Behind the Curtain

Lisa’s massage parlor is on the third floor of a building in Flushing, up a narrow flight of stairs whose steps advertise the eyelash-extension business in the unit across the hall. Her door is bubble-gum pink and so are the walls and ceiling inside. There are heavy pink drapes embroidered with gold gingko leaves by the windows and gauzy curtains in a doorway that sway when the breeze picks up. In the back of the parlor, just beyond a reception area with a sofa and television, are three chambers just wide enough for a massage table pushed against a wall and someone standing next to it. Lisa has worked in this parlor since 2015, shortly after she immigrated from Chengdu. The layout is exactly the same as when she took over the place in 2016; there isn’t enough time and money to renovate. But she likes to decorate and so there’s a row of seashells by the door (souvenirs from trips to the beach), a purple sequined cloth thumbtacked to the wall in the waiting area, and a dog-shaped pillow on the sofa. Most of her clients are long-term — some have been coming for over five years — and making the space feel relaxing and welcoming to them is why she takes so much care with her decorations.

For a month in early 2024, an adaptation of Lisa’s massage parlor took over the Storefront for Art and Architecture gallery on Kenmare Street. This exhibition by Red Canary Song — a mutual aid network of massage workers, sex workers, and activists — relays the complex intersection of identity, economics, and public policy in the Asian massage parlor, a space that is as ubiquitous as it is misunderstood. Designed by RCS organizers Chong Gu (who was also a graduate student at the Yale School of Architecture) and Yin Q (an artist and kink worker), the installation is one in a series of artistic investigations into intimate body-care spaces that the collective has recently staged.

Red Canary Song was formed after the death of Song Yang, an undocumented massage and sex worker who plunged from a four-story window during a 2017 police raid in Flushing and eventually died from her injuries. (The reason why she fell is debated: her autopsy report says she jumped to evade arrest by the NYPD, while her family thinks she was pushed.) The group, primarily based in Flushing, consists of ten core organizers, who are mostly massage and sex workers themselves, and around 300 people in the industry who are connected to them via WeChat and Kakao. RCS’s primary work is distributing cash aid to workers, connecting them with health care and legal services, and building emotional support and community care systems. But it also builds narratives that challenge the stereotypes surrounding massage parlors and intimate bodywork spaces. By bringing their stories, told in their own words, to galleries, cinema, and public space, RCS is inviting more people to understand the true day-to-day experience of its members. By illustrating how their challenges are similar to many other marginalized New Yorkers — even if they don’t share the same racial and ethnic identity, class, or profession — the hope is it builds the empathy and solidarity needed to enact structural change. “The shared experience is a marginal relationship to power,” Gu says. “This is how racial capitalism is set up.”

New York is a city of informal economies, but the ones that are visible from the street, like unlicensed food vendors and the weed dispensaries mushrooming by the minute, draw more scrutiny than the nannies paid under the table or landlords renting illegal cellar apartments. More eyes on them, more complaints. One of them is the Asian massage parlor, which is highly visible as a storefront, but also mysterious from the outside.

There are hundreds of Asian massage parlors across New York City, in wealthy neighborhoods and poor ones, on densely built urban blocks and in suburban neighborhoods. They hold stories of survival like Lisa’s, but whenever we hear about them it’s usually for one reason: something unlawful is happening there. This oversimplified framing is continually reinforced by salacious headlines about human trafficking, organized crime rings, and so-called “illicit acts” that may include hand jobs and oral and penetrative sex, which are all illegal to buy and sell by state law. The massage parlor raid has become ingrained in mass media, even dramatized in a 2019 Law and Order: SVU episode in which detectives worked on an anti-trafficking mission named “Operation Dragon Slay.” (The episode borrowed from the true story of Song Yang.)

The massage parlor carries different meanings for the different people who encounter it. To customers with achy backs and sore feet, it’s an accessible place for body work, with services priced far lower than places with licensed therapists. According to RCS, most of the customers of workers in the collective are immigrants, too; many are construction workers and people who are a long way from their families. To Lisa, massage work is a form of community care. In an oral history that has been excerpted in RCS’s installations, she describes a client who said that because of his work, he hadn’t seen a woman in three years and started to cry when holding her.

