“So you’re the new whores Choy sent from Seoul. Mr. Lyong is not happy.” She stood in three-quarter profile, looking down her nose at them, her hands held together in front of her waist. She might have started singing an aria, standing like that. “I am Mrs. Cha, and I’m in charge here. You will do what I say.” There was a pause. “When I stop speaking, you say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ We do things a certain way around here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the women said in unison.
“That’s better. You girls are here to work, and I want you in shape. I am most disappointed that you arrived so ill. It cost Mr. Lyong dearly, and he let me hear all about it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Here are the rules. One: You do what I say, and no arguing. Two: You are not to leave. Ever. Unless I say so. If I catch you trying to escape, my boys here will rough you up. They are not above taking out an eye or cutting off your toes. Three: This is a business and you are to treat the customers with respect. You give them what they want. If you don’t perform my boys will beat you black and blue.” There was silence as the women absorbed this. Mrs. Cha stepped forward and slapped Il-sun hard across the face. The sound resounded through the suite and Il-sun cried out in surprise and pain. “I didn’t hear ‘Yes, ma’am’!” said Mrs. Cha with her voice raised.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. If you follow those simple rules you will have three square meals and a roof over your head. Make a habit of disobeying me and my boys will dump your body in the Puget Sound. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the women chimed, though not knowing what the Puget Sound was. The message, however, was clear.
“I’ll put you to work in three days. You better be ready by then,” said Mrs. Cha. She turned to walk out, but Gi stepped forward.
“Ma’am?”
Mrs. Cha’s head turned, viperlike, ready to strike. Gi could almost hear her hiss and see her split tongue taste her pulse in the air. “What do you want?”
“I’m sorry to bother you ma’am, but Il-sun is pregnant. She can’t see men in that condition.” It had taken all of Gi’s courage to speak up. For anyone other than Il-sun, she would not have done it.
Mrs. Cha’s eyes went wide and her nostrils flared. Gi stepped back for fear that her fire breath would reduce her to cinders. “No, she most certainly cannot!” she said, and stormed out of the room.
63
“
Y
OU
OLD
BITCH
,”
M
RS
.
Cha said in English to herself into the mirror. She was sitting at an antique dressing table in her bedroom, removing eye makeup with a cotton ball. Where had all the lines around her eyes and mouth come from? A cigarette burned in an ashtray on the corner of the table. She pulled pins out of her hair and it fell in a black sheet down her back. The years of dye had made it course and brittle, where it used to be silky and soft.
The price of getting old,
she thought to herself. She found a silver-handled hairbrush in a drawer and ran it through her hair in long, meditative strokes. This ritual always felt particularly French to her, and she began to sing “La Vie en Rose” in a fair imitation of Edith Piaf.
Quand il me prend dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas . . .
Chung-min had promised to take her to Paris, many years ago. That was one of many unkept promises that had kept her hanging on to him for so many years, hoping to extract a drop of intimacy from a man who was lithified by easy, dangerous money.
Old age is the sum of all the small bad decisions made in the ignorance of youth,
she thought.
She had been a fool to trust him. He always had other women—she knew that. He never even tried to hide it; but he always came back to her. She was the crown jewel in his collection of women, or so she believed. Like a fool, when she was twenty, that made her feel special.
When Mrs. Cha arrived in Seattle she was only eighteen, but she looked older. She had been sent there by her unusually progressive father, who encouraged independence and worldliness in his daughters. If Asian women had been in fashion then, and if she had been taller, she would have been a top model. Her features were perfect, her skin smooth and her hair radiant. She held herself with poise and grace, walking with confidence and even with an air of snobbery. She knew how to make the most of it too, with a flirtatious glance here, a toss of the hair there. It was fun being a beautiful girl with no attachments in a time and place when “free love” was becoming a catch phrase.
Her father had been an important and affluent man in Seoul, having made his money rebuilding the city after the North Koreans destroyed it in the 1950s. Mrs. Cha grew up speaking Korean, Chinese, and English with her father’s business associates. She discovered that she had a knack for languages and a love for literature. In high school she had taken up French, Italian, and Spanish. She moved to the States to study language and literature at the university, picking up Russian and even a bit of Swahili. She read Hugo, Lu Xun, Tolstoy, Camus, Hemingway, Faulkner, Molière, Dostoyevski, and Nabakov, plus a run of trashy romance novels, all in their native languages, and loved them all. Her weakness was for Russian literature. She had dreams of one day becoming a renowned literary critic, and maybe even a novelist. At the very least she imagined herself working as a translator and editor for a large international publishing house, but none of that was to be. She had written a novel, a masterpiece, which was sitting in a box on the top shelf of a closet, that nobody had ever read. It had all the drama of Tolstoy and the psychology of Camus and the grit of Hemingway. But the success of that work belonged to an entirely different person—to an elite ex-model living in her fancy New York apartment, or the chief editor of an important literary magazine, not to the madam of a brothel owned by the Korean mafia. She had chosen her life, and the two worlds were not compatible.
The truth was, she had had a difficult time taking her own dreams seriously. She was easily the brightest student of literature that the university had seen for over a decade, but progressive as her father was, he still expected her to find a husband and become a subservient wife. She had been taught to be deferential and soft spoken to men, and as a result she found herself undermining her own ambitions. Then she met Chung-min.
