 or so hours later she will have had sex with up to 10 men.

 At the end of the night, if she's lucky, the zipper compartment in her shiny black plastic handbag will carry HK$4,000. On a bad night she may walk home with less than a thousand.

 From Beijing, Lan Li is one of the 3,000 or so mostly mainland prostitutes still reckoned to be working the hotel lobbies, streets, nightclubs and saunas of trouble-torn Macau.

 Lan Li came to Macau by boat, after a stint as a 'hostess' in a Guangzhou nightclub while triad smugglers sorted out her 'papers'.

 Effectively she was working her passage, reckoned to have cost her between 4,000 yuan (HK$3,700) and 5,000 yuan.

 'I came here with three friends, we stay in the same apartment with five other girls. Maybe there can be problems but it's better for me to work alone, I get more customers,' she says.

 Six weeks ago, only child Lan Li was living with her mother and father in the San Li He district of Beijing.

 Working as a shop assistant, she earned less than 1,000 yuan a month. 'I want money, that's why I come here, sometimes I am happy and sometimes I am sad. My mother and father don't ask. I send my mother money.'  Lan Li's 'boss' takes $600 of every $800 she charges customers. She has a room, paid for by her minder in a hotel nearby.

 Another mainland girl, Ling Ling, 21, from Shanghai, works the lobby of a seedy hotel in the enclave's inner harbour area and charges $300 a time, making an average of around $1,500 a night. She says the bulk of that goes to her pimp. The rest, apart from enough to pay rent and keep, is sent back to her family.

 'My father has left home and my mother is sick - she cannot work - and I have two little sisters who need money,' she says.

 Ling Ling is reluctant to talk about how she got to Macau but says it cost her 5,000 yuan. She says her mother wants her two sisters to learn English so they can leave China.

 'But it is up to me to provide the money because I am the oldest,' she said.

 'I am in Macau for three months, I tell my mother I am a waitress in a club. I can't tell her what I do. I can't tell who I work for.'  According to police, the decision is probably out of her hands. If they are 'doing well' for their pimps, girls like Ling Ling will be forced to stay on or be shipped somewhere else.

 Either that or be arrested and expelled from Macau and sent back into the hands of smuggling gangs waiting across the water.



Caught in cash-for-sex trap