Princess Bari (9 page)

Next was an older female tourist. This time, not only were the soles of her feet glowing red and blue, but as I rubbed and thumped her feet I closed my eyes and started to see something: a car, crossing a bridge. Suddenly a truck came racing up from behind, slamming into it. The small car lay upside down in the road, the frame half crumpled. I stopped and leaned over to whisper in the ear of the Korean-Chinese woman working beside me.

“I think this woman was in a car accident.”

“Why? Does she have a weird scar or something?”

“No, it's not that …”

Some of my customers picked up on the fact that I was good at finding the parts of their feet that needed extra attention, and they became my regulars. Xiang, as well, had guessed there was something different about me, but she assumed it was just that I had an unnatural aptitude for the job.

*

Two years after I first came to Paradise, I turned fifteen and moved to Dalian with Xiang and her husband. Zhou had earned his acupuncture licence and was going into business with a friend who'd opened a foot massage studio there. I felt it was my duty to break the news to Uncle Salamander properly, so I called him up and invited him out to dinner.

“Oh my,” he laughed. “Our little Bari is all grown up now.”

It wasn't easy scheduling dinner with him. Since he worked as both a travel agent and a tour guide, he was busy ferrying visitors from the airport to their hotels every day and personally driving the small sightseeing bus that shuttled tourists to Mount Baekdu.

He asked me to meet him at a restaurant specializing in skewered lamb. Branches had opened up all over the country. Lamb meat was threaded onto long, metal skewers and rotated over a hot grill using an apparatus that had been invented by an army veteran. Uncle Salamander got there before me. When I arrived, he waved me over to where he was sitting in a booth. He kept dabbing at his sweaty face with a wet wipe.

“Everything okay?” he asked. “Still getting a lot of customers?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, we've been short of hands lately and had to hire more masseuses.”

“Good, good. I think I need a drink.”

I pulled the cooked lamb from the skewer and set it on his plate as he poured himself a shot of
soju
.

“How old are you now?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen already! How time does fly!”

“Uncle, I need to tell you something.”

I told him about Xiang and her husband, and how they were like family to me now, just like him, and that they were planning to move to Dalian and open a massage studio and so I'd decided to go with them. He nodded.

“Since you say they're good people, I suppose I can trust them. Do you owe Paradise any money?”

I shook my head.

“But have you told your boss?”

“Not yet. I wanted to discuss it with you first.”

Uncle Salamander waved his hands at me and brought his finger up to his lips.

“Don't breathe a word of it. Just slip out of there when the time comes. Someone in your situation can't afford to trust anyone. Keep your guard up from now on. Even in this town, people aren't as friendly as they used to be. Do you know why? Money. No matter where you go in the world, it's always the same. The electric lights go on, money comes in and kindness vanishes. All the young guys from the North that I used to trade with have become pimps.”

Uncle Salamander took another shot of
soju
and leaned his head back.

“They make a living by selling girls like you. Which reminds me: I found your sister.”

“Mi? Where is she?”

He told me he'd tracked her down a long time earlier, through a younger colleague who owned a bar in Longjing.

“I told him I was looking for a girl from Musan and mentioned your father's name and position. That's how I found out where she is.”

I set my chopsticks down and was already halfway out of my seat.

“Let's go to her now!”

“Hold on, there's more to the story. Do you really think I would've stopped there?”

It seems the moment Mi crossed the Tumen River, she was scooped up by human traffickers and sold to a Han Chinese man in a village about sixty
li
outside of Longjing. Uncle Salamander was too bogged down with work to go look for her right away, but when some business came up that took him to Kaishantun, he set out to find her with only the name of the village written on a scrap of paper.

The place that greeted him at the end of the winding dirt road, dust clouds billowing around him as he went, was a remote mountain village. There were a dozen homes there, with both Han Chinese and Korean-Chinese. When he asked around about my sister Mi, a Korean- Chinese woman cautiously pointed to one of the houses. The two-room house, which was on the verge of collapsing, had a chicken coop to the side of the courtyard, a pen where they were raising pigs and corn and bean fields that started right behind the house and stretched back quite a way. At least it looked like they never had to go hungry.

