15
That Woman
More than 20 women lived in the large room where I was dumped. Huge men patrolled the halls to keep us inside. Occasionally, one of the women looked pitifully at me and said, “Time will solve everything.” There were no bruises on my skin, but my muscles and bones ached. One of the thugs brought me food twice a day.
I lay facedown in a corner of the room that first night, wishing I could close my eyes forever, wishing myself back to the cave.
When I woke up, I was inside a large car, my body crumpled into the back seat, my hands and legs tied together with rope. Looking behind me, I found the face of the woman whose baby had drowned in the river. She smiled awkwardly at me; the dimples on both sides of her chin carved themselves into deep, bashful crescents.
One of the men noticed that I was awake and patted my shoulder. “If you’d been more like her, we wouldn’t have had to treat you so harshly,” he said. “It’s okay now. Take it easy—it’s a long trip. If you’re not comfortable, let me know, and I can loosen the rope. Or I can tie your hands and legs separately.”
I tried to remember what had happened. I recalled Kangmin taking me to a hill to find clover branches; he was unusually talkative that day. We were supposed to have a party in the cave. And then we ran into those people, and here I was stuck in a strange car. I thought about Sangwon. He must be back from town by now—he must be looking for me.
“How long did I sleep?” I asked the deep-dimpled woman. She answered cautiously, “A long time… We thought you might be dead.” The man chimed in, “You slept for more than ten hours. I didn’t know that medicine was so powerful.” He snickered.
“Where am I going? What did you do to me?” My anger and the cigarette smoke inside the car drew dry coughs from my throat.
“We already told you several times we want to introduce you to a better world,” the man said. “We felt sorry for you. You’ll see how exciting our place is, how much better life is, and if you don’t like it, you can leave. Look at her—” He smoothed the deep-dimpled woman’s hair, and she lowered her head. “See how smart she is! You two should look to each other. From now on, we’re a family. Welcome to our family.” He looked much younger than Kangmin; the pimples on his neck turned dark pink with excitement. One of the other men began snickering. They all had the same army hairstyle, shiny black leather jacket, and loose thin gray pants.
A woman sitting next to the driver in the front seat turned back and warned him, “Save your breath, you talk too much. I have a headache now. Why do you chatter on like a housewife? Act like a man!” It was the woman who had accosted me on the hill when I was with Kangmin. She was wearing sunglasses even inside the car, but I recognized her.
I thought it must be past midnight, but when someone lowered the window to throw out a cigarette butt, night became day. Fields, mountains, houses, and trees appeared and disappeared quickly.
Kangmin’s words echoed in my brain; it had all been set up. Could he really believe this was best for me? Would he really take care of Sangwon? Sangwon always said he wanted to grow up to be like Kangmin. He joked that he’d be much cooler than Kangmin, but never as hairy.
I wondered how Kangmin would explain my sudden disappearance to him.
“We have new sisters here!”
After several hours of driving, we were let out of the car into a narrow alley stinking of trash and food. The area was dense with buildings, and we were apparently behind one of them. Taking a bunch of keys from her handbag, the woman I saw on the hill opened a small door, and two men dragged us into a five-story brown building. Inside, it was dark and quiet; our footsteps reverberated through the hallway.
As soon as we were let in, without a single word the woman left. The men pushed us into the elevator and took us to a room on the top floor, announcing our arrival to its occupants.
Most of the other women were sleeping, and those who weren’t didn’t even look up. One of the men behind us said, “Get some rest. We’ll call you later.” He looked around the room and spoke loudly, “Hey, take care of these two—they don’t know anything about this place. Treat them like younger sisters.”
No one answered, but then he didn’t wait for a reply. The door closed and I heard his footsteps tapping down the hall.
A woman with a husky voice pointed her chin in our direction and muttered, “Don’t forget to take your shoes off.” There was not enough space to lie down, so we sat right next to the door. The woman with the husky voice advised, “Rest now, while you can. You’ll be busy soon enough.”
She had big, flat, flesh-colored bandages on both eyebrows. I shot a sidelong glance at them, and she turned toward me, thrusting her face close to mine.
