Karaoke and me

This is *Sarah's Story

The hard liquor streams through them both, her arms are like jelly. He holds her down, her back against the cold leather sofa, his warm breath on her flushed cheeks, she feigns a light giggle and returns his kisses. His hands creep beneath her little, black dress as he presses his drunken body weight on her. A faint laughter enters the room; it’s her boss, drink in hand, the night is going well, his customers are happy. But Sarah isn’t; so embarrassed by having an audience; she escapes the grips of the well-dressed Chinese man and seeks refuge in the dimly lit lavatory. Unknowingly, his footsteps have traced hers and soon there he is, in front of her, unzipped and exposing his most private parts to her.

Sarah was fed-up; fed-up of being broke and of not being able to hold a steady job while trying to stay in school. She was tired of turning to friends for help or government funding, so she decided to be a karaoke girl at “Chicago.” She confesses it was pride that lead to her decision and the money sounded good too. In the summer, girls can make up to $600 /week working part-time. But no karaoke customers means $5/hr pay. About 25 girls work at this lounge; most of them are just over 19 years of age and from Japan without work permits or are international students.

Their job?

“It was like a house party where teenage boys try to see what they can get away with. Your job was to make them have a good time, entice them to drink so the establishment makes more money, and you make more money,” said Sarah.

However, sometimes, the customers, who were not teenage boys at all but middle-aged sometimes married men, would feel entitled to grope and fondle the karaoke girls. The girls, who are expected to drink as much as possible with the men, are sometimes too drunk to resist their progressions or too afraid to loose the men as their customers. If you piss them off they might not choose you from the line-up next time.

“Despite it being very shady, it felt sort of safe, not completely safe but I felt that he wasn’t lying about prostitution because he said that he actually had kicked people out for expecting that,” Sarah said about the job interview she had had with owner.

In a brief interview the owner he denies even having karaoke girls working at his lounge.

“My opinion about women working in places like that is that it is really up to the women. Just as long as they are not forced, then they can do what they seem fit at the moment. I've learned from my experiences, that people in the end will do what they think they should do,” said a fellow church goer and long time friend at Sarah’s church.

In Canada places like this are illegal and one would wonder why a young lady who is a Canadian born would choose to work in a place that she could be arrested for working in and fined up to two years in prison. Her friends, the few she’s chosen to tell, were all surprised of her job at “Chicago.”

“She did have choices. I think she could have went about it differently,” said a close friend of Sarah.

“I do now know of what she did in her past but I don’t view her differently since she has told me about this,” said Sarah’s current boyfriend.

At “Chicago” although Sarah never engaged in prostitution herself inside or outside of the lounge she says, “I am not sure if this (the bar) was just a passive excuse for selling sex outside of the bar…because if they (the karaoke girls) were being honest they might get fired for taking business away from the bar” said Sarah.

In Toronto, rub and tug massage parlours are popular in the local news, originating from similar places in China and Korea but whether “Chicago” is a place like this has yet to be confirmed.

The night that Sarah was approached by a drunken customer in the ladies washroom with his pants dropped, was when she felt it was time to leave “Chicago.”

Thankfully she was not raped; embarrassed that he had taken it too far with “Sarah” they both ignored what had happened that night and went back to the karaoke room.
That was almost a year ago and today Sarah lives on a meagre government funding whilst continuing to pursue her degree in psychology.

*All real names in this story have been changed .