All Woman and Springtime (22 page)

“No, use this,” Cho said, smiling and handing her a pink plastic bottle. “It’s real shampoo!” For the first time, Cho was not a caricature—the thick makeup had washed off her face and she looked her age: nineteen. Gi put the bar of soap on a ledge and poured some shampoo into the palm of her hand. It came out as a thick, rose-colored ooze. It had a sweet, floral smell that made her think of summertime, and it foamed up deliciously as she worked it into her hair.

The women lingered in the shower, savoring the heat, carefully scrubbing every part of their bodies. When finally their hands and feet had become wrinkled from the water, they turned off the showers and toweled off. Not wanting to put their dirty clothes back on their clean bodies, they wrapped themselves in their towels and went back to their apartment.

In their absence, the young woman had set up a chair in the light of the window and arranged an array of bottles, jars, tubes, and brushes on the table. She instructed Il-sun to sit in the chair, and gave Cho and Gyong-ho a pile of magazines to read while they waited.

Cho and Gi sat on the floor and began looking through them. The magazine in Gi’s hand was so glossy that it was sticky, and it was full of all kinds of unusual images and words. It was overwhelming to her senses: the tackiness of the paper, the bombardment of colors and shapes, the discordant smell of too many different types of perfume wafting up from the pages. There were words in Korean, but also occasional Chinese characters and foreign words that Gi could not read. Each page seemed to compete with every other page for her undivided attention. Advertisements were unheard of in
Chosun,
so it was difficult for Gyong-ho to grasp the concept of what they were. Cho said that the pictures were sexy, but Gi did not fully understand what she meant. They certainly caused her to feel strongly. Maybe that strong feeling was “sexy.” She did notice that, without fail, every photograph showed people with regular features and lithe, strong bodies. Their faces were free of blemishes, their teeth perfect, and their eyes clear. Their clothes looked expensive and well matched, albeit, in many cases, oddly styled and immodest.

Want was a sensation that, for Gyong-ho, had been mostly relegated to the desire for food. But now, looking at the pictures, there was a new kind of want. She found herself wishing she could have a watch, and fancy shoes, and rounder eyes, and fuller lips. Want was like a fire catching inside her, getting out of control as she turned the pages. To want, she knew, could be dangerous: Wanting leads to asking for something you do not have, which is as good as telling the Dear Leader that he is not providing well enough for his beloved people.
Wanting is treason
.

She dropped the magazine.

Not once, on any of the pages, was there a reference to the Dear Leader. The articles did not begin with a preamble of gratitude for his beneficence and wisdom, nor were there any photographs of him. She became fearful that somehow the Dear Leader might know that she had perused the imperialist magazines, that she had wanted something beyond her reach, that she had enjoyed a hot water shower and not given him proper thanks. She was afraid that because of his disappointment in her, secret police would come in the night and steal her away. She was suddenly very much aware of her captivity and felt wrenched by homesickness. She missed the regularity of her days: the orphanage, walking to work with Il-sun, the fearsome foreman, the Party Youth meetings. She wanted to see Mr. Choy right away and beg him to take her back. But Mr. Choy would never do it. And now her life was hanging in unbearable uncertainty.

“They will never know, teacup,” said Cho. She must have been struggling with the same thoughts. Gi was unsure which would be worse: Their knowing, or the idea that no one would ever know.

The beautician worked on Il-sun for over an hour, cutting and styling her hair, cleaning and painting her fingernails and toenails, and doing her makeup. When she was finished, Il-sun looked like a page out of one of the imperialist magazines. There was not a single blemish that could be seen. Her lips were a deep shade of red, painted in a pouty kiss, her cheekbones defined by a touch of shadow. Her hair had been cut to shoulder length, curled, and clipped up in the back. She looked ten years older: twenty-seven rather than seventeen. Gyong-ho wanted to place her on a pedestal in the window and sit for hours watching the sunlight pass over her beautiful face. The young woman offered Il-sun a hand mirror.

