Sandi looked at the price tag on the male chastity belt. A thousand Hong Kong dollars. “Do the subs like this?” She asked.
Xonia shrugged. “Some do, some do.”
“And they can all fit?”
Xonia shook her head. “That’s the point. The restriction. The imprisonment.”
She would save the money, plunk it into her account, advance a thousand dollars closer to Sydney.
Her parents did wonder about her. Mickey had found her bankbook, had reported the vast amount that Sandi was socking away. What was she doing with the money? She didn’t have friends. Appeared to have no interest in men. Came and went at strange hours and never told her parents where she worked. Was she seeing some gweilo? Was she taking drugs? There was no way to know what she was doing. Mickey, always eager to curry favor with his parents, offered to follow her into town. Mother deemed this too risky. What if Mickey got lost, became confused, was momentarily stupefied and turned into one of those boys who are deposited across the border in Shenzhen by anxious Hong Kong immigration authorities and go missing, becoming the subjects of TV Pearl documentaries. No, Mickey should stay close to home, working at his books and figures and earning his good grades so that maybe he could go to college in Canada. Mickey, the oldest son, was where his mother and father deposited their hopes. Sandi would end up married somehow, they told themselves, and why did a housewife need a secondary school degree? She was pretty, she would find some businessman or realtor or, at least, a lorry driver and they’d put their names down on a waiting list for a government flat, just as her mother and father had done, and when their names came up, they’d move in, beginning their lives, having kids, maybe get lucky and birth all boys. That’s the way it worked. No reason why Sandi wouldn’t eventually understand her place in the order of things.
What mattered was keeping Mickey out of trouble, away from those boys with hennaed hair and tattoos by the wall. He might win a scholarship, with a little bit of luck, some supplement for the family’s meager savings to ease his passage to a good school in Vancouver. He’d marry some smart overseas Chinese woman, and . . . who knows? Maybe the whole family could move to Canada, get away from this housing estate, live in the cool air and fresh woodlands of Canada. Not that Sandi’s mother had ever been to Canada, but she had watched the TV specials, seen the travel brochures. It was just so clean. Sandi had been to Australia. She paid for her own three-week vacation. But she never once told the family what it had been like. So Mother’s dreams remained fixated on Canada, on Mickey going to school, on some giant crane built out of Mickey’s skill with numbers and equations reaching across the Pacific and plucking them up and out of Shek-O Housing Estates. Nothing should jeopardize that, especially with Mickey’s exams pending, a procession of A-levels and SATs and ACTs for which he had been diligently preparing. He would score well on the maths, science, and history. His English scores, of course, might be lower. But surely the colleges would make an exception for a future engineer, for a precocious computer programmer. And he was such a hardworking boy, shut away in his room, scratching away with number two pencils on practice exams. The schools would see that and realize that not only was this a bright boy, but that he came from a good family that cared and would do everything necessary to ensure his future, their future.
When Sandi thought about Mickey, it was with a mixture of distaste and boredom. She accepted that he was the son, and therefore the vessel of so much parental aspiration, yet he was such a little dick, the kind of boy she had known by the dozen when she had still gone to school. Bright little mathematical machines, these boys became in her mind compendiums of statistics rather than human beings. Their scores, achievements, grades and results represented the reduction of character and desire to numbers on a page. Mickey stacked up well, Sandi knew, but there were so many like him, and what kind of life was that? Test well, and maybe you could go to college, test brilliantly and perhaps there was a spot for you overseas. She would get overseas on her own terms, by her own efforts, without having to sit for any stuffy exams.
