Kuala Lumpur Undercover II

As eight sexy girls strut their stuff on stage, spandex shorts swathing their behinds as tightly as the lotus-leaf wrappings of a Chinese dumpling, author Ewe Paik Leong once again finds himself on the trail of Kuala Lumpur’s ladies of the night. Following the success of his original book, which resulted in several red-light areas being closed down by the Malaysian authorities, he is back with new girls, new locations and new, shocking material.

In his new book, the author reveals websites where freelancers sporting Islamic hijab headscarves advertise their services and, in true Malaysian fashion, where the names of dishes are used to denote the different races: nasi lemak for Malay girls, char kwey teow for Chinese, and chapati for Indians. He visits KL’s ethnic enclaves and interviews sex workers in ‘Little Vietnam’, ‘Little Indonesia’, ‘Little China’ and ‘Little Nepal’. The author also travels north to Thailand to report on activities in Bangkok and Phuket, and south to the Indonesian islands of Batam and Karimun, both a short hop from Singapore. On Karimun Island, he visits a self-contained prostitution village, or lokalisasi, where women idle under front porches of houses and wait for business while feathered chickens scratch the dirt looking for their next victim.