Asian massage workers and sex workers have long been the targets of violence in America – but their stories often get pushed to the margins. This week, as AAPI Heritage Month begins, we’re pulling those stories to the center. Yin Q – one of the core organizers of Red Canary Song, a collective organizing with and for Asian and migrant sex workers – joins the show to share some of the stories of their community, break down the history of violence against Asian sex and massage workers, and sketch out what a future where sex work is decriminalized would look like.

Listen or subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

On today’s episode

Our host

Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.

Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines. 

Today’s guest

Yin Q is a Queer, Chinese American parent, writer, and sex worker rights advocate. They are a core organizer of Red Canary Song, a grassroots organization of Asian and Migrant sex workers and massage workers, and Founding Director of Kink Out.

Learn more about Red Canary Song at https://www.redcanarysong.net/, and follow them on Instagram @redcanarysong.

Episode transcript

The Amendment podcast transcripts are automatically generated by a third-party website and may contain typos or other errors. Please consider the official record for The Amendment podcast to be the audio publicly available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Yin Q:

For sex work to be decriminalized would shift an incredible amount of power to female bodily autonomy. And that means so much. That means also looking at bodily reproductive justice, looks at like so many different things.

Errin Haines:

Hey y’all, welcome to The Amendment, a weekly conversation about gender, politics, and power from The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m your host, Errin Haines. So today is already the first day of May, which means it is also the beginning of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Now look, this is The 19th. We get it. The AAPI community is large, diverse, and intersectional. They are not a monolith, and we’re not gonna try to cover them like they are today. We’re gonna highlight one specific community, the Asian folks who are working as massage and sex workers across the country. For that, I’m joined by Yin Q, a Chinese American parent, writer and sex worker advocate, who is also one of the core organizers of Red Canary Song. Did you hear me say intersectional? So, Red Canary Song is a grassroots organization of Asian and migrant sex workers and massage workers and their allies. Since 2018, they’ve been supporting their community through mutual aid advocacy and organizing. Our country has a long history of violence against migrant Asian women who are massage workers and sex workers, and a much shorter history of trying to mitigate that violence through structural change. Organizations like Red Canary Song and activists like Yin Q are already thinking through solutions, which is why I’m excited to have Yin on today. Welcome, Yin.

Yin:

Thank you so much for having me, Errin.

Errin:

So I mean, just to start why don’t you just tell me about the origins of Red Canary song. How did your organization come into being?

Yin:

Sure. In 2017, November, a Chinese massage worker fell to her death during a police raid in Flushing, New York. Yang Song had been harassed by the police, raped at gunpoint by someone holding a badge, and basically asked by the police to become an informant on her own community. And she had been arrested several times, and after she had refused to provide information about her community, about her landlord, about other workers, they came after her again. And during that raid, she fell from a four story window to her death. Protesters, sex workers came together in Flushing to protest the police raids that were happening all along 39th and 40th road. And a year later, Red Canary Song came together to not only advocate for massage workers, but also to provide mutual aid first to Yang Song’s family, to bring them over from China and support their investigation as well as that they could collect their daughter’s belongings. And then also we continued to advocate for Asian migrant massage workers. From a decriminalization stand and abolition standpoint.

Errin:

It’s so important what you’re saying. I mean, not just remembering Yang Song and telling her story, but really taking an active role in trying to get justice for Yang Song and being there to support her family. So the remembering, but also the activism coming together in that moment to make this organization. I wanna ask you about what the death of Yang Song really reveals around the larger patterns of violence against Asian women, Asian massage workers and sex workers in particular in America.

Yin:

There’s an entire anti-trafficking movement that is incredibly strong, incredibly well funded, and very popular amongst White celebrities. And then you also see their messaging all throughout every transit hub, in airports and train stations and bus stations. And it is a very easy motto to get on board with, right? To rescue children, to rescue women from exploitation. However, their forms of rescue are really going after the women themselves and the people themselves who are doing the work and putting them in handcuffs, incarcerating them, putting them through the prison industrial complex, and possibly deporting them back to countries that are unsafe for them. As well as layering incredible amounts of shame and stigma upon sex work itself. So we are looking at an entire industry that is being fueled by a Judea Christian right morality standpoint of rescue White saviorism.

