The first thing I wanted to be was an actress. It’s rather ironic because I’m actually named after a well-known actress, according to my mother—my real name, that is. (Ashley Chan is my pseudonym, of course.) These days, you could say I am acting. I’m what would be called, in the old manner of speaking, a courtesan.

In our modern times, the term is “call girl” or “harlot”, though personally I prefer “escort”. In Mandarin, I’m an expert at “mai yin”. It’s a deceptively simple proposition: people pay me to “act out” their sexual fantasies and since most of them are complete strangers, the variations are aplenty.

I do confess, I pretty much do them all—within reason.

I’m fine with my job, though admittedly it isn’t an easy thing to say. Some people cringe at the thought of having sex for money—for all sorts of reasons, as you can imagine—but there are trade-offs. One of the main attractions is that my work has taken me to some wild places. I have my “fly me to you” clients, who want me to meet them in London, Tokyo, Hong Kong or Taiwan. I also have terrible clients, like an Indonesian Chinese businessman whose money I mostly returned when he threatened to report me to the police. I could not stand his bullshit and left the hotel room early.

I’m twenty-four years old, a five-foot-three (160cm) Chinese Singaporean, and I measure 32B-24-35. (The real-life actress I’m named after is 35-22-35.) I’ve been described as good-looking in a slim and slightly curvaceous way, and I dress to fit the occasion, depending on whom I’m meeting: definitely sensual if the work calls for it and much more casual when I’m at university.

And yes, I’m at university. This is my final year there, and my fourth year as an escort.

Consequently, I lead a double life—with all the trappings (and traps, to be sure) of someone who has to hide a secret to live a real life, one that leads to the proverbial yellow brick road and true “happiness” (whatever that is). Along the way, I’ve hit a few roadblocks, two of which were pivotal: I left the escort industry in my third year but went back to it, and in my fourth year, I nearly killed myself.

Both have left me somewhat ill at ease with the future. (You’ll read about it later.) It’s a relatively new feeling, and to be honest it makes me feel like I should leave the industry despite the many good things that have happened.

Bad things do happen if you stay in the game too long. Of course, if I do leave, I’ll probably hold onto a few of my favourite clients—just to remind me of the nice parts of the job. I like to kiss, for instance. One girl in Australia charged an extra fifty dollars for kissing; that’s crazy. Here in Asia, we kiss them for free, because we want to! (And I do like some of the men I’ve kissed.) I think that’s the rule, in general, for Chinese escorts. It’s about the girlfriend experience, so we don’t charge or it becomes transactional. Men don’t appreciate that. They want to feel like they’re your boyfriend; they want you to see them as “people”, not just “clients”. Or rather, they just want to pay you and forget about it—or forget they ever paid you!

One thing I can remember growing up is the motto from my secondary school: “With Constancy and Purpose”. Those words, when I think about it, have defined my life. Even if you don’t know where you’re going, you at least have an objective in mind, and that’s something I believe in: you should at least mark where you want to go, so you have some purpose.

So to call a spade a spade, I’m proud to call myself a fledgling whore. Speaking frankly, as an escort, I’ve sucked and fucked my way since November 2015—orally, vaginally and anally. The second position is the most popular, but it’s my least favourite.

I like that I have preferences, you know.

So how on earth did I get into this? Or, to put it bluntly, did I not at some point in my career think that what I do is wrong?

Well, the answer is yes. But I only thought this in the beginning. Lately, I’ve come to realise and fully understand that everything is a trade-off and a compromise. It took a while for that concept to sink in, and it was no easy task.

What I mean is, you can’t be scared and do sex work. You can’t keep thinking that taking off your clothes and acting sensual is morally wrong because then you can’t do sex work and you will go crazy.

I have in my career seen many girls who have gone crazy—girls who think it’s a playground for the rich and try to hook a man for his money, girls who fall in love but have to deal with a vengeful wife who finds out. In other words, these are girls who don’t fully understand what they’re working for or what their purpose is as a sex worker.

I’ve fully internalised it, so I don’t feel the guilt and shame. This has made my clients trust me—they confide in me and know that I won’t use their secrets against them. They are also certain I won’t do foolish things, like go crazy and stab them one day, or go to their house and expose their secret lives.

It also means, however, something else—that I can be pretty distant. Sometimes I can be emotionally close but, in other areas, I am emotionally closed off. I will go for the money when the time is right—I’ve been pretty mercenary since I was young anyway—and then back off when a client is “spoken for” and I don’t need to “bother” him anymore.