“I can take these off today,” she said. She pointed to her right eyebrow with her index finger.
“What happened to your eyebrows? Were you hurt?” I asked, leaning away from her face, which had come too near to mine.
She sat up and opened her small black bag. “No. I had plastic surgery. Actually, I got my eyebrows tattooed once several years ago, because drawing eyebrows on every day was too much of a hassle. They looked good at first, but then they began to spread out, like hairy bugs. So gross! I couldn’t stand them anymore. So, a week ago, a plastic surgeon cut the fleshiness under my eyebrows a little bit. Today I can take these bandages off. Isn’t that fast? The technology for cosmetic surgery is getting better. If you want to use the hospital, let me know. It’s so cheap and so professional. But there is a long wait, even for my simple surgery; I waited for two months.”
I listened to her blankly. She looked a little bit older than the other women there, owing mainly to her high, protruding cheekbones. She smiled and unpeeled part of the bandage on the right eyebrow to show me. “See! It looks fine. Even the wrinkles above my eyes are gone after cutting out that useless flesh. I couldn’t wait a week, I was always checking. It looks even better than yesterday.”
I blinked. There was really nothing in the place where her eyebrow should have been. Instead, I saw a scar stitched with a thread. It scared me, but I said, “Yes. It looks fine. But it would be strange not to have eyebrows.”
She replaced the bandage and looked at herself in the small mirror of her compact. “It’s okay. I’ll tattoo them on again. But a different shape than I had before. I was sick of those.” She picked up a magazine and murmured, “I’m searching for suitable eyebrows. Apparently, crescent eyebrows are in style right now.”
Soon, I noticed that every woman’s face around the room looked artificial. They spent so much time looking at themselves in their mirrors. Some of the women spoke Korean, and I could tell from their accents that they were from North Korea. I knew they’d noticed mine too, though they gave no sign. Others spoke Chinese and Korean together. Listening in on snippets of their conversations, I tried to figure out if my suspicions were true.
They slept during the day and worked every night, always wearing strong fragrances and showy makeup and dresses. It wasn’t hard to guess what my new job was to be. “Please be seated.”
When I entered the smoky office, the woman from the hill gestured to me to sit on a glossy leather sofa covered with a tiger skin. She was peering at me from behind a huge desk that made her small figure look somewhat absurd. I remained standing.
She got straight to the point. “So. What did you do over there?”
I stared at her. “I want to go back. You kidnapped me and shut me up here. I have a child I have to take care of—he’s sick with a disease. As a woman, you must understand. Please, let me go.”
Her close-set eyes squinted at me for a moment, and she nervously stubbed out her thin brown cigarette in the transparent ashtray on the desk. “I know nothing about it, and I don’t care! I just heard about you from my brothers and bought you at a high price for my karaoke bar. We paid your friend on the hill. You saw it, too. Now you have to work to earn back what we paid for you.”
That day, she wore spectacles with transparent purple lenses instead of sunglasses. Her eyebrows, which started from behind her glasses, were long lines shaped like two round mountains. It seemed that eyebrows were a big deal here.
She told me to call her sajangnim (boss) and took a sip of a tea from a transparent, round tea thermos. Inside the thermos purple flowers and green leaves danced languidly.
“Anyway, you’re here; you’ll work until you reimburse the price we paid for you, and then you can leave. Isn’t this much better than a cave swarming with bugs? Think about it: you are an illegal vagrant in China. You are not supposed to set foot in this land, but you did. If someone reports you to the police, they’ll come and drag you away within five minutes. We are protecting you. You don’t know how dangerous it is outside. You can’t imagine how runaways like you, especially women, usually end up.” She cupped her chin in one hand and looked up at me. “You’ll understand our kindness someday. The women working here all have good hearts; they’ll be good friends for you. If something makes you uncomfortable, let me know. We’ll do our best to take care of you.”
She took another brown cigarette from a box. Her red and silver lighter spouted a thin flame, and she lit the cigarette with a long draw. “If you really want to get out of here, work hard. That’s the fastest way. You can start after this weekend. I’ll think over what role you can play best.”