Yin:

And this entire movement really stems from this hypocrisy of really rooting out and looking at what America’s crimes against humanity, regarding slavery and during the Atlantic slave trade, and what they’ve done is they’ve actually taken the same language and turned it around and used it against Asian women and Asian sex workers by creating a victim. They’re using the word slavery. They’re using such tools as rewarding people for coming out to be able to surveil themselves or their own communities, to reward them with a Harriet Tubman Award for anti-trafficking. So we’re looking at these ways of where again, we are seeing a culture that is pitting one minority against another minority culture and community.

Errin:

What, what narratives about Asian women, about sex workers, about massage workers and migrants really perpetuate this violence that we’re talking about?

Yin:

Well, this is a long history, right? We’re taking a look at a long history of how immigrants were allowed to come into America. The first immigration law, which was the Page Act, was both anti-Asian, but it was also anti-women because it was specifically targeted against Chinese women who were coming into the country to be partnered with the massive amounts of the Chinese men that they had brought over to do the labor, the hard labor, of creating the railroad lines. However, they didn’t want those families to create, you know, they didn’t want them to be families. They didn’t want those men to stay, they wanted only to use them, those bodies as labor. So the first fear was actually that these Asian women were not only coming to create families to stay here, but that they were prostitutes. So it was actually a whorophobic immigration law as well. This is the first law of immigration to be created in the United States.

Errin:

Targeting women and women of color.

Yin:

Targeting women of color under the fear of sex work, under the fear of prostitution. And what we also see then, throughout the entire history of the globally then is this imperialism of White colonialists and imperialists going to Asian countries, setting up military bases and creating spaces that were sanctioned for basically GIs to have access to comfort women and to sex workers.

Errin:

So sexualizing Asian women, but on their terms.

Errin:

It was okay if they were the ones that were making the rules and not these women having any agency. Well, I wanna talk about a 2021 case that I remember well, because it happened just outside of my hometown of Atlanta. There was a man who murdered eight people in three massage parlors. Six of the eight victims in that case were Asian women. And in the wake of those murders, those which were so tragic, Red Canary Song put out a press release that really rejected the call for increased policing as a solution to violence in that situation. Why don’t you think that increased policing will solve the problem of violence against sex or massage workers? And if that’s not the solution, what are the alternatives to increase policing?

Yin:

Right. So we have seen time and time again, throughout Black, Brown, and Asian communities, that increased policing is always targeting our own communities. It has never been a system that is safe for us. To end gun violence, bringing more people in with guns and power differences as well as cultural differences does not compute at all in my brain at all. I dunno why this seems to be logical for anyone else. Our solution to creating safer environments within workspaces is for labor rights for us to first decriminalize sex work, decriminalize unlicensed massage work, and also to really give communities the resources for community care so that people can get the resources that they need, whether it be access to mental health, whether it be access to, to physical health emergency rooms, physical health, education, translation services.

Yin:

Right now, we are also seeing how massage workers are in a no win situation because we have Asian massage workers working within a system where to get a license, you need to put in 1000 hours of unpaid labor. These massage schools are anywhere from $300 to $3,000, depending on where you can go to get that license. And the tests for getting your massage license are only given in English, and you are not allowed to have interpreters or translators. And yet these massage industries who are creating these licensure criteria are also part of the wellness industry, right. That are creating these spas that have things like the word zen in the name or hot stone, or Shiatsu or Tui Na, acupressure. They are using actually the cultural inherited body care methods that different Asian cultures have passed down for generations, and yet when women come here to work, to use the resources of their own hands, they can’t get the licensure. So we really see like this incredible hypocrisy throughout the entire system on both ends.

Errin:

Yeah, I mean, to that, all I can say is, damn. What you’re saying, that that Asian women would have barriers to a profession that Asian culture has so heavily influenced in this country. So yes, I mean, solutions other than policing, policy right? Diversion of those resources to address some of the issues that we know are intersecting with issues that these workers are coming up against in their communities. Like you said, that the mental health piece and housing everything else that may need to be addressed so that they are in safer environments overall. I wanna go back to the spa shootings just for a moment, because near the one year anniversary of those shootings, Red Canary Song hosted a memorial vigil to honor those lives that were lost in Washington Square Park. And I just want you to describe what that visual was like, that felt like an important moment, for folks who weren’t there. What was it like, was there a particularly powerful moment that stood out to you?

