Sex Trafficking in Chinatown

It all started with a prayer walk.

As a Chinatown “native”, I was walking through the neighborhood of my early childhood. The sights, sounds, and smells were all familiar. It was really easy to walk by a block in Chinatown and say to myself “this isn’t anything I haven’t seen before.”

While walking past the Windsor Hotel on Broome and Forsyth Street, something caught my eye. It seemed like someone had sprayed a phone number on the wall of the hotel, from what I could make out. “Sexy Aliso” it said.

My heart turned inside out. What could this mean?

I had long known about the sex trafficking problem in NYC but I did not know what the nature of the problem was like. I felt God gravitate me towards this specific issue as we walked around Chinatown. What I noticed is that the Chinatown of my childhood was changing. Housing developments appeared where tenements once were. Hotels, which were not a prominent feature of the Chinatown skyline in my memory, were popping up everywhere. Empty beer bottles scattered around these areas. As we prayed for Chinatown, my eyes began to be opened to the changing atmosphere of what used to be my childhood.

Today, 27 million people are enslaved by human trafficking around the world. Those numbers are so enormous that it’s hard for someone like me to translate the issue into something that goes on in my own backyard. And yet, it does. The massage parlor industry is booming in Chinatown. Names like “happy ending” are not uncommon for these places that employ struggling women trying to make ends meet.

I can’t really determine what it was that I saw. But the sex industry is real, and it’s alive in NYC. Women, eroticized by men around the world, become exploited objects of pleasure instead of being treated like human beings.

Something needs to be done about this injustice, for sure. At NYCUP this summer, we have four interns with the International Justice Mission and the NOMI network fighting sex trafficking. These students are living the lives of modern day abolitionists. What does that look like? More on that at a later date!