Active and bustling with people, Main Street is known to be one of the busiest streets in Flushing. With the Chinese population making up 75.5% of the entire population in that area, it isn’t a surprise to see the overwhelming amount of Chinese businesses that are thriving in that environment. While Main Street may be known for its restaurants, malls, or even its trending Bubble tea, it isn’t only full of positive things. Scattered amongst the countless Chinese businesses, lie many massage parlors with bright advertising posters in both Chinese and English for customers to come get a massage for a cheap price. However, looks can be deceiving. Many of these massage parlors are places where immigrant Chinese women work as sex workers to earn a living. With that being said, this brings us to a tragedy that occurred on 40th Road, which is a small street that is close by to Main Street, with a woman named Yang Song.

Being originally from the Liaoning, Shenyang Province, Yang Song and her husband, Zhang Zhou, moved to Flushing in the year of 2013. The couple moved because of the Tohuku earthquake and Tsunami that ruined the businesses of their Vietnamese restaurants. With Zhou having American citizenship and Yang Song being on a green card, Yang Song was determined to settle down in Flushing and start her own spa. However, the couple was met with the issue of Zhou being too old to work in addition to the tight finances they had to deal with. Viewing that her waitress job wasn’t sufficient enough, Yang Song had no choice, but to seek out a job that would enable them to survive. Without telling her husband and family, she began to work as a sex worker “in a foot spa”.

In New York City, sex work is illegal and can cause a person to be arrested and criminalized. Yang Song was arrested and charged with prostitution on September 27th, 2017. Despite facing these negative consequences, this didn’t stop her from continuing on with her career as a sex worker because of the goals she wanted to achieve in her life.

“She worked for her dream. She was not someone who likes to give up.”

–Hai Song, Yang’s Younger Brother

Just as Yang’s younger brother stated, Yang Song had many goals in mind. She was determined to support her old husband. She was also determined to buy a lavish house for her beloved parents. Due to this, she refused to let her arrest scare her away from the one job that was keeping a roof above her head. Her determination carried her all the way to the date of November 25th, 2017. On the dark night of this date, the NYPD raided her work building in an attempt to arrest her for doing sex work. This led to Yang Song’s body falling four stories away from the NYPD and onto the hard sidewalk. Being rushed to the hospital in hopes that she could be saved, Yang Song had sadly lost too much blood and died from her injuries.

While some may say Yang Song was at fault for committing illegal activities, there is also the other side of the story where the NYPD and officials have committed atrocities against Yang Song. Before her death, it was reported that Yang Song was sexually assaulted by a member of the NYPD at gunpoint. When she reports this incident to the police and personally finds the man that assaulted her, the NYPD disregarded her case in order to protect their fellow NYPD member and their image. In addition, the NYPD has pressured her to become an informant to report on her fellow sex workers, which she chose to refuse. With these actions of the NYPD being revealed to the public, it has caused many protestors to take the street in rallies to claim that the NYPD did play a significant part in causing her death. In response to this, District Attorney Brown was known to release a statement that was meant to appease the public by showing that the NYPD had no part in causing her death. However, it caused an uproar due to the choice of controversial words he used in his statement to describe Yang Song’s incident. In using the words, “prostitution is a degrading and humiliating industry”, it signifies a clear bias towards the NYPD in addition to failing to understand that Yang Song was simply doing work in order to survive in her environment.

After hearing what the NYPD did to Yang Song and reading the strong words Brown used, I immediately thought that the government needs to step in to fix the corruption with the police and its officials in addition to initiating more policies to help the sex workers. However, my interview with the Sex Worker Project and the Red Canary Song organization helps me learn that more policies is the last thing a sex worker would want.

In my interview with the Sex Workers Project, it signified the problem of the government viewing sex work and sex trafficking as the same thing. These laws that claim they support sex workers only cause them to be over-policed and criminalized, which leads to the threat of them losing their immigration status and of them being deported. In hearing the words, “over-policed and criminalized”, it connected me to the reading, #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation written by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, where the Black population was constantly faced with the problem of being over-policed for revenue and criminalized by officials due to the inequality of race.

