🚀 go-pugleaf

of society, and having little, if any, prospect of being
    again admitted into decent and respectable circles of life,
    deprived also of their own self-respect as well as the regards
    of their relatives, occasionally even troubled with qualms of
    conscience, they mostly dread thinking of their future, and seek
    oblivion in excesses of boisterous dissipation. The Chinese
    prostitutes of Hong Kong are an entirely different set of
    people.... Very few of them can be called fallen women; scarcely
    any of them are the victims of seduction, according to the English
    sense of the term, refined or unrefined. 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. If
    not possessed of special attractions or wealthy lovers, they look
    forward to being taken out of the brothel by an honest devoted man
    to share the lot of a poor man's w