Yin:

So part of our actions are to have art be part of our memorials as well. And so if I can just describe then what we, what Chong Gu, Wu and myself and a few other RCS members created this design of a structure that created, that was based on massage tables and brought together our alter making rituals so that the massage tables then were turned into our alter tables. To really not only commemorate the eight victims of the shooting, but also to really explain, like, show what our community is about. And that we not only grieve those eight lives, but we are grieving so many lives every year, every month of the people that we lose within the sex worker BIPOC community, we really are clutching our hearts on a monthly basis of all the people who are lost through mental health, to suicide, to overdoses, to the lack of care that the society shows for the people who are most in need. We are up against so much oppression and crisis on a daily basis that if we don’t take the time to grieve together collectively, then that grief will isolate us and it will cause interior damage. It will cause damage between communities as well if we are not constantly coming to the table to hold one another in these times of grief.

Errin:

So I wanna also ask about some of the other work that you’re doing at Red Canary Song to combat violence against Asian massage and sex workers. I know Red Canary song regularly organizes mutual aid. Can you talk about what that mutual aid is, how you’ve seen it help your community and how that is different from charity, really?

Yin:

Right. So Mutual Aid is not about rescuing someone. Again, it’s about providing the material resources or the resources of translation, resources of medical care, of just the basic presence of somebody who can listen to another person who’s going through the same,, through the same situation by providing emergency care to people without question. Yeah. Without them having to prove themselves has been so important throughout the pandemic, just getting fresh groceries to people in Flushing, workers in Flushing when the grocery stores had been shut down long before the rest of the New York City had been shut down. And now our outreach teams are visiting over 300 to 500 workers. And listening to stories, finding out where, what do they need in terms of getting government forms filled out, what do they need regarding being in touch with an immigration lawyer, all of those things. They need an access points, you know? They need access points of privilege. So for me, my mutual aid at this point of my time with Red Canary Song is like grant writing. Like, how do I make sure that I can move the money from philanthropy and donors to our outreach team so that they can, they can provide the cash, they can provide the food.

Errin:

Yeah. And and what you’re describing, it is not charity. I mean, what you’re describing is empowering folks, right. And it comes from listening to folks and hearing about their needs instead of trying to dictate to them what what may be best for them or what you all may think that they need for them to be able to articulate what their needs are. But also for you all to be providing the kind of assistance that leads to self-determination, right. And autonomy and agency. That is definitely a different way to think about mutual aid but it’s also making me just kind of think about you individually. So on a more personal note, like, talk to me about what draws you to this work every day and why you really continue to be invested in this cause.

Yin:

Yeah. Well, I have been a sex worker for over 30 years in different parts of the sex work, and I have lost so many friends and partners to the stigma, the shame of and the fear of incarceration. I myself have also been incarcerated during the raids. I am not only pulled because I’m within the community but personally I feel seen with other Asian sex workers.I feel seen with other bipoc sex workers. I, because, you know, within my Asian culture, my family, my biological family, that is my, I see the stigma, I feel the stigma of sex. First of all, sex is just not talked about within Asian cultures. And then sex work altogether is completely shamed. So when I speak to other massage workers who, they may be going to church every Sunday, but they are unable to speak about their work. When we look at that anti-Asian hate, we’re really looking at a community who most people were not as impacted as the people who are within these spas, you know, or the people who are doing domestic work, or the people who are doing like the labor that is in direct contact with others.

Errin:

I wanna get even more granular with you though. I mean, Red Canary Song is an organization that is centering sex workers, centering massage workers, the subgroup of the larger Asian American community. You talked a little bit about how they’re left out of kind of broader conversations around AAPI hate, but what about how they’re left out during a AAPI heritage month? Like why is it so important to advocate for this group specifically?

Yin:

Yeah. It’s so hard because we are silenced in our own communities. We’re silenced in our own families. We’re silenced in our schools, so advocating means coming out and it means that you’re putting yourself in danger, right? I will say for myself, I have had dead animals left at my door. I have had pornography, you know, just thrown all over my stairs in front of my house where I have children. So I can say that it is hard to be in the spotlight. I do it because I know I have a supportive community. And so advocating means that some of us have to step forward, but it does not mean that I’m here to speak on behalf of all of Red Canary Song even, because we are of all, like, of intersectional identities.

