regards
of their relatives, occasionally even troubled with qualms of
conscience, they mostly dread thinking of their future, and seek
oblivion in excesses of boisterous dissipation. The Chinese
prostitutes of Hong Kong are an entirely different set of
people.... Very few of them can be called fallen women; scarcely
any of them are the victims of seduction, according to the English
sense of the term, refined or unrefined. The great majority of
them are owned by professional brothel-keepers or traders in women
in Canton or Macao, have been brought up for the profession, and
trained in various accomplishments suited to brothel life.... They
frequently know neither father nor mother, except what they call
a 'pocket-mother,' that is, the woman who bought them from
others.... They feel of course that they are the bought property
of their pocket-mother or keeper, but they know also that this is
the feeling of almost every other woman in China, liable as each
is to be sold, by her own parents or relatives, to be the wife or
concubine of a man she never sets eyes on before the wedding day,
or liable, as the case may be, to be pledged or sold, by her
parents or relatives, to serve as a domestic slave in a strange
family.... They have the chance, if they are pretty and
accomplished, of being wooed ... and they may look forward with
tolerable certainty to being made the second, or third, or fourth,
or at any rate the favorite wife of some wealthy gentleman. If
not possessed of special attractions or wealthy lovers, they look
forward to being taken out of the brothel by an honest devoted man
to share the lot of a poor man's wife. Or they may endeavor to
save money by singing, music and prostitution combined, and not
only to purchase their freedom, but to set up for themselves,
buying, rearing, and selling girls to act as servants or
concubines or prostitutes, or they may finally come to keep
brothels as managers for wealthy capitalists or speculators. There
is further a certain proportion of prostitutes in Hong Kong who
have, by the hand of their own parents or husbands, been mortgaged
or sold into temporary servitude as prostitutes, or who of their
own will and accord act as prostitutes under personal agreement
with a brothel-keeper, for a definite advance of a sum of money,
required