“I'm pretty sure the only things of value in that shack were the piglets. They probably sold one to buy Mi. There was an old man loafing around in the courtyard, and I could hear a child bawling inside the house.”

Uncle Salamander said he'd combed his hair very neatly and wore a green jacket so he would look like a government official. He cleared his throat loudly and told the old man that he'd heard a North Korean girl was living there. When he asked where she was, the old man got angry and retorted that they'd spent good money on her only to have her run away. He said his son had gone searching for her all over, but the bastards who sold her to them said she wasn't in China anymore.

“I didn't want to tell you this part, but your sister had a baby with that man. The situation must have been really bad for her to abandon her child like that. As far as I can tell, she's nowhere to be found anywhere near Yanji. In fact, you never know – she might have fled to South Korea. That would be a small mercy.”

I'd come to the restaurant expecting nothing, but there I was crying my eyes out in front of strangers for the first time in my life. I realized at last how numb I had become to the loss of my family. Or maybe I was crying over my own fate.

I took my uncle's advice and did not say a word to my boss about leaving. Every day that week, when Xiang clocked out, I packed a few of my belongings and sent them with her, and that Sunday I got permission to go home with her again. The next day, the three of us boarded a train.

Dalian filled us with hope. The waterfront was beautiful, the city was clean and the parks were really well designed. Zhou's friend, Chen, was originally from Dalian and had experience managing a sauna in Yanji. He'd purchased a commercial building on a small side street off of Anshan Street, one of the main roads downtown, and had redone the interior. It was an old, three-storey building, but the ivy climbing up the grey walls made it look nice. There was a restaurant on the first floor, and the foot massage studio was on the second floor. We rented a two-room flat on the third floor.

There were so many people looking for work in the city that when we posted job adverts in the newspaper and a local weekly magazine, women gathered like clouds. Xiang, Zhou and Chen sat inside, behind a desk, while I waited on a chair outside the door and called out names from the r
é
sum
é
s we'd collected. The women were queued up all the way down the stairs, waiting to be interviewed. The top five all had massage experience, and we hired twenty more because they were pretty and looked like they were in good health. Chen told me only ten of them would end up employed. He was right: during the first week of training, led by Xiang and Zhou, five slipped out the exit and never came back. Then, when it was time for the grand opening, Xiang sent away five more who hadn't shown any improvement.

Chen and Zhou printed up flyers and distributed them in bars, restaurants and teahouses. They charged much less than the fancy hotels, which had large saunas that offered both full-body and foot massages. Chen, drawing on his management experience, hired some teenagers who were loafing around nearby and offered them a commission on any customers they brought in. Zhou set up a separate room off to the side, where he provided acupuncture and cupping. We didn't get the rich customers that the hotels got, but we did get small shop owners and people in town on business. Chen also went around to motels and inns and drew in visitors who were there on group tours. We made pretty good money for being a brand-new business. Chen had already become something of a community leader in the neighbourhood.

*

When I look back now on how I wound up crossing the ocean and coming all the way to England, I can't help but blame my name. Grandmother told me the story of Princess Bari every night in our cosy little dugout hut, but it wasn't until after I was on that ship that I thought about the princess going west in search of the life-giving water – out where the sun sets.

One day, Xiang and I were up on the third floor, sleeping in late, when we heard men arguing loudly downstairs. Their voices were punctuated by the sound of glass breaking. Startled, our eyes opened wide, and we heard a man's high-pitched scream. It was Zhou. Xiang and I looked at each other, sprang out of bed and ran downstairs in our bare feet. The door to the massage studio was wide open. The first things I saw were glass shards and goldfish writhing and flapping around on the cement floor: the fishbowl was knocked off of the table. Four men stood over Zhou, who was sprawled on the floor, blood pouring from his head. Xiang shielded him with her body and yelled at the men.