But to neighbors who are concerned about living next to something they perceive to be associated with the sex industry, massage parlors are a nuisance. In 2015, an art gallery on Orchard Street transformed itself into a faux massage parlor for an exhibition (complete with a price list etched on the door and an LED sign) and swiftly received an email from an angry neighbor who said that they called city agencies to “slap a fine” on the gallery and were planning to sue for “damages to the value of our condominiums.” Such mundane fixtures as security cameras and tinted windows are enough to rouse suspicion from passersby, and from law enforcement. The NYPD has asked the public to be on the lookout for and report such things because they could be signs that human trafficking is happening there. In a 2017 report, the anti-trafficking organization Polaris lists signs with low prices and locked front doors as other evidence of “illicit” activity. In effect, storefronts have become an unwitting accomplice to the animus directed toward Asian women, immigrants, and sex workers.

The 2021 mass shooting at three Atlanta spas (another name for massage parlors) is an extreme example. The 21-year-old man who killed eight people — six of whom were Asian women — told investigators that he had a “sexual addiction” and that the victims represented “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.” As soon as the news broke, but before all of the facts were known, “happy endings” jokes flooded social media platforms. It was a callous response to horrific violence. And it was also unsurprising. As Anne Anlin Cheng wrote in The Atlantic, the comments spoke to a “prejudice that is deeply ingrained, if largely unacknowledged in American society.” She described how the shootings were an escalation of the anti-Asian violence brought on by the Covid pandemic, but also emblematic of the “continued degradation of Asian women, the criminalization of women connected to sex work (or imagined to be), and American male fantasies of entitlement to Asian female bodies.” Atlanta police later said that the shooter had been a customer at two of the three locations he targeted: Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa. It’s not clear if he had a connection to Young’s Asian Massage, but given its name and his comments, it’s not a huge leap to see why he went there.

Since the Atlanta spa shootings, Red Canary Song has been exploring the spatial dimension of massage parlors as part of its storytelling. It started with a memorial held on the one-year anniversary of the tragic event. They created altars on massage tables and surrounded them with curtains, like the ones in a parlor. This connected mourning more directly to the sites where the violence took place but evolved into a way to make their activism work more relatable by working with a space that people in the audience would recognize. In their eyes, parlors are primarily spaces of care, healing, and survival.

Workers like Lisa, who also leads Red Canary Song’s outreach to the Chinese-speaking community, have a complicated relationship with the massage parlor. It’s not an “ideal” place, she tells me. Her work technically breaks the law (in New York State, practicing massage therapy requires a license, which few migrant massage workers have) but it was the only way she was able to make money when she arrived in Flushing. “Honestly, in my heart I didn’t want to do it,” Lisa said in her oral history. “[But] if you don’t work, how are you supposed to survive, to eat, to pay rent?” The two other lines of work available to women in her position — who don’t speak English and don’t have legal immigration status — are restaurants, which involve backbreaking work for low pay, and nail salons, which have a long learning curve and require more skills. Lisa’s eyesight wasn’t strong enough to become a manicurist, and back pain prevented her from seeking restaurant work, so she entered the massage industry.

John J. Chin, an urban planning professor at Hunter College, has been studying worker experiences in the storefront massage economy. In 2019, he published a study based on interviews with over 100 women working in massage parlors in Los Angeles and New York. Most were Korean or Chinese, with an average age of 46. A common assumption about this line of work is that women are forced into it; however, 83 percent of the study participants said that they didn’t feel coerced. Most women in the study learned about massage work from ethnic newspaper ads or friends and relatives who were already in the industry and suggested the occupation as something that is flexible and convenient. “Some of the women really went out of their way to portray themselves as free agents — not to dismiss the fact that some women are really exploited and feel really trapped in this business,” Chin says.

The risks involved in massage work are substantial, and they don’t usually reveal themselves to workers until a problem arises. Licensure is an expensive and rigorous process, completely out of reach because the test is only offered in English. One woman in Chin’s study said a parlor owner would charge workers $1,200 for a license, a scam that likely took advantage of their lack of awareness about how licensing works, he writes. Additionally, Chin found that many women were confused about their risks and rights. Sometimes managers misled them to believe that hand jobs were legal.

