John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

Mei reached into the hole for water to wet herself and Madame Qing slapped her and said she had to do it only with the paper and then wash her hands in the basin with the slippery cake.

“You girls from the North are not worth the trouble,” said Madame Qing.

There were girls in the house who weren’t new, mostly Southerners, and three Dwarf Bandit girls, who woke up late in the day to look over Mei and the other arrivals. Mei couldn’t understand most of what they said but a lot of them pointed at her feet and laughed and that was more shameful than Madame Qing watching her clean herself.

When it began to get dark each of the new girls was given a ball of rice and then locked in a room with mattresses laid on the floor. Mei thought the rice was very sweet compared to millet and it made her feel a little sick. After the candles were put out they lay and listened to the music on the other side of the door, and to the laughing and men’s voices braying in another language Mei could not understand.

“These are wicked women who live here,” said one of the girls from the boat, who was from near Jinan. “They lie with yang gweizi , and we are going to be their servants.”

They were there nearly a week, Madame Qing teaching them more about cleaning themselves and not eating with their hands, until late one afternoon they were ordered to take all their clothes off and pile them in the middle of the room. A servant woman — all the servants in the house were older men and women — gathered the pile and carried it away and it was too late when Mei remembered that her half of Ma’s comb was still in her pants. Basins filled with a sharp-smelling liquid were brought in and they were told to wash their hair in it and then sit while the servants picked the bugs from their scalps. Their hair was dried after that, servants rubbing it with towels, and then the wicked girls came in with a trunkful of beautiful clothes and began to dress them up like dolls, chattering and laughing the whole time. The silk felt slippery against Mei’s skin and when the old girls began to powder and paint her face she understood, finally, that it didn’t matter if she could not cook or sew. It took a long time for the Southern girls to find a pair of slippers that would fit her feet.

The old girls went out then and Madame Qing came in to explain that Mr. Wu, who owned the house, was coming tonight to entertain some of his friends and that they were to do whatever they were told or they would certainly be beaten and possibly thrown into the harbor for the sharks to eat. The girl from near Jinan began to cry then and Madame Qing slapped her for making ugly tracks in the powder on her face.

“If they ask your name,” said Madame Qing, “you must tell them something beautiful.”

“I will be Jade Lily,” said one of the girls, quickly.

“I will be Morning Dew,” said another.

Mei thought of Poppy Blossom, but it only brought pictures of Baba smoking his pipe and Ma dying on the k’ang .

Mr. Wu was an older man with eyes that watched everything, and his friends were all very rough men from the South. The new girls were supposed to serve them rice wine and then sit with them and answer questions if they were asked. The man next to Mei, who had drawings inked into the skin on the backs of his hands, kept shouting the same words at her till she decided he was asking for her name and she said Ling-Ling.

The men stayed for three days. They made her drink wine and they used her and the other new girls whenever they wanted, sometimes taking them into another room and sometimes using them in front of all the others, who laughed and shouted things. Mei hurt everywhere they touched her but was not ashamed. They were doing these things to Ling-Ling, and that was only a dog after all.

When Mr. Wu and his friends finally left the old girls came back.

“Now you are our sisters,” they said. “We can teach you what we know.”

Some of the new girls were bleeding and some were still trembling and the girl from near Jinan, who had decided to call herself Silk Whisper, tried to drown herself in one of the water closets but there wasn’t enough water.

None of them were ever let out of the house. In the daytime, if they wanted, they could go out onto the balconies from the rooms on the second floor and look down past the barracks to Hongkong and the harbor. Even from that distance Ling-Ling could see that there were more people in Hongkong than she had imagined there were in the world. Mr. Wu’s friends had only been there to “break the soil” said the old girls, Ling-Ling’s new sisters, and most of the time the house was for entertaining yang gweizi , “officers and gentlemen” as Madame Qing called them. They had to learn to smile and be gracious and please the English men, and even learn some of their words.

Ling-Ling decided that it was not knowing that made her the most afraid. Not knowing what the Southern girls were saying, not knowing what Madame Qing was planning to do to them next, not knowing what was in the minds of the English foreign devils.

“Sister,” she said to one of the old girls who was called Radiant Star and had originally come from the North like herself, “I want you to teach me everything.”

Radiant Star taught her how to put a vinegar sponge up inside herself so she would not make half-human babies with the yang gweizi , taught her to sing some of the dirty songs the men liked and how to talk like South China people.

“You are like Fan-tail,” she told Ling-Ling when Ling-Ling would try her South China talk out. Fan-tail was Madame Qing’s parrot, who repeated phrases from all the languages spoken in the house. “Everything you hear you say it the same.”

She also began to learn English from one of the yang gweizi , a young man who was not an officer, not a soldier at all but some other kind of official sent to work in Hongkong. Nights that he came, two or three times a week, were easy for Ling-Ling because he always asked for her and paid extra to stay the whole night and wore a rubber bag on his penis so she did not need the sponge, which sometimes got lost inside her. He would use her in one of the usual ways and then sit with her in the bed or out on the balcony if it was hot and want to talk. He already knew how to talk Southern, would joke with the sisters in that language, but wanted to learn to speak like North China people too. Ling-Ling was his “sleeping dictionary,” he said, and insisted that she learn how to say his name, which was Roderick Hardacre.

As good as Ling-Ling was with South China talk, this was almost impossible to do, her tongue unable to imitate the sounds. Fan-tail was much better at it, mastering “Well I’ll be buggered” after only a few visits from Roderick Hardacre. He would have her say his name again and again, correcting her patiently, and then ask her questions in South China talk while she answered in what he called Mandarin. After a while he would get tired of that and try to teach her things in English that weren’t his name.

This is how she discovered that the yang gweizi know nothing about the sky. They would stand on the balcony and Roderick Hardacre would point to the stars and make her try to see shapes of animals or people and tell her long stories about their adventures. When Ling-Ling began to understand the words she discovered that he was not talking about the Three Enclosures or the Azure Dragon or the White Tiger of the West or the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl but something completely different, either something he was inventing to mock her or strange beliefs of the yang gweizi . If it was overcast or too cold to step out he would teach her poems, having her repeat them line by line and then explain what they meant.