All Woman and Springtime

by Brandon Jones

  The lemon water worked quickly to bring some vitality back to her, and she was able take in more of her surroundings.

  She was lying in a narrow European-style bed in a small bedroom. The walls were covered in old, peeling wallpaper with a red floral pattern, and the hardwood floor was dented and scratched, and looked like it might have been there for a century or more. The ceiling was white plaster that was cracked in a crazed pattern radiating from an old light fixture. There was a table next to the bed with a cheap, modern-style lamp that looked out of place in the otherwise antiquated room. The air was cool and humid.

  The woman who had helped her drink the water was short and slight, with a round face. She appeared to be about Gi’s age, or maybe a couple of years older, with heavily painted eyes and hair dyed an impossible auburn color. She had a kind face that bore a look of genuine concern. She helped Gi up to a sitting position, and then piled pillows against the headboard so that Gi could be supported by them while she sat. The woman then took a bowl from the bedside table and fed Gi a spoonful of its contents. It was a thin rice gruel mixed with meat broth. Although she was ravenous, Gi could only eat a few spoonfuls before she felt full and slightly nauseous.

  A groaning sound came from an adjoining room, and the young woman set the bowl back on the table and hurried out the door. Gi could not tell whose voice it was, but she hoped it was from one of her companions. She tried to get up to see, but as soon as she moved she was overcome by dizziness and had to sink back onto the pillows. She pulled the covers off her body and was surprised by her nakedness. She had lost precious weight—her ribs protruded and the bones of her hips were well defined by lack of flesh. Her arms and legs were fragile stems. She noticed that the sores on her body had been thoughtfully dressed with gauze and tape, and she felt grateful that somebody cared.

  A while later the young woman returned and fed her a few more bites of gruel. Slowly her strength began returning. After the second feeding, the young woman helped Gi out of bed and to the toilet. She gave her a pair of panties and an oversized tee-shirt to wear. The effort of making the thirty-pace round-trip between the bed and the toilet was exhausting, and afterward she fell into a deep sleep.

  After that, the young woman awakened her every couple of hours to eat gruel and drink water. By the next afternoon, Gi was able to stand and walk to the toilet on her own. The young woman, it turned out, could not speak Korean, so Gi was not able to question her about their location. Once she could walk, she insisted, using hand gestures, on going to see her friends.

  Gi discovered that she was in a suite of four small bedrooms with an adjoining bathroom. At one time the suite was probably a two-bedroom apartment, complete with kitchen and bathroom, but the kitchen had been taken out and the living room and kitchen divided into two small bedrooms. Each of the women was in her own bedroom.

  Cho, like Gi, was able to walk, if shakily, on her own. Il-sun was not yet walking, but she had some color in her cheeks, and smiled when Gi walked in. She looked relieved to see her. Nobody had information about where they were.

  Jasmine was the worst off of all. She appeared to have a fever, and slipped in and out of consciousness. Her lips were badly cracked and bleeding, and she was in a state of delirium. She was drinking and eating, however, when the glass and spoon were lifted to her mouth. Gi saw it as a promising sign. All the women were very thin and pale, but alive.

  On her way back to bed, Gi paused to look out her bedroom window. It was her first look into the new world she had entered. She counted the time from their flight across the DMZ—they had spent a month in South Korea, and about three weeks in the shipping container—and she figured that it must already be early summer. It did not look it, though. The sky was overcast and a light drizzle darkened the charcoal gray asphalt of the road below, and the air held a humid chill. She could see that she was on the second floor of an old redbrick building, but could not tell how wide or tall the building was. To the right was an intersection that had a lot of cross traffic, but the street below was relatively quiet. She could hear the steady stream of cars through the intersection, and overall it sounded just like Seoul. She was certain, however, given the amount of time they’d been at sea, that she was no longer in Korea. Directly across the street was another brick building, with cracks in the walls and a sagging roofline. At street level there were shops of various kinds, though she could not tell what they were selling: All the writing was in western-style lettering. Various cars were parked along the street. Two people were walking along the sidewalk directly below her, but they were shielded from view by a large black umbrella.

