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Mong Shuan was simply 16 when she turned to an unconventional supply of revenue: promoting betel nuts from just a little stall in northern Taiwan. The stimulant, a small, rectangular fruit derived from areca palms, is chewed by tens of millions of individuals throughout Asia. For the following three years, Mong would work six days per week for the equal of round $670 a month. A small bonus was tacked on for dressing provocatively to entice male clients.
Her job was to slice the nuts open and add a pinch of slaked lime (or calcium hydroxide, which will increase the physique’s absorption of the stimulant they include), earlier than neatly wrapping every one in a leaf. To satisfy her gross sales targets, the betel nut “should be scrumptious.” she instructed CNN in an e-mail. However hoping to draw extra enterprise, Mong would put on her dyed crimson hair lengthy, just a little make-up and a schoolgirl outfit within the type of Japanese anime character Sailor Moon. “A very powerful factor is your look,” she added.
Distributors like Mong, who left the job in February, are recognized regionally as “betel nut beauties.” The phenomenon emerged within the late Sixties, when the Shuangdong Betel Nut Stand, a stall in rural central Taiwan, efficiently marketed their merchandise with a marketing campaign centered on its “Shuangdong Women.” By the flip of the twenty first century, tens of 1000’s of the neon-lit cubicles, which dot roadsides and industrial neighborhoods throughout the island, have been staffed by younger girls.
Hoping to doc the phenomenon, photographer Constanze Han spent a month in 2022 driving down the freeway connecting the island’s capital, Taipei, to the southern metropolis of Kaohsiung, assembly betel nut beauties alongside the best way. Her fascination with the ladies dates again to the summer season journeys she used to make to her grandfather’s courtyard home on the outskirts of Taipei.
“I cherished driving there as a result of there have been the betel nut ladies,” she recalled in a telephone interview. “As a baby, I didn’t actually perceive (who they have been). My household had been to Amsterdam one time and we’d walked previous the red-light district, so I believed it was an identical factor.”
Whereas the scenes of girls, scantily clad in glass cubicles, would possibly resemble brothels, promoting betel nuts shouldn’t be extensively linked to prostitution in Taiwan. The truth is, the ladies not often go away their stalls besides to method drivers of their excessive heels. Nonetheless, the very existence of provocative betel nut beauties appeared unusual in “a quiet, conservative tradition” like Taiwan’s, stated Han, who hoped her mission might assist dispel among the stereotypes the ladies confronted.
“(Folks with) engrained concepts of respectability, with out actually realizing or having interacted with these ladies, is perhaps like, ‘Oh these are ladies from the flawed aspect of the tracks,’” she stated. However in actuality, Han added, “all of them appeared fairly stage (headed) and accountable.”
The photographer, who grew up between Hong Kong and New York with stints in Latin America, has at all times been within the jobs girls take to outlive whatever the stigma related to them. She was impressed by the work of Susan Meiselas, whose Nineteen Seventies photograph sequence “Carnival Strippers,” captured girls working long and hard hours performing stripteases at carnivals in New England.
“I at all times find yourself gravitating in direction of girls,” stated Han, who would spend time attending to know her topics earlier than asking to take their pictures. “The dialog half, the place there are not any pictures, is such an enormous a part of it. I find yourself having extra trustworthy conversations with girls and I really feel extra curious in regards to the nuances of their experiences.”
Altering habits
Han photographed 12 girls, principally of their late teenagers or early 20s, other than one barely older topic named Xiao Hong, who clothes extra conservatively as she prepares the product carrying brilliant blue gloves at a betel nut stall in New Taipei Metropolis. The others seem drenched within the neon gentle of their cubicles or are shot gazing out of the home windows; one lady’s face is distorted by the reflection of the busy streets outdoors. The photographer would spend hours capturing small, quiet moments that reveal the job’s mundane nature.
Han’s expertise as a former trend editor comes by within the pictures, which regularly look as in the event that they have been staged or taken from the pages of a shiny journal. But it surely’s necessary that her photographs are “as trustworthy as potential,” she stated.
The ladies would often arrive for work of their regular garments and get turned into extra revealing clothes within the cubicles, Han defined. Typically, house owners would incentivize them to decorate in a sexier manner, although a few of Han’s topics stated they might have executed so anyway, as a result of it helps them promote extra merchandise.
One of many girls Han photographed, Ju Ju, is pictured carrying crimson lingerie as she seems to be out of her strobe-lit sales space within the metropolis of Taoyuan. She started promoting betel nuts to assist make ends meet, the photographer stated, including that employment alternatives have been restricted for the younger mother, who has no increased schooling. However Ju Ju has since grown to worth the steadiness of the job. She has now been promoted to a supervisor place of two cubicles, and hopes to purchase her personal stall someday, Han added.
Nonetheless, issues that the ladies are victims of exploitation persist in Taiwan, and have prompted some regulation over the previous 20 years. In 2002, for instance, the local government in Taoyuan county carried out a strict costume code that requires sellers to cowl their breasts, butts and bellies.
Though it’s historically served by Taiwan’s indigenous communities at necessary gatherings, use of the addictive stimulant can also be declining sharply. The island’s Ministry of Well being and Welfare — which notes that customers are 28 times more likely to develop oral most cancers than non-users — says that fewer than one in 16 Taiwanese males chewed betel nuts in 2018, down greater than 43% from 2012.
As such, Han’s pictures doc a side of Taiwanese life which will ultimately stop to exist. She hopes viewers “can have a look at it as an attention-grabbing phenomenon with out an excessive amount of judgement.”
“I hope that (the photograph sequence) opens individuals as much as a distinct concept of — or a curiosity about — Taiwan as a complete.”
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