Human Trafficking in My Hometown

There’s
still so much of this city I don’t know, even having being from and living here
for two thirds of my life. It’s kinda
embarrassing, sometimes, that my friends who aren’t from here know more than I
do. “But you don’t have an accent,” my
friends not from the Empire State will remark incredulously to me.

I’d been
waiting to write a blog post about a mini-crisis I’d been going through for a
few months that sort of came to a head yesterday. But then I read this article from Nicholas
Kristoff’s column
on my hometown paper, the New York Times. 

Americans tend to associate “modern slavery” with
illiterate girls in India or Cambodia. Yet there I was the other day,
interviewing a college graduate who says she spent three years terrorized by
pimps in a brothel in Midtown Manhattan.

Those who think that commercial sex in this country is
invariably voluntary – and especially men who pay for sex – should listen to
her story. The men buying her services all mistakenly assumed that she was
working of her own volition, she says.

Yumi Li (a nickname) grew up in a Korean area of
northeastern China. After university, she became an accountant, but, restless
and ambitious, she yearned to go abroad.

So she accepted an offer from a female jobs agent to be
smuggled to New York and take up a job using her accounting skills and paying
$5,000 a month. Yumi’s relatives had to sign documents pledging their homes as
collateral if she did not pay back the $50,000 smugglers’ fee from her earnings.
. .

I’ve
become more aware of this problem here in the U.S. – in more “wholesome” cities
like Minneapolis and Atlanta – and I’ve never made New York an exception. But what is it about this story that strikes
me?

Is it
that her oppressors are of East Asian descent – Chinese and Korean? Is it that she’s been captive just north of
Koreatown, close to midtown, Penn Station Herald Square – one of the few areas
of Manhattan that I am familiar with? Is
it that Yumi and I both hold bachelor’s degrees, share similar ethnic
backgrounds and sense of restlessness and ambition?

I don’t
know. What I do know is that I am
furious.

I wasn’t
even halfway done with reading the article when my inner self shouted,

THIS. IS. NOT. OKAY.
!!!

What
makes me any different from Yumi? From
this article, we see another facet of human trafficking – it’s almost scary,
really – that it can happen to anyone. Yes, awareness plays a crucial part in
prevention; but I’ll admit that as aware as I am, I’ve thought that I’m too
educated, this couldn’t happen to me.

In my
last post, I asked what I should do in response and my friend and former
colleague Matt’s comment enlightened me to my role: my part is to share
these stories. I’m also moving into a
place (not physically) where I might actually be able to do more, which I’ll
further elaborate on soon.