by Mian Mian
The last thing I heard was that he’d been caught by some thugs who’d been sent by the boss of the gambling den, and that he’d been shot and killed. But by the time they’d got to him, he was broke.
Not long after that, the gambling parlor was shut down, and everyone who’d worked there dropped out of sight. I never saw any of them again.
2.
Little Shanghai was her name. Like Dalong, she came from the poorest section of Shanghai and was nothing like Qi, who’d lived on Huaihai Road in the French Concession. Little Shanghai was simpleminded, had never been to school, liked men, liked to sing, and was a very dedicated and hardworking prostitute.
Her first boyfriend made her go through two abortions before he finally dropped her. She tried to commit suicide, and it was the kind of suicide where she really did want to die, but he still didn’t want her. All she wanted was a man—a real boyfriend. Another man came into her life. He was older, and his face bore what looked like knife scars, and you could tell at a glance that he had a bad stomach. He had no eyelashes. He said he was in the woolen sweater business in the South; he said that he wanted her because she was only nineteen, because she was pretty.
She felt loved, and it made her lose her head. He bought her many nice things, although the truth was that there was nothing she lacked. Her parents had opened a small business, and she was the youngest child in the family, so she didn’t need money. What she didn’t have was love, and that was what she wanted.
One day he told her he wanted to take her to Guangzhou—just for fun, he said. He said that he was going to a trade show there. And so she went, after saying good-bye to her parents, went with him to a guesthouse in Guangzhou. The guesthouse was frequented by drug addicts, pimps (what the Shanghainese called “chicken heads”), counterfeit-watch makers, and drug dealers. All of the rooms seemed to be connected, and there were lots of people crowded together in these rooms, and many of the floors were covered with bedrolls. Little Shanghai’s boyfriend said to her, I spent fifteen years in prison, so you’d better do as I say, and I’m telling you I want you to be a “chicken.” I know everything there is to know about your family, and if you refuse me, I’ll make your lives a living hell. I’ll tell everyone you’re a whore. But if you do as I say, I’ll protect you. I’ll find a good place for you to do business, and when you’ve earned enough, we can go back to Shanghai together. We can set up a business of our own and get married.
A lot of men from Shanghai brought their girlfriends here on exactly this pretext. These men all dressed alike, in double-breasted suits the same pale green as pickled vegetables, all with identical gold-colored buttons. Each of these men in suits had spent a decade in prison, and each one of them had a face that betrayed a bad stomach. Even though all of the girls were marketable, not every girl who’d been convinced to sell her body would succeed at it. You had to have a natural talent, a vocation for selling your body. Some girls were born with the ability to sell their bodies, and some were not. The Shanghai girls these men scouted out were hungry for prestige, highly marketable, and yearning for a man they could depend on. Little Shanghai was no exception, and she couldn’t escape, and that was how she entered a life where day becomes night and night becomes day.
He brought her to a restaurant here in this city, where they watched the other men’s women picking clients, making lots of money, and referring to their own pimps as their laogong, their “old man.” This brought out her competitive nature. Three weeks later she had gone to work.
Every night we watched her riding the hotel elevator, up and down, up and down. There was an illegal gambling parlor in the hotel basement, and where there’s gambling, there are prostitutes. It’s a custom in Guangdong: when you’re done gambling, win or lose, you call a prostitute. Otherwise it’s bad luck. Little Shanghai in the elevator, a condom hidden in her underwear, kept a running tally in her head. Each john was equal to five hundred yuan. She had a good feel for numbers, but money left her cold, and after every trick she went back to the room she shared with her laogong and turned the money over to him. She never saved any money.
That elevator was her world, and I remember it as the window on her life. She always wore a red short-sleeved wool sweater; she called it her uniform. She would stand in the corner of the elevator, right by the buttons, as if she were the elevator girl. She had soulful black eyes and a man she called laogong, and she thought she loved him. She had given him her heart. All she had wanted was a man, and now all she wanted was him. She would do anything for him, and besides, now that she was a prostitute, nobody else would ever want her anyway. Her love was in her heart, not in her body. She had always been that way. The man who was with her right now was pathetic, and the one before him hadn’t been much better, but it didn’t matter.