I got up to leave. “Remember, right now, you are a debtor,” she said, gravely. “You can’t leave before we’re square. As long as you’re here, your body belongs to me.”
I wasn’t Jia anymore, I was walking money.
The day after our arrival, I went outside with the deep-dimpled woman—I had learned her name was Mija—under the supervision of a man who haughtily informed us that he was going to turn us from country bumpkins into city women. The journey into town was my first glimpse of a Chinese city. The streets were so alive. The only thing I could compare it to was Pyongyang’s World Youth Festival, though much noisier and more chaotic. I couldn’t breathe very well because of the smoke. People and cars mixed together on the road; there were no traffic policemen. Vehicles moved wherever they wanted, and pedestrians rushed fearlessly in front of them, blocking the intersections. I was panic-stricken. The constant honking made me dizzy, and I couldn’t see the sky above the rows of neon signs, big and small, mixing Korean and Chinese characters. Several giant signs featured widely smiling Korean women wearing hanbok.
“This place has everything,” our warden said, beaming. “It has changed so fast. Look at those glittering signs—aren’t they pretty? People who want to party come here to spend their money. That’s where you come in. I hope you appreciate how lucky you are.” He stroked Mija’s hips and leered. Seeing this, I gripped her hand tightly and pulled her to my side. She looked at me in surprise and smiled.
Her revelations to me the night before had brought us closer. We both realized that it was in our interest to leave our misunderstandings behind and try to become friends.
The previous night, as I tried to fall asleep, Mija had tucked her arm under her head and lain down, facing me. I looked at her in the darkness with barely concealed contempt; I felt she had aided in my kidnapping.
“I have nothing left,” she said.
The night air beyond the window was filled with laughter and music. Most of the women had gone, leaving behind only the noxious smell of cosmetics and perfume. I felt like vomiting.
“When I sent my baby down the river, my life floated away with her,” Mija said, abjectly.
I turned onto my back and looked at the ceiling. It was much higher than in any of the other rooms I had seen so far. I thought of the cave, with its low ceiling and its stench, which I had learned to ignore after a while; perhaps we can get used to anything. I still felt hostile toward Mija. Truly, I cared more about Sangwon than about some wretch and her dead baby.
Mija turned onto her back as I had and went on. “I don’t know why I said I would go with them.” As she spoke, her voice grew louder, spreading into the whole room. “I felt so empty after I lost her. My baby’s father was called my husband, but he never took care of us. He always flirted with other women. He told me he was starting his own business with another woman, and then they left, and never came back. I wonder if he even remembers our baby’s name.
“I spent the days lost, with nothing to do. All I had to do was feed my baby, but we had nothing. Sometimes, my sister-in-law brought corn and rice, but eventually she stopped, and I couldn’t blame her. She had three children of her own, and my brother didn’t return from China for several months. My baby and I barely managed to live by eating cake flavored with pine bark. It eased the hunger, but it brought horrible physical pain. We were constipated; my baby was crying from pain all day and night. I even put soapy water into her anus with a rubber hose. I heard that some of my village people who couldn’t go relieve themselves died because of it. I knew what the food did to us, but we ate it again and again. I couldn’t stand my baby’s screams. I decided to cross the river to save her.”
Mija paused for a moment. I could hear her breathing heavily, trying to hold back her tears.
“I didn’t know you were in the car until I got in,” she said quietly. “When I asked them to take me, they told me to be at the mouth of the cave in three hours. When I saw you, I was surprised. They just said, ‘She’s not as smart as you are. We are trying to help her.’ I didn’t care about you, I even thought it would be better for me—at least I would see one familiar face when I got wherever they were taking me.”
She turned away and sniveled quietly. I watched the ceiling in silence for a while and then slid into sleep.
Across the busy street, a hair salon was our destination. The hairdresser spoke Korean. She didn’t ask me what I wanted; she just looked at me this way and that and then poured some chemicals onto my hair. My scalp burned, but when I tried to touch my head, she warned me, “You need this for your untamed hair.”
While I suffered from whatever was in my hair, our warden teased me as though I was an animal in the zoo, and chatted gaily with his girlfriend on his cellular phone. He didn’t leave my side for several hours. Occasionally, he threw some magazines onto my knee, saying, “You can kill time with those.”
The magazines were colorful, showcasing many pretty women, but I couldn’t concentrate. I looked out through the front door of the salon; so many people in the busy street. As darkness fell, the neon signs became brighter. Among them, one written in red letters caught my attention: Pyongyang Restaurant. It was a glowing three-story building, all glass. Women dressed in hanbok and men in bow ties seemed to flicker inside. All I could think of was how I could escape from this torture.
Several hours later, my hair had turned reddish-brown.
I didn’t see the owner of the karaoke bar for days; it seemed she had completely forgotten about me. The women slept all day. At dawn, the smell of alcohol overpowered their cheap perfume; some women came back singing softly, while others came in frowning and swore themselves to sleep. Occasionally they would be riled up, and their loud laughter kept me up through the wee hours, until the men in the hall forced them to be quiet. When they woke up in the late afternoon, the women had returned to their reticent selves and quietly began preparations for another day at the karaoke bar.
When I first encountered the nightly routine, I was frightened by the drunken women. In the mornings they had hollow eyes and complained of headaches; at night their eyes were wild and out of focus. That will be you soon, someone seemed to whisper in my ear.
One evening, after most of the women had left for the evening, Mija and I cleaned up. We had opened the window completely to let some fresh air in when the owner came in and looked around the room.
Finding us, she commanded the eyebrowless woman, “Hey, help them make up.”
“Will they start working tonight?” the woman asked, checking her curls in the mirror.
“Right. Hurry. It’s time for the guests,” the owner snapped.
“You should have said so before. I’m busy right now. And I’m not here to take care of novices.”
“Stop whining. Since when are you busy? Nobody is interested in you, as usual.”
The eyebrowless woman glared into her mirror for a moment, trying to find a word to spit back. Instead, she spun around to me. “Come here,” she said without emotion.
Seeing the eyebrowless woman grab a cosmetic case, the boss departed. “Hurry,” she said on her way out. “Make her hair smoother, too. The first impression is the most important—for her and for me.”
The woman sneered, “That cross-eyed bitch is giving up on me. She’s getting worse.” She took a strong-smelling lotion out of the case and rubbed it on my face. “This means you’ll start a new life tonight.” She watched my eyes for a moment and took out another bottle of lotion. “Just smile at the guests and serve them nicely. It’s okay—after the first time, you’ll think it’s nothing.”
“I’ll think what’s nothing? Are we singing and dancing for them? Or just serving food? Do we have to drink a lot?” Considering what I had seen, the job couldn’t be that pleasant.
She didn’t stop applying the lotion to my face. “You’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t understand this place and the people here. I didn’t risk my life for this,” I complained.
Instantly, she lifted my face and powdered it from my forehead to my chin. Shutting my eyes to protect them from the powder, I heard her husky voice say, “Grow up and open your eyes. I’m satisfied with this life now. If you stop thinking about life, everything becomes simpler. When you open your eyes, a day starts. When you close your eyes, your day is over. What you eat and what you can buy will be the most important things to you sooner or later.”
Having applied makeup to my face, the eyebrowless woman had me put on a shiny blue dress embroidered with silver, with holes that left my arms, my neck, chest, and thighs exposed. It felt like nothing more than a tiny towel, and my face grew hot. Once I was dressed, the owner took me to the first floor.
The lights in the hall were all on, and the building was alive. The owner stopped in front of a red door. “The better you serve the customers, the sooner you can get out of here and see your kid,” she said, with menace in her voice.
She opened the door, and I saw a wall dominated by a giant TV screen surrounded by several smaller screens. Ruddy faces turned toward me. The room was filled with cigarette smoke. The smell of alcohol was in the air, and the music and the spinning lights were mesmerizing.
The owner pushed me into the room. “She’s new.”
