Sylvia Yu Friedman nonetheless vividly remembers her brush with demise in 2012, greater than a decade in the past.
Then a younger journalist and filmmaker, Friedman had travelled to a red-light district outdoors town limits of southern China to seize footage of underage ladies within the intercourse commerce for a documentary.
“The alley was pitch black, no road lamps. There was a low constructing with sliding glass doorways, giant home windows and pink mild.
“There have been ladies in make-up and brief skirts trying unhappy, and thugs with pasty white faces milling round. Vicious canine have been barking. You could possibly palpably really feel the ickiness and the hazard,” she recounted.
A frontline employee who accompanied Friedman suggested her to stroll by means of the alley, pretending to be a vacationer and surreptitiously movie the scene on her cell phone.
Friedman’s intestine intuition informed her she would by no means get away with it – no feminine vacationer was seen on this a part of the nation. However so decided was she to get the footage that she hushed her interior voice and braved the stroll by means of the darkish alley.
With the footage in hand, she hastened to the getaway automobile.
In a heartbeat, thugs and mamasans surrounded her, shouting menacingly and demanding to see her cellphone. Shaking with concern, Friedman deleted her footage, however they didn’t let her depart.
“I used to be so scared,” she mentioned. “Simply after I thought I used to be going to get harm and noticed my life flash earlier than my eyes, instantly, one of many thugs mentioned the police have been coming and so they scattered like cockroaches once you shine a light-weight.”
That night time, Friedman screamed in her room from the phobia and trauma. Her post-traumatic stress dysfunction lasted for months and he or she needed to search counselling, she informed CNA Ladies.
