At the name call after supper, Suya is nowhere to be seen. Meili searches the fields, the latrines and the construction site behind, and returns to the barn in floods of tears. Last night, when Meili told her it was her birthday, Suya took off her earrings and gave them to her as a present.
Two sisters, who know how close Meili has become to Suya, walk over and sit down beside her. A man came to their village last month and persuaded them to travel with him to Changsha, promising them jobs in a Sino-foreign pharmaceutical company with monthly wages of a thousand yuan and free food and accommodation. But when they arrived they discovered that he’d sold them to work as hostesses in a nightclub. The next morning, they escaped out of the nightclub’s kitchen window and went straight to the police, who put them in handcuffs and bundled them off to the Custody and Repatriation Centre.
An hour or so later, as she lies down listening to the wind rustle through the trees outside, she suddenly remembers Suya mention that prostitutes are sometimes transferred from labour camps to specialist penitentiaries that examine women for sexual diseases. But if she’d been transferred, surely they would have let her take her handbag? Meili quickly reaches for the handbag, pulls out the red journal and hides it under her blanket. The lights are turned off, but Meili is too upset to sleep. She stays awake all night, tossing and turning, only managing to doze off a few minutes before dawn . . .
In her dream, she is swimming towards her womb along a dark channel, pursued by thousands of babies. When she reaches the end, she rubs the walls but is unable to find any entrance. The babies come closer, mouths wide open. With a jolt, she wakes, rolls onto her side and notices that Suya’s handbag has gone. She has a vague memory of torchlight flitting across her face a few moments ago and of the sound of receding footsteps. She closes her eyes again, but can’t return to sleep. She wonders whether Instructor Zheng has dragged Suya off into the woods. As she rubs the red journal under her blanket, she remembers the day her grandmother took her to a market stall beneath a large tree in the centre of Nuwa Village. Among the earth-coloured felt and the bobbins of black thread, she spotted a white cotton scarf and white hairclip that seemed to her immaculate and other-worldly. From that moment on, white became her favourite colour. She remembers the first white van she saw enter the village, with revolutionary slogans blaring from the speakers on its roof and posters of Chairman Mao and Premier Hua Guofeng stuck to the side windows. Then she remembers, when she was about five years old, watching a man daub onto a village wall the words
CARRY OUT THE FOUR MODERNISATIONS; IMPLEMENT THE ONE CHILD POLICY
. As soon as he was finished, her friend pushed her against the slogan, staining her clothes with chalky-smelling whitewash. Her grandmother shouted at her and told her to go straight home.
Meili thinks of Waterborn and wonders how she’s survived these past two weeks without her milk. She thinks how Nannan always kicks off her blanket in the middle of the night, and if it’s not wrapped over her again, her arms and legs become stone cold. She thinks of Kongzi’s obsessive desire for a son and feels angry, then consoles herself with the thought that at least he’s never stolen anything or slept with a prostitute. He may have watched a few porn films and forced her into some of the lewd positions he picked up from them, but compared to the depraved men Suya described, he’s pretty respectable and honourable. If only he was willing to talk to her and listen to her more, everything would be fine.
When the wind outside drops, she hears fresh cement being stirred in the construction site beyond the latrines. The male inmates are building a factory. Next year the camp will receive official permission to accommodate four hundred inmates, and to take advantage of this expansion of free labour, the Party Secretary has decided that the camp should manufacture Christmas crackers for export to Europe and America. Suya told Meili that Christmas is the foreigners’ equivalent of Spring Festival and that an old man with a white beard squeezes down your chimney at night with a bag of presents and waits for you to wake up. Meili rubs Suya’s red journal again and tries to think of a place where she can keep it safe.
KEYWORDS:
sewage, second wife, handjob, visiting Miss Five, grey cheongsam, dead shrimp.
AS SOON AS
Meili walks out of the tiny lift and is hit by a vulgar smell of cheap perfume, she knows that she’s been duped. Her legs start to shake. This morning, a genial-looking woman arrived at the camp, offering the female inmates jobs as hotel cleaners. Meili jumped at the opportunity, and boarded the minibus together with the two sisters. Although she signed a one-year contract, she made up her mind that she’d leave after a few weeks, once she’d earned enough money to buy a ticket to Guai Village.
