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Travel: Asia : Singapore
Singapore (July 2002)
(c) by F.N.G. © Oct 17 2002 WordNasty Ink.
In terms of cosmopolitan worldliness, Singaporeans flip their noses in the air at the unpolished Kuala Lumpur city slickers. In turn, Kuala Lumpur folks maintain haughty airs when downsizing their chic diction - garnered from a city boasting the tallest flagpole, the tallest skyscrapers, the tallest space needle, and the highest recorded sale of XS condoms - when attempting to communicate with the out-of-towners from Penang. Penang people, in righteous indignation, will then sniff impatiently at the small town Ipoh hicks. Having arrived at the last resort, Ipoh hicks will finally pull out that dime store magnifying glass and inspect the specimen called "the country bumpkin" at the bus stop known as Taiping.
Taiping, is the one-street petri-dish in Malaysia where my father was adopted and raised.
When my father was a teen motorcycling from Taiping hills into the city of Penang, he must have been swimming upstream. After he courted and married my mom in Penang, he settled down in the relative metropolis of Georgetown. When I was still a child, they thought about moving to Singapore to live, but luckily, father always thought big, and chose Vancouver, then New York City.
When I arrived at Singapore a month ago, friends and relatives were prepared for a super-sized American New York City boy, easing his way back into his father's country hills by way of a soft-landing through the westernized downtown of work central, fine capital of planet earth. And they got just that: brash, amplified, brand-label incarcerated, chock full of celluloid sexual decadence, in search of Starbucks Americano coffee, bottle of José Cuervo Gold in tow.
And after all the blinding stars have disappeared from the camera flashes, and everyone had excitedly followed my sister away, there was me.
Who would have thought that all I had to show for all the years stateside was nothing but a little Elvis song Love Me- in all it's pristine countrified blue - playing quietly in my heart?
There may be glamour to some in going back to your hometown and starting every sentence with "back in America…." Perhaps there is a king-for-a-day charm in throwing money around when the currency conversion is 1 US dollar to almost 4 Malaysian Ringgit dollars. The joy of going home to my birth town has always been in greeting a stranger on the street and opening each conversation in hokkien with, "ah koh…, ah chee…, ah chek…, ah eee..."
Translated: "brother…, sister…, uncle…, auntie…"
"In Singapore, do what the Singaporeans do," that's what my mother said as I disappeared into my cousin's fancy car. This was to be the night my karaoke virginity would be lost. I have always imagined karaoke clubs to be Saki-loaded Japanese businessmen singing Captain and Tenille songs at the top of their lungs. Up till then, I just assumed that the tab for a few thousand dollars a night was based on an insurance policy to safeguard the establishment against the risky nature of taking on such hits. I entered the club trailing behind a few of my relatives. The lounge was empty. A disco ball threw sanguine mirrored lights on the walls as a pretty girl in a velvet gown sang a Chinese song, accompanied by a keyboardist. The madam of the house greeted my relative and a few words were uttered beneath the din of the onstage performance. My cousin leaned over and said:"Go with her to pick out a girl."
While I protested, I was led through a maze of small catacombs with picture windows looking into each. Around the next turn, the madam's hand squeezed my arm and steered me into a windowless room of twenty to thirty well-dressed, well-made-up girls. The last time I was alone in a room with so many women was an accidental stumble into the Clit Club on 2nd ave. In this Karaoke cubby hole however, a voice boomed from behind my left shoulder: It was the mamasun barking in Mandarin: "Any English Speakers here!? "
I looked around and all the girls, all very Chinese, shook their heads, then turned away. I shrugged and beamed my countrified smile at the back of their heads.
I was off the hook.