  By the next day Il-sun was getting up on her own. In spite of the trauma of their ordeal, she had not lost the baby. “She’s going to be a survivor just like us,” Gi said to her.

  Il-sun smiled and replied, “What makes you think she will be a girl?”

  Gi did not have an answer. It just had to be a girl.

  There was no improvement for Jasmine yet. The young woman fed her every couple of hours with thin gruel. The other women were starting to eat solid food, in larger portions and less often. Strength was coming back to them rapidly.

  It was not until the fourth day of her recovery that Gi had built up enough strength to try opening the main door out of the suite. She had been afraid to touch the doorknob because she knew the mystery of their situation would be solved on the other side of it, and she did not want to uncover any grim truths. She stood in front of the door for several minutes before reaching out to it. Finally, after taking a deep breath and holding it in, her fingers wrapped around the knob and she turned it. The knob was fixed in place—they were locked inside. Confirming for herself that she was once again held in captivity drained the precious strength out of her body. She went to bed, closed her eyes, and escaped into numbers until she fell asleep.

  By the fifth day Jasmine still had not improved and their caregiver brought a man into their suite to have a look at her. He was a tall Asian man in his midthirties, but he did not speak much Korean. He brought with him a bag of medical supplies, and Gi assumed him to be a doctor. He thoroughly examined Jasmine, looking into her eyes, her nose, her ears, and inspected the sores that still festered on her body. He took her blood pressure and temperature. He brought some pills out of his bag and handed them to the young caregiver and gave her instructions in his unintelligible language. Then he brought a bag of fluid and some plastic tubes out of his kit. He inserted a needle into Jasmine’s arm, attached the tubes to the needle and then the bag of fluid to the tubes. He used a push pin to secure the bag in a high position against the wall.

  “What is that?” asked Gi.

  The doctor scrunched up his face at the question, his eyes rolling upwards as if trying to find the right words. Finally he said, “Food water.” It was not correct Korean, but she understood the meaning.

  “Will she be okay?”

  He looked confused at first, not understanding the words, but he seemed to understand the concerned look in Gi’s eyes.

  “She fine week next,” he said. “No worry.”

  The doctor then did a cursory inspection of the other three women, and indicated that they would be fine as long as they continued to eat and drink plenty of fluids. He then packed up his case and walked out the door.

  Within a day Jasmine was much improved. Her fever abated, and with it left the delirium. As soon as Jasmine was able to stand on her own, their caregiver came less frequently, and only to deliver food and clean clothing. They were still not allowed out of the suite, and nor had anyone come to explain their circumstances to them.

  A full week after arriving at their new location, the women were looking significantly more healthy and full in the face. The lock on their door jiggled, and in walked a stately woman, elegantly dressed in a fancy embroidered gown, followed by two large, muscular men.

  “Come!” The woman shouted in Korean, standing in the doorway. Her voice rattled like an old truck, its huskiness caused
by a lifetime of heavy smoking. The women came out of their rooms and stood before her.

  She was short, but her posture was so erect and her poise so perfect that she seemed to tower over them. They would have described her as a tall woman, even though she was almost the shortest person in the room. She could have been anywhere from her midfifties to her midseventies, depending on how well or poorly she had aged, with her hair dyed black and pulled back in a tight bun. She had high, well-defined cheekbones, which were painted with a smear of rouge, and her eyebrows were penciled in over her eyes in a sinister arch. The outer corners of her eyes slanted upward, and her lips were pinched and plump and painted a deep shade of red. The skin of her neck was loose over hard, ropelike tendons. She wore a string of pearls and matching pearl pendant earrings that showed off the length of her neck. Her face was slightly wrinkled, and she was beautiful and frightening. When she was younger her beauty must have stopped hearts and caused collisions. Now she did it with her hard, penetrating stare.

  “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

  “YOU OLD BITCH,” MRS. 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.