Lyong Chung-min was a dapper, flashy, dangerous bad boy whose smile had the effect of sliding her panties off her legs. He was then a lieutenant for Uncle Jang, running heroine and speed through the port of Seattle and distributing it along the Pacific coast. He was confident and powerful, and being seduced by him made her feel special. He drew her slowly into the dirty underworld of Blue Talon.
At first she thought it was just an erotic game, an odd fetish of his powerful sexual appetite that caused him to ask it of her. She would have done anything for him. It did not help matters that his fingers were inside her when he asked, and she was near climaxing. It was quite a turn-on.
“I want you to fuck another man for money,” he said.
“What?!” she asked, incredulous, panting.
“I want you to fuck another man for money,” he repeated.
“If that’s what you want me to do,” she replied.
“I do.”
“Will you watch?”
“Maybe.”
“What if I like it?”
“You won’t.”
“What if I like it more than I like fucking you?” she groaned. She enjoyed dirty talk.
“You won’t.”
“I might.”
“No, you won’t,” he said, thrusting his fingers inside her roughly. It hurt. It was a gesture of threat, and for some reason it pushed her over the edge into climax. Looking back on it, it was not some kinky enjoyment of his threatening demeanor, or the pain caused by his fingers, but the fact that he was expressing a desire for her loyalty that made her orgasm. He wanted her to enjoy sex only with him. It was as if he was asking for some kind of commitment from her. It was the most intimate thing he had ever expressed to her in their relationship: It was an indication that he cared, and she fell for it.
“Stupid old bitch,” she said to herself in the mirror.
What had started as an erotic game—his taking money from a man who then had sex with her—eventually became a job. By the time she realized that it was no longer a turn-on, that he in fact was her pimp and she was just a prostitute, it was too late to change the course of fate. She was now, irreversibly, a whore, full of shame masked by defiance. Then she aged. Then she became a madam.
Too late in life to switch career paths,
she thought. Another song by Edith Piaf flashed through her mind.
Non, rien de rien
Non, je ne regrette rien . . .
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the front door.
“Grandma, I’m home.” It was the strong, young voice of her teenage grandson. He already sounded like a man, and she was proud of him.
“I’m in here. Come and give me a kiss.”
He entered the room and kissed her on the cheek. He was tall and handsome.
“Do you have much homework?” she asked him in English. He was going to go to university and become an engineer, or doctor, or anything that would keep him out of organized crime. She would see to that, and she was prepared to defy Chung-min if he came recruiting. He would leave her grandson alone; he owed her that much.
“I have an exam in physics tomorrow,” he replied in Russian. It had been a game to them to alternate languages. He had inherited her talent.
“Then don’t let this old woman keep you from studying!” she said in Italian.
“Ciao!” he said, smiling into the mirror, and then turned to leave.
“Don’t forget to eat!” she said to his back in English. He went to his room and closed the door.
She went back to brushing her hair. Her thoughts turned to the new girls, and her heart broke a little. They were so young and naïve. She could tell from their accents that they were from North Korea—doubtless victims of the burgeoning sex trafficking business from that region. She wondered if they had mothers or grandmothers back home who worried about them—then she stopped herself. It would do no good if she allowed herself to sympathize with them. She had a job to do, and so did they. Their roles were clearly defined, which made things simple. Their lives were not going to be a pleasure cruise: This business killed off the weak and made the survivors strong. She felt bad for slapping the girl, but it was always better to assert dominance right at the very beginning. It would keep the girls in line.
Small kindnesses can come later,
she thought.
But for now it is better for them to see the rough edge of the business. How else am I to care for them?
Her eyes fell on a small statue of the Buddha sitting on a wardrobe and the word
compassion
went instantly through her mind in half a dozen languages.
“You old bitch,” she said to herself in the mirror.
64
A
T
SEA
,
I
L
-
SUN
HAD
thought she was going to die for sure. At times, in the misery of the shipping container, she wished she would. Would she see her mother and brother on the other side? Would she finally get to meet her father? These were not questions that had answers, but she longed to know.
She first suspected that she was pregnant two weeks after arriving in South Korea. Her period did not come—but that could have been the stress. Then the nausea began and her breasts were just a little plumper than normal. The nausea had not been too bad at first, and she tried to blame it on the
Hanguk
food—maybe the Americans were poisoning it. Maybe the plumpness in her breasts was just normal growth; after all, she was only seventeen, and admittedly she had been eating well. Once she was in the shipping container the sickness reached its peak, with the foul odors and the pitching of the sea. Even so, she knew.
What did it mean for her to be pregnant? She did not know how to be a mother; and how could she love a child that every day would remind her of Gianni and his treachery? In moments, some scraping part of her mind even thought that if she could get a message to him, he would bring her back and care for her and the baby; but she knew better than to put stock in that hope. Throughout her childhood she had fantasized about motherhood, and it was never supposed to be this way. But her body wanted this baby—the biology was so much more powerful than her will. Then when Gi, Jasmine, and Cho found out, and they doted on her so much, and it gave them so much hope, she could not help but feel a sense of pride and a desire to see it through. This baby made her special. And maybe she could use it as leverage in their new home. Whoever was to be her new master would surely take pity on a young mother-to-be. Would that be the dreadful Mrs. Cha? She was a woman too, so she must have sympathy.