Christina Firpo's Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945 is an excellent and revealing excavation of what the prostitution industry in colonial Vietnam looked like in the two decades before the old order of French rule ended, right before the Second World War. Though prostitution is what is under examination here, Firpo rightly points out that the selling of sex and sex work here took on many forms: formal prostitution was only one of these, with debt-bondage, A Dao singers, and taxi-dancers all implicated in the larger structures of sex for sale, in one form or another. Firpo sketches out a world where all of these possibilities were available to those who could pay, with the immiseration of a certain proportion of the population resulting from these exchanges. Sex for sale was built into the structure of everyday life in colonial Vietnam: that much is clear from this study. By using a black market economic approach, Firpo helps us understand that this trade in its many component parts was but one of many where the market and services for goods that the state designated as illegal met, for one reason or another. It was never difficult to sell or purchase sex in this period in Gallic Southeast Asia. And the numbers of people involved in the trade seem to have been larger than one might suppose, such was the ubiquity of sex for sale in colonial Indochina, and in Vietnam in particular.
Firpo's study is one of a number of scholarly works that have been produced over the past several decades looking at the selling of sex under colonial regimes in this part of the world. We have such work now on many different places in Southeast Asia: Spanish and then the American Philippines; the Dutch East Indies; British Malaya (and colonial Singapore in particular, through James Warren's incredibly detailed study on Ah Ku and the Karayuki-san); and British Burma, to name just a few. If one adds the treaty ports of China and Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, a fairly detailed picture is emerging of what prostitution in its many forms and variants actually looked like, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Asia during the fin de siècle period. Firpo's work helps to complicate what we do already know by showing the diversity of experience of the selling of sex in different Vietnamese contexts. Therefore she has a chapter on the spatial dimensions of sex work in Vietnam, a huge colony which stretched for many hundreds of kilometres, north to south, from the southern door of China to the Gulf of Thailand. She also looks at venereal disease and its complications (harrowing, to say the least), in the most medical-oriented chapter of the book. The effects of the sex trade on children is particularly well documented, as is the notion of forms of sold-sex in those who might not be formally called prostitutes, but who worked in fields where the purchase of such services could happen as a normative part of one's daily work. Finally, she allows us a window into the world of singers and dancers of different sorts, who found occupational niches that lent themselves to these complexes across the width and breadth of French colonial cities. The urban/rural divide is indeed important in this study, and Firpo shows how urbanism was a central component of the evolution of such trades. This was especially so as Gallic Vietnam matured as a colonial entity over time, into the years right before the Pacific War.
Firpo includes some useful graphics in the book which help us along in our understanding of how these trades worked in the Vietnamese context. Maps of Hanoi, for example, show us the layout of the city, but also where military barracks, clandestine brothels, and Chinese ‘singing houses’ stood, revealing a geography of trades allied to prostitution in this northern city. A chart (on p. 62) shows us the percentages of troops infected with venereal disease in a single regiment, which went from roughly 9 per cent in 1903 to an astonishing 75 per cent in 1914, just over a decade later. A photograph (on p. 139) shows us what a pre-war A Dao singing group looked like, so we have better context for chapter 5's exposition on this particular trade, and how it fit into the larger systems that the author describes in the book. A cartoon in Vietnamese just a few pages later also shows us the subaltern view on some of these issues, in this case involving the ‘saving of unemployed women’, an excuse used by a Vietnamese man for his nocturnal activities. By the dawn of the Second World War, raids on the dance halls were tabulating venereal disease counts in the hundreds, and later in four digits, showing us that it wasn't just dancing going on in these places.
What Firpo achieves in this book is a very useful kind of template of what a particular world looked like, one which has been intimated before, but which is much more fully understood as a result of her efforts. One can sense her sympathies in the fabric of her pages: she is a neutral scholarly observer, of course, but the difficulty of the subject is clear, and she handles this with grace and wisdom. Though there is a good bit of French in these sources, there is also plenty of Vietnamese—an important inclusion, as this is not a history only told from the vantage of the coloniser. Firpo allows us entry into a world where the Vietnamese wrote about these trades, too, and shows us what they thought about them. All this as Vietnam hurtled toward mid-century and its own freedom from colonisation, although that was still some ways away. In this and as a whole, she does a fine job allowing us to be immersed in a milieu. This was a world of pain and suffering, to be sure, but it was also one that should be excavated, so that we know what these lives were like. We don't want these voices to disappear from our collective memory.