Some of the most challenging day-to-day situations involve social stigma. Neighbors don’t want these businesses around, even though they are located all over the city. In a study published last year, Chin analyzed the locations of parlors listed on Rubmaps, a website that lists massage businesses that provide sexual services. He found that they are located on commercial strips in neighborhoods of all types, but are concentrated in Midtown, the Financial District, South Brooklyn, and Eastern Queens. Businesses in New York are clustered in areas where customers live and work, the study found, unlike in Los Angeles, where they are concentrated in neighborhoods where massage workers live.

“People get upset about these establishments without really understanding the plight of the people working in them,” Chin says. Neighbors have treated Lisa condescendingly and left trash on her doorstep. Since the pandemic, business has been slow. Lisa had to let her employees go and now works alone. The massage market is oversaturated in Flushing and prices are the same now as they were four years ago: about $40 for a 60-minute massage and $30 for 30 minutes. Competition is fierce and she says that sometimes massage parlor owners will file 311 reports on their enemies. “It’s like the Real Housewives,” Lisa says. “People hate each other in the industry.”

Lisa has worked in this industry for nine years, but it’s not something she’ll ever be fully comfortable with. Her daughter back home in China will likely never know about the work she does. But the work does bring her fulfillment. She’s sympathetic to her clients and is proud of helping to care for them. Lately, though, she has been spending the majority of her time on RCS outreach, helping new immigrants to Flushing adjust to the city. Because of this, her massage parlor has turned into a community hub where she’ll let someone crash for a few days while they find a place. (With a few blankets and a pillow, a massage chamber becomes a bedroom.) Sisters in the RCS network come for lunch and to talk to someone who understands what they’re going through. With every outreach event she organizes, Lisa feels more harmony within the community. “It feels good that there’s some sense of belonging in Flushing now,” she says. “That’s something that I’ve never had before. I always thought I would pay my debt and return home. I didn’t think I would stay until recently.”

Despite all of the social and economic challenges that come with their profession, what brings the most anxiety to massage workers is law enforcement. This makes them vulnerable to violence and exploitation because even if they are victims of a crime, they have no recourse. In “Fly In Power,” a documentary film produced by Yin Q and RCS, Charlotte, a former massage worker who now leads RCS’s outreach to the Korean-speaking community, told a story about how her manager asked her to fill in for a cook at the parlor who left but never paid her for that labor. In her oral history, Lisa recounts how a customer stole two month’s rent in cash. Neither went to the police. The risk of deportation that comes with filing a report was too high.

Sex work exists on a spectrum: there are people who are forced, people who are coerced, and people who engage willingly. This is also true of sex work that happens in massage parlors. However, the view that if sex work is happening, trafficking is happening too, has become pervasive. After the ratification of the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking and the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000, the last two decades have seen a rise in anti-trafficking policy. Since then, the federal government has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to state and local law enforcement to fight the issue, and have had, and continue to have, a major impact on massage parlors and how they are treated by New York City.

Progressive scholars and activists have criticized this strategy. While sex trafficking happens, there is inconsistent statistical recording on how many people are affected. The prevailing “raid and rescue” strategy does little to help survivors and ignores the reality of why workers enter this business, automatically assuming that someone else has forced them to. “Obviously exploitation and violence does happen, but it happens because workers are vulnerable,” says Yves Tong Nguyen, a sex worker and an organizer with RCS. “It happens because they are put in a position for which they’re criminalized and for which they cannot receive services.” The sociologist Nandita Sharma describes anti-trafficking campaigns as “a moral panic” that obscures the real vulnerabilities of women, which are rooted in economic issues, and legitimizes regressive immigration policy. Elena Shih, an assistant professor at Brown University, calls this the “trafficking deportation pipeline” that has been used to target Asian sex workers “under the guise of benevolence.” And as Chin points out, “anti-immigrant sentiment or prejudices can be difficult to disentangle from concerns about criminality.” There’s a perception that Asian women engaged in sex work need to be rescued from trafficking and that law enforcement will help save them.