I’m done for, this time! she says to herself as she moves down the red-carpeted corridor. Glancing over her shoulder she sees the woman’s face becoming sterner with each step she takes. ‘Stay inside and wait,’ the woman says gruffly, ushering them into separate rooms and shutting the doors behind. Meili pities the sisters, who’ve escaped one brothel only to be sold to another. She decides that if she’s forced to sleep with a man, she’ll follow him into the room, strangle him and escape. So long as the police don’t find her, she’ll make her way back to the bamboo hut, even if she has to walk all the way.
The door opens and a dumpy girl in a grey cheongsam tells her it’s time to eat. Meili follows her through a windowless bathroom stinking of sewage to a room where her contract has been placed on a round dining table.
‘Sit down,’ says a man in a sky-blue shirt sitting by the window. His hair is blow-dried and his lips have a purple tinge. ‘I’m the boss of this nightclub. I won’t ask where you’re from or check your documents. But I paid eight hundred yuan for you, so I must make myself clear. If you work hard and do as we ask, I’ll let you go in three months – I’ll even pay for your bus ticket home. But if you don’t cooperate, if you attempt to escape, well, you’ll only have yourself to blame for what might happen. No one knows you’re here, and no one will know if you disappear. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘I signed a contract to be a cleaner. I refuse to do any other work, so you’d better let me go straight away.’
‘Your job is to be a hostess, to look after our clients. The men who come here are rolling in money: shake them about a little, and coins will fall into your hands. If you do as you’re told, you’ll have hot meals and a shower every day. For a peasant like you, it’s heaven! We’ll teach you all you need to know.’
‘I’ll clean rooms, wash dishes – anything. I’m not afraid of hard work. But I won’t sell my body. I’m a simple woman with no education. I’m not suited to this job.’
‘But peasant girls like you are very popular with our clients. They’d love your simple, honest, wholesome look, and would pay good money for you. But I warn you straight away: all tips must be handed over to us. From now on your name is Ah-Fang, and you’re twenty years old.’
A girl reeking of cheap musk enters the room. She’s wearing high heels and a red skintight cheongsam. She places a bowl of noodle soup in front of Meili and sits down, the long slit in her dress exposing her bare thigh.
‘This is Ah-Fang,’ the boss says to the girl as he gets up to leave. ‘She arrived today. Show her the ropes.’
‘How can you dress like that?’ Meili says to her as soon as the boss has left. ‘What if your parents saw you? You’d bring shame to your village.’
‘Who cares – now that I’ve left that miserable dump, I’ve no intention of moving back!’ says the girl, a look of disdain darting across her young face. ‘My name is Xu, by the way. When you’ve finished your meal, have a shower, then I’ll give you a new dress, cut your hair and see you transform from a mother hen into a phoenix!’
‘Don’t boss me about, little sister – I’m a mother of two,’ Meili says, casting a condescending eye over Xu’s skinny, adolescent frame.
‘Well, I warn you, big sister: if you don’t cooperate, you’ll be treated worse than Communist martyrs were in Guomindang jails. The boss paid good money for you, so you’ll have to repay his debt. I was a bit rebellious myself, when I first arrived. See this wound on my thigh? That’s where the boss jabbed a needle into me. He never injures your face or cunt, because those are the parts that bring the money pouring in.’
‘Why haven’t you tried to run away?’ Meili asks, staring down at the bowl of noodles.
‘Run away? I’m only here because I ran away from my village. Where could I run to now? Besides, I wouldn’t get very far. The boss’s brother is head of the Public Security Bureau. He launched a crackdown on prostitution last week. The police raided every nightclub and brothel in the city, but they didn’t touch this place. If I did escape, they’d arrest me and bring me straight back.’
‘But this is such grubby, shameful work. You’re a pretty young girl. How can you bear to let all those filthy men touch you? Don’t you care about losing face?’
‘What does face matter? All I want is money. And being a nightclub hostess is less tiring than working in a salon, where you have to wash men’s hair and massage their bloody feet before you have sex with them.’
‘You’re quite a girl! Do you have a boyfriend?’ Meili stares at Xu’s straightened, shoulder-length hair and remembers Suya saying that a straightening treatment in a hair salon can cost a hundred yuan.