That night, as she walked up from the mini-bus stop to her family’s flat, she recalled the boy Mickey had been instead of what he had become. They’d spent every spring on the beach, before the summers and the crowds of tourists who would overrun their sand and waves, carving the whole cove into tiny fiefs of towel and beach chair. Mickey had been a bony kid, before the years of studying indoors had added layers of adolescent blubber, before his eyesight deteriorated and he needed glasses and he became pale as an Englishman’s ass. She’d taught him how to bodysurf, how to catch the little waves and ride all the way to the shore. When typhoons were expected, the swells would be overhead and the local kids would ignore the high-numbered storm warnings and splash in the breakwater, catching lifts on the choppy waves. Even from here, as she walked up the hill, she could hear the surf, reminding her of the reckless freedom, of unheeded parental warnings and taking ownership of the nearly empty beach. The older kids would all be off surfing at Big Wave or Cap D’ Aguilar and the beach would belong then to their crowd. You truly felt like a little emperor. The waves raising you up like you were in a palanquin, the weightlessness being for a moment terrifying and then, as you surrendered to it and lifted your head out of the foam, it was an intoxication, the rush of liberation. Mickey had loved the ocean, the beach, but he would only go in the water if Sandi was there, watching over him. What is it about the beach that can make a day seem as long as a season? You rode the water, lay on the sand, begged change for ice cream, built a castle, scavenged in the rocks, ignoring used rubbers and digging up broken glass polished by the waves, trashed compact discs turned pink by the saltwater, little black crabs with orange pincers. The spring wasn’t as hot as the summer, so you could stay on the sand all day, heading into the water a dozen times, and each time that weightlessness as the waves picked you up.
But how many days like that had there really been? She now wondered as she rooted around in her bag for her keys. They had been in school during the spring, of course, and there were the rains that came, changing the color of the water to a murky brown and making the waves all chop and foam and too weak to carry them. There could only have been a few springs before the other boys began smoking cigarettes and sniffing glue. The older boys would already have been surfing. It now seemed that almost as soon as she was aware of gender, the tough boys began hanging around on the wall and taunting Mickey for being in his sister’s charge. When they went to the beach then, Mickey would become tentative, not wanting to be seen with his sister but still too frightened to bodysurf without her. She would ride the waves and check on Mickey once in a while as he sat on the sand, picking up cigarette butts and bottle caps from around him but unwilling to even venture to the rocks, for fear the boys on the wall would make fun of him.
As she set down her bag in her room and could feel Mickey next door, could detect his heat and eagerness as he studied for his tests, which, she knew, were coming up next week, she now estimated there had been only four or five such good days, or perhaps even that was an exaggeration. Maybe there had only been one of those days on the beach, one afternoon, a few hours where they had been big sister and little brother and where they had felt free, before Mickey became this weird little droid who sat in his room all day working on figures and Sandi became acutely aware of her body and gender and the universe of difference that implied between her and her brother. A whole life, an entire relationship, how could it rest on just those few hours?
One afternoon, after Mickey logged on and retrieved his SAT and ACT scores, the family indulged in a celebratory banquet. They had lunch at the Excelsior, the four of them. Father had even ordered shark’s fin. And Mickey had been so smug, that little prick, sipping his soup and nodding as his mother went on about how proud she was and patted his little bowl-cut head. Sandi had swallowed her soup and felt practically invisible as the family wallowed in their good fortune at having such a son. His math scores had been the second
best at Chai Wan #2, his science and history ACTs had also been impressive, in the top 2 percentile. It was as if the family’s suffering and frugality had somehow been rewarded. Mother and Father seemed almost relieved at having been right. Unspoken during the previous months had been the question: What if Mickey didn’t do well? What if his test scores were merely average?
But they weren’t. He truly was a bright boy. And now the family’s time was spent filling out financial aid forms and scholarship applications, for which Sandi, because of her better English, was always enlisted to help divine the meanings of the questionnaires, to ascertain which answers would magically open the purse strings of these universities. This was another exam, the family assumed, another shoal of trick questions which must be carefully negotiated in order to secure the right result. Nationality. Race. Religion. Family income. Family assets. Extracurriculars. An essay. The truth was irrelevant, everybody knew that. What did these colleges want? Sandi was entrusted to translate and extrapolate, and to alchemize the right responses. At one point she grew exasperated with the family’s hand-wringing about the issue as they sat around the rickety wooden dining table beneath the Park ’n’ Shop calendar, sipping tea and flipping through Cantonese primers on the subject of cajoling money from foreign universities. Why not just write the truth, she asked at one point. No one responded because that, of course, was out of the question.