Leigh Latimer is an attorney in Legal Aid’s Exploitation Intervention Project, an initiative that helps gender-based violence survivors clear their convictions. When she was assigned to the Human Trafficking Intervention Court in 2013, she saw firsthand how the trafficking framework led to racial disparities in women arrested for prostitution. Around 2015, the demographics of clients she met through this program changed. Suddenly, all of them were of Chinese and Korean descent. “They were policing Flushing like crazy,” Latimer says. Most of these clients were charged with both prostitution and practicing a profession without a license, indicators that they were arrested in an Asian massage parlor. According to a report from the Urban Institute, the number of Asian-identifying people charged with practicing without a license increased from 31 to 631 between 2012 and 2016; during the same period, the number of Asian-identifying people charged with both prostitution and practicing without a license increased 2,700 percent, from 12 people to 336.

Physical environments are marshaled as evidence of illegal behavior, since people living in a massage parlor is viewed as a sign of trafficking. But for workers in RCS it’s more representative of the reality of the housing crisis. The presence of a rice cooker, personal care items, and slippers during raids has also been cited by law enforcement as evidence. To workers, these are more emblematic of day-to-day life. Nguyen calls them “items of duality,” since they carry multiple readings. “We talk about the rice cooker in the massage business because people prepare food there and they live there but they’re criminalized for it,” she says. “There are so many regulations around the spaces that you’re allowed to live in, the spaces that you’re allowed to work in, and that you’re not allowed to do both. So many New Yorkers do live and work in the same place, especially since Covid.”

New York changed its approach to human trafficking after the death of Song Yang. The NYPD announced in 2017 that it would focus on arresting the buyers of sexual services instead of the sellers, a model that law enforcement believes is more humane, and that workers still see as criminalization that threatens their livelihood. Then in 2021, district attorneys announced that they would stop prosecuting prostitution (although they still do) and Governor Cuomo repealed the “walking while trans” bill: a 1970s state law that prohibited loitering with the intent of prostitution, a charge that massage workers also frequently received. The impact wasn’t felt overnight, but steadily arrests across all categories dropped. According to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, the number of New York City arrests in which unauthorized practice of profession was the top charge went from 696 in 2016 to 5 in 2022. Prostitution arrests fell from 1,089 to 75 during the same period.

But these changes didn’t mean that Asian massage parlors were safe from criminalization; the primary tools to police them just shifted.

Massage parlor raids have always involved multiple agencies, including the police and fire departments, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Buildings. Since the pandemic, RCS has been hearing from workers in its network that they are receiving more attention from the Department of Buildings (DOB).

“It’s our understanding that policing is multiarmed; there are people who are the police that are not police,” Nguyen says. “Social workers, Child Protective Services, and healthcare workers come off as more legible, more justifiable reasons for policing. If DOB says, ‘This is violating zoning code,’ who’s going to go against that? No one, unless you really know what they’re trying to do. And really how unsafe is it? Because look at all of the buildings across the city that are unsafe or have multiple violations. As certain types of policing become unpopular, the city says, ‘We’re no longer going to do this.’ They try to make it their moral stance, but we know that it’s not and that they find other ways of policing that feel more credible and that most people will support without thinking critically about it.”

After hearing about the rise in DOB interactions, Gu researched data from the Office of Administrative Data and Hearings and found that there were at least 553 DOB inspections of massage parlors between October 2020 and September 2021; from March 2019 through February 2020, there were 252. Now RCS hands out “know your rights” flyers about DOB policies along with pamphlets about where to find OB/GYN care, immigration lawyers, and English classes when they conduct outreach, which is often by knocking on doors and hosting events.

Last summer, the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement (OSE), which addresses complaints about illegal businesses, investigated four massage parlors in Bay Ridge at the request of the city councilmember and local community board. Josephine Beckman, the district manager of Community Board 10, told Brooklyn Paper that neighbors were suspicious because of the late hours posted on the storefronts and curtains over the windows. “Concerns about the possibility of human trafficking and prostitution are taken seriously here and are referred to the proper law enforcement,” she said. (Beckman did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) All of the businesses received complaints about code violations in the year leading up to the OSE action.