A few minutes later I was ushered into an empty room with comfortable plush sofas and a big television screen. Mangoes, biscuits, watermelon chunks on toothpicks, breadsticks, bottles of cognac and wine were brought in on silver trays and crystal bowls. Whoa! I got up to leave: I was not used to drinking alcohol unless my back was comfortably nudged against a back alley dumpster. As I reached the door, a girl in her twenties, in a flimsy top and hip huggers entered, blocking my escape. Behind her, a few of my cousins nodded to me to go back in. Behind them, the madam assured: "She speaks English!" I motioned for her to have a seat, then I sat. Before a word escaped my mouth, an attendant materialized from thin air and started pouring cognac in my glass. Before the first shot went down the hatch, he was there again, refilling the glass. The girl's big I-don't-speak-English smile was only superceded by my even bigger I-don't-speak-Mandarin smile.For the next two hours, with the help of demonstrative hair pulling, wild flapping arms, gesticulating elbows, rolled eyeballs, extending tongues and a lexicon of face-making interspersed with sighs of desperation, more attempts to escape the room only to be pushed back into the room and onto the sofa, we eventually came up with half an English sentence. The only Mandarin I remember was the multiplication tables I was forced to memorized in kindergarten. Briefly translated, "2x3=Remy Martin" was the extent of the courting song from this tropical primate.
I was never much into the whole nightclub girls routine. But now that some bonafide employees were at hand, I suddenly wanted to know more about what they do, where they came from, what they were thinking. Before I could get this sentiment out, the girl motioned to the microphone and asked me if I'd like to sing a song. My first pick would be Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Corcovado"
This is where I want to be, here with you so close to me
Until the final flicker of life's ember
I who was lost and lonely, believing life was only
A bitter tragic joke, have found with you
The meaning of existence, oh my love.Hardly a karaoke song, but it's the only one I could think of once the cognac shifted into overdrive. However, I didn't feel like looking through volumes after volumes of 3-ring binder lyric sheets, so I whispered to my karaoke hostess: "Why don't YOU sing a song?" This, of course, was communicated with flicking my adam's apple with my finger and shaking a left pant leg.
"What song do you want me to sing?" She said.
"The song that you love to sing the most."
She rummaged through pages after pages, volumes upon volumes of mandarin songs for quite a while. I watched her hands supporting the binder covers, which reflected fingerprints from hundreds of strangers' hands before hers. She turned back to me and I saw the muted neon light upon her ruminative glance.
She was no longer young: "I can't find it."
At one point, one of the friends who accompanied us to the club came crashing into the room with a girl. Obviously inebriated and quite friendly with the girl, he pulled her top up and they both laughed. "Cow-sai!*" he shrieked, and they both laughed some more. My hostess turned to me and smiled. I was clueless: "What is cow-sai?"The drunken friend leaned over and said: "F**KING!"
The hostess assigned to me laughed. She said something to the friend-about-town. I then asked him what she said. He told me: "She said this friend of yours (me) is too good and innocent of a person."
I decided I needed to go do a No.1 at the men's room. My hostess offered to show me the way, since she had to go too.
After we were done, we met at the hallway that led back to the catacombs. She leaped on me and planted a light harmless kiss on my cheek. "What is this called?" She asked.
Harmlessly, I answered. "Cow-sai?"
We ended up giving the girl a ride home at the end of the night. This has been a friendly gesture I have always shown many of the working transvestite girls at Edelweiss at NYC. As a trained photographer, I am always interested in getting behind the veil to watch the puppeteer's skillful fingers at work. All the way to her place, my assigned hostess licked her lips and gnashed her teeth at me. My cynical smile remained immobile, forehead slightly wrinkled. At the instant when she got up to get out of the car, I saw the truth emerge. She was tired, worn out, disappointed at not raking in extra profit, and ready to hit the sack. The mask was down. She didn't even turn around to flash a pretend smile. She got up, out of the car, and stumbled home. I sighed quietly and turned to my cousin: "Let's get something to eat."
Over the next few nights, I would sneak a big mouthful of my sister's tequila and walk from my aunt's posh house downtown to Orchard road. Instinctively of course, I gravitated to the place where they had all the working girls. In order to watch how a prim society functions, you have to get underneath it's perfect skin and study the dance of iniquities that provided the foundation to its daily dredges.At a corner, many masalas stumbled out of bars loaded with Fosters beer. They pretended to be drunk so people would forgive these innocent white tourists for not realizing the fact that the working girls they were propositioning were not girls. Back in their hotel rooms however, suitcases stuffed with volumes of International Guide to Thai Ladyboys were lying open with carefully underlined addresses and jotted notes alongside each.