Errin:

Yeah. That you’re hitting on such an important point here. Like the intersectionality as part of inclusion, as part of how we have a different conversation around some of these issues that really are front and center for a lot of us, but maybe are not including everybody, especially the bodily autonomy, the bodily agency conversation that we are having right now. To leave folks that are doing massage work and sex work, to leave them outta that conversation is to not really be having the fullest conversation that we could really be having. I wanna also ask you about the documentary that you directed, Fly In Power, because that focuses on the experiences of a couple of folks that are involved with Red Canary Song. Can you just tell me about that documentary, why it was important for you to tell that story?

Yin:

Yeah. So Yoon Grace Ra, Xen Nhà and Kai, all our documentary crew team – first of all, more than half of us are sex workers ourselves – and we found that it’s really important for us to uplift the narrative story of a migrant massage worker who has gone through all of these systems, who has been arrested on multiple basis and has faced the anti-trafficking court system again and again so that her story could come forward. And also how we are also in solidarity with other body workers. And I’m talking about home care workers, people who are taking care of elders, people who are taking care of young people, people who are taking care of disabled people. I myself have been a elder care worker too, where I’ve actually cared for a client who then became the person whom I was taking care of in his old age through his dementia. And when we think about sex workers, we are so many different people because we’re part of a work that is fluid in terms of who in terms of how do we work. We are in every space. And we are, we are literally the people who are taking care of the body’s needs.

Errin:

Yeah. Even listening to you talking about the idea of sex workers as caregivers, right. Literal caregivers, that is not a thing that, that most people are associating with sex work, but really showing really the humanity and dignity of that work through something like this documentary. It makes me wonder, I’m thinking even just about some of the most prominent myths about sex trafficking that you were able to debunk with this documentary. I mean, is there anything like that that comes to mind?

Yin:

Yeah. That the most of the women who are arrested do not actually claim to be sex trafficked as victims. And what they are actually given is when they come to the court systems, then they are given two different options. One is prostitution, and then the other one is to claim themselves as a sex trafficked victim. They’re told that if they claim to be a sex trafficked victim, then they won’t be deported. Then they also have to then use that plea to then also testify against the business owner. So we are seeing then another hypocrisy system where women are coerced, basically to claim themselves as victims so that they won’t fall into the prostitution criminalization. However, it’s an either or. It’s an either or, and they’re given very little choice. They’re not given another option.

Errin:

Yeah. Well, I wanna talk about the future. Thinking about, but first thinking about the present, what are some of the problems in your community that really are top of mind for you right now?

Yin:

Okay. So raids are still happening all over New York. And so we are seeing like this change then from, because  certain human rights, like when – and I will compare it to gay marriage – that generations of young people then start to embrace a more progressive ideology. And so gay marriage then became legal. We are also looking at sex work, how the younger generations are starting to change their ideas and views about how prostitution is seen as sex work. And we see the anti-trafficking movement really getting scared. You know, we’re seeing like the patriarchy really getting scared that, oh, this is going to, you know, for sex work to be decriminalized would shift an incredible amount of power to female bodily autonomy. And that means so much. I mean if you can just imagine this immense shift, not only whether somebody is doing sex work or not, that means also looking at bodily reproductive justice.

Yin:

Looks at like so many different things. And also what we are seeing though then is what’s on top of my mind is that we see the anti-trafficking movement then doubling down again. So they went from doing raids and arresting people for prostitution, and now they’re arresting people for unlicensed massage work. And I already talked about how that that’s a no win situation. And now they’re also arresting or going after and going into, doing raids with department building inspectors and going after landlords. So the DOB is coming in writing up fines and speaking to the landlords and saying, if you have this kind of business here, we will find you, we will come after you. And so you’re looking at various levels of systems of oppression. So we were looking and that, you know, Esther K. actually mentions in the documentary that they’re using every form of legal authority to come after the work of these migrant women who are giving massages to other migrant workers, to other people who need body care, who have body desires, you know? And so instead of being able to actually use your time and resources to create safe spaces for themselves to advocate for themselves, they are actually just always under the threat of incarceration and, and under the threat of their businesses being shut down so that they cannot provide for their families anymore.

Errin:

I can hear the urgency in your voice around all of these issues that you’re talking about. So I wanna talk about what Red Canary Songs demands are. What do you wanna see individuals and institutions doing to combat violence, to combat this climate that you’re, that you’re describing against, uh, sex and massage workers?

