Editor's Note: Over the next little while I am going to share some stories told to me by a girl I met in 2017 at a bar in Koh Pha-ngan, an island in the Gulf of Thailand just north of Koh Samui. Koh Pha-ngan is famous for its Full Moon Party with attracts upwards of 20,000 party-goers, sometimes more, every month. I met her in a bar on the outskirts of Thongsala, and persuaded her to leave the bar and travel the length of Thailand with me. The week after I met her, she got a text from a Thai friend who was working at a massage parlor somewhere in Korea. Her friend said the money was very good; much better than in Thailand. I was skeptical, so I told her to ask her friend what was involved. The friend said there was no sex, just massage. I had my doubts. I warned her that many Thai women were lured to Korea with the promise of jobs, but upon their arrival, they were instead forced into sex work by pimps who seized their passports and blocked any escape attempt. Despite my warning, she was insistent, so I bought her a ticket to Seoul...
My first week in Korea was very hard on me. The day I arrived, I was taken to a shop and immediately put to work. I serviced six different men that night, including the owner. The greatest number of men I had ever had in one night at the bar on Koh Pha-gnan was four. That had only happened once. The following day, the driver who had picked me up at the airport returned, and I was bundled off to another shop where the process was essentially repeated. This went on for the first week: another day, another shop.
I later learned that this pattern was typical for new girls. Someone like my friend would earn a commission from persuading someone like me to come to Korea to work. On arrival, girls like me would be picked up at the airport and taken first to one shop, and then another, and then another, to be offered as seemingly fresh meat to sex-starved Korean men. I was driven around to five different shops during my first week in Korea. Each day I would service five or six men, and sometimes more.
This was very different from my time as a bar girl in Thailand. There, I had some measure of control. Men would come into the bar, pick out a girl, buy her a 'lady drink' or two, sit with her a while and chat, and then negotiate a price... and I was free to accept or reject an offer. True, the offer was usually accepted. It was rare that a night went by without me accepting an offer, and while it didn't happen all that often, there were some nights when I would sometimes get bedded by more than one man, but in Thailand, it was my choice... and the men, but especially the men from Western countries, were usually nice, and handsome too. Not so much in Korean 'massage' shops.
There, I was on display along with several other girls. We would be seated at the front of the shop, heavily made-up, usually dressed in a see-through teddy and skimpy panties that left nothing to the imagination, in high heels that added four inches to our height. When a man would walk in, we'd stand and present ourselves. He would look us over and pick one of us. Then he would take us to a back room and fuck us. There was no pretence of 'massage'. In these Korean 'massage' shops, sex is sold in 30-minute chunks, so the men wanted to get straight down to business. In the room, my job was to get the man hard, first with my hand, then with my mouth, and then let him get off with my pussy.
I knew that things had changed at the start of the second week when the driver arrived and took me back to one of the shops I had been at previously. I later learned that this shop owner had offered the trafficker the most for my services. That's where I settled, in a small city of about 100,000 called Boryeong, for the next few months. I became one of four regulars in a little 'massage' shop down a back alley. I was no longer 'fresh meat'. Now, along with other regulars, I found myself competing with freshly-arrived girls like I had been just a short while ago. That was OK. As a regular, I might have to service two or three men a night, sometimes more, but not often. As a regular, I also began to develop repeat customers, men who would come back to see me again and again.
Once we settled into a shop, we were occasionally allowed out. We were given a small amount of money with which to buy the necessities of life: food, cosmetics, medicine, clothing. Customers sometimes also gave us tips. We wouldn't venture far. We would go to nearby convenience stores which had an arrangement with our shop owner, and on our one day off a week, some of us would go to a small local bar that specialized in serving Thai girls like us from the other 'massage shops' in town... and of course, the bar would also attract Korean men who were looking for more than the 30-minute 'quickie' they could get at the massage shops.