Some of my favourite clients understand this and are equally reciprocal. They don’t need me to text them repeatedly to remind them of appointments, and for some of my regulars, they know when to meet each week. They know I need time to recharge, and at my own pace. We’ll talk when we meet, and not a moment sooner. They understand that for me, it’s tiring to answer emails from different aspects of my life. I’m always on the phone because of my many emails and I have to tell people I’m a hard person to get a reply from.

Paying for sex falls into this grey area, where people who need their sexual needs met are willing to go about it in a transactional manner, rather than, say, find mistresses and then inadvertently destroy their lives. Sure, it’s not exactly the most ethical thing to do and not what I would call “morally right”, but it is a compromise, between fantasy and reality.

Here’s a family secret that changed the course of my life: my grandfather had a “China mistress” (meaning a girl who comes from China). My grandma knew about her but kept it from us. The thing is, we are a Chinese family—we are Cantonese—and she probably believed that youngsters should not know about this kind of thing. How she actually found out, I don’t know—I’m guessing she got the news through the grapevine, or through one of my grandfather’s friends.

After my grandfather died, the mistress gave us hell. She came to the house when no one else was around and screamed at my grandma. She said that my grandfather left her some money and that she deserved to go to his funeral, that kind of thing.
Boy, if I had been home, some unfortunate things would have happened to this girl!

When I found out about the mistress, I was shocked. But the revelation made a profound impact on me: I realised that transactional sex may not be a perfect system, but maybe it is better than having a mistress. Why? Because the utmost priority for a wandering man should still be his children, his wife, his family. A mistress should be the absolute last priority—lower than a sex worker, pretty much—unless, of course, the man really doesn’t have a conscience. A mistress is emotionally involved, too much even. People don’t understand that hiring sex workers is the better of both evils.

*

These days, I’m living with my grandma. She’s seventy-two and already forgetful about many things. She even fell several times while crossing the road (once I had to postpone a meeting with a client because I had to get her to a clinic!). It’s just the two of us, in an HDB flat in Pasir Ris. I see my mother once every four months and my father once a year—or whenever he bothers to visit me (or rather, my grandma—she’s his mother), which is usually during Chinese New Year. Every year, I get two reunion dinners, one with each parent because they don’t see each other! I don’t have siblings, but cousins do drop by sometimes and stay with us.

I think my grandma suspects I’m a sex worker, so by now the other members of my family might know, too. She found my sex toys once, which led to a shouting match. And when she finds condoms all over my room, we often argue about it. Because I’m not exactly a passive person, I got aggressive and said, “Would you rather that I give birth out of wedlock or use a condom?” She threw things at me but I maintained my stance. Finally, I yelled at her: “If you want the money, shut the fuck up!”

My basic message to her is: “If you want me to take care of you, keep quiet.” She understands that much but she is a selfish woman who is hard to love, who has hated me for half my life and made my life a living hell. She compares me to my cousins who are ten years my junior.

“Well, they have parents who can teach them how to act and behave themselves,” she says, “not like you—you have no parents to teach you.”

She constantly said things like that to me until I was fifteen, so I grew up with low self-esteem. I also constantly victimised myself. I wasn’t the best-looking girl either, since I wore braces on my teeth (but I later fixed that with surgery).

I left this living arrangement once, but it didn’t end well. That’s why I put up with her. Back then, I left both my grandma and grandfather to live with my boyfriend for a year and a half. I have some regret about that, because my grandfather died in 2016, towards the end of my first year of escorting, and now I wish I had spent more time with him.

He died in Malaysia, so we needed money to ship his body back to Singapore, which cost a whopping $10,000. Alternatively, we could have cremated his body and brought back the ashes; that would have cost more than $1,000. We didn’t have either amount, and that was when I saw first-hand how incredibly heartless my family can be. In the end, my grandma borrowed money to bring his body back. I was very upset because, actually, my grandfather’s family is rich (but, of course, he’s the poorest). These guys live in fucking landed property in Hong Kong and only gave $1,000 for his funeral—surely they could have done better!

It was ugly to see the way my family chose to indulge their self-interest. I decided then that I needed money and that I would have to depend on myself to get it. Some people are so comfortable with their lives and can say that money isn’t important, but I disagree. Money is important and you need money to do things, and difficult situations can be resolved with money—there’s absolutely no doubt about that.

Ultimately, my grandfather’s death was most traumatising and that’s when I decided to keep working in the escort business. The whole importance of money, the significance of it, didn’t occur to me until something that major happened, and it was a real cataclysm.

And that’s how I basically got here. What impacted my choices the most was my grandfather’s death and my father’s selfishness (which I’ll go into in the next chapter). If I do ever leave sex work, I would wait until my grandma expires—which at her age could be anytime soon.