Thriving business of being a mistress

Huang Meien, who was born in Zhuhai 21 years ago, is slim and attractive. Yet she thinks she cuts a poor figure in the city's shopping malls when she sees the competition.

'My boss, who is from Macau, keeps a mistress,' says Ms Huang, who earns 900 yuan (HK$840) a month in a textile factory. 'His wife lives in the United States with their children. The mistress comes to the factory and throws her weight around. There is nothing we can do. There are many such mistresses here.' In the special economic zone of Zhuhai it costs about 3,000 yuan a month - pocket money for the chief of a factory or medium-size business - to keep a mistress. That includes renting an apartment and a monthly allowance, so she does not have to work and can be what local people call a bird tied by a golden thread.

There are thousands of them in Zhuhai and Shenzhen, home to industrial estates full of factories run by Hong Kong, Macau and overseas Chinese men, most working there without their families who stay at home because of the children's education, the wife's job, the better living environment.

It is the huge discrepancy in incomes that has spawned the mistress phenomenon, and the sex business in Guangdong.

Most painted ladies come from outside Zhuhai and Shenzhen, from parts of China with an average monthly income of 500-800 yuan and as little as 300 yuan in poor, rural areas. Zhuhai people refer to them as northern chickens with mushrooms, a pun on a popular Cantonese dish.

The businessmen find them at hotels, bars and night spots. Next to reports of the preparations for the handover to China in a year's time, the Macau Daily publishes photographs of the women, with their measurements, nickname and the nightclubs where you can find them.