Every kind of prostitute worked in this town. There were streetwalkers standing by the road; there were girls who only worked in hotel rooms, girls who plied their trade in nightclubs, and call girls who wouldn’t go out unless they got a phone call. There were the girls who lived off of a few wealthy patrons (not that they considered themselves prostitutes), and there were others who slipped past immigration to Hong Kong and Macao and only worked there. Little Shanghai was one of the less expensive prostitutes, one of the ones who turned many tricks each night. She was only a little more pricey than the girls on the street.
Men of every description and a handful of women stepped in and out of the elevator. The majority of the men were johns. Most of the women were like Qi, hostesses who worked in the nightclub upstairs, and they looked down on Little Shanghai because they made most of their money in tips from the clients they joined for drinks. Actually sleeping with a client earned them more than a thousand yuan. They thought of themselves as hostesses, while Little Shanghai was just a chicken, a cheap whore. A number of the Shanghainese hostesses were convinced that Little Shanghai wasn’t really Shanghainese—how else could they account for her poor taste in clothes? They took her for a country girl from somewhere near Shanghai, or possibly a native of some place like Suzhou or Hangzhou.
Someone was playing the piano in the hotel lobby; she didn’t know what song it was, but listening to it relaxed her. Almost all of the restaurants had the same background music, Kenny G. Little Shanghai didn’t like Kenny G, but from 8P.M. to 10P.M. each night there was always live piano music, and because of this, she especially liked coming here during those hours to look for clients. She spent a long time in the elevator, standing in the corner, stopping at every floor. When the doors opened, she would quietly ask the concierges who sat at each floor, Anybody here? and the concierges would give a discreet signal. Sometimes she would step off the elevator, and sometimes she wouldn’t. It was obvious to the men riding the elevator that she was for sale.
Her eyes communicated an innocent desire. Fixing a man in the elevator with those black eyes, she might ask, Do you want to do business? Some of them wouldn’t look at her, but some of them did, not that she cared much either way. Little Shanghai was used to it. Sometimes a man would come straight over to her and start feeling her up, squeezing her small, firm breasts, reaching inside her pants to see how wet she was, and bringing their fingers to their noses to catch her scent. Every man who touched Little Shanghai in the elevator was hurried and anxious, and every man who looked at her had a rapacious gleam in his eyes. Little Shanghai always smiled at this, figuring that the men liked the way she looked as she leaned against the wall of the elevator and smiled.
She never swore, but she didn’t object if men talked dirty to her, or maybe she was just used to it. She was like a dumb little girl who didn’t know how to do anything but make love. But she gave an impression of cleanliness, of being as pure as the driven snow, and this brought her lots of business. On occasion, she’d follow a hunch and go straight to a room with a client, quickly pulling off his pants and putting his penis in her mouth. She knew how to handle a penis. To her, a penis was just a penis, neither good nor bad. She might also take
off her own clothing, exposing her hard little red nipples, or she might put a finger in the crease between her legs, but whatever else she was doing, she kept him in her mouth the whole time. Her movements were tender but efficient. She did everything she could to persuade a man to go with her. She knew she couldn’t stay in a room for long. If she was there longer than ten minutes, she would have to give the floor concierge a tip, whether she’d done any business or not. They were her partners, sending business her way and acting as lookouts. If they thought she was cheating them, she wouldn’t be able to work at this hotel anymore. So she had to make sure that a prospective customer would decide within ten minutes whether or not he was going to screw her.
