So near, yet so feared: ladies of the fright

I'm reading a book, snappily titled The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World, by Shaun Rein. Cheap China as in the country, not the material used for making cups and toilets. Geddit?

When the author arrived in China in the mid-1990s, he was struck by how even provincial prostitutes were dazzlingly beautiful and strikingly young. Fifteen years later, he wrote that the hookers were "middle-aged, bloated women wearing cheap make-up" with "propped-up cleavages" that made them look like "overstuffed, raw sausages".

In the book's introduction, Rein uses this regrettable trend to illustrate how the mainland's economy and job opportunities have changed for the better; the diminishing number and quality of hookers shows that the young and beautiful girls are now choosing careers other than prostitution.

Alright, so perhaps the author and I visit different places and perhaps I don't scrutinise Chinese prostitutes as keenly as a red-blooded, male China-market researcher/author does. But in my experience, the pool of young mainland prostitutes has, if anything, increased.

Every karaoke bar, hotel bar, hair and beauty salon, massage parlour and not a few street corners are crawling with platform-shoe-tottering, long-legged, unusually busty, micro-mini-clad, rhinestone-glittering beauties with varying shades of orange hair.

If they're not prostitutes, I'll eat my own shorts.