He did as he was bade, neatly lining his shoes up by the doorway and stepping gingerly onto the dusty wooden floor. Jie stood and led him by the shoulders to one of the rolling chairs by the desk and pushed him down on it, then leaned over him and stared intently at his scalp. “Okay,” she said. “First of all, you need to switch shampoo, you have very greasy hair, it’s shameful. Second of all, you appear to have a pigeon’s egg growing out of your head, which has got to sting a little. I’ll tell you what, I’ll get you something cold to hold on it for a few moments, then I want you to go have a shower and clean it out well. It looks like it bled a little, but not much, which is lucky for you, since scalp wounds usually bleed like crazy. Then, once we’ve got you into a more civilized state, I’ll put you on the internet and make you even more famous. Sound good?”
He opened his mouth to object, but she was already spinning away and digging through the small fridge, crouching, hair falling over her shoulders in a way that Lu couldn’t stop staring it. Now she had a bag of frozen Hahaomai chicken dumplings—he recognized the packaging, it was what they ate for dinner most nights in Boss Wing’s dormitory—and was wrapping it in a tea-towel, and pressing it to his head. It felt like it weighed 500 kilos and had been cooled to absolute zero, but it also made his head stop throbbing almost immediately. He slumped in the chair and closed his eyes and held the dumplings to the spot where the zengfu—the slang was infectious—had given him a love-tap. He tracked Jie’s movements around him by the sounds she made and the puffs of perfume and hair stuff whenever she passed close. This was not bad, he thought—a lot better than things had been an hour ago when he’d been crouching in front of the station, talking to the gweilo.
“Right,” she said, “take these.” He opened his eyes and saw that she was holding out two chalky pills and a glass of water for him.
“What are they?” he said, narrowing his eyes at the glare of the sunset light streaming in the window. He’d been nearly asleep.
“Poison,” she said. “I’ve decided to put you out of your misery. Take them.”
He took them.
“The shower’s through there,” she said, pointing toward the bedroom. “There’s a towel on the toilet seat, and I found some pajamas that should fit you. We’ll rinse out your clothes and put them on the heater to dry while we talk. No offense, Mr. Labor Hero, but you smell like something long dead.”
He was blushing again, he could tell, and there was nothing for it but to duck and scurry through the bedroom—he had a jumbled impression of a narrow bed with a thin blanket crumbled at the bottom, a litter of stuffed animals, and mounds of fake handbags overflowing with clothing and toiletries. Then he was in the bathroom, the sink-lip covered in mysterious pots and potions, all the oddments of a girl which a million billboards hinted at, but which he’d never seen in place, lids askew, powder spilling out. It was all so much less glamorous than it appeared on the billboards, where everything looked like it was slightly wet and glistening, but it was much more exciting.
Every horizontal space in the shower seemed to support some kind of bottle. Lu found two big liter jugs of shower gel that he could also use as shampoo, but after squinting at the labels, he found that one appeared to be for bodies and another for hair, so he made use of both. The water on his head felt like little sharp stones beating against it, and his shoulder began to throb as he rubbed the shampoo into his hair. After the shower, he cleared the steam off the mirror and craned around to get a look at it, and could just make out the huge, raised bruise there, a club-shaped purple bruised line surrounded by a halo of greeny-yellow swelling.
“There’s something you can wear on the bed,” Jie yelled from the other side of the door. He cautiously turned the knob and found that she’d drawn a curtain across the door to the bedroom, leaving him alone in naked semi-darkness. On the bed, neatly folded, a pair of track pants and a t-shirt for an employment bureau, the kind of thing they gave out to the people who stood in front of them all day long, paid for every person they brought in to apply for a job. It was a tight fit, but he got it on, and balled up his clothes, which really did stink, and peeked around the curtain.
“Hello?”
“Come on out here, beautiful!” she said, as he stepped out, his bare feet on the dusty tile. She leaned in and sniffed at him with a delicate little sniffle. “Mmmm, you chose the dang-gui shampoo. Very good. Very good for ladies’ reproductive issues.” She patted his stomach. “You’ll have a little baby there in no time!”
He now felt like he would faint from embarrassment, literally, the room spinning around him.
She must have seen it in his face, for she stopped laughing and gave his hand a squeeze. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s only teasing. Dang-gui is good for everything. Your mother must have given it to you.” And yes, he realized now, that was where he knew that smell from—he remembered wishing that his mother was there to give him some herbs, and that wish must have guided his hand among the many bottles in her shower.
“Do you live here?” he said.
“In this pit?” She made a face. “No, no! This is just one of my studios. It helps to have a lot of places where I can work. Makes life harder for the zengfu.”
“But the clothes, the bed?”
“Just a few things I leave for the nights when I work late. My show can go all night, sometimes, depending on how many callers I have.” She smiled again. She had dimples. He hadn’t ever noticed a girl’s dimples before. The head injury was making him feel woozy. Or maybe it was love.
“And now?”
“And now we talk to you about what you’ve seen,” she said. “My show starts in—” she looked at the face of her phone—“twelve minutes. Just enough time for you to have a drink and get comfortable.” She fished in her fridge and brought out a water filter jug and filled a glass from a small rack next to the tiny sink. He took it and drank it greedily so she fetched him the filter jug, setting it down on one side of the desk before settling into the chair on the other side.
She began to click and type, furrowing her brow in an adorable way, slipping on a set of huge headphones, positioning a mic. She waved to him and he settled into the opposite chair, refilling his glass.
“What kind of show is this again?”
“You are such a boy!” she said, looking up from her screen, fingers still punishing her keyboard with insectile clicks from her manicured fingernails.
He looked down at himself. “I suppose I am,” he said.
“What I mean is, if you were a girl, you’d know all about this. Every factory girl listens to me, believe it. I start broadcasting after dinner, and they all log in and call in and chat and phone and tell me all their troubles and I tell them what they need to hear. Mostly, it comes down to this: if your boss wants to screw you, find another job, or be prepared to be screwed in more ways than one. If your boyfriend is a deadbeat who won’t work and borrows money from you, get a new boyfriend, even if he is the ‘love of your life.’ If your girlfriends are talking trash about you, confront them, have a good cry, and start over. If your girlfriend is screwing your boyfriend, get rid of both of them. If you are screwing your girlfriend’s boyfriend, stop—dump him, confess to her, and don’t do it again.” She was ticking these off on her fingers like a shopping list.
“It sounds a little repetitive,” he said. He wondered if she was making it up, or possibly was delusional. Could there really be a show that every factory girl listened to that he’d never heard of? He thought of how little the factory girls in Shilong New Town had talked to him when he worked as a security guard, and decided that yes, it was totally possible.
“It’s very repetitive, but we all like it that way, my girls and me. Some problems are universal. Some things you just can’t say too often. Anyway, that’s not all there is to it. We have variety! We have you!”
“Me,” he said. “You’re going to put me on a show with all these girls on it? Why? Won’t that make the police want to get me ev
en more?”
“Darling, the police already want you. Remember the video. Your face is everywhere. The more famous you are, the harder it will be for them to arrest you. Trust me.”
“How can you be sure? Have you ever done this before?”
“Every day,” she said, eyes wide. “I’m my own case study. The police have been after me for two years now, and I’ve stayed out of their clutches. I do it by being too popular to catch!”
“I don’t think I understand how that works,” he said.
She looked at the face of her phone. “We’ve only got a minute. Here, quickly, I’ll explain: if you’re a fugitive, being poor is hard. Even harder than for non-fugitives. It’s expensive being on the run. You need lots of places to live. Lots of different phones that you can abandon. You need to be able to pay bribes and you need to be able to move fast. Being famous means that you have access to money and favors from a lot of different people. My listeners keep me going, either through direct donations or through my advertisers.”
“You have ads? Who would buy an ad on a fugitive’s radio show?”
She shrugged. “The Taiwanese,” she said. The island of Taiwan had considered itself separate from China since 1949 but China had never stopped laying claim to it—without much success. “Falun Gong, sometimes. They don’t care if I make fun of them on the show, so long as I run their ads, too.”
He shook his head. “It’s all too strange,” he said.
She held up her hand for silence and swung down a little mic from one of the headphones’ earpieces. “Hello, girls!” she called into the mic, clicking her mouse. “It’s your best friend here, Sister Jiandi, the friend you can always rely on, the friend who will never let you down, the friend you can confide all your secrets to—provided you don’t mind eight million factory girls finding out about it!” She giggled at her own joke. “Oh, sisters, it’s going to be a good night, I can tell! I have a special surprise for you a little later, but first, let’s talk! Tonight I’m using Amazon France chat, chat.amazon.fr, so go and sign up now. You’ll get me at jiandi88888. Remember to use a couple of the latest FLG proxies before you make the call—and it looks like the translation services at Yahoo.ru and 123india.in are both unblocked at the moment, which should make it easier to sign up. Well, what are you waiting for? Get signed up!”
She clicked something and he heard a blaring ad for Falun Gong start in his headphones. He slipped one off the side of his head. Jie swung her mic away and pointed a finger at him. “Feeling the magic yet?”
“This is it? This is your big show?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “We’ll probably have to switch chats three or four times tonight, as they update the firewall. It’s fun! Wait, you’ll see.” In his ear, the ad was wrapping up and he slipped the other headphone back into place.
“Talk to me,” Jie said, her voice full of warmth. It took him a moment to realize she was talking into her mic, to her audience, not to him. Her fingers were working the keyboard and mouse.
“Hello?”
“Yes, darling, hello. You’re live. Talk, talk! We’ve only got all night!”
“Oh, um—” The voice was female, with a strong Henan accent, and it was scared.
“It’s okay, sweetie, my heart, it’s okay. Tell me.” Jie’s voice was a coo, a purr, a seduction. Her eyes were moist, her lips drawn up in a bow of pure sympathy. Lu wanted to tell her his secrets.
“It’s just that—” The voice stopped. Crying noises. In the background, the sounds of a busy factory dorm, girlish calls and laughter and conversation. Jie made soothing shhh shhh sounds. “It’s my boss,” the girl said. “He was so nice to me at first. He said he was taking an interest in me because we are both from Henan. He said that he would protect me. Show me around the city. We went to nice places. A restaurant in the stock exchange. He took me to the Windows on the World park.”
“And he wanted something in return, didn’t he?”
“I knew he would. I listen to your show. But I thought it would be different for me. I thought he was different. But he—” She broke off. “After he kissed me, he told me he wanted to do more. Everything. He told me I owed it to him. That I’d understood that when I accepted his invitation, and that I would be cheating him if I didn’t—” She began to cry.
Jie made a face, twirled her finger in an impatient gesture. Lu was horrified by her callousness. But when the crying stopped, her voice was again full of compassion and understanding.
“Oh, sweet child, you’ve been done badly, haven’t you? Well, of course you knew it would happen, but the heart and the head don’t always agree with each other, do they? The question isn’t whether you acted like a fool—because you did, you acted like a perfect fool—the question is what you can do about it now. Am I right?”
“Yes.” The voice was so tiny and soft he could barely hear it. He pictured a girl shrunk to the size of a mouse, trembling in fear.
“Well, that’s simple. Not easy, but simple. Forfeit your last eight weeks’ wages and walk out of the factory first thing tomorrow morning. Go down to a job-broker on Xi Li street and find something—anything—that can get you started again. Then you call your boss’s wife—is he married?”
“Yes.” The voice was a little bigger now.
