Investigative reporting/Nonfiction Writing: Journalist Teng Chen reports on the estimated 9,000 illicit massage parlors in the U.S. — and the Chinese moms who often staff them. Here is one woman's story.
Lisa, an honest worker in a failing state-owned factory in China, went to the United States to change the fate of her own and her child. In this big adventure of immigration, she stumbled along and was then drawn into the rapidly taking-off Chinese illicit massage industry. Ten years later, she became the owner of two illicit massage parlors, in charge of 13 "masseuses", accumulated wealth and changed fate, as she had wished. But at the same time, she has also become a targeted criminal in American society.
By depicting Lisa's immigrant life for more than a decade, this article shows the sorrow of the bottom working-class Chinese immigrants: The inexorable greed for US dollars coexists with the equally inexorable desire for love and dignity. In the end, China is somewhere they cannot go back, and the United States they can never reach.