Peter May - Snakehead

She relayed her story, with an apparent lack of emotion, as if something more than her baby had died inside her. She had sacrificed everything. Her husband, her child, her brother, only to see the reason for it all washed away in a rainstorm.

She turned glazed eyes on her brother. ‘I stayed with Christina and her husband for nearly six months after that, but I could not rely on their charity forever. I knew I could not go back home. And I did not have the courage to face you. Or Xinxin. So I went to Fuzhou in Fujian Province. I had heard it was part of the new economic miracle and that there were jobs to be had. I thought maybe if I had a little money I could get to Taiwan and start a new life there.

‘Christina gave me the address of a friend so I had somewhere to stay when I arrived. They were a young couple. Very friendly. They took me under their wing. He had several market stalls and gave me a job running one of them. I told them it was my plan to try to get to Taiwan when I had enough money. I worked there for nearly a year.

‘Then one day he came to my stall and told me they had a chance to go to America. He had made contact with a snakehead who could arrange it all for a small deposit. He said I could use the money I was saving for Taiwan to pay my deposit, and I could earn enough money in America to pay off the rest when I got there. It was $58,000 dollars.’ Her eyes still shone with awe at the recollection of the figure. ‘It seemed to me like the biggest fortune I could ever imagine. I did not know how I could possibly pay it off. But he said in America you could earn that kind of money very quickly. It was like a dream. In my head I could really see myself in the Beautiful Country. I wanted it to be true. So I said yes.

‘We met with the shetou one night and handed over our money. He told us to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. But it was a month before we had word to meet the next night outside a fishing village north of Xiamen. There were nearly twenty of us. They gave us false papers and put us on a fishing boat that took us across the Straits of Taiwan. We landed somewhere near Tainan. Then they took us in vans to Taipei, and we stayed there in an apartment for about three weeks before they put us on a flight to Bangkok. We stayed there in a filthy place for another ten days, and then I was split up from my friends. I pleaded with the local shetou to let us stay together, but she said it was not possible. I was put on an airplane with some other people I did not know, and we flew to Panama City. We were given new papers there, and they put us on a farm where the ma zhai came every night for sex. If you refused they beat you and forced themselves on you anyway.’

Still there was no emotion. The words came from her mechanically, as if it were someone else’s story. Oddly, it made it all the more vivid for Li. He felt the skin on his face prickle with shock and anger. This was his sister that these ma zhai had beaten and raped. He remembered her as a child, forever laughing, full of mischief, a pretty little girl for whom his friends had always had a fancy. Days of innocence. Innocence long since gone. To be replaced by a hard, unrelenting cynicism, reflected in the granite set of her features.

‘Eventually they took us north in the backs of trucks,’ she said. ‘Twelve, fifteen hours at a time. Through countries I can hardly remember. Nicaragua, Costa Rica, San Salvador, Guatemala…Finally into Mexico. So close now. You could smell the Golden Mountain, see it gleaming in the sunshine across the border. If you closed your eyes you could imagine touching it.’ She curled her mouth, and blew out the last of her smoke in disgust. ‘Only there was no Golden Mountain. Just a filthy basement in Houston, and more ma zhai telling me I owed the shetou , and that if I didn’t pay they would beat me until I did.’

Li stood up and walked across the windowless room, trying to contain his anger and frustration. It was almost more than he could bear to hear. The story was so familiar to him, he could tell her what would happen next.

‘They wanted me to work in a massage parlour. They said it was the only way I could make enough money to pay off the shetou . At first I refused.’ She shrugged listlessly. ‘But you can only resist for so long. There comes a time when you must accept the inevitable. In a way I was lucky. One of the boys thought I was pretty. Too good for massage, he said. So I started work at a club in Chinatown. The Golden Mountain Club.’ A jet of air escaped her lips and she shook her head. The irony was still not lost on her. ‘They called me a “hostess”, which meant that anyone with enough money could have sex with me. All the big shetou came to the Golden Mountain Club, and the shuk foo from the tongs. There were gambling rooms in back, and private rooms upstairs where they took the girls for sex. The other girls said I was lucky because I was prettier than them, and all the really important people wanted to sleep with me — the ones who paid the most money. I didn’t care. They were all the same to me. But sometimes they would give me five hundred dollars, more if they had won at the card table. And I was able to start paying off my debt.’

She shook her head, lost in some world of her own. And in a small voice she said, ‘I don’t know what happened. Maybe I offended someone, maybe the other girls were jealous and had it in for me. I don’t know. But one day my ma zhai told me I was fired from the Golden Mountain Club. He said he’d got me another job in a massage parlour, with an apartment up the stairs. I would only have to share with two other girls.’ She screwed up her face in disgust at some memory she was not about to share. ‘It was the worst thing ever,’ she said. ‘Even worse than the beatings. I’d been there for a month when you came with the INS.’

Her story ended as bluntly as it had begun. Li stood with his back to her, trying to make his mind as blank as the wall he was staring at. And when he could stand the silence no longer he turned and saw big wet tears streaming silently down her face.

She said, ‘When I saw you there, Li Yan, none of it mattered any more. Losing the baby, the beatings, the sex in squalid little rooms. All I felt was shame. That my own brother should know me for what I had become. And I could see myself through your eyes and know it, too.’ Her sobs came in short, rapid explosions from her chest, uncontrolled, uncontrollable. She buried her face in her hands, doubling over and letting her grief for the person she had once been completely overcome her. A long, deep, low moan escaped her lips, and Li felt it like a blade in his heart. He moved around the table and took her by the shoulders, lifting her to her feet, and drawing her into his chest, holding her tightly there to smother her sobs and never let her go again.

The still waters of Lake Conroe shimmered in the moonlight, caught in glimpses between the trees as Mendez drove them east on Lakeside. Exclusive residences sat darkly behind trees and hedges and high security gates. Mendez took a right, and they turned into a long dirt track that headed away from the water toward where a big old ranch house had its red-tile roof peppered with the shadow of a great oak tree shading the front porch. The house had been extended several times over the years, at the side and back, and rooms had been built up in the roof. To their left a couple of chestnut mares grazed in the moonlight behind a white painted fence, paying scant attention to the arrival of the Bronco.

Their headlights swept across the front of the house and Margaret saw the freshly painted pillars that supported the roof over the stoop, a red door set in the blue-painted clapboard siding. Bay windows overlooked the porch from the main front rooms. Fleshy shrubs grew in strategically placed pots. An old wooden rocking chair sat looking out over the pasture toward the lake. For some reason Margaret thought it looked as if it had been a long time since anybody had sat in it.