Dusk settles over Hanoi, but behind the neon karaoke lights and the hum of motorcycles delivering young women to massage parlours, a chilling underside is thriving: a sex-tourism network driven by Korean patrons and shrouded in online secrecy. Those women caught in the web — mainly Vietnamese, often misled or coerced — are the latest victims of what investigators are calling “Korean-style prostitution” exported across Southeast Asia. The phenomenon isn’t simply a few travellers in search of discreet thrills; it is a system, one that mirrors the shady machinations once confined to Korea’s own red-light districts but now has sprawling tentacles reaching into Vietnam.
In the Korean lexicon, “pakje”(박제) refers to the act of taking a screenshot and exposing someone’s personal information — here, it becomes emblematic of the online chat rooms where nude photos and identifying details of Vietnamese women were casually traded by Korean men. A Vietnamese woman called “N” reported this phenomenon to the Women Migrants Human Rights Center of Korea in September 2024: she discovered her own name and social-media id posted in a male-only chat room of 1,400-plus men, branded the “F***ed-Up Vietnam Pakje Room.”
To understand this crisis, we must trace the cultural tributaries feeding it. In Korea, prostitution is illegal, yet the industry has long lurked in the shadows of districts like Miari in Seoul (미아리) or Yongjugol (용주골) in Gyeonggi Province. Those red-light zones may have been cracked down upon, but the appetite — and the network — persists online and overseas. Meanwhile, in Vietnam prostitution is also illegal and socially stigmatised, yet enforcement is inconsistent and vulnerable to corruption.
Korean men travelling to Vietnam often find established enclaves catering specifically to their desires — “Koreatowns” in cities like Hanoi and Da Nang, with Korean-language signage, massage parlours, karaoke bars and delivery motorcycles ferrying women to hotels late at night. Local authorities in Ho Chi Minh City even uncovered a Korean-owned restaurant alleged to have been running a prostitution ring for foreigners, supplying Vietnamese women for sex services in nearby apartments.
The translational term “선택 문화” (seontaek munhwa, literally “choice culture”) emerges in this context: a familiar string to Korea’s own past red-light districts, where men pick a woman from the lineup — but in Vietnam the process is adapted and globalised. The Korean traveller becomes sex-buyer, the Vietnamese woman becomes compromised victim, and the online network masquerades as tourism.
What’s particularly alarming is the digital dimension. These pakje rooms thrive across platforms like Telegram and KakaoTalk, employing identity verification, screenshot sharing, even reviews of service and women’s performance, often without any consent. The online marketplace commodifies human beings, cloaking exploitation behind slick social-media posts and seemingly innocent travel chat groups.
Vietnamese society, where “mất mặt” (losing face) is a heavy cultural burden, finds itself squeezed: women recruited under tourism or hospitality pretenses often end up in sex work, their identities exposed, their choices erased. Meanwhile in Korea, the gender consensus is cracking: women’s rights activists and organisations — such as Tacteen Naeil – ECPAT Korea — warn that overseas child and adult sex tourism is not only immoral but a growing transnational crime.
The Korean government has issued travel advisories. Its embassy in Laos, for example, warned of prostitution risks to citizens abroad. Although not specific to Vietnam, the warning signals that Seoul recognises this is not harmless “sex tourism” but harmful international exploitation.
When Korean culture’s shadow meets Vietnamese vulnerability, the result is a bleak human-rights trench: online predators and brothel-style networks adapt to geography but reproduce the same power dynamic — older Korean men, younger Vietnamese women, digital currency of nude images, and one-sided consent. The moral hypocrisy is sharp: Korea’s own crackdown at home has only shifted the problem abroad.
For Vietnam, the stakes are also national. The proliferation of Korean‐language bars, the motorbike “drop off” patterns, the lined-up women waiting in uniform — these are not only illegal acts but reputational risks for a country promoting tourist images of heritage and landscape. Vietnam’s official status still criminalises prostitution, but the enforcement clearly lags the evolved forms of exploitation.
In Korean society, the concept of “체면” (chemyeon, face/honor) meets the reality of digital damnation: those caught in the system lose jobs, families, dignity; the women lose freedom and safety. Yet the travel and tech-enabled network keeps churning — because it is profitable and clandestine.
If anything, this story demands us to look beyond the image of innocent tourism and hyperlink the human tragedy behind the app-based message board, the “Koreatown” karaoke sign, the motorcycle ride with a young woman in shorts to a hotel lobby. The line between travel and trafficking blurs, and culture becomes the veneer of commerce. The questions we should ask: Where are the Korean men who see this as fun rather than violent? Where is the Vietnamese woman whose agency was stolen in the name of “tourism”? The ghosts of Korea’s past red-light districts have found a new stage — in Southeast Asia, digital, mobile and merciless.
Ah, my dear sisters, let Spicy Auntie speak plainly today, without the usual wink and chili-pepper laugh. Because there is nothing charming about men flying across borders to buy the bodies of women who had no real economic freedom to choose anything else. Korean men who swagger into Hanoi’s “Koreatown” karaoke clubs as if they are stepping into a buffet of flesh, calling it “culture,” “relaxation,” or that revolting euphemism seontaek munhwa — “choice culture.” Choice for whom, exactly? The women certainly didn’t choose to have their photos traded in Telegram chat rooms like used electronics. They didn’t choose to wake up one morning and discover that their name and face are being dissected by 1,400 men rating them like side dishes to a night of soju and sleaze. Spare me the poetry — this is exploitation, pure and simple.
And now, I must turn my chili-pepper stare toward Vietnam’s proud Communist authorities. Oh yes, the same government that loves to celebrate its “socialist commitment” to gender equality, the heroic woman worker, the strong mother of the nation, the brave female war martyr. What a lovely poster image. But step just one block outside the official propaganda museum and you will see your “daughters of the revolution,” as you love to call them, lined up outside Korean-owned massage parlors, ready to be “escorted” by motorbike to hotel rooms where passports and dignity evaporate under fluorescent light. Don’t tell Auntie you don’t know. Everyone knows. The local officials know. The police know. The karaoke owners know. And the money flows — quietly, efficiently, shamefully.
Communism, my loves, is supposed to mean that workers are not commodities. That human dignity isn’t for sale. That the daughter of a rice farmer in the Mekong Delta should not be reduced to a QR code in a Korean men’s chat room. But here we are — the revolutionary nation of Vietnam allowing foreign men to treat Vietnamese women like giá rẻ (discount goods), because tourism dollars and foreign investment shine brighter than women’s rights.
And to the Korean men who believe that what happens “abroad” isn’t really cheating, because “she’s just a girl in Vietnam”: Auntie sees you. Your wives will see you. History sees you. You are not adventurers. You are not connoisseurs of exotic nightlife. You are cowards who use your passport as a weapon and another nation’s poverty as your playground.
Sisters — Vietnamese, Korean, all of us — we deserve better than these men and the governments who escort them with silence.