Dance of Life

As with so many of her compatriots, Filipina Maria de la Torre's pulchritude was her impoverished family's only sellable asset. Her father, seeking to raise his clan's standard of living, sent the 16-year-old virgin to be a bar girl in Wanchai, Hong Kong's exotic-dancer hot spot. Sounds like the making of a tragedy. But her experience, which is empathetically recounted in Bars of Steel by her cousin-by-marriage Paul Strahan and his co-author Brandon Royal, is much more complex than that. Often, this true-life coming-of-age story is even heartwarming.

Mary, as she is known, is no Suzie Wong, the 1950s progenitor of Wanchai bar-girl protagonists. From a village outside Angeles City, Mary must first overcome mundane frights, such as flying on a plane or even riding down an escalator, before she faces her major challenge—how to retain her virginity and still pay off the outrageous fees she owes her agency for getting her to Hong Kong.

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No book about the red-light district would be complete without a splash of insider knowledge. So we learn that Japanese men like their playmates to keep their panties on "for as long as possible" and that although American sailors come for the girls, Australians are "far more interested in their beers." The book is rife with sexual tension, but the authors save the story from becoming another sex-in-Asia tell-all. Instead of neon, what illuminates Bars of Steel is Mary's quotidian struggle to help her family, make friends and retain her humanity in the face of prickly mama-sans and pushy johns.