Every man liked to do something different with her body. Sometimes she had to do a “sandwich,” with two women and one man, or two men and one woman. She was an apt pupil and learned a lot from having sex with so many different men. Whenever a man praised her technique, she felt happy. She watched the ceiling pulsing above her, and Little Shanghai’s cries always sounded so joyful, unlike those of some women, whose cries made it sound as if they were in agony. Little Shanghai’s cries were exquisitely beautiful. Whether she was genuinely enjoying herself or felt numb inside, no one knew, and she never said, because no one ever asked her this question. She knew that men liked it when she cried out, and she wanted it to be over quickly so that she could go brush her teeth and take a bath. She had to bathe many times a day, two baths for each trick. After the bath she could get paid, and after getting her money she might drink a cola, or sometimes a Heineken, from the minibar in the john’s hotel room. And then it was back to the elevator again.
Sometimes she had clients who were impotent. She always told them, There’s nothing wrong with you; you’re a good man, you’re just not used to being with a hooker. You’re nervous, but I like you; you’re a good person. The only way to deal with an impotent client was nonstop oral sex. The truth was that Little Shanghai simply couldn’t bear impotence. Nothing bothered her more. It made her sad; sometimes it even made her cry. She thought that it had to be very depressing for those men to have this problem, so she spared no effort trying to help her impotent customers. If they still couldn’t get it up, she only charged them half, but most of them paid the full amount anyway. Sometimes she’d get a customer who had taken too many drugs or had too much to drink, and he would fuck her for a long time without coming, and if he couldn’t come, she only got half of her fee or, worse, nothing at all. When she ran into situations like these, there was nothing Little Shanghai could do but try her best. They might fuck her until her feet were half frozen, but she still wouldn’t get paid. For her, that was the worst possible case.
Riding the elevator till midnight, Little Shanghai might start making phone calls, or she might go knocking on the doors of hotel rooms. But this was very risky. If a prospective customer reported her, she could get into trouble. Even if her laogong had paid off everybody in and around the hotel, there were still a few people who didn’t accept bribes, and she was aware of this. If she were reported, her laogong would not be happy with her. He might beat her, or he might not talk to her for days and would be even less likely to sleep with her. She had genuinely fallen in love with him after she’d come back home to him from her first night on the job, and he had held her close. That was the moment when she’d started loving him. She needed to feel someone comforting her. What motivated her every day was what she felt at that moment. It was what she yearned for.
But she still had to go knocking on doors, because the elevator was emptying out and the few potential johns she saw were bringing girls back to the hotel from somewhere outside, or else the johns were drunk, and doing business with drunks was too time-consuming, and time was money, especially at night. When she brought in lots of money, her laogong treated her well. He liked gambling, and there were many other Shanghainese chickens and chicken heads living in this hotel. While the whores went and earned wages, the chicken heads made wagers. Little Shanghai’s laogong gambled away all of her money. Even when he won, he would go on to lose his winnings, and sometimes Little Shanghai had to do business wearing a tampon. But she thought that her laogong was going to marry her someday, or else why would she call him her “old man” while he called her his “lady”? She believed her laogong was good-hearted. Once, somebody had given him a girl, and he’d wanted to keep two women, but Little Shanghai had gone into the bathroom and tried to kill herself. It only took that one attempt. He didn’t try anything like that again.
After a year of this life, Little Shanghai had serious cervical erosion. Whenever she tried to have sex, she bled, so she went to Liuhua Hospital. The doctor said that she needed electrotherapy. The doctor was an older man, and every day there was a long line of girls waiting to see him. He was a famous gynecologist, and he was soft-spoken and gentle with his patients. After each examination he washed his hands with a very old and very hard-looking little piece of soap. He had unusually small hands, without any flesh on them, and the skin covering them was dark brown and crisscrossed by pulsing blue veins. He said that Little Shanghai needed a long course of laser treatment.
Little Shanghai started going to the hospital every two days.
