Meantime, across the border, events are becoming more dire, as, I surmise, mistress price is deflating along with the economy on this ex-Money Rock and still-Freedom Mountain:
china.scmp.com
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Second to none
SHERRY LEE
They were a sign of more prosperous times, a status symbol and a luxury for both the rich and not so rich. So affordable were mainland mistresses or ''second wives'' that whole villages sprang up around Shenzhen to accommodate them.
But that was in the early 1990s; it is a very different story today.
Twenty minutes' drive from Lowu station, Huangbeiling was one of the city's most notorious concubine villages, housing hundreds of mistresses in its low-rise blocks - until the financial crisis five years ago.
Second wives were then dumped faster than dotcom stocks as the crash sent cash-strapped husbands scurrying home to their first wives. Today, the mistresses in Huangbeiling have mostly been replaced with migrant workers.
''They can't afford to keep a second wife. With no money, the men have no mood for women,'' explains David Cheung, a private detective specialising in investigating cross-border, extra-marital affairs. About two years ago, Cheung started to receive calls from dumped mistresses looking for their men. He estimates that as the economic downturn has kicked in, about half Shenzhen's ''second wives'' have been abandoned.
Caritas, which runs a hotline on extramarital affairs in Hong Kong, says the number of counselling cases involving mainland mistresses has dropped from 27 per cent out of their 621 cases in 1998 to 18 per cent of 430 cases last year.
Forced to face the fact that the ''good life'' was over, the women they left behind had to look for other means of survival. Some have taken humble jobs while others, spoilt by their privileged lifestyles, declined to work, instead returning to Sichuan and other remote provinces from where most of the women came. A few have remained, making a living as prostitutes in karaoke bars and discos, still hopeful a suitor may come to their rescue.
Four years ago, Amy Lu was a mainland mistress. At 36, with long bleached hair, she has lost her fresh, northern complexion but still retains a pleasant and polite personality.
Her story is typical. She arrived in Shenzhen from Sichuan in 1987 looking for a better life. Inevitably she met affluent Hong Kong men whose jobs required them to live or spend days regularly across the border.
Lu was the second of two children: her father was a PLA officer, her mother a factory worker. More interested in money than study, she swapped her local university place for $58 a month as an assistant in a cake shop.
In 1987, southern China started to boom. Lu was 21. A former classmate told her about the big money to be earned in Shenzhen so she decided to go. ''I thought that if I earned more money, I would be happy and could buy anything I wanted,'' she recalls.
Her parents tried to stop her from leaving, but ignoring her mother's warnings of never being allowed back home she took the train to Shenzhen with three friends.
Another friend introduced her to a factory job, run by a Hong Konger, where she earned $120 a month assembling toys. Her life changed the day her boss showed some friends round. ''One of them passed my workbench and started talking to me,'' she recalls. He was almost 40, married with three children and owned a nearby factory employing more than 100 workers.
At first they were just friends, going out with a group of people to dinner and karaoke. A year later, the man asked Lu to work in his toy factory. She took up the offer and romance blossomed, but Lu says they didn't sleep together until five months later. ''He offered me money, I didn't take it and said, 'I am not that kind of woman','' she says. ''Then he knew I was true to him.''
From there it was a short step to mistress status, in 1989. To hide her from prying eyes, he moved her out of the staff hostel to a cosy three-bedroom apartment in Huangbeiling. She shared the flat with her Sichuan friend, who had become the mistress of an associate of Lu's lover.
He opened a cosmetic shop for her to work in and gave her a monthly wage of $1,000. In addition he paid the $2,000 rent on the flat and by the end of the relationship she was on an allowance of $5,000.
Whenever he visited they would go shopping for clothes in Shenzhen Commercial Shopping Mall. Nights were spent singing and dancing in clubs and karaoke bars. If he was feeling flush, there were gifts of diamond rings and gold necklaces. Lu no longer wore Chinese-made clothes and clumpy shoes, but elegant dresses and high-heels.
Days were spent in self-indulgent idleness. ''In the evenings we followed TV dramas and watched horror movies until early morning,'' she says. ''Our life was very relaxed, we were very happy and had nothing to worry about.''
Some women juggled several lovers but Lu stuck to one. Keeping more than one on the go required considerable dexterity. ''They arranged things very well to make sure the men called at different times.''
She says her lover told her that he had married too young and didn't love his wife and stayed with her out of a sense of responsibility and because of his children.
Lu kept her ''new identity'' a secret from her parents and introduced him as her ''boyfriend'' on their one trip back to her home.
Throughout, Lu believed his wife knew nothing of his affair - at least until one day his friends told her the truth. Lu recounts what he told her had happened: ''She had a quarrel with him, he suggested a divorce, but she refused.''
Lu, who never set eyes on her love rival, says she doesn't feel guilty for pinching somebody's husband. ''I never blamed myself, even though they were married, our love was true love, but theirs wasn't,'' she says. ''The longer I was with him, the more I loved him. I sacrificed everything.''
In 1997, their relationship crumbled. Within months he had shut the factory and ended the affair.
''He said he couldn't divorce his wife and the economy wasn't good. He had to return to Hong Kong to look for a job and couldn't come to see me. Then he said he wanted to pay me compensation money. I said 'no, I don't need it'. I didn't cry, I knew that one day we had to separate.''
Suddenly Lu was on her own in a flat whose rent he paid. ''I couldn't sleep and just smoked. I would stare at the TV seeing nothing. I just sat in the house.''
In the months that followed Lu had plenty of time to reflect on how she had arrived at this point in her life and where she might go next.
She lived on savings, but other abandoned mistresses fared worse, living four to five in a flat and spending $2 a day on food.
Six months later, Lu decided to go back to Sichuan. ''I called him and told him and he gave me $50,000 to return home,'' she says.
At first, she hoped to find a job and start afresh, but being used to the comfortable life of a kept woman, she found it hard to do mundane jobs. ''I worked as a shop assistant, but it was only $400 to $500 a month, and it was long hours,'' she says.
She failed to settle and returned to Shenzhen six months later.
Partly due to the economic downturn but more to do with her own self-esteem, Lu now realises her life as a mistress is over. She sometimes hears news of her lover through a friend, but Lu thinks she will never see him again.
She has now decided to follow an independent path. ''I survived on my own before I met him, I should be able to do it now,'' she says. In 1999, she landed her current job, as a typist in a Shenzhen trading firm and earns $1,200 a month, a quarter of her former mistress' allowance.
She lives in dingy staff quarters shared with three other staff.
She dreams of owning her own business one day, but for now she says she is happy.
Would she be a second wife again? Lu shakes her head. ''I don't want to go through all that again.'' |
