by J. M. Lee
“I couldn’t find any work when I got here,” Yong-ae said. “So I walked around the port, singing to myself. That drew gamblers and tourists, and a few dropped coins in front of me. Someone mentioned that I should audition for the club here, and here I am.”
Her stage makeup made her look like a different person. Neon lights flared from the top of the building across the way, turning her face red periodically. Yong-ae took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her bra and lit one. She inhaled. A waiter brought her a whiskey on the rocks.
“You’ve become a true capitalist,” I commented.
She shrugged. “It’s just what it is here. Someone giving you a helping hand turns out to be the devil. Money slips through your fingers like water. Darkness overtakes the lights of the casinos, and the rich become poor.” She took a sip.
“But we did find freedom,” I countered.
“I didn’t leave to find freedom,” she scoffed. “I never knew what that was, so I didn’t even know it was something I wanted.”
“But didn’t you find it? You’re free now. You can eat whatever you want, sing whatever you want, laugh whenever you want.”
“Maybe.” She hugged herself. “I still don’t understand it. It doesn’t make much sense to me.”
Her words resonated with me. Anyone who crossed the Tumen under cover of night would understand—foreign countries, unfamiliar tongues, our destitution, the SPSD, snitches, uncaring people walking past, extreme cold and rain, the anxiety of not being able to predict what was to happen—none of this changed just because we were now in Macau.
“I have a lot of debt,” Yong-ae confided, lowering her voice. “They wanted a security deposit before I began singing here. The promoter lent me money but the interest is really high and the fee isn’t great. I’m making my payments but the debt’s growing. I’m never going to be able to leave this place.”
“How much do you owe?”
“Fifty thousand dollars. I think. I’m not sure.” She wiped her eyes, black mascara streaking one cheek.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to make her feel better.
Later, we left and walked along the wet, warm neon streets before getting into a cab. We stopped at a house on a quiet street in Coloane.
“Is this where you live?” I asked.
She smiled at me. “I don’t live anywhere. I just stay here.”
That night, I lay curled in her room, swimming through the dark ocean of silence.
THE FAIR GAME OF LIFE
Mr. Oh died. He had committed suicide. Early on the morning of September 8, 2005, Mr. Oh put on a new black suit, combed his hair, and jumped out a window on the thirty-seventh floor of the hotel. He was taken to Saint Memorial Hospital. We sprinted to the hospital as soon as we heard. He had met a lonely end. He hadn’t left anything behind.
We talked to the dealer who had seen him last. Mr. Oh had stood up from the table around three in the morning. “He lost his last chip, then sat still for a moment.” He shook his head. “He’d had amazing luck earlier. He won $200,000 before ten p.m.!” Dash’s mouth fell open. He shot me a look. “Told you,” he mumbled. “You can get lucky.”
“But luck is what drove him to death,” the dealer interjected. “He always got up once he won a hundred bucks, you know? This time, he couldn’t help himself. That’s what killed him.”
I remembered what Mr. Oh had told us, that nobody could win against the house.
“He kept going,” the dealer continued. “When that last chip was gone, he pushed his hair back, picked up his empty briefcase, and walked out the door. That’s the last time I saw him.”
I stamped his death with a prayer. His body would turn into powder before being poured into a ceramic vessel for his flight home to Korea.
“Money’s the problem,” Dash groused. “If he had money, he wouldn’t have died.”
I realized then that I needed money, too. I had to buy Yong-ae’s freedom. Then she wouldn’t have to sing for strangers from a dark stage; she could sing for herself.
The casino was a magnet for money from all around the world. Dollars, yen, euros, and yuan joined and became a rainbow of chips, which were thrown down and sucked into slot machines.
Dash stuck his head out from the bottom bunk. “Hey, Gilmo,” he called. “The odds of winning are one out of thirty-six, since there are eighteen black and eighteen red slots. So if you bet a dollar, you get thirty-six bucks back. You lose some, you win some, but those aren’t bad odds.”
I looked down at him from my bunk. “Those aren’t great odds. Don’t forget zero. That’s the house’s. So it isn’t thirty-six out of thirty-six, it’s thirty-six out of thirty-seven. So each game, you lose one out of thirty-seven, which is around 2.7 percent. Your return is 97.3 percent. So if you bet a hundred bucks, you can only get ninety-seven bucks and thirty cents back. You’re done after thirty-seven games.”
Dash frowned. “But that’s still a good chance, isn’t it? Especially if you compare it to buying a lottery ticket. All you have to do is win just once, and you multiply your win by thirty-six.”
“But nobody plays a single game,” I reminded him. “Betting the same amount each time, if you play two games, your loss ratio is 5.4 percent. Three games? It’s 8.1 percent. Ten games is 27 percent, and twenty games is 54 percent. So you end up losing half the money you bet.”
“But the probability of winning goes up if you put your money down on two or three numbers at a time. Or even and odd numbers or something.”
I shook my head. “If you put chips down on two slots, it’s two out of thirty-seven, but you have to split your money up so the win’s going to be that much smaller. You lose no matter what you do.”
“So what if we bet more?” Dash asked. “Let’s say we bet on red but we don’t win. So we keep doubling our bet until we win. We’ll win big at some point.”
“That’s impossible. You’d need so much money. And anyway, they put a cap on how much you can bet.”
“So you’re saying we can never win?” Dash looked frustrated.
“Let’s say you’re at a casino where the cap is a thousand dollars,” I explained. “If you bet ten dollars, then double it each time, by the seventh game you can bet six hundred and forty bucks, but by the eighth game you’re over the cap.”
“But nobody will be able to stop you if you’re really smart about it or really lucky.” Dash was stubborn in his belief that luck would come to him and that life was essentially fair. “Probability is exact. If you roll a die, you’re guaranteed to win once every six times.”
“So you think you’ll win once every twelve times if you roll two dice?”
Dash nodded confidently. “Of course.”
“But think about this,” I countered. “The probability of getting a seven is six times higher than getting a twelve.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can only get twelve from a six and a six, right? To get a seven, you can roll a six and a one, a five and a two, a three and a four, a four and a three, a two and a five, or a one and a six. That’s six options. What are your odds of getting a one?”
Dash stared at me blankly.
“Zero. You can never roll a one, because you have two dice.”
Dash looked crestfallen.
“But there’s one other possibility,” I said slowly, thinking hard. “It’s not a mathematical solution, but maybe the law of physics can help us.”
“How?” Dash perked up.
“The thirty-seven slots of a roulette wheel can’t be identical. There may be differences in the pockets. Maybe one has a little more give on the bottom or something. But to find the tiniest difference, we’d have to watch the games for several days.”
“I’ll do it if it’s going to make us rich,” Dash said excitedly.
“But there’s no use if they figure it out . . .”
“So we really can’t win against the house, huh?”
His question spun in my head. I sh
ook my head regretfully.
“But you’re a math genius,” he cried. “Can’t you think of something?”
Even I couldn’t accurately measure the spin of the wheel or distance. Nor could I compound all the possibilities of a slot machine. The only game we could possibly figure out would be blackjack, since I would be able to predict what cards were left in the deck. But counting cards required a strict division of roles, and I didn’t have a team, let alone a partner.
In a smart black suit and white shirt, Dash slid his cigar pack into his inner pocket, patting his pants pocket to make sure he had fake IDs for the both of us. The fake IDs he’d confiscated from gamblers as a security guard had come in handy. Each time we went to a new casino in our attempt to find a mathematical solution to our problem, we took new IDs—Matsumoto Yoji from Fukuoka, Richard Chang from Singapore, Nguyen Tha from Vietnam.