The work took hours. Mickey would be, they decided, a minority among minorities. He wasn’t a Chinese or a Hong Konger, but a Haka, a member of a minority that had fled China centuries ago and whose culture was in danger of vanishing. There was Haka blood in their family tree, as there was in so many Cantonese, so this was exaggeration rather than prevarication. But chinky is chinky, Sandi thought as she translated their lies. What Western institution would care if you were Haka or Cantonese or Fukkienese? They would only see chink, Sandi knew from her extensive dealings with gweilos. She kept this to herself as she dutifully wrote down the responses they dictated, while Mickey played Grand Theft Auto on his computer. The little punk was such a hero the family didn’t even expect him to fill in his own applications. He was like a prizefighter resting up between bouts; becoming even chubbier as he dined on roast pork and duck prepared by his mother. He was dismissive when Sandi asked him what he thought they should write on the forms. It was suddenly beneath him now, a matter of clerical work fit for Sandi. The adulation of the clan had clearly gone to his head and made the little punk insufferable. His mother had boasted so vociferously to the other mothers in the housing estate that everyone now knew of the prodigy in their midst. A great student becomes a kind of celebrity in Hong Kong, Sandi knew, and now Mickey had achieved the kind of status accorded to local heroes. Even the boys on the wall ignored him now rather than make fun of him as he went by. In some way that they recognized, Mickey had become cool, his achievement in a distant field and venue according him their grudging respect.
The answers were contrived. Sandi wrote a dutiful essay dictated in Chinese by the family committee, a turgid piece of prose about duty and diligence and the virtues of hard work. It was a virtual repeat of the essays she had done for Mickey’s original applications. Her suggestion that they write something about what it had been like growing up on the beach, with the waves and sand and the scavenging in the rocks, the feeling of weightlessness, of days that seemed to go on forever, was ignored in such a way that Sandi was made to feel stupid. The forms were filled out, photocopied, slid into their pristine envelopes, and sent via courier services to the various schools—the family’s aspirations traveling in the bellies of cargo jets for eventual perusal and judgment by gweilos in far-away ivory towers.
Could Sandi come to a party? Xonia wondered. Five or six girls. A rich English banker in a house on the Peak. He liked subs, Xonia explained. It would be very good money. He always paid well. Ten thousand an hour, probably four hours. Plus, if she was a good girl, a gratuity.
Sandi held her phone to her ear and weighed the proposition. She didn’t like being a submissive, being bound and tied up and fondled and spanked. The loss of control unnerved her. Still, she quickly ran through the numbers, and forty thousand plus gratuity would push her bank account up even higher into the six figures. One job like this could save her weeks of sessions at the shop. And, lately, work had been slow. In the summer, so many of her regulars were out of town. She’d had to make do with responses to a classified ad she’d placed in a local giveaway magazine. It had killed her, using Mickey’s computer to authorize the transfer from her account to the magazine’s. There was, of course, a surcharge for these kinds of ads, the woman had explained to Sandi when she had booked. That had set her back a few thousand, and had made Sydney seem that much father away. And now, with Mickey’s departure as imminent as the arrival of a propitious envelope bearing the news of acceptances, scholarships, financial aid grants, Sandi was more determined than ever to get out of Hong Kong. It had become, in her mind, a race to see who could leave first. She had to beat that little prick, to show her family that she too had plans, a vision, was good at something, even if she could never tell anyone what that something was. Her departure would be a resounding reminder that she too had aspirations and dreams and that Mickey wasn’t the family’s only success. Xonia gave her an address on Plantation Road and Sandi said she would be there.
