For Women, Going across Border to China Means No Return

Naw Seng, Mizzima News (www.mizzima.com)

RUILI, China, Feb 5 (IPS) - Nandar lives in a small, messy room in an apartment building that doubles as a brothel in this Chinese town across the border from Burma. She is not a sex worker -- not yet anyway.

But the lack of job opportunities is driving home the point that she may not have much choice but to do what many Burmese women here do for a living: Their faces painted a ghostly white, they solicit men along a busy, shadowy street corner in the town centre. "I don't want to be here," she says.

Nandar arrived in Ruili, in the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan, from Hefei, the capital of China's eastern Anhui province, where she lived for three years as the wife of a Chinese farmer who had 'bought' her.

She has passed through Ruili before, when she left Burma for China, At 17, Nandar left her small village near Mandalay, Burma's second largest city, to take up a restaurant job at the border with China promised by a female Burmese broker.

At 16 she was kicked out of the house after her mother discovered she had had premarital sex, a taboo in Burmese culture. "I wanted to die," Nandar recalls. At that point - after fighting with boyfriend and moving out of his house -- she decided to try her luck with the border job that was supposed to get her 30,000 kyat (30 U.S. dollars) a month.

She and the broker set out for Muse town, Burma - which lies across Ruili -- but instead of getting a job there, Nandar was sold by her Burmese broker to a Chinese trafficking gang in Wanding, a Chinese border town near Ruili.

Along with four other Burmese young women, she was drugged and sent to Jiangsu, a coastal province well over a thousand kilometres all the way at the eastern end of China. ''We were all unconscious,'' Nandar recalls.

The girls arrived in Jiangsu five days later and were transferred to another gang, who took them to neighbouring Anhui province. During their two weeks there, interested men came to inspect the new arrivals.

Nandar was sold to a Chinese man for 18,000 yuan (2,180 dollars). The other women went for between 5,000 and 20,000 yuan (600 and 2,420 dollars) depending on their youth and beauty, she says.

Buying wives from neighbouring countries - such as Burma or Vietnam -- is a thriving business on the Chinese border. Reports of women from these countries being deceived, sold or migrating across the border to become wives of Chinese men are not unusual.

This trend has been fuelled by a mix of factors -- China's opening of its borders in the eighties, increasing mobility of people, and poverty. The one- child policy in China has also resulted in a demographic imbalance and a shortage of women and prompts men -- for whom not having a family bears stigma and who cannot afford big dowries -- to use brokers and look beyond borders for partners.

The border areas - Ruili in the last decade has become a rough-and-tumble town where drugs and prostitution are far from unknown -- are also a magnet for poor women in search of jobs.

Given military rule in Burma, it is also not easy for Burmese women who leave the country illegally to return. Many get as far as Ruili, but end up in sex work. Many die there too, killed by HIV/AIDS and heroin.

For Nandar, life continued in her second 'home' -- a village near Hefei, capital of Anhui province, with her 50-year-old husband. Her work included farming, breeding animals, housekeeping. After a year, she gave birth to a baby boy.

''I really wanted to go back to Burma, but I couldn't when I saw my child's face,'' she said. Still, she continued to think about ways to flee her husband and China. One day, a quarrel with her husband led her to eat rat poison. ''I almost died,'' Nandar adds. After three days in hospital, she was back home.

Nandar befriended the only other Burmese woman in her village. To their neighbours, the two were from Yunnan province, at the western end of China that is close to Burma, Thailand and Vietnam. The women never revealed their Burmese heritage.

One evening shortly after she recovered from eating the poison, Nandar and her friend left their husbands and families. They ran for three hours to a police station. Both were sent back to Ruili.

Burmese authorities say they are working on preventing girls from becoming victims of human traffickers and are helping them to go home. More than 10,000 girls returned to Burma from neighbouring countries between July 2002 to July 2003, according to the Myanmar National Committee for Women's Affairs, which coordinates the government's anti-trafficking programmes.

The Burmese government says 390 traffickers were arrested during the same period, and 1,008 women were ''saved from being sold abroad''.

''The flesh trade is bad for both China and Burma,'' says Mya Maung, a former employee of Save The Children, an organisation that works with women like Nandar along the Chinese border.

He doubts the sincerity of the Burmese government's efforts and its figures about the number of women who have returned to Burma. He estimates that over 700 Burmese women still live in China's Anhui, Hunan, Guangdong, Hubei, Fujian, Jiangsu and Sichuan provinces.

Mya Maung says that Burmese authorities arrested two Burmese women who fled their Chinese husbands last year after they re-entered Burma. Both were sentenced to long prison terms for illegally leaving the country. ''Now I am afraid to send the girls back home,'' he adds.

Those who do not go home have limited options in Ruili. Most turn to sex work and are exposed to HIV and coupled with drug problem in the border with Burma, make a mix of high-risk factors. Yunnan province has the highest HIV rates in China - and the U.N. Development Programme in an August 2003 report says Ruili is ''one of the Cities in China where HIV was first detected''.

A prostitute's fee - 10 yuan (US 1.20 dollars) for a brief encounter or 50 yuan (6 dollars) per night -- is barely enough to survive on, but few Burmese women find other ways of securing an income.

One of Nandar's friends, 37-year-old Ma Than, fled China's Hunan province after living with her Chinese husband for seven years. Now she collects plastic refuse in Ruili for five or six yuan (60 to 70 cents) per day - she cannot sell sex because of her age. ''I thought I would return to Burma some day with alot of cash,'' Ma Than explains. ''But I got nothing.''

The Burmese government is responsible for women like Nandar and Ma Than, maintains Aye Aye Myint of the Ruili branch of the Burmese Women's Union, based in Thailand.

Her organisation provides condoms and sex education to prostitutes. The military government does nothing for the girls who are the victims of trafficking gangs, she says. At the same time, she believes that the only way to curb the flesh trade is to improve Burma's failing economy, which drives women to leave home in search of income for their families.

Her group gives the Burmese women in Ruili suggestions on other ways to make money, ''but most of them don't listen because we can't find them a job'', Ma Than says.

For Nandar, the lack of jobs means she has two choices: to work as a prostitute in Ruili, or to return to her husband across the border. Returning to Burma is out of the question. If she stays, ''I will have to be good to everyone in order to survive. I will make my living with what I have.''

A telephone rings in the corner of Nandar's room and she runs to answer it. Her face reveals mixed feelings toward the caller on the other end. It is her former husband, calling from Hefei. Nandar hangs up after a few minutes, sits silently, then says, "It is better to go back there again."

(The author, Naw Seng of 'Irrawaddy' magazine in Thailand, wrote this article under the IPS-Rockefeller Foundation media fellowship programme 'Our Mekong: A Vision amid Globalisation'.)