“Call his wife and tell her everything. Tell her what he did, what he said, what you said back. Tell her you’re sorry, and tell her you’re sorry her husband is such a sack of rotten, stinking garbage. Tell her you walked away from the pay he was holding back, and that you’ve left your job. And then you start to work again. And no matter what your new boss says or does, don’t go out with him. Do you understand?”
“Call his wife—”
“Call his wife, walk away from your pay, and start over. There’s nothing else that will work. You can’t talk to this man. He has raped you—that’s what it is, you know, when someone in power coerces you into sex, it’s rape, just rape—and he’ll do it again and again and again. He’ll do it to the other girls in the factory. You tell as many as you can why you’re leaving. In fact, you tell me what factory you work in and the name of your boss, right now, and then millions and millions of girls will know about it, too. They’ll steer clear of this dog, and maybe you’ll save a few souls with your bravery. What do you say?”
“You want me to name my boss? Now? But I thought this was confidential—”
“You don’t have to. But do you want another girl to go through what you just went through? What do you think would have happened if you had heard another girl speak his name on this show, last month, before you went out with him. What will you do? Will you save your sisters from the pain you’re in? Or will you protect your bruised ego and let the next girl suffer, and the next?” She waited a moment. The girl on the phone said nothing, though the sounds of people moving around the dorm could still be faintly heard. Lu imagined her under her blanket on her bunk, hand over the mouthpiece of her phone, whispering her secrets to millions of girls. What a strange world. “Well?”
“I’ll do it,” the girl said.
“What’s that? Say it loud!”
“I’ll do it!” the girl said, and let out a little laugh, and the laugh was echoed by the girlish voices near her, as the girls in her dorm realized that the confession they’d been listening into on their computers and phones and radios had been emanating from a bunk in their midst. There was a squeal of feedback as one of the radios got too close to the phone, and Jie’s fingers clicked at the keyboard, squelching the feedback but somehow leaving the other squeals, the girlish squeals. They were cheering her, the girls in the dorm, cheering her and chanting her name, her real name, now on the radio, but it didn’t matter, because the girl was laughing harder than ever.
“It’s Bau Peixiong,” she said, laughing. “Bau Peixiong at the HuaXia sports factory.” She laughed, a liberated sound.
“Okay, okay, girls,” Jie said into her mic, in a commanding tone. The voices quieted. “Now, your sister has jus
t made a sacrifice for all of you, so you need to help her. She needs money—your pig of a boss won’t give her the eight weeks’ pay he’s holding on to, especially not after she calls his wife. She needs help packing, help finding a job. Someone there is thinking of changing jobs, someone there knows where there’s a job for this girl. Tell her. Help her move out. Help her find the new job. This is your duty to your sister. Promise me!”
From the phone, a babble of girls saying, “I promise! I promise!”
“Very good,” Jie said. “Now, stay tuned, friends, for soon I will be unveiling a wonderful surprise!” A mouseclick and then there was another ad, this time for a company that provided fake credentials for people looking for work, guaranteed to pass database lookups. Both of them slipped their headphones off and Jie drained her water-glass, a little trickle sliding down her chin and throat. Lu suppressed a groan. She was so beautiful, and all that power and confidence—
“That was a pretty good opener, wasn’t it?” she said, raising her eyebrows at him.
“Is it like this all the time?”
“Oh, that was a particularly good one. But yes, most nights it goes like that. Six or seven hours’ worth of it. You still think it’d get repetitious?”
“I can see how that would stay interesting.”
“After all, you kill the same monsters over and over again all night long, don’t you? That must be pretty dull.”
He considered this. “Not really,” he said. “It’s the teamwork, I guess. All of us working together, and it’s not really the same every time—the games vary the monster-spawning a lot. Sometimes you get really good drops, too—that can be very exciting! You’re going down a corridor you’ve cleared a dozen times, and you discover that this time it’s filled with two hundred vampires and then one of them drops an epic sword, and it’s not boring at all anymore.” He shrugged. “My guildie Matthew says it’s intermittent reinforcement.”
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