I entered a 7-11 and bought myself a can of Guinness. Remembering that Singapore is a steroid version of the Village from the Tv series ThePrisoner , I chugged the stout from the cash register to the front entrance. I had beer coming out of my nostrils as I descended the staircase of the convenience store. Somehow, amidst the delicious syncopation of the Indonesian transsexuals' struts, I noticed that all the Aussie boys were drinking brewskies openly on the streets. I touched a Singapore police officer next to me and asked: "Why aren't they getting in trouble for drinking in public? Isn't this Singapore after all?" The police officer said: "I don't know, but drinking in public is o.k. in Singapore."
"Excuse me for one moment," I said in a singsong voice to the policemen as I sashayed back into the 7-11.
It had been raining outside. Thick tropical rain. After walking it in for an hour, I was soaked like a damp dog sitting on the steps of an Orchard Road hotspot where all the working Indonesian she-males strutted back and forth. I sipped one Carlsberg after another and watched deals being made before my eyes. Several girls walked by and commented, "Why such a sad face?" How do I tell them that this, was the melancholia of watching my personal Discovery channel in progress? It was the wonderment, the sadness, and the liveliness of observation that kept me awake, despite the alcoholic delirium at my disposal.A hooker's walk is her signature. A dozen Thai and Indonesian girls could walk by and I would be able to remember each of them just from the way their signature rhythm issued from the base of their high heels and dispersed through crowds of bodies. These two are moving in adagio, business needs to pick up. That one's alone, and s/he takes the sidewalk in staccato allegro. Sometimes I'd tilt my head to study the wave motion trembling through the S-curve reverberating joyously into the night. Sometimes I'd close my eyes and shake my head to the sensual cantabile disturbances in the air when another working girl walks by.
An uncle of mine told my sister: "Walking is a form of dance."
I was at a cultural event.
After a night or two, I started looking around the area. I discovered there were more karaoke clubs within the Orchard towers. I ran into a few more relatives' friends making their rounds. "What are you doing out here?" they asked. I told them I was watching money changing hands. We stood at the corner and played the "He or She?" game for about half an hour. Then they asked me if I wanted to join them for a drink.Before I answered, I was thrown into a room with two new karaoke girls. This time, these friends were entertaining business clients in a roomful of girls. The clients were obviously not doing too well in holding their drinks. Pass the cognac neat! I laughed, everyone laughed, the clients laughed, I looked down, slap my knees and laughed some more, while the business clients sang very loud and out of key. I giggled between my legs, and I felt the girls swaying their bodies in laughter. Suddenly I quietly snapped my head up and caught all the girls in an unguarded moment with their faces in a pause between two plastic laughs. They were ghastly bored. They did not want to be there. They hated the loud grating voices of the married men trumpeting pop hits against the ever threatening feedback drone of microphones too close to loudspeakers. They were paying more attention to their nails. A few of the girls looked up and saw my stoney expression of seriousness. In my unguarded moment, my face was hardened, unimpressed, and most disturbing: uncritical.
A cousin of mine had intermittently taken me to the side and imparted a wisdom of "that which is not seen" in Asian philosophy: "It's not what you can see. It's more often what you cannot see." In watching Karaoke girls in action, I thought not so much about what they were doing, but more about what their other options would have been. Where these Mainland China girls come from, a day's work listening to businessmen doing lousy Tony Orlando hits and enduring what wives do in lousy marriages could convert into a year's worth of neccesities back home. And even if the conversion to renminbi and yuans may be at an all time low, it's still better than walking the alleys getting beaten up by a bad drunk at the end of a bad day. These girls are coming from a culture that have been known to prematurely abort female fetuses in favor of a male offspring in accordance to China's one-child-per-family rule. I'd imagine that the gender complex of being a daughter in such a society may lead women to strive to become breadwinners in the family. Religious people have imparted sermons on how one's body needs to be treated as a sanctity. To that I add: "Families are waiting to be fed."
But what about the other bad things that may be tied in with the organization of prostitution? Drug abuse, pornography, money laundering, demeaning the image of womanhood. I didn't say I condoned it. But people make choices. Sometimes, circumstances make decisions for people. Each person takes a turn. There's a right turn here and a wrong turn there. A karaoke girl told me she would be quitting the business in 2 months. She may be doing it for 2 more months or perhaps another 10 years. I was in no position to make any judgement. The important thing was to behave with civility, whether it be daytime on the streets, or in the wee hours of the morning, in the caverns of the karaoke club when no one was looking.
