The two powerhouses clinked their glasses and sipped their drinks. They finished their cigars and brandy, dousing themselves in alcohol, thick smoke, and suspicion.
Chapter 7
The stainless steel handcuff dug into Wei Ling’s left wrist, leaving a purple bruise in the shape of a bracelet like a punk-rock fashion statement. Her backside was sore from lying hours on end, the only alternative she had to standing directly next to the bed. A bedpan in need of attention rested on the floor under the mattress, just beyond the outstretched toes of her bare feet. She was trapped in a world so narrow it made a cell in the solitary confinement block seem like a suite at the Four Seasons.
The middle-aged lady who took care of Lee Chang visited Wei Ling three times a day. She brought soup and rice for breakfast, noodles with a plate of steamed vegetables for lunch, and a full meal in the early evening. It was a balanced diet, and better than the food from the sweatshop kitchen served to the able-bodied seamstresses. Wei Ling’s food was coming directly from Lee Chang’s personal refrigerator. No bruised fruit. No vegetables on the verge of spoiling. Every dish contained real chunks of chicken, pork, or beef, a vast culinary improvement over the usual unidentifiable meat particles. Everything had its positive side, and for Wei Ling the food was the only thing she had to look forward to.
Food aside, Wei Ling knew she was in trouble. No one with your best interest in mind locks you in a storage room and chains you to a bed. The good doctor hadn’t come since the morning she was diagnosed as pregnant, and Wei Ling wasn’t holding her breath waiting for his next visit. With the bloated body of the doctor sitting on a slab in the morgue, skull caved-in, she was right to assume he wouldn’t be stopping by anytime soon.
Wei Ling wanted an abortion. She didn’t care that it would cost her five hundred dollars in penalty money to the Changs. The baby would bring shame to her own family, and her family’s honor had led her to Saipan in the first place. The honor of working overseas. Honor and a little cash to help her struggling family in Southern China’s Guangzhou region. Coming home with a baby, worse still a half-breed, was not an option. Her family would disown her, and she wasn’t from a place in society where a single mother would be met with open arms. She knew the path. Her family would disown her, she would be deemed unemployable, and she would end up on the street.
Having the baby wasn’t an option.
Lee Chang promised her daily that an abortion was on the way, per company policy. Two other girls had become pregnant since Wei Ling’s arrival at Club Paradise, and the doctor had acted quickly, under the orders of Lee Chang. So she waited for her fate in the recently transformed storage room, one arm cuffed to the metal bed frame. She was a prisoner, and like all prisoners, her life choices were limited. Worse, she was alone.
The seamstresses’ quarters, for all its rules, regulations, and downright mean spiritedness, was a hell of a lot better than where she found herself now. And she missed her friends. Shi Shi Wong and the other hundred seamstresses were her family. Misery loves company, and in the seamstresses’ quarters, they all helped each other to get by.
Her current isolation took away her only mental outlet. The handcuff on her wrist took away her physical ones. She never thought she would say it, but all she wanted was to have an abortion and be allowed back to work. She wasn’t asking for much, but Wei Ling had a growing suspicion she would never see the inside of the seamstresses’ quarters again. ***
Shi Shi Wong looked for her slippers in the piles of footwear scattered on the floor and stacked into four-foot-high bookshelves near the back door of the seamstresses’ quarters. She wedged her feet into her green-trimmed flip-flops and slipped out the unlocked door into the rainy night.
The grounds were off limits after lights-out, a nightly ritual marked with a five-second alarm blast at eleven-thirty sharp. The doors to the seamstresses’ quarters were locked some nights and open others, depending if the guards remembered to bolt them, which in turn was dependent upon the nightly poker game and how much the night guards drank.
But the locks were the least of Shi Shi’s worries. The guards kept an eye, albeit an inebriated one, on the property, and any girl on the grounds after hours was guaranteed a beating. No whips or batons—just a good old-fashioned, barehanded roughing up with a few kicks thrown in for emphasis. A beating bad enough to remind the guilty party and her co-workers of the rules. A beating just short of an injury that would prevent her from working. It was a fine line, and the guards needed to look no further than Lee Chang to see how it was done with precision.
Shi Shi stooped as she walked behind the seamstresses’ dorm and stopped at the corner. A lone guard stood at the front gate, his silhouette visible under the dim overhead light. Shi Shi crouched down, held her breath, and listened. The light pattering of rain on the puddles of mud that had formed on the dirt ground was the only audible sound. She looked around in the darkness between the buildings, stood, and covered the distance between the seamstresses’ quarters and the factory in short, quick strides. She moved quietly among the fabric sheds behind the factory that held rolls of cotton, nylon, and hi-tech concoctions with fancy names like Rip-Proof Synthetic and Moisture-X.
Shi Shi stopped and repeated her crouch-and-listen routine.
Nothing.
With a final short sprint from the darkness, Shi Shi touched the side of the infirmary wall, crouching under the security lights just beneath Lee Chang’s residence. She wiped at the wet glass with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and peered through the window into the empty infirmary. “Where are you?” she said to herself in her native tongue.
She shuffled among empty boxes, garbage cans, and crates of discarded swatches of unused fabric. A dull yellow glow emitted from the next window on the first floor, the weak light drowning in the rain as it reached the end of its spectrum. A TV blared from Lee Chang’s residence above, the sound of screaming soccer fans broadcast live from China overpowering the sound of rain hitting the fabric sheds’ tin roofs. Shi Shi stepped up on two old crates and looked in the window next to the infirmary. The rain on her face and the textured sliding windows didn’t prevent her from immediately recognizing the body of her bunkmate of two years. She tapped on the window and Wei Ling sat straight up, pain shooting down her arm to her elbow. She looked through the glass, saw Shi Shi’s face, and began to sob.
Wei Ling tugged at the bed, moving the heavy frame and mattresses inch by inch until she could reach the bottom of the window. She put the pain of her left wrist out of her mind and stretched with her free hand, turning the lock and teasing herself with freedom. Shi Shi, still standing on the crates, pushed the window open, rain splattering into the room. She grabbed Wei Ling’s outstretched arm and embraced it.
“Wei, are you ok? We’ve been worried about you.”
“I knew you would come looking for me,” Wei Ling said, tears streaming from her eyes. “I’m pregnant,” she said before the sobbing spell escalated.
“From that night?”
“Yes. The American.”
“Wei. I’m so sorry.”
“Lee Chang keeps telling me that the doctor is coming to take me to the hospital, but I’ve been chained to this bed for a week now.”
“The doctor is dead.”
“Dead?”
“They found his body on the beach earlier in the week.”
“Are you sure?”
“Putani, the new girl from Thailand, is sleeping with one of the guards. He told her. He thought it was funny.”
“You have to get me out of here. That crazy Lee Chang is going to kill me.”