One day, Xiaohong, Sister Morphine, went with her. Sister Morphine said she’d lost interest in sex, so she waited outside. Little Shanghai didn’t think she would ever be able to make sense of a girl like Sister Morphine. What did not being interested in sex have to do with going to the gynecologist? How could anyone so young not care about sex anymore? And what did it mean to lose interest in sex in the first place? And what was so great about using heroin? You might as well light a match to your money and watch it burn. But Xiaohong was the only girl she knew here who wasn’t a prostitute. They’d met at the hotel swimming pool. Little Shanghai had been with a client. It was very unusual in this city to run into a Shanghainese girl who wasn’t a prostitute, so Little Shanghai liked Sister Morphine.
After the laser treatment, the two of them took a walk in the sunshine. They weren’t used to the daylight. As Little Shanghai walked along she began to smile, and with Sister Morphine looking on, Little Shanghai pointed out men in the street, saying, Look, look over there. You see that one? I’ve done him, and I’ve done him too. Really. Honestly. I don’t want to come out anymore, I just can’t.
When she had her laser treatments, Little Shanghai didn’t feel anything. It was very relaxing; the only thing was, it wasn’t cheap. After a few treatments, Little Shanghai went back to work. After a few tricks she started bleeding again. Once, the bleeding didn’t stop. She was taken to the hospital, and she stayed there for several days. But as soon as she was out, she was back at work, only it hurt her to have sex, and she couldn’t show off her technique anymore. Her womb had been destroyed.
Little Shanghai was washed up, completely finished! Everyone said so. But Little Shanghai wasn’t convinced. She used her mouth and stayed in business. She only used her mouth, but in no time she was in high demand, and she became the “Flute Queen” of the hotel. But her laogong was on a losing streak, and even though he was stealing money left and right, he kept sinking further into debt. He gave up his room and went to Guangzhou, saying that he was going to pull off a few burglaries there, and then he would come back. Her laogong gave her some money he’d borrowed for her, and he told her to look after her health.
Her laogong came back, only he came back with another woman. He’d decided to go to Macao because it was getting harder to do business here. A lot of people had come to town from the Northeast, and the Shanghainese were moving on to Macao. But her laogong couldn’t take Little Shanghai with him, because she could only use her mouth, and the false papers you needed to get into Macao cost so much money that her laogong needed someone who could do anything you asked. Little Shanghai felt that her laogong didn’t want her anymore because she was crippled, but this was something that couldn’t be changed. Who had given her such an unlucky fate? Why did so many other gi
rls get away without being damaged? There were so many girls, some of them tricked into the business, some told at the outset what was going on. None of them had any money either, since they gave it all to their men, but at least they still had a dream. They were waiting for their man to marry them, or to give them some share of the money so they could go back to Shanghai. But what about Little Shanghai? Altogether she had earned enough money to buy an entire factory, but all she had to show for it now was five hundred yuan. In all the time she’d been working, she had never bought herself any clothing, had never been out to eat. Instead she’d packed a daily meal of fried rice with salted fish and bits of chicken, or maybe some stewed eggplant. Her favorite food was nothing fancy either—just simple Shanghai-style poached eggs—but since she’d come south, she hadn’t even eaten this once.
Little Shanghai left the hotel and became a hostess at another nightclub. Her stint working the hotel had taught her speed and endurance, and because she could sing and dance (she sang only songs by Teresa Teng and told everyone that she had once won a singing competition), she became very popular. Every day she took home big tips, and sometimes she would spend the night with a customer. The nightclub patrons were much more easygoing than the men she’d picked up at the hotel, and they paid more. Now that she didn’t have a laogong, she only had to make money for herself and didn’t have to work as hard. She could even take a week off from time to time, and she felt that, little by little, her life was getting better, and her health was improving too. She was starting to think that the time had come to go back home to Shanghai for a visit.
But then a new man came into her life. He was from the Northeast, a thief, and a pimp. He stole shoes for Little Shanghai, and she fell in love with him. She decided to go back to the hotel for a while and work the elevator again, because in one night you could service a lot of customers. At the nightclub you could only be with one client each night. Little Shanghai and her new man wanted to make a little money so that they could go back to the Northeast and get married.