Mong Shuan was just 16 when she turned to an unconventional source of income: selling betel nuts from a little stall in northern Taiwan. The stimulant, a small, oblong fruit derived from areca palms, is chewed by millions of people across Asia. For the next three years, Mong would work six days a week for the equivalent of around $670 a month. A small bonus was tacked on for dressing provocatively to entice male customers.
Her job was to slice the nuts open and add a pinch of slaked lime (or calcium hydroxide, which increases the body’s absorption of the stimulant they contain), before neatly wrapping each one in a leaf. To meet her sales targets, the betel nut “must be delicious.” she told CNN in an email. But hoping to attract more business, Mong would wear her dyed red hair long, a little makeup and a schoolgirl outfit in the style of Japanese anime character Sailor Moon. “The most important thing is your appearance,” she added.
Vendors like Mong, who left the job in February, are known locally as “betel nut beauties.” The phenomenon emerged in the late 1960s, when the Shuangdong Betel Nut Stand, a stall in rural central Taiwan, successfully marketed their products with a campaign centered on its “Shuangdong Girls.” By the turn of the 21st century, tens of thousands of the neon-lit booths, which dot roadsides and industrial neighborhoods across the island, were staffed by young women.
Hoping to document the phenomenon, photographer Constanze Han spent a month in 2022 driving down the highway connecting the island’s capital, Taipei, to the southern city of Kaohsiung, meeting betel nut beauties along the way. Her fascination with the women dates back to the summer trips she used to make to her grandfather’s courtyard house on the outskirts of Taipei.
“I loved driving there because there were the betel nut girls,” she recalled in a phone interview. “As a child, I didn’t really understand (who they were). My family had been to Amsterdam one time and we’d walked past the red-light district, so I thought it was a similar thing.”
While the scenes of women, scantily clad in glass booths, might resemble brothels, selling betel nuts is not widely linked to prostitution in Taiwan. In fact, the women rarely leave their stalls except to approach drivers in their high heels. Nonetheless, the very existence of provocative betel nut beauties seemed strange in “a quiet, conservative culture” like Taiwan’s, said Han, who hoped her project could help dispel some of the stereotypes the women faced.
“(People with) engrained ideas of respectability, without really knowing or having interacted with these girls, might be like, ‘Oh those are girls from the wrong side of the tracks,’” she said. But in reality, Han added, “they all seemed quite level (headed) and responsible.”
The photographer, who grew up between Hong Kong and New York with stints in Latin America, has always been interested in the jobs women take to survive regardless of the stigma associated with them. She was inspired by the work of Susan Meiselas, whose 1970s photo series “Carnival Strippers,” captured women working hard and long hours performing stripteases at carnivals in New England.
“I always end up gravitating towards women,” said Han, who would spend time getting to know her subjects before asking to take their photos. “The conversation part, where there are no photographs, is such a big part of it. I end up having more honest conversations with women and I feel more curious about the nuances of their experiences.”
Changing habits
Han photographed 12 women, mostly in their late teens or early 20s, apart from one slightly older subject named Xiao Hong, who dresses more conservatively as she…
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