They go from house to house, floor to floor, door to door. They knock. If a woman answers (there are few instances of that) they say, "Sorry, mistake." If a man opens the door, the caller asks, "Want nice girl here?"
Some of these peddlers are in their early 'teens, for Caribbean females blossom young.
They are sent forth by their lovers, by their husbands, some by their own parents, to garner the dough.
In Little Spain sex is cheap, selling it is precarious and competition is not only voluminous, but perilous, for the girls will fight with knives over a prospect.
So the Puerto Ricans went hunting for a market and found it among the Chinese, underwomaned thirty or forty to one, racially conspicuous, so they cannot go forth into the byways, let alone the highways, on the hunt.
The secret of the new system, self-delivered sex, wasn't long kept dark.
The downtown hoodlums began to lie in wait for the girls after they had made their rounds, to beat them up and take their money from them. So now the girls, after one Mission Mott Street, book themselves ahead, dating each flat for the next duty tour--and they have the Chinese buy postal money orders, made out to them, individually, against the next visit. These are not cashable except by the beneficiary without running into trouble with the Feds, and the toughest canaille shudder away from that.
So the flesh-peddlers' profits now get to Little Spain.
The hick who takes in Chinatown from a sightseeing bus is led first to the Rescue Society for Bowery bums, which, according to the guide, is located in what was once an opium den.
Then he is shown a joss house, in back of the Chinatown post office, and he is told about the maze of secret tunnels which are supposed to connect most of the buildings in the area, for use during tong wars, opium or Prohibition raids.
The modern generation of American-born Chinese never smelled, let alone smoked, opium, and few of the old-timers remain. Occasionally you can spot one, a bent, wizened, broken and prematurely old fellow who stands out like a barn alongside his non-indulging brethren, who have the Chinese gift of seldom showing their age.
Concubinage is permitted under Chinese law, and some of the older, wealthier Chinese own an extra wife or two, or even a slave-girl brought over from the old country. But these are things you can't prove, and anyway, it's done uptown by the white folk, but under a different name.