My interview with the Red Canary Song organization further enforced the points given in my previous interview. I first started off by asking about the meaning of the quote they had on their website, “Rights not rescue”. The representative told me that their quote signified the need to protect sex workers against anti-trafficking initiatives. Instead of giving support, it does the complete opposite by initiating more continued racism and anti-migration attitudes. These policies prevent sex workers from pushing for better working conditions on their own, which destroys their rights and dignity. In addition, many sex workers are forced to work with racist officials that are against sex work. They prevent them from being able to report any harassment that has been done to them and can cause sudden arrests or detainments to keep them away from family and friends. After hearing this, I was reminded of Rasha’s story in How Does It Feel to Be a Problem by Moustafa Bayoumi due to Rasha and her family being detained from society because of the racial profiling that happened with 9/11.

These two activists groups are part of the coalition of organizations that are pushing for the NYPD to end parlor raids and to decrease the policing around Chinese immigrant women. The Sex Worker Project, in particular, was known to have successfully worked together with other women support groups to hold a rally in front of the 109th Precinct on Union Street in response to Yang Song’s death.

I connect Yang Song’s story back the many massage parlors that exist around Main Street today. While some may view them as places of illegal activity that needs to be shut down, I view these places as physical proof of the desperation and determination Chinese immigrant women face to survive in the new environment they chose to live in. In the book, Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, it connects to Luiselli’s idea that the people that choose to come here have decided to give it their all to stay here no matter how bad the circumstances get. Although sex work may be considered bad work, these sex workers deserve to have the same rights as other workers and shouldn’t be violated for their choice of survival.

Bibliography:

Martinez, Gina. “Protesters Rally at 109th Precinct after Woman Dies in Police Raid.” QNS.com, Dec. 2017, qns.com/story/2017/12/21/protesters-rally-at-109th-precinct-after-woman-dies-in-police-raid/.

Whitford, Emma. “One Year on From Yang Song’s Death, Asian Sex Worker Advocates Call for Reduced Policing.” Documented, Documented, 20 Jan. 2019, documentedny.com/2018/11/26/one-year-on-from-yang-songs-death-asian-sex-worker-advocates-call-for-reduced-policing/.

Whitford, Emma. “Sex Workers Condemn Massage Parlor Raids amid Proposed Crackdown in Flushing.” Queens Daily Eagle, Queens Daily Eagle, 1 Apr. 2019, queenseagle.com/all/sex-workers-condemn-massage-parlor-raids.

Red Canary Song. Interview. By Emily Kang. 1 May 2019.

Sex Workers Project. Interview. By Emily Kang. 3 May 2019.

ACS 2017. “Population Density, 2017”. Social Explorer. Web. May 5 2019.

Grant, Melissa Gira, and Emma Whitford. “Family, Former Attorney of Queens Woman Who Fell to Her Death in Vice Sting Say She Was Sexually Assaulted, Pressured to Become an Informant.” The Appeal, 15 Dec. 2017, theappeal.org/family-former-attorney-of-queens-woman-who-fell-to-her-death-in-vice-sting-say-she-was-sexually-d67461a12f1/.

Grant, Melissa Gira. “Yang Song Report Release 06 19 2018.” DocumentCloud, 21 June 2018, www.documentcloud.org/documents/4551645-Yang-Song-Report-Release-06-19-2018.html.

Lam, Elene. “Red Canary Song.” Red Canary Song, Apr. 2018, www.redcanarysong.org/.

Mu, Lan. “Family Tells Story of Masseuse Who Died in Flushing.” Showcasing the Best of the Community and Ethnic Media, 8 Dec. 2017, voicesofny.org/2017/12/family-tells-story-of-masseuse-who-died-in-flushing/.