According to a Department of Buildings spokesperson, the most common code violations that massage parlors receive are “work without a permit” for building interior walls that divvy a space into massage chambers, “illegal occupancy” for using a space differently than what’s on a certificate of occupancy, and “illegal use” in a commercial or residential district, meaning that the business doesn’t have the right zoning-related permits. Until recently, massage parlors were considered a “physical culture establishment,” a category of business that included gyms, tanning salons, and yoga studios and required a special use permit to operate. In 2021, a zoning code resolution adopted by City Council removed the permit requirement, citing it as a barrier for small businesses. But it also created a new category of business called an “unlicensed physical treatment establishment” and made it illegal anywhere in the city. It only applies to massage parlors where workers are unlicensed. (The zoning text specifically exempts “barbershops or beauty parlors that offer massage to the scalp, the face, the neck or shoulders only.”) Even though the Department of Buildings doesn’t issue licenses for massage work — they’re administered by the New York State Department of Education — it can now take enforcement actions related to them by issuing charges for practicing without a license.

The other businesses in Lisa’s building have the same layout as hers, with chambers that are separated by walls that have a three-foot gap between their tops and the ceiling. It’s a common technique that landlords use to avoid getting a construction permit. Only Lisa’s unit has received a DOB fine, which the landlord passed down to her even though she didn’t build the walls.

Since property owners are responsible for making sure that their buildings are up to code and bear responsibility for violations, Nguyen sees this as a strategy to recruit landlords into policing massage businesses. In a statement, Christian Klossner, the Executive Director of the Office of Special Enforcement, said: “Massage therapy requires a license, and having unlicensed massage parlors is prohibited throughout the city. Property owners who allow their tenants to engage in illegal activity face fines and other enforcement.” This makes it harder for unlicensed massage workers to do business because law-abiding landlords won’t rent to them. However, this doesn’t necessarily curb the industry; it just pushes it further underground.

Recently, there’s been a shift in where Asian massage workers are setting up. Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights has long been a hub for sex workers, but lately there has been more activity (a result of heightened economic pressure in the city) and more complaints. It’s become a TikTok and YouTube trend to walk down the street, nicknamed the “Market of Sweethearts,” filming workers who are standing by doorways, waiting to usher customers to the parlors upstairs. Frustrated constituents are upping the pressure on the City to do something. At a December town hall meeting, Councilmember Francisco Moya, who represents Jackson Heights, suggested “going after property owners” to address the problem. His office is also working on legislation that would allow the Department of Health to conduct drop-in inspections like it does for restaurants. “While we know this won’t end prostitution, our goal is to reduce activities that threaten the health and safety of our entire community,” he told The New York Post. (Moya’s office did not return requests for comment.)

Now, it seems, raids are back. In January, the NYPD executed court orders to shut down a dozen massage parlors on Roosevelt Avenue that were alleged brothels. No arrests were made. Mayor Eric Adams attended the highly publicized, coordinated operation and told members of the press that the businesses were “really bringing down the quality of life of this community.”

At the heart of the controversy over massage parlors is a debate over who has a right to live and work in the city: a classic case of NIMBYism facilitated through municipal code, education law, and social exclusion. Storefronts become physical ciphers that are weaponized or demonized in a larger, but subtle, refusal of immigrants who are just trying to find a way to make a living in the city. “People don’t want to accept that these women are also community members,” Chin says.

There has been a growing interest among urban designers and planners to reorient cities toward care. It’s an ethic of compassion that has encompassed conversations about attending to physical landscapes and social infrastructure alike. This has looked like promoting parks to address mental health and redesigning public spaces and transit to center caregivers instead of commuters. To center care is to ask cities to value actions that have been devalued, especially labor performed by women, and to make space for them. This framing is at the heart of RCS’s reading of massage parlors: It expands the definition of care to encompass all of the services that massage workers provide, placing the Asian massage parlor in the same category as other businesses and spaces that attend to these needs. It also confronts the reality that wellness is layered. “The notion that everything happening inside these spaces is horrible disregards that sex work is care work and care work is real work,” Gu says. “Massage parlors are nourishing places where we feel healing and connection with others.”

The punitive treatment of massage parlors ignores the realities that cause workers to enter the industry and the reasons why customers seek their services, “illicit” or otherwise. As workers continue to organize for their right to earn a living, lawmakers are starting to listen. Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas, who represents Woodside, Jackson Heights, and Elmhurst co-sponsored a bill in the New York State Assembly that seeks to decriminalize unlicensed massage and another that seeks to decriminalize sex work. But the biggest issues are more urgent than what a legislative calendar can realistically accommodate. Lisa says that for workers like her money, housing, and healthcare are immediate needs. And for now, parlors are what’s available to meet them.