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The great majority of them are owned by professional brothel-keepers or traders in women in Canton or Macao, have been brought up for the profession, and trained in various accomplishments suited to brothel life.... They frequently know neither father nor mother, except what they call a 'pocket-mother, that is, the woman who bought them from others.... They feel of course that they are the bought property of their pocket-mother or keeper, but they know also that this is the feeling of almost every other woman in China, liable as each is to be sold, by her own parents or relatives, to be the wife or concubine of a man she never sets eyes on before the wedding day, or liable, as the case may be, to be pledged or sold, by her parents or relatives, to serve as a domestic slave in a strange family.... They have the chance, if they are pretty and accomplished, of being wooed ... and they may look forward with tolerable certainty to being made the second, or third, or fourth, or at any rate the favorite wife of some wealthy gentleman.
To this the Magistrate replies, in explanation: "It is not quite correct to speak of the brothel-keeper as demanding redemption money. The person whose property the prostitute is is the pocket-mother, that is to say, the purchaser of the girl. Nearly every prostitute has her own pocket-mother, and she it is who has sole control over the prostitute's movements.
Let the Police Magistrate, H.E. Wodehouse, reply, as he did concerning a case of suicide: "When registering her name she said she had no pocket-mother, that her parents were both dead, and that she became a prostitute of her own free will. The inspector said that that was the description of themselves that nearly all prostitutes gave, and that it was very rarely that it was true."
The Report of the Commission answers the question: 'The great majority of them are owned by professional brothel-keepers or traders in women in Canton or Macao; they have been brought up for the profession, and trained in various accomplishments suited to their life ... They frequently know neither father nor mother, except what they call a pocket-mother, that is, the woman who bought them from others ... They are owned in Macao and Canton.
The man who wished to marry her offered the pocket-mother a sum of $2,000, but she demanded $2,300 and refused to part with the woman for less; whereupon she hung herself.
He says: "The name of the deceased was Chan Ngan-Kin.... She was registered as a prostitute in this brothel on the 23rd of December, 1890. When registering her name she said she had no pocket-mother, that her parents were both dead, and that she became a prostitute of her own free will.
It is true that, being registered by the Government, she becomes in a manner responsible for the proper conduct of the establishment, but the property in the girl does not rest in her, except in the case of the two or three girls to whom she may herself be pocket-mother, that is to say, whom she may herself have purchased.
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