At 9:15, Sealing Cheng showed up outside her office at the Humanities Building. She instantly commanded attention with her white thick-rimmed glasses and keen features beneath, porcupine haircut and all-black slim fit. The anthropologist had been involved in drama since childhood, and it’s only at her father’s behest that she backed out of the final admission interview at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. At the end of the day, though, anthropology and acting are very much the same thing: anthropologists and actors of the finest sort have an appetite and stomach large enough for the myriad manifestations of life while remaining calmly detached from their own likes and dislikes, prejudices and understandings.
Life Writings with Poetry and Soul
Fun-loving and scholarly, the associate professor of the Department of Anthropology is a freewheeling spirit. The eloquent gestures and mellifluous voice with which she effortlessly invoked the theories and modestly imparted her views betray notwithstanding the sensitive and compassionate soul beneath the steely exterior. Sealing’s mother is a pianist; but the daughter chooses not to fly her nimble fingers across the black and white keys. She picks up the pen, rather, sketching on paper genuine lives and thoughts of the stigmatized, marginalized and most vulnerable peoples on the transnational stage—the migrant sex workers in the US military base in South Korea and the African asylum seekers in Hong Kong. Given the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award, her monograph, On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (2010) contains vignettes of Filipina entertainers at the South Korean US military base that elaborate on their love, romantic relationships and aspirations for a better life. With kindness and patience, she peels away pretences one after the other and comes in touch with the truth of her subjects’ existences; such understanding boils down to how she was treated in her salad days. Attending a Catholic girls’ school, Sealing was a problem student in the eyes of the teachers. In Form 2, she had a big row with her father and left home to find her mother in England. Her rebelliousness was nothing compared to that of her British counterparts. She became an exemplary student and was nominated the best student in a foreign country.
‘I didn’t know being respected by teachers would feel so good,’ she said.
Tristes Tropiques
Back to Hong Kong, Sealing entered the elite stream and got to study her favourite arts subjects. By the end of the eighties she made it to The University of Hong Kong to study social sciences, and there in the Sociology Department she came across its only anthropologist—Laos expert Grant Evans. Towards the end of her MPhil, driven by the simple wish of leaving Hong Kong and seeing more of the world, she decided to give PhD a go. In two years she had applied for 13 scholarships, all unsuccessfully. Burying her head in cocktail books and planning to run a pub instead, Sealing, then a research assistant at the Department of Anthropology at CUHK, was spurred on by Maria Tam, associate professor of the Department, to give one more try. This time, out of four scholarships, she notched up three. Thus in 1997, she headed first to South Korea to learn the Korean language for half a year, then flew to Oxford to commence her PhD studies at its Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
Often it is serendipities, not forethought and planning, that lay down the courses of our lives. One night during her Korea stay, Sealing exchanged views on love and marriage in a coffee shop with her male Korean schoolmates. The conversation did not go well and made her realize that any rational debate on sex and romance would inevitably run up against the high wall of nationalism: ‘Once nationalism is invoked, any critical discussion stops. The self-other divide is absolute.’ Later in Oxford, she decided to focus on sex and nationalism, and the US military base in South Korea became a natural point of engagement.
By the time she set foot on the US military camp towns in South Korea, however, most Korean women were gone; standing in for them were women from the Philippines and some ex-Soviet states. Now that the targets were decided on, the hard part was how to reach out to them meaningfully. A Latin America festival was going in full swing in Seoul at that time; Sealing went down to the salsa dance floor and met two Latino GIs, one from Bolivia and one from Mexico. They brought her to the clubs and she managed to gradually build relationships with the Filipina entertainers. A true confession from one, however, came only eight months later:
‘I lied to you—I have three kids, not one; I am 28, not 22,’ an entertainer conceded during lunch.
‘Something has changed at that moment. What they said may not thoroughly be true, but they have become more generous with the truth at least.’
The love and money sagas staged in GI clubs posed huge spiritual and cultural shocks to the pious churchgoing girl. ‘A woman needs to date a lot of boyfriends to secure her income. From a transnational and historical perspective, the colonial exploitation the Philippines was subject to for half a century has propelled its female nationals into overseas ventures to strive for a better life.’
Sex is a Kind of Labour
In 2007, Sealing was commissioned to interview Korean sex workers in the US to see if they were victims of sex trafficking. In a sun-drenched studio apartment in New York, a woman in her early 40s, who worked in massage parlours, said:
‘Some clients don’t have sex—they just do chats.’
‘That’s good,’ Sealing observed naïvely.
‘Of course not! Those guys spend all the time chatting.’
‘Good clients are…?’
‘Those who come in, take a shower, have sex, pay and go—such are good clients.’