"I'm not going to touch you. You have the night off. You can stop acting and pretending to smile," I winked at the karaoke girls. "Now, can we get back to poking fun at these businessmen?"
And for the first time that night, I saw a genuine smile.
Now this, was good company.
Outside the club, I got inside the car of these business clients when they offered to give me a lift home. I sat in the back, cupped my hands and rested my mouth in them as the car turned the corner away from Orchard Road.I thought to myself: "Aside from opening and closing the door to the Karaoke room, I haven't touched anyone or anything the whole night.
So why do my fingers smell like semen?"
What was I not seeing?
The concept of karaoke girls originated from the traditional Japanese geisha girl operation. Walking along Orchard Road, I was fascinated to hear women strutting down the street with a tape recorder in their handbags playing sounds of wooden clogs upon concrete pavement. In the olden days, when Geisha girls were at the height of their evolution, the sound of their wooden clogs - as they walked along the street towards their workplace, was an audio advertisement. Therefore the ambient sounds of the wooden clogs emanating from the handbags of these pretty China girls were nothing more than a red light indicator that signaled: Open For Business.
I suppose the point of karaoke girls was for men to behave like dutiful husbands and respectful businessmen in the daytime and let all their "five legs emerge" (a hokkien expression ) at night, when nobody was looking.
After all: they paid for that right.
To be fair, I did see a few men who wanted nothing more than to sit and converse with a girl. To be fair, there were men from whom these karaoke girls could make easy money from. A nice chat and a few drinks and a gentle "no, not tonight." Here's your tab.
In my brief visits to the karaoke club system, I was happy to at least be able to get past the stagey, plastic smiles of whichever butterfly girl was assigned to me, and get a few good laughs out of each. A "butterfly" girl meant she hopped from one room to another - not booked to one room for an entire night. Whoever got me was like having the night off: I kept my hands to myself (A permanent condition - I have been advised- that has developed from permanent loneliness), provided a running commentary on all the other clients in the room, complete with acerbic facial remarks and all the things these girls were thinking deep down, but were paid to keep to themselves. I thought that since I was technically paying too, I might as well exercise that freedom and vocalize everything the girls have been itching to say throughout the night.
"And they didn't fall in love with you?" My aunt mused when I recounted the events of the night before.
"C'mon!" I rolled my eyeballs. "These karaoke girls can hold their liquor. You'd have to be pretty dead drunk to take a liking to someone like me!"
My other cousins-who have gone to live in Australia - have advised me that these 'brothers' and 'sisters' from my own race may be out to take advantage of me. I have always detested the Chinese distrust of their own kind. My contention is that ultimately, it doesn't matter, since almost anyone, regardless of race, creed, or class may be out to get you anyway. I am not exactly naïve. I know that my relatives are referring to the cunning mind of the Chinese. They'll cut their fellow man before they consider cutting a foreigner. But I'm Chinese too. So what's all the fuss about? They can roll me for all the dough I have (approx. 5 Singapore dollars in my wallet).
I know the Chinese would laugh at my sense of the romantic. I suppose it's got something to do with living in the States for so long. And although Singapore was a few hundred miles from my hometown, and China a few thousand more away, there was a sense of loving in me for my own people. I've always had the funny notion that if you were kind to people- while bad things may still happen to you - truly dire straits will tend to stay farther offshore. And so what if my ship did sink? Do I care if I go down loving people? Many civilizations have perished for lesser aims. No one comes into this world wanting to break up a marriage or to put their bodies up for grabs and cash. We are not superior to animals because we have superior machines to hunt them for food and luxury. We are superior to animals because we have the ability to recognize a person for who they were before circumstances forced them to take upon a post of disrepute.
My aunt tells me I really shouldn't be mixing with karoke girls. Well she's well-to-do and comes from a respectable family. Like my father, a Taiping mountain boy, I see no social stigma in mixing with Indonesian whores, Thai transsexuals, Transvestite ah knwua's, Malaysian ponduns, and karaoke girls from mainland China. I've spent some time in the company of entertainment lawyers from the recording industry. I think it's safe to say anyone would be a guaranteed step up.