Yin:

Yeah. We were standing with Decrim New York at this time to decriminalize sex work under the Stop Violence in the Sex Trades Act. We understand that it is not a perfect policy. We are still in the workings of making sure that the decriminalizing of sex work would still be able to provide resources and safety and not exploitation, not capitalistic exploitation from the top down that we’ve seen in other industries that have been decriminalized or legalized as we’ve seen in, let’s say the cannabis industry,

Yin:

So that’s what we’re really looking at of like making sure that it doesn’t then become a free for all, for all of the people who have the money to both exploit and create monopolies around spaces for sex workers.

Errin:

This is also making me, I mean, we’re in an election year, you organize a community though that historically has had very little political power. Some folks literally can’t vote because of the immigration status. And just more broadly, our country often silences sex workers and low wage workers. So how do you work towards kind of those policy systemic changes that you’re talking about with these kinds of challenges in mind?

Yin:

It’s about building allyship across the board. Yeah. And I will be honest, like as a, as a sex worker for 30 years, and I’ve been like, organizing know your rights seminars, I’ve come up against raids. Um, but I did not know the, the more global issues. I did not know the American history, history as well as the, the policy issues that were surrounding not only sex workers, but migrant workers, black workers, trans workers that were so enmeshed and suffocating all of us, you know? So to be able to just get this story, just get this education so that a younger generation can learn, but also really creating solidarity with other body care workers and labor workers.

Errin:

I mean, you brought up allyship, so let’s talk about it. Are people becoming more aware of the work you’re doing and getting involved and really what would you say right now to somebody who is maybe outside of the community who’s listening to maybe this conversation about what they can or should do to get more involved?

Yin:

Yeah, I think that actually just spreading this information is the most important way to get involved. I will say that like as Red Canary Song, we are a collective, we are not a nonprofit, and we don’t believe in actually growing. We actually believe that in providing the education and the resources so that communities can create systems like that. Like we have, like other mutual aid communities have, and that we look to other communities also to inform how we work as well, and to share information so that other spaces can create these mutual aid spaces. I would say like really caring about your own community, creating your own mutual aid community, and that has the branches. To be able to inform, educate, and learn from other communities is the best way to get involved.

Errin:

Yeah. Well, I can already kind of see that you have the imagination for a reality that is not the reality that so many of the folks that you are fighting on behalf of and in community with. What is the future that you’re trying to build? How would you describe the world that you’re working towards?

Yin:

I have, you know, I believe what we, our goal is something that KhoKhoi brings up in the documentary, again, is a space where we all have, we can get to the resources that we need,, the basic resources that we need. And so that our work together is work of joy and, you know, understanding that there’s always going to be labor. But also can we work in a, can we create communities that can provide each other rest? Can we provide, create communities that can provide each other care so that people can be cared for on all different levels in every, in every identity siphon that they, that they show up in. I would hope that my comrades could show up to their church and be embraced as sex workers, and that they could, you know, voice their care in these kinds of spaces. So that is to be able to show up at each space to be fully seen, just to have the empathy, you know, even if we don’t have the deep understanding, even if we don’t have shared experience, like the exact same experiences, just to be able to have the empathy would be the goal.

Errin:

Well, Yin, thank you for helping me to think about what that world can look like as we kick off AAPI Heritage month. It has just been wonderful to talk to you. I really appreciate you coming to The Amendment today.

Yin:

Thank you so much, Errin.

Errin:

Okay, y’all, so this is an announcement that’s very near and dear to my heart. Applications for The 19th’s third class of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper Fellows are officially open. This is the fellowship expressly for HBCU alums or former students, and in particular, those who are interested in a year-long reporting, audience engagement, or product and technology track. Look, I’m telling you guys, this program is no joke, stellar benefits, real world journalism experience and access to training and mentorship from me and other digital women leaders. So for more information, you can head to 19thnews.org/fellowship2024, and be sure to apply before May 31st. I promise you won’t regret it. So that’s this week’s episode of The Amendment. For The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m Errin Haines. Talk to you again next week. 

The Amendment is a co-production of the 19th News and Wonder Media Network. It is executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, Terri Rupar and Faith Smith. Our head of development is Emily Rudder. Julia B. Chan is The 19th’s editor-in-chief. The Amendment is edited by Jenny Kaplan, Grace Lynch, and Emily Rudder, and was produced by Adesuwa Agbonile, Grace Lynch, Brittany Martinez and Taylor Williamson with production assistance from Luci Jones. Our theme music was composed by Jlin. I love my theme music.