Gail Hershatter is a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her most recent work is The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past. Asia Scholar. 
 

"Whereas courtesans deployed considerable skill to induce their regular customers to spend money on them and their house, the mark of their relationship with actors and other lovers was that the women spent money on the men, giving them expensive presents and even borrowing money to clear their debts. This was known as 'raising a small devil.'"

— Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasure: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai