The hotel had connections with organized crime, and somehow the management must have offended someone important, because it ended up being closed down, and even the manager was hauled away. The day of the raid, the girls and maids scattered, but Little Shanghai happened to be in the elevator just then and wasn’t able to get away.
She spent her days at the detention center hoping that her
laogong
would come to see her and bring her a clean change of clothes. Since her
laogong
had her passbook, and since she’d put away a lot of money, she was sure that he’d figure out how to pay someone off and get her out. All of the other women had visitors, and some of them had even been freed after the right people got paid; but no one came to see Little Shanghai. Every day Little Shanghai would tell people how much her
laogong
loved her, and how he was definitely trying to work something out for her, there on the outside.
In the end she was sentenced to one year of reform through labor at a women’s camp. There at the Women’s Reeducation Center, she continued to repeat the same story. Everybody got sick of hearing about it, and they all started making fun of her. Although everyone ridiculed her, they still helped her out by giving her clothing and cookies. Little Shanghai was pregnant, so she didn’t have to do any work at the Reeducation Center. After only six months, she was released.
She went from place to place, asking people everywhere if they knew where her
laogong
was. With her protruding belly, she rode the train to Shenyang. Her man said to her, The money’s gone. I spent it all. Now get the hell out of here. He also said, It never crossed your mind, did it, that I couldn’t possibly be serious about a girl from Shanghai? Shanghai girls aren’t good for anything but fucking. He kept repeating this, over and over. Little Shanghai came to town, alone. She wanted to go to the hospital and have her pregnancy, already in the eighth month, taken out. A man went to the hospital with her, a man who was in love with her. He wanted to marry her, but he didn’t have any money either.
After the operation, Little Shanghai found that she had totally lost her figure. Her face and body sagged; her black eyes were no longer black. Only her eyelashes still had their upward sweep.
Little Shanghai went back to work at the nightclub, but this time she couldn’t get herself back in demand. She didn’t have the money to buy herself any nice clothes, and that man from the Northeast had gotten rid of her old clothes. Sometimes Little Shanghai would cheat on her new
laogong,
going out with other men and sleeping with them to make money, but she didn’t feel good about it, because her
laogong
strongly forbade this, and the two of them often fought about it. But Little Shanghai was happy inside. She felt that this man’s love for her was normal.
One day a letter came from the man’s mother. She wrote that she’d heard her son had a fiancée and she was so happy that she’d borrowed two thousand
yuan
that she was going to give them as a wedding present. Little Shanghai cried and cried. Two thousand
yuan!
She used to be able to earn several times that in just one night! With this in mind, she decided that she would go home with this man and marry him.
3.
Ye Meili, “Beautiful Evening,” that was her name. From the time she was a child, she had been bought and sold many times by people who trafficked in human beings. She was nineteen years old, maybe twenty—she never told the same story twice. She was illiterate, and she spoke a bizarre sort of Mandarin. Her peasant accent was as coarse as her looks. She said she was a Uighur from Xinjiang, but none of us knew where she really came from. Only she knew the truth, and she liked to tell tall tales—that was her stock in trade. She first appeared in our midst when Little Shanghai’s
laogong
brought Ye Meili to town from Guangzhou. Her pale face was covered with freckles, and the high bridge of her nose was an add-on, her large double-folded eyelids were the product of surgery, and her big tits looked like silicone implants. She was intense and hot-tempered, and when she saw Little Shanghai’s pathetic exit from the scene, she resolved that she was going to use that man. She was going to use him to get herself to Macao. That was where she wanted to go. There were casinos there, and she wanted to gamble.
But with her “ethnic” looks, she didn’t look Chinese, and her man couldn’t get her the false documents she needed to cross into Macao. So he got false papers for himself and went on alone, waiting for her to slip into the territory by boat. The first time she tried this, there was heavy fog, and the boatman accidentally piloted the boat to Hong Kong. They didn’t realize where they were until they stepped ashore, and they decided to turn themselves in. The police sent them back, and they were released after paying small fines.
The second time she tried to sneak into Macao, their boat was pursued, and Ye Meili stood in the boat screaming and yelling at the top of her lungs, How come you’re going so slow?! Faster! The boatman was afraid she was going to shout too loud and give them away, so he sped up. The bumping of the boat threw Ye Meili around until her ass was covered with bruises, but they made it to Macao. Except that her old man wasn’t there to meet her. She waited and waited until she couldn’t wait any longer. The boatman didn’t get paid, so he raped Ye Meili, grabbing her big tits and coming just like that. But as he was pulling his pants on to leave, Ye Meili sat down on his face with her big ass, with her pubic hair overlapping the boatman’s beard, and she squeezed her legs tight, and she stuck her two hands in the dirt, and her two huge tits started to shake violently, and Ye Meili cried out, faster and faster, and every recess of her entire body was shuddering with joy.
By the time the boatman left, he wasn’t steady on his feet, and his face was dripping with the fluids that had flowed from Ye Meili’s hole, including his own semen.
Ye Meili crawled forward, slithered through a barbed-wire fence, and finally reached the road. She knew that in Macao no one would ask you for identification if you were riding in a privately licensed car, so she got into a private car right away. But nobody wanted to do business with her, since she was covered with scratches from the barbed wire. So she went to a public phone, changed some money for Portuguese escudos, and, even though it was risky, called up her man, who was at the time gambling at Chinese dominoes.
Ye Meili put on some pretty clothes and went to work. She didn’t want to go to nightclubs; the nightclubs here were too “regulated.” You had to learn from your supervisor how to do “cloud nine with fire and ice,” which was a blow job with ice. You had to wear an evening gown, blow-dry your hair, and paste on false eyelashes every day. In addition, you had to leave your breasts half-exposed and pushed up like a pair of balloons. The girls, all of them from provinces in the interior, sat around the club holding numbered cards. Anywhere you looked, all you could see was rows and rows of ballooning tits. Being picked out of this lineup was too humiliating for her.
She decided to find herself a spot to stand in. You couldn’t loiter on a street corner in Macao, so she stood outside the main salon of one of the town’s casinos, the Lisbon Hotel.
Just like Little Shanghai, she did business with gamblers. But unlike Little Shanghai, Ye Meili wasn’t about to hand over all of her earnings to her man. She did understand his situation—he had spent more than ten years in prison, had no other way to make a living, and liked to gamble, and none of this was going to change. But she wasn’t so stupid as to actually think of him as her man. Naturally she held back some money for herself.
The only thing was that she really loved to have a good time, and the moment her man wasn’t looking, she went shopping. She loved everything she saw, until she brought it home, and then she didn’t like it anymore. She drank, and she screwed around with other men, letting all kinds of counterfeiters and forgers screw her for free, or sometimes spending money so that she could sleep with some guy she liked. She also went gambling, but since none of the casinos would let her in, she could only play the slot machines. She always lost, and when she was tired of losing, she cursed out loud, and when she was tired of cursing, she went shopping.
Once, when she was on her way to a disco, she was stopped and asked for her papers. And because she didn’t have any papers, she was sent back to the Chinese immigration authorities in Zhuhai. But the Chinese authorities wouldn’t take her. They said she was Russian and sent her back to Macao, where she was held in detention. At this point, Ye Meili remembered a client she’d once had. This client had a large glass cabinet at home that was chock-full of cigarette lighters of every description, and she wondered why it was that other people had so many lighters and she didn’t have even one. This made her cry.
Her man put up the money to get her out of jail, and to keep her out of any more trouble, he locked her up in a hotel room and had her service her customers there.
But in the end she stole her man’s money and slipped back onto the mainland. She wanted to be free. And so she came back to stand on our street.
4.
Sister Morphine is my name. I used to have a lover in this town, I couldn’t stand to be away from him, and nothing was right without him. I thought that’s what love was. When he left me, I started using heroin. My craving for it was so intense, and my tolerance grew, and I liked to keep chasing the dragon until I was totally fucked up, until I felt as if I was more dead than alive. When I was alive I wanted to be dead, and when I was near death I wanted to live. I never had to think about anything else, and I felt free at last.
Sometimes, when I’d had a lot of heroin, I would think about men. I longed for a man’s lips. None of the men here knew how to use their mouth on a woman. It wasn’t something men around here did; either that, or maybe they just didn’t like to use their mouth on women they didn’t know. I don’t know what it was. I started going out with different men. They all flattered me with the same tired phrases. They said nice things to me, but they all used the same old clichés. None of them ever said anything new. And no matter who they were, they were all like children when they came. I was always on the bottom, and they didn’t usually need to have me take my clothes off, and I was so overcome with boredom that I could hardly move. I took a simple kind of pleasure from it, and it all passed without a word between us.
But I absolutely loved watching any kind of man taking off his clothes in front of me. It was a moment of lyricism, the only moment of lyricism, and it always happened in a flurry and was over in the blink of an eye.
One day, I was seized with a sense of doubt, a sense that I did not love Saining. Because I didn’t know what love was anymore. Maybe I was just hooked on the frame of mind he put me in. This filled me with loathing. When I thought back and pictured Saining and me making love, I was so filled with disgust that I thought I would die. From then on, everything seemed tainted. I no longer had any interest in sex. I was twenty-three years old, and my body was dead.
Because of my severe asthma, I could tell from the tightness in my chest just how much a batch of heroin had been cut with, say, rat poison, or an insecticide like
66
Powder. Drug dealers were always being caught and imprisoned, or simply executed, with a bullet to the head, so I was constantly scrambling to find new dealers. But none of them could fool my bronchial tubes. Poor-quality heroin made me instantly sick.
There were a few dealers I’d run into on the street, but I met most of my dealers in dark little rooming houses. Usually run by people from Chaozhou, these squalid establishments fanned out around the edges of this spotlessly bright and shiny city. They were like the underground sewers of this little open city, this embodiment of economic “reform,” and they were crawling with rats. I’d never seen such gigantic rats in Shanghai. The junkie prostitutes lived in these hotels, where many people were crowded into a room. I felt as if I didn’t understand men at all. These girls were bags of bones, with ashen complexions, and their skin was covered with ulcerations and needle marks. But they could always find a man to do it with them, even the down-and-out and junkie whores with missing teeth.
Heroin made me hypersensitive, and I couldn’t stand living in the same apartment I’d once shared with Saining, so I decided to move. But before I’d found a new place to live, I moved into one of these hotels. Sanmao arranged a free room for me. I didn’t understand how Sanmao was able to get me a free room in a place like that. His wife told me that Sanmao used to be part of the “black society,” engaged in organized crime, and had been a gang member at one point. As she explained it, it had originally been nothing but a bunch of kids who got together and stole bicycles. Over time they moved on to bigger things and became a real gang. But once, during a fight, somebody had fired a gun, and Sanmao had fainted in fear. When he woke up, he vowed to go straight, and he took up singing songs by the Taiwan pop star Qi Tai. From there he got into rock and roll.
The smell of air-conditioning, the smell of heroin, real and bogus, the smell of condoms, the smell of blow jobs, the smell of fast-food take-out containers, the smell of frozen fruit, the black-and-white Cantonese movies, the smell of table lamps, the smell of sweet rice porridge, the smell of paper money, the smell of the hotel manager, the smell of vomit.
One day, Little Shanghai was wandering around the hotel, randomly pounding on doors, and she finally pounded on mine. She was holding a shiny red apple in one hand, and I supposed that a customer had given it to her.
I’m sorry, she said. Wrong door again.
Come on in, I said. You can give me a hand.
There was a man passed out in my bathroom.
Little Shanghai said, Dead people are heavy. The two of us can’t possibly lift him. I said, He’s alive; he just passed out. Dead or unconscious, she said, he still weighs the same. I’ll have my old man come over and help you. He’ll be able to do it.