“Is that really me?” she asked. Il-sun shifted the angle of the mirror and inspected herself from all sides. She lingered for a long time, watching herself as she changed her expressions: smiling, scowling, flirting. She seemed captured by her own beauty, as if in looking at herself the whole rest of the world simply melted away. It was a clue into Il-sun’s personality, Gi realized, an explanation of her embodied contradictions: self-admiration. When she flirted and teased and made the whole world want her, she was really only admiring herself through the eyes of other people.

Cho went next, though she was less patient for the process and pressed the beautician to be quick. Even so, at the end of it she looked more mature and sophisticated. The beautician’s makeup style was less heavy-handed than Cho’s, and she came out looking almost demure, rather than like a caricatured flower-selling girl, her normal look. The beautician did not bother cutting Cho’s hair because of her restlessness, but instead pulled the front of her hair back and plaited it down the back of her head, giving her an innocence that Gi never would have guessed was possible.

When it was Gi’s turn, she sat in the chair nervously as the beautician applied various creams to her face. The beautician looked at her from different angles, puckering her lips and knitting her brow in concentration, and then wetted Gi’s hair and began selectively snipping at it with sharp scissors. She then used a blow dryer—a contraption that was unheard of in
Chosun
—and styled her hair. She sprayed Gi’s hair with something from a can and instructed her not to touch it. After the haircut, the beautician busied herself applying makeup to Gi’s face. Gi had never worn makeup before, and she enjoyed the way it was applied, with light brushes, soft swabs, and pencils. The beautician held up several tubes of lipstick, comparing their colors with Gi’s complexion. She settled on a frosty pink and daubed it on gently, and then told Gi to roll her lips together. The lipstick tasted a little like crushed flower stems, but in a pleasant way. The beautician cleaned and filed Gi’s fingernails and toenails, digging into the nail beds to scrape away embedded grime. At times the sharp end of the tool jabbed painfully, but even that was pleasant. She then brushed on several layers of polish that matched the color of her lipstick. When the beautician was done, she handed Gi the mirror.

Gi could not believe that she was looking at herself. Her pale skin glowed with warmth. The liner and shadow around her eyes made them stand out in a pleasing way. The blush on her cheeks altered the shape of her cheekbones so that she no longer had a drawn look. It was a miraculous illusion and she understood why Il-sun had been so captivated by herself. Looking in the mirror, Gi saw herself as almost pretty. She was certainly more feminine.

“Wow, Gi! Look at you!” Il-sun exclaimed. Gyong-ho couldn’t help but smile.

43

M
R
.
C
HOY
WAS
SITTING
at a desk in his office, observing the live streaming of a dozen sex shows on a monitor. Frankly, he was bored. This was not where he had imagined himself being at the age of thirty-six—he had had such high aspirations. When he was eighteen he had been accepted to an American university. It was the most exciting time of his life. He left his home in Seoul a vigorous and promising teenager with the dream of graduating with honors, starting a corporation of his own, and having his picture on the cover of
Forbes
magazine by the time of his thirtieth birthday. But things had not gone according to plan.

He arrived at the University of Washington in Seattle looking very out of place in a business suit and tie. His hair was conservatively trimmed above his ears and he spoke textbook-perfect English. He had thought that these things would help him win friends and impress his teachers, but they only made him a target for ridicule from the shaggy, tightly muscled fraternity boys who prowled the campus. He had not been warned of the shock and loneliness of living in a foreign country without friends or family nearby. American movies had not prepared him for the reality of living among Americans, with their loud, brash manners and disrespectful airs, or their heavy, fatty, overly sweet foods. His first year in the States, his face was a greasy terrain of acne and his own odor offended him.