It was my last night out on the town in Singapore. "One more for the road?" A few friends and a relative my age pulled up in a fancy sedan and opened the door. Fifteen minutes later, I was led into one karaoke room one last time. There was a feeling that I needed to see the spectacle one last time before I left Singapore. A tall girl came in and quietly sat herself next to me. She was completely aloof and made no pretenses to the fact that she was working a tedious, horrible job. One of the androids came in and topped my cognac off. He poured her a glass mixed with water. She asked if I was with the guys in the room. "Just friends of relatives," I nodded. She wanted to know if I was on vacation, since I didn't seem to have a clue what to do with my hands. I said I was. She asked me where I came from. "Up north," I shouted above the din of the karaoke music. "I'm from Penang! Malaysia!"
Someone shouted "He's from America and he's looking for a wife to take home!" I contemplated leaping across the lounge table and stuffing papaya sticks up his nostrils and giving him an atomic wedgie that would wipe out any reasons for him to visit another karaoke club.
The girl then picked up the microphone and started singing a Mandarin pop song. At the closing of the song, she turned to me and said, "I like this one best: It's a love song about wanting to return to a romance." I nodded. She handed the microphone over: "You sing one." Everyone started screaming for me to do one. I didn't feel like looking for a song. I picked up the glass and toasted. Down the hatch.
"I didn't realize you can drink on the job." I noted.
"Sometimes the clients come in here and they make us drink. So we've developed a tolerance for being able to drink up to almost a full bottle of cognac in one night."
I looked at her. "In that case," I took the glass from her and plopped her drink down my hatch and filled it up with water. "You should start drinking water to clean out your liver."
"Don't worry about me," she said.
"I worry." I started drinking water too, so the karaoke place was now making zero profits on the booze.
"You live far from here?" I asked her as we stood outside the club after it closed. She said no.
"Come," I waved with my head. "I'll walk you home. No strings attached."
No sense in taking a car on a good night. And the last thing one needed at the end of a long night catering to men was some drunken Australian guys stumbling all over you with beer breath huffing, "HOW MUCH SWEETIE?! HOW MUCH?!"
"What did you say just now? No strings attached ?" she asked as we walked along the gauntlet of working girls on Orchard Road.
"Ya," I explained. "That means I give you something, you don't have to give me anything. Like a gift."
"I never heard of it."
Throughout my vacation, I was so used to holding all my aunts' arms to help them cross the street that I absent-mindedly took her by the upper arm when we walked across a busy intersection.
"Where are you from again?" she asked.
"Born in Penang, Malaysia. Living in the Garden State. How about you?"
"Outside Xi'an."
"Oh I was just there last December. It's a nice place, a bit sad. What happened to your Xi'an red cheeks? All the drinking must have chased it away."
"I can drink a lot when I'm happy. Tonight, I'm happy."
"Yes, it's been a nice night. These guys in the room tonight, are they always gentle like tonight or were they just behaving because I was there?"
"No, they're always like that." Then she said: "I'd like to see America one of these days."
"It's not all its cracked up to be. But I agree, you should visit."
"A Chinese passport isn't much good for traveling outside of China."
"That's true," I said.
"What is New York City like? I hear Chinatown has karaoke clubs."
"Chinatown in New York City is a very sad place. You don't want to go there. The people are unhappy. But New York City is very pretty this time of the year."
"I hear the money is good."
"I couldn't tell you. I've never even been inside a strip club or a go-go bar before."
"I wish my English was as good as yours."
I pointed at myself and raised my eyebrows. "Pour a glass of sand into your mouth and gargle razor blades and you'll sound like me. It's easy."
Her English wasn't bad. With a little conversation, she could definitely get the hang of it.
I proposed. "We'll get together for some English lessons tomorrow. No strings attached."
She jotted her number down on a piece of paper.
"Well," I said. "Goodnight. In case we don't get together tomorrow, please, take care of yourself."
"Don't worry about me."
It was a nice quiet walk actually, about a mile from Orchard Road back to her apartment. The rain from previous nights have cooled down the night air. But now I was faced with the problem of having to hail a Guinness Taxi home. (That's when you convert a three mile walk into a half mile walk with the aid of a few bottles of Guinness.) I looked to the left and then to the right. The roads were empty. It was 4:30 in the morning. As I crossed the empty street, a large car pulled up alongside me. I looked in. It was my cousin. "How the hell did you find me?" I asked.