I lowered my head instinctively, and a stout man rose to his feet and approached us. He rubbed the owner’s back. “That’s why I like you. How did you know we brought a really important guest tonight?” He leered at the owner, then at me.
“I read you better than your wife, right?” the owner said with a laugh. Patting the stout man’s stomach, she said, “It’s her first time here. She may not serve you so well, but look after her. Okay?” She wrapped her arm around my shoulder, overflowing with smiles as she spoke into my ear, but never taking her eyes off the others. “Do your best to serve these guests. They are my top customers.” Her eyes glittered, but her mouth didn’t smile.
All eyes seemed to be on me. I didn’t raise my head or move a finger after the owner left. The gleaming lights were moving overhead as the stout man addressed his table, switching to Chinese from Korean. His voice was high and thin compared to his body.
Speaking into my ear, he said in Korean, “You’ll have a good time here. We’ll take such good care of you.”
He sat me down on a sofa. The short dress made me uncomfortable, and I tried to cover my bare thighs, folding my arms in my lap. I counted seven pairs of legs under the table. Men and women’s legs next to each other.
I wondered how Mija was doing. Earlier that evening, a man had led her to the other side of the hall. The owner was displeased with Mija’s very thin curly hairstyle, and had grabbed her hair and pulled it back behind her ears. Mija screamed in pain, but the owner just howled with laughter. “Do you think this is the nineteen seventies? How much will it cost to get the countryside out of you?”
The stout man handed me a cup of wine. “My Chinese friends want to know when you crossed the river.”
I recoiled with fright to hear my secret mentioned so casually. Does everyone know? The fact that I had risked my life was mere entertainment to them. I didn’t take the cup, keeping my eyes fixed on the ground.
The man wrapped his heavy arm around my shoulder and thrust the cup in front of my face. “I’m asking you when you came here.”
A woman across from me answered in haste, “She just arrived. Like sajangnim said, this is her first night.”
He said something in Chinese, pressing my forearm with his chubby hand. “You’re brand new. Wasn’t it cold crossing the river? Weren’t you scared? The river must still be cold. This big guy will warm your body up—come here.” He put his other hand on my thigh and tried to pull me toward him.
I pushed him back with all my might and jumped out off the sofa, shrieking, “Don’t even think about touching one strand of my hair. I’m not joking. Do you understand?”
He landed on the woman sitting next to him. She cried out in pain.
“What the hell is this wench trying to do?” He stood up and tried to hit me.
The woman interjected, pulling him down. “Calm down. She’s new, she’s not yet been tamed by a man. Isn’t she fresh, compared to us? You can train her gradually—it’ll be fun. Come on! Sit down. Think about your Chinese guests. Didn’t you say they would be good rich patrons? Consider your reputation. Come on!”
He stared fiercely at me for a moment and nodded his head to the other men several times, saying something in Chinese.
As he spoke, the woman walked over to me and put her face in mine. The smell of liquor engulfed me as she hissed, “Don’t make trouble. Everything that you did will be reported. Be careful! You’d better listen to me, or I can’t get my money either. Got it, moron?”
She turned back and smiled at the guests. Addressing them in Chinese, she said, “Let’s play a game. You’ll love it. You push the buttons on this remote control with your eyes closed, and you have to sing whichever song comes up. Let’s go clockwise around the table, and no matter what song you get, you have to finish it. If one person can’t sing his song, another person can volunteer, and then that volunteer can ask the person who couldn’t sing to do whatever the volunteer orders. Drinking a glass of wine or a bottle of a beer, licking the sole of his foot, taking off a piece of clothing—anything. How about that?”
People clapped their hands in delight. The stout man roared with laughter. “This old fox knows every song here. And she likes to take guys’ clothes off.” He clapped his knees. “Okay. Let’s do it! It’s your turn to be naked, for once.”
She smirked playfully, “Let’s see! I’ll go first.”
As the other woman told me the rules of the game, I was stupefied. There was no way I could know any of the songs.
Seeing my reaction, the stout man smiled insidiously and patted my knee. “There are North Korean songs, too. Don’t worry. I’ll sing for you if you don’t know. I’ll be your protector.” He winked.