Timid and lonely, a stranger to everyone, Mr. Choy wandered the streets near the campus during his free time, looking for some form of solace. One day, he happened upon a dollar cinema not far from the university. He loved movies and he needed an escape, and the price of admission fit his student budget. He purchased a ticket to what he thought was a popular film; the title certainly had been similar to the one he had seen on posters around town. He realized his mistake soon after the film started—an understandable confusion with a play on words—and he almost rushed out of the theater in embarrassment. He had grown up a very proper young man. Once the action started, however, he could not take his eyes off the screen. He stayed, and in the dark anonymity of the theater he discovered something about himself: He loved pornography. In Korea, women had been chaste, untouchable creatures from fairy tales who giggled behind their hands and turned away from him. It always felt like they were laughing at him, and it made him feel small. He was shy and had never been on a date. He did not even really know what a woman looked like without her clothes on—he was a late bloomer.

He became a regular at the dollar cinema. It fascinated him. He enjoyed seeing all the parts of women that were normally shielded from view. He loved watching them be penetrated and pleasured in all the many different ways women can be penetrated and pleasured—it opened a whole new world to him. He even harbored a fantasy of becoming a director of pornographic films, though he did not take it very seriously; he still had a plan for success and intended to see it through.

Mr. Choy finished his degree, a business major with a minor in computer science—not with honors, as he had hoped, but well enough. He expected that the American business world would prove more disciplined and open to his talents than the university had been. He had a million bright ideas and boundless energy: Certainly one of the large corporations was bound to snap him up and make him a star. Rejection, however, was around every corner. The rich brats who failed the same courses in which he had earned As and Bs were getting high-paying jobs in companies owned by their fathers or their fathers’ friends while doors were repeatedly slammed in his face. For an unknown, unconnected Korean kid the gates to success seemed closed.

At the time, an underground Internet porn community was beginning to develop in Seattle. The Internet was just taking off as a common household service, and more people than ever were using computers to explore the world. Terms like
downloading, uploading, cyberspace,
and
virtual reality
were becoming commonplace. With his background in computers and his penchant for porn, and because nothing else was working out for him, Mr. Choy was poised to enter the business at just the right time. Pornography, it seemed, had found its ideal medium in the Internet.

Having been the model business student, he put together a stellar business plan using sound statistical data to show the profit potential of a website he hoped to launch. He needed only startup capital, and not even much of that. So, taking the textbook approach, he went to the bank. His project would have been given the green light for sure—the business plan was perfect—except for one sticking point: The banks were not keen on the idea of funding a pornographic endeavor. “It just isn’t the right image for our bank,” he heard over and over again as he was being shown the door.

Frustrated and defeated, he set up a meeting with Uncle Lyong. Lyong Chung-min, the leader of the Korean organized crime syndicate Blue Talon, had a reputation for rough dealing, violent extraction of moneys owed to him, and outright extortion. It was difficult to be Korean in Seattle and not have some dealing with Uncle Lyong, though most everyone tried to avoid it. The most disturbing part of meeting him was his amiability. He spoke to Mr. Choy in soothing, familiar tones as if he were a favorite son rather than a complete stranger he would be willing to cripple over an unpaid loan. Nervously, Mr. Choy pitched his idea with the same professionalism he had used at the banks. It was unnecessary. Uncle Lyong did not care what he was funding. His business was in extracting exorbitant interest under the threat of bodily injury—he knew he would get his money, one way or the other. Uncle Lyong reassured Mr. Choy that he was “in the family now.” Mr. Choy did not find this reassuring.

Mr. Choy did the numbers, and even with the excessive interest on the loan, his website would clear a nice profit. Blue Talon proved to be a valuable resource for a pornographic upstart, with its connection to prostitution and the naked, desperate underworld that feeds on such industry. It was a nice symbiosis.

The problems started occurring after Mr. Choy made his final loan payment to Uncle Lyong. He had assumed that he was now clear of Blue Talon, and could build his business as he saw fit. He still had plans to branch out and develop his more legitimate corporation. But he was wrong. The debt was cleared, they agreed, but there were other fees for “services” that had to be paid out regularly. The main service turned out to be the
not
breaking of his legs with an iron pipe; which, when it came down to it, he was willing to pay for. Mr. Choy could hardly complain; he was still making money hand over fist, and Uncle Lyong was quick to point that out to him. Still, he craved autonomy.