It irked her that the boys on the wall still taunted her and now left Mickey alone. “Whore,” they shouted. It was some small satisfaction that they too would hear of Sandi’s emigration after the fact. Her absence would be a monument to their own inability to get themselves anywhere other than to the beach for the morning swell and then to the wall in the afternoon. Their collective subconscious could inscribe on the base of that blank monument their own failures—at schools, careers, love and sex—these losers had struck out in so many arenas they would need a pedestal as big as a school bus.
The modern white house was built onto the side of a hill so that the entrance hall was actually on the top flight and she had to descend to find her way to a living room with floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows looking out over Central, Victoria Harbor and, beyond that, Kowloon. The house was the size of two dozen housing estate flats. Entire blocks of lower-middle-class Hong Kongers could have lived here, Sandi thought, whole families subdividing this living room into numerous flats. Yet only one man lived here, a banker, annoyingly tall yet slightly built, with sandy hair graying at the temples, a similarly grayish complexion, a shaved chest and legs and a semiflaccid penis poking out from a leather, crotchless G-string. A woman whose wrists were bound to a black nylon strap laced around a pulley screwed into the ceiling was panting and leaning so that the pulley took all of her weight. The Englishman held a wooden paddle in his hand and was spanking the girl. In between thwacks he was spitting on the red marks the paddle left on her buttocks.
There were five gweilo girls sitting at a sectional leather sofa around an intricately carved, dark wood coffee table. Each of them wore a chastity belt like Sandi had seen in the shop. They were younger and prettier than the doms who hung around the shop and she didn’t recognize any of them. The girls were taking turns sniffing up a white powder sifted out on the glossy jacket of a heavy book about Chinese ceramics, before lying back, sipping from champagne flutes and then almost shouting at each other in Russian. Taking the scene in—the spanking, the drugs, the Russians—Sandi thought about turning around and leaving. This didn’t seem safe. What she liked about her work was the control, the fact that she was in charge. This appeared reckless, like the beginning of a long and difficult evening, the whole goal of which was to reach uncharted sexual and psychological realms. This was the opposite of what attracted her to BDSM in the first place. And those Russians with their teased blond and brown hair, silicon tits and tireless appetite for drugs, there was about them an air of violent, mercenary willingness to do whatever it took for a big score. She turned to walk out and saw Xonia coming from the kitchen, wearing a black le
ather bustier, black panties and thigh-high patent leather boots. She was in full dom gear tonight.
“Sandi!” Xonia said, taking her by the arm, “How wonderful! Have you met the girls?”
And instead of leaving, Sandi thought about the money, about how many dull sessions with the American magazine writer it would take to equal just one night up here on the Peak. Just this one night and she could book her ticket, board that plane and get out of here forever, sky to sunnier climes where she could ply her trade among the better-equipped, more professional dungeons of Sydney and make a new life away from the housing estates, the boys on the rock, the same-sameness of it all. She let Xonia guide her back into the room.
The Englishman looked up. “Oh, wicked, wicked, that’s what we’ve needed: a Chinese girl.”
Xonia took her down another staircase to a bedroom where Sandi could change, handing her a chastity belt. Sandi slipped out of her black skirt, white blouse and cotton panties, stashing them in her Prada bag, which she zipped up and took the precaution of hiding in a closet behind a dehumidifier. Who knew what these people were capable of? She stepped into the chastity belt, the shiny aluminum feeling like she had a saucepan strapped to her thighs. Pushing the nylon belt with its steel clasp into a slot on the side of the crotch plate, she heard a metallic click and then realized Xonia hadn’t given her the keys. Checking herself in the mirror, her small breasts bobbing as she tied her hair back in a tight bun, she didn’t like the faint look of fear she saw in her own eyes, an unfamiliar diffidence that she hadn’t seen in herself since her own adolescence. She wanted to get this over with as soon as possible.
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