The woman who had suggested the game pushed several numbers, and words came up on the screen, accompanied by loud music. She grabbed a microphone with a broad grin, saying, “Oh, that’s a hard one.” She didn’t make any mistakes in the rhythm or the lyrics, and the stout man danced and sang along with her. All the women passed the test. When a man couldn’t sing, the woman in charge sang for him and ordered him to drink a big cup of wine. She asked a young man to take off his tie. “Let’s start with the tie—we’ve got lots of time.”
I was the last to sing. Before I could push the buttons, she handed me the microphone and whispered, “Keep your eyes slightly open and push one-thirty-five.”
I was surprised; I didn’t expect her to help me. Frantically, my fingers found the number 135, and the song that came out was the most popular one in North Korea at the time.
The stout man said loudly, “What a lucky night for you.”
It was the song the other dancers and I had sung at the hotel for foreign customers on their last night in Pyongyang, and I was happy to sing it again. This time, I was singing for my survival, and a bolt of fire shot up my throat. I watched the woman who helped me. She was smoking a cigarette, listening without expression.
When I finished, she took the microphone and sniffed, “Huh. What did you do over there? Your voice sounds well trained.”
The stout man stood up and clapped, holding a cigarette in his mouth. “Okay. This time we’ll go counterclockwise,” he said, snatching the microphone back and handing it to me again.
The woman patted his stomach and said, “I’m the moderator of this game. I will take care of it. You, relax.”
He snarled at her, “I’m the one paying the money. I will decide whatever I want to do.”
She looked at him and shrugged. “As you wish…” Sitting down, she nodded to me to go ahead.
I stared at the man for a moment.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “Push the buttons with your eyes closed, come on! Other people are waiting.” He chortled, lighting a cigarette.
I pressed the buttons on the remote control randomly, trying to get a similar number. I thought the closest number would be another North Korean song. What popped up on the screen was in Chinese.
I turned to the others. “I can’t sing this one. I don’t know Chinese, it’s not fair.” I looked to the self-appointed moderator for support.
“A game is a game,” she said. “Other people were punished, too. You should follow the rule.” She leaned over the sofa.
“Come on. It’s already started,” the stout man said, pushing the microphone close to my mouth.
I stood there in silence, holding the microphone.
The woman in charge looked around the room. “Who wants to sing for her?”
No sooner had she asked than the stout man stripped me of the microphone and said, “This is my favorite song.”
He sang it, throwing his bulk around. Other men and women joined him, and I watched them vacantly.
When the song was finished, he stroked his chin in mock thought. “What will I ask of you?” He walked around me several times, then stopped, as a slow grin spread across his face. “Take off your underpants.”
Several men who understood Korean whistled and giggled.
I thought I had misheard it. Someone said, “What did that fat man say?”
“She has to start with an outer garment,” the woman in charge said.
The stout man shook his head. “No, she wears a one-piece dress. I’m trying to be considerate, right?” He looked around at the others for their support. The Chinese men asked the others what he had said. Understanding, they smiled.
“Didn’t you hear me? We’re all waiting. Do it right now!” With his arms folded, he sat down on the sofa.
Shame rose from my stomach.
“Let’s see what kind of underwear you people wear,” he jeered.
“No. It’s not going to happen,” I said, glaring at him, flushing with anger.
He looked daggers at me. “You have enjoyed other people’s punishment. You aren’t exceptional. I am politely asking you to pay the penalty. ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ When you are in this room, do as the people in this room do.” His glittering eyes frightened me. “Right now!”
I turned to leave, but he seized my arm, snarling, “I warned you. Don’t embarrass me. They came here to enjoy themselves tonight, and if you leave like this, you will regret it, I promise.”
I didn’t know what I was doing; I only knew I had to escape. When he dragged me back to the table, I grabbed the nearest object and slung it at his head. Shattered glass spread all over the room. With a sharp scream—“You wretch!”—he tumbled to the floor, clutching his head. There were shrieks as a few people lunged for me. I covered my head and crouched in a corner to make my body as small as possible.