I hid behind Dash’s wide back, feeling paralyzed in unfamiliar spaces, noise, and crowds. When he put on his fedora and nice clothes, Dash looked ten years older. He could pass for a young businessman or a wealthy scion. At the roulette tables, stone-faced dealers pulled chips toward them and got ready for the next round. Having changed money into $1 chips, Dash placed bets, holding a can of beer in one hand. I observed the mathematical relationship between the wheel, the balls, the dealer, and time. The wheels spun endlessly. The rainy season passed as we did our homework. It was now November.
Dash reassured me every night as we left empty-handed. “This is tuition. We have to invest in this education to get something out of it.” Sometimes it sounded as though he were trying to reassure himself.
With no money left, we went to bed without dinner. We had starved in our past lives, but this felt different. The long-forgotten feeling of deprivation clawed our sleep, crushing our dreams. I couldn’t come up with a way to win. The statistics I gathered were too irregular to deploy. I had to find a system that would make us win each time.
RUN ON THE CASINO
We stepped into Tomorrow Casino. Dash was wearing a black suit and was chomping on a cigar. The guards checked our IDs. Today, Dash was Richard Chang from Singapore, and I was Wei Zhenmin from Shanghai. We changed $1,000 into chips and went to a roulette table. Dash sat down and placed a bet as I watched from behind. Each time the wheel spun, his chips went to the dealer. Two hours later, he was out. I hesitantly took his seat. The wheel clattered and spun; a hush fell over the table as people watched the balls spinning around. I placed my bet.
“No more bets,” the dealer said.
When the wheel stopped, the dealer took all the chips. I glared at the wheel before betting on four numbers. The wheel spun again, and the balls clicked into pockets. People began murmuring. I had won. The dealer kept going, expressionless. Two hours later, I cashed in my chips and left with $2,300. Day after day, I gradually increased my take. Rumors of the boyish gambling phenom spread through the streets of Macau. I was winning small but consistently. People began gathering around me to watch and place their bets with mine.
The problem occurred when the bets began growing. One night, a guard stopped us as we headed toward the roulettes. “Please come with me.”
Dash hesitated.
“Don’t make this into a bigger problem,” the guard said quietly.
Dash followed the guard haughtily, and I followed. Four guards surrounded us as we went down a steep staircase behind a small employees-only bathroom in the corner. A steel door with peeling paint clanged open and they shoved us into a dark room, where a floor manager was waiting for us.
“These are fake IDS,” he said. “You aren’t Richard Chang and Wei Zhenmin! You’re Hu Enlai and Jiang Jiajie. You’re a security guard and you’re a janitor at Megasquare.”
Dash fastened the top button of his jacket. “I’m sure a third of your clients on the floor have showed fake IDs,” he shot back. “No gambler wants his true identity known.”
The manager squinted at him. “You’ve been winning consistently. From our perspective—”
Dash cut him short. “Are you accusing us of cheating?”
“Well, your win rate is suspicious.”
“We do work at a casino,” Dash snapped. “Is that a crime?”
The manager shook his head.
“And we have been winning at roulette. Is that a crime?”
The manager shook his head again.
“Do you have proof that we cheated?”
The manager shook his head once more.
Dash reared back. “Then why are you holding us against our will in this hole?” he thundered. “Maybe I should call the police right now! Or a reporter! What do you think will happen to you if people hear that the Tomorrow holds customers without any evidence and threatens them? I don’t doubt that you’ll lose your job. And we’ll be taking you to court!”
The manager waved his hand in supplication. “No, no, we’re not threatening you. I wanted to have a conversation. Your win rate is so high.”
“We don’t cheat, we’re good!” Dash cried.
“But you did enter with fake IDs,” the manager countered.
I felt queasy. What if he discovered that we were from North Korea and didn’t have official IDs?
“Hear me out first,” Dash said, lowering his voice. “Don’t you want more customers who stay longer and make more bets?”
The manager narrowed his eyes.
“We’re not the enemy,” Dash said magnanimously. “We’re on your side.”
“How do you figure?”
“Where else will you get free publicity for the Tomorrow? All we want is to be able to come here.”
The manager cocked his head, looking interested.
“See, this is how it works. People will flock here because we’re winning so much. You know that word of mouth is everything.” Dash was right. We only won around $3,000 each time. There was no way we could win more than $10,000 even if we increased our bets. But more people would come to watch us, hoping they would also get lucky.
That was how we managed to get the casino to look upon us benevolently. With the buzz, gamblers poured into the Tomorrow from all over Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, and Shanghai. A group even sprang up to study my bets, though they never figured out my secret. People lost all the money they brought before they had to leave to catch their flights home.
The roulette wheel spun and clattered. Everyone glanced at me. I put a $500 chip on black and a $500 chip on odds. Excited that I doubled my usual bet, people followed suit. A huge pile of chips rested on black and on odds.
The dealer dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. “No one on red?”
Dash spewed cigar smoke and pushed a pile of chips on red. $10,000. He glanced at the dealer and put the same amount on evens. Then Yong-ae placed her bet on red and evens, too: $30,000. She slid a long, thin cigarette in her mouth. Men around her vied to light her cigarette.
“No more bets.”
It grew quiet as people wiped sweat off their foreheads. This was turning out to be the biggest game of the day. The wheel slowed gradually and the balls clattered into place. Moans erupted. Only Dash and Yong-ae let out cheers. I lost $1,000, Dash won $20,000, and Yong-ae won $30,000. We ended up with $49,000, and the house earned nearly $300,000. We played two more rounds, losing $20,000 the second time and winning $30,000 the third. We cashed out our chips and left.
We booked a room at the Sofitel Macau to celebrate. Lights twinkled in the ocean outside and sparkled along the streets. We ordered a bottle of Moët and Chandon and popped the cork.
Dash raised his glass. “We’re rich!” White bubbles fizzled in his glass as he clinked it against mine.
“We’re not rich,” I corrected.
“Oh, we’re not?” Dash gestured at the shiny briefcase filled with Benjamin Franklin and Ulysses S. Grant.
“That’s not ours,” I explained calmly. “We’re giving it to the manager of the Casablanca. Then Yong-ae can leave the club.”
Dash stared at
me, then at Yong-ae. “Is that all you care about?” He poured himself another glass. “Fine, we’re not rich. At least we can enjoy ourselves tonight. We’ll be rich one day. We’ll rule Macau, just like Kunlun was king of Shanghai!” He laughed and drank some more champagne.
Two days later, we handed $50,000 to the manager of the Casablanca, but he demanded additional interest of $5,000. “What will you do now?” he asked Yong-ae.
“I’m heading to Seoul,” she said. “My father dreamed of going there.”
The manager nodded. “You should leave as soon as possible. You don’t have anywhere to stay anymore.” He pulled his chair up to his computer and turned the screen around to show us. It was Dash’s face.
Dash gasped, turning ashen.
The manager pressed a key, switching to a photo of me, then Yong-ae. He grinned. “I heard you pulled a big one at the Tomorrow. But now you’re on the no-entry list for all the casinos.”
We understood—this was why he had absolved Yong-ae of her debt without argument. She couldn’t enter his club anyway.
“I’m saying this because Sarah and I worked together and everything,” the manager said. “You should be careful. They’ll come at you since you won so big. If I were you I’d hide out for a little while.”
Dazed, we walked to the wharf, where panhandlers were wandering around luxury yachts. We sat at a colonial-style open-air café. Dash flicked ash off his cigar and gazed at a gull sitting at the end of a mast. “Fifty-five thousand dollars! I knew prices were steep, but that was ridiculous.”
Yong-ae crumpled up her employee badge and threw it in the ocean. The white cellophane fluttered into the blue sky, flashing in the afternoon sunlight.
“That very incident, the fraudulent gambling at the Tomorrow Casino, put you on the Public Security Police Force of Macau’s blacklist,” Angela says.
“It wasn’t fraudulent gambling.”