“Who are you? How dare you hit him?”

One of them, a short, chubby man in his fifties, shook a piece of paper at her.

“Do you know what this is? It's a promissory note. You think you can borrow someone else's money and not pay it back?”

Xiang shook her husband and gave him a searching look. He grimaced and answered weakly: “I didn't know either. They say Chen borrowed money from them.”

“Why are you responsible for Chen's debts?”

In response to Xiang's sharp tone, the older man let out a guffaw.

“Because he borrowed it under this shop's name. You are business partners, aren't you?”

A man with a shaved head pointed the jagged neck of a broken bottle at us and said: “Not even the deposit on this pathetic business of yours will be enough to pay back the principal.” Then he flung the broken bottle away.

Zhou, who'd already been on the receiving end of the bottle, cowered and crawled into Xiang's arms. The men, back-alley loan sharks, threw open the doors and rummaged through every cabinet, going all the way up to the third floor, as if tallying up the value of every item and piece of furniture in the building.

The older man took off his suit jacket and unbuttoned his shirt.

“Come sit here,” he said to Zhou. “The rest of you should get lost.”

He glared at us as he said this, but instead Xiang dragged her husband over to the spot he'd indicated and crouched firmly beside him.

“Both of our lives depend on this shop,” she said, “so whatever you say is meant for my ears, too.”

“Very well. I have two suggestions for you. Pay back the full amount of the loan before the end of the month, or pay off the principal with interest month by month.” Zhou was speechless.

“What's the full amount?” Xiang asked.

“One and a half million.”

I couldn't even fathom that much money. One serving of three dumplings cost one
yuan
– this was my dinner when times were hard. Xiang stared off into space and laughed in shock.

“And if we can't pay you back?” she asked.

“You'll pay us back with your bodies.”

Xiang and I were at a loss for words.

“We need more time,” Zhou said quietly.

“More time? Don't try to worm your way out of this.”

“I own a small plot of land back in my hometown that I can use as collateral for a loan, but I'll need time.”

The man thought this over for a moment; then he rose, buttoned up his shirt and put his jacket back on.

“Fine. You have exactly three days.”

“My hometown is all the way in Heilongjiang Province. It'll take me three days just to get there and back.”

“Yeah? Then I'll give you two extra days. But if I come back in five days and you still don't have my money, I'll gouge your eyes out.”

After the men left, we all sat slumped on the floor and cried quietly. I was crying from fear, but Xiang and Zhou were probably weeping at having their dreams shattered. Then we heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and the bald man who'd threatened us with the broken bottle came back in. He handed two train tickets to Zhou.

“Economy. Looks like I'll be suffering too, because of you.”

Even after Zhou and the bald man had left for the station, Xiang and I didn't bother to clean up. We went up to the third floor and sat there in a trance. In the afternoon the masseuses started reporting for work, and came to find us with confused looks on their faces. Xiang barely summoned the strength to send them home, saying we would be closed for a few days.

Early the following morning, we heard someone banging on the door downstairs. Zhou had returned with the bald man, who entered right behind him. The two of them had been drinking. The bald man was red-faced, but otherwise sober, whereas Zhou was dead drunk. Neither had much to say. Xiang and I guessed that they'd come to some sort of agreement, but we had no idea what. Zhou whispered to us to pack our clothes for a trip. He wouldn't explain why. I threw a few toiletries, underwear and clothing into a bag and followed them. We slipped out without anyone seeing us and crossed Changjiang Road, where we caught a taxi about a block away from our building. We headed to the north side of Dalian Bay to the train station near Ganjingzi Park. The bald man walked ahead and led us to a cheap motel down a dark, muddy alley. The room was cramped and dark, and even the wallpaper was black with dirt. It was the kind of place that was mostly used by migrant workers from other provinces. The bald man disappeared again without a word.