At that moment, one thick, low, commanding Chinese voice emerged above the yelling. I didn’t move. As he spoke, the others quieted. When I raised my head, the young man who had received the penalty of taking off his tie grasped the stout man by the arm and accompanied him out of the room.
The stout man’s voice spread through the hall. “If you guys don’t kill that crazy bitch, I’ll burn this building down.” I was dragged to the room with the tiger-skin sofa, the sajangnim’s office. Two men stood next to me, holding clubs covered in white towels. The boss opened the door with a bang and rushed into the room, her high heels clacking viciously. I raised my head and saw that her face had already turned a dark red.
Her eyebrows whirling, she bellowed, “You crazy vagrant! Do you know what you did tonight?” She kicked at my chest with her shoes. “You can never leave this place now. You’re here for good.”
She snatched a club from someone’s hand and swung it around at me. I heard her snapping and snarling at me in time with the thuds on my body. I passed out.
When I opened my eyes, the woman who had helped me in the karaoke room was looking down at me, holding a cigarette. “They beat you the clever way,” she said.
I tried to stand up, but my shoulders felt stuck to the floor like magnets.
“You’d better not move. They wrapped their clubs in towels—it prevents bruising. Your skin won’t show any surface bruises, but you’ll have a lot of them inside.”
My nose felt clogged; it was hard to breathe. I looked around for a handkerchief and the woman gave me hers. It had a strong perfume smell. I unfolded it and blew my nose. There was a lump of blood. “Sorry,” I rasped.
Her voice was flat. “It’s okay. I have a bunch of hankies.”
I looked at her cigarette. It was the first time I was ever tempted to smoke. “Thanks for trying to help me.”
She moved her cigarette so the ashes would not drop on my face. “I wasn’t helping you, I was trying to earn my money. That’s our job, making them drink. They pay money and we satisfy their every dirty request. The more they drink, the better for our pockets, even though their behavior gets ugly. Don’t think you’re special, or purer than us!”
I broke in, “I have never thought I’m special, that’s not why I made a fuss. I came to China for a better life, not for this. That doesn’t mean I blame the women who work here.”
She stood up and headed to the door, sighing, “I have to go,” as she stepped into her orange high heels.
“Did you get your money for the night? Or did you get nothing, because of me?” I couldn’t see her eyes, but I was sure she didn’t like her job either.
“I got nothing. Thanks to you.”
I felt ashamed of my behavior. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
“Oh, well. I just hope I’m not in the same room as you next time.” Stepping out of the room, she looked back. “Did you study singing?”
I nodded slightly.
“I liked your voice.”
“Pack your things.” The owner stalked into the room; I hadn’t seen her since she had beat me senseless with a club. Mija was taking care of me. She had changed her hairstyle, and it looked so strange on her. My body had recovered somewhat, but I couldn’t stop retching.
The owner found an empty, worn-out backpack in the corner of the room and threw it at me. “Hurry. Just pack the things you really need.”
I could barely sit up. I stared at her. “I don’t have anything to pack. How does a person who was dragged here against her will have time to bring her own things?”
Ignoring me, she snapped to two men at her side, “Take her.”
“Where is she going?” Mija asked, fearfully.
The owner shouted, “Take her. Hurry!”
I tried not to move, but it was impossible to resist the men.
We were already near the end of the hall when the owner shouted behind me, “Your temper can destroy people around you. Leaving will be better for you and for us.”
My feet never touched the ground; the men held me up by my armpits. I asked them, through gritted teeth, “Where are you sending me?”
“To a better place.”
They dragged me to a white car in front of the building and forced me into the front seat. I screamed and struggled to free myself; I couldn’t imagine a worse place, but I somehow knew that one was waiting for me.
I heard the sound of the car doors locking, and turned to look out the back window at my captors as the car pulled away. The only difference between today and the day I was taken from the cave was the size of the car. It was a sedan, and it smelled like leather, not sour flesh. The car moved fast and without a sound.
I shot a sidelong glance at the driver. I could just make out his profile. It was the young man who had restrained the stout bully on my first night on the job.