‘No, I’m single. I’m waiting for a rich guy to make me his “second wife” and buy me a car and a nice apartment. Many Korean businessmen visit this place. If you agree to be their second wives, in two years you’ll have enough money to last the rest of your life. Still, I’m doing pretty well already. I make a hundred thousand yuan a year. My parents have built themselves a house with the money I sent back. You’re a mother of two, so I don’t need to tell you about the sex side of things. All I’ll say is that if you don’t reach orgasm, you must pant and groan as if you have. And there are some terms you must learn. “Fast food” is no foreplay, straight in and out, and costs a hundred yuan; “playing the flute” is a blow job, and costs fifty; “visiting Miss Five” is a handjob, with some breast fondling thrown in—’
‘Shut up! I have a husband, for God’s sake.’
‘You think your husband is any different from the men who come here? I’ve seen them all in this place – from municipal government officials to foreign CEOs. I may have a flat chest and an average face, but this month I’ve slept with two British engineers and three American tourists. All of them have wives and children. These days, a man who remains faithful to his wife is either an idiot or a loser.’
‘Hah – you and I live in very different worlds, it seems,’ Meili says, remembering Suya telling her that prostitutes have to think of themselves as a commodity, not a human being.
‘You think so? Bring your husband here for a night and he will leave you within three days! I’ll never make the mistake of getting married.’
‘How do your parents imagine you make all this money? Wouldn’t they be horrified if they knew?’ Xu’s pink lipstick and turquoise eyeshadow remind Meili of the foreign women she’s seen in magazines.
‘My parents are village cadres who have to scrape by on sixty yuan a month. I told them I’m a shop manager. When I went home last Spring Festival and handed them a fat envelope of cash, they beamed with pride.’
‘I must leave this place!’ Meili looks out of the window and sees on a large billboard across the road, a little girl in a pink dress and leather shoes smiling up at her. Diesel fumes from the cars streaming past far below slide into the room through the metal bars of the open window.
‘You want to escape? The boss will hunt you down, drag you back and beat you to death. You won’t be able to say I didn’t warn you.’
Meili lowers her eyes again, picks up her chopsticks and gulps down the noodle soup.
‘You’ll see, it’s not so bad here,’ Xu says with a smile. ‘I’ll give you a health certificate in case the hygiene inspectors turn up. I promise you, in three months’ time, you’ll like it here so much, you won’t want to leave. The boss is putting you in room 303 tonight. There’s no need to be nervous. After your shower, rub some lubricating oil between your legs. When the client walks in, turn off the lights, help him off with his clothes, then slip a condom onto him straight away, before his erection wilts. Most of the men will be drunk, so don’t waste time making conversation. If they turn violent, kick the door . . .’
‘Shut up, shut up . . .’ Meili hisses, staring down at the tiny dead shrimp floating on the dregs of her noodle soup.
KEYWORDS:
heaven on earth, cloud of smoke, source of life, unsheathed pillow, blazing fire.
MEILI CREEPS DOWN
the dark corridor and locks herself in the toilet. All she can see are a bucket, a mop, a mirror, a rusty nail jutting out from the brick wall – nothing that she could use as a weapon. The window is open, but it also has metal bars, so there’s no escape. The steel security door is the only way out of this place, but it’s double-locked. She has no choice but to return to her room. When she enters, she sees the boss lying on the single bed, a bottle of liquor in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He puffs a cloud of smoke into the air and tells her to shut the door.
‘No, it’s too hot in here, I’ll leave it open,’ she says, her voice faltering. She decides that if he touches her, she’ll fight him off with all her strength. During the shower she took after lunch, she scrubbed off all the mud and grime from the camp, soaked her lice-infested hair in conditioner and combed out every insect. Then she sat on the bed, pulled Suya’s journal out of her bag and read the third page: ‘. . . He pushed my thighs up and stuck his head between my legs. I told him he wasn’t allowed to do that, and tried to wriggle free, but he said: “What’s your problem? I’m paying you enough money, aren’t I?” I pulled his hair and tried to yank him off, but then he pinned me down and rammed himself inside me without a condom, and pounded and pounded, first one hole and then the other . . .’ Meili couldn’t bear to read any further. Her skin, which had relaxed in the warmth of the shower, became cold and tense.