"Hop in. We'll go eat some ketchup mee goreng in little India."
Walking along the back alleys of Little India, I felt the same tingling in the air as when I walked along Sungei Road and Bugis Street when I was a child. My aunt warned that the tingling was due to the sexual diseases that were infesting the air. Back then it was the tall transsexual hookers in the shadows, reeking of sexual transgression, who made the night vibrant, sirens calling out with a flash of white legs. Going to Little India was almost a homage for me, since the Singapore government quickly turned Bugis Street into a tourist trap with fake crossdressing hookers just for camera flashbulbs.
I'll go anywhere tourists fear to thread. My top priority in traveling has always been to watch the way the locals live. I wasn't sure how much of what I was seeing was new to my cousin. Personally, being penniless was a good way to go among the towns people. I sensed that even the pimps on the alleys knew I wouldn't be worth the trouble of rinsing off a bloody knife afterwards. So I strolled casually past one house after another, each with a red light on its the second story wall, many with four chairs lined across the driveway, with four femme du jour on display, like a hawker stand. Most were Indonesian. There were a few Thai real girls. I tried to talk to a few, but their English was indecipherable. They were definitely catering to a different group of clients altogether. One girl started drawing me towards an hourly hotel room as I was chatting with her. Hookers always begin their conversation in the manner girlfriends would to their boyfriends. It always begins innocent. I keep it innocent and always attempt to steer it away from sex.
"Lonely?" she touched my elbow.
"Hungry actually. You?"
"What do you like?" She raised her eyebrows.
I am a man after all. I knew the words every girl wanted to hear most: "Wanna go get something to eat with me and my cousin?!"
Her hand dropped like a dead fish away from my elbow.
"I'll ask for extra ketchup in your mee goreng!!!!" I called out as she walked into the night.
The sad thing was, I meant every word I said.
It was my last afternoon in Singapore. I had climbed into bed at 6:30am earlier that morning. Now all the bags were packed and headed for the airport. I went downstairs and my sister was still hankering for her morning Starbucks Coffee. (This would be equivalent to going to Edinburgh and demanding Gordon's Fishermen Frozen Fishsticks). I decided to scoop up my last handful of change and head out for a walk. I was looking for a public phone to call Helen from the previous night.
Half an hour later, we were looking for a place to eat. She took quite a while getting ready. The way she explained it, she was up talking to a friend until the wee hours of the morning. It turned out that we both went to sleep at about the same time. I wrangled my pocket change as we walked into one of the shopping centers in search of a place to eat. I was all ready to get rid of my last few S'pore dollars. I told her to pick a place, a nice place. She picked a fast food joint with a bowl of curry noodles at $2.50. It ended up being too spicy, so we decided to walk it off. Suddenly she turned into a watch store, and started looking for a Guess watch. She said a friend of hers wanted it and she was trying to find it.
"I'm not good with watches," I stuck my boney hand out and flashed my $14.99 genuine Timex watch. I beamed my crooked teeth countrified smile at her: "This $20.00 watch tells pretty good time."
Listen to me talking big.
I want to appease the cynics with at least one observation of how Helen had already begun to weave a web of deceit in planning her way to America, but the truth is, she behaved the same exact way in the shadowy room of a Karaoke club as she did in the daytime walking down the main street. We have to accept that just as there are respectable people with ulterior motives, there are also those from ignominous stations in life without an ounce of trickery in their veins.
"So all you do in America is play the piano and read books?" She asked over a few glasses of beer which I have begun to immerse myself in each time I prepare to depart from a beloved land and beloved people . She was drinking club soda.
"Ya." I wondered if I should go into detail about how I cuddled stuff animals and practiced parental kisses on all of them.
"We need to find you a wife."
"I do ok by myself. What we need is to find you a husband," I said. My voice sounded doubtful even to myself. A mate isn't the solution to every problem, as divorcees have often discovered.
"When I do go back to visit my parents in Xi'an, I can't tell them that I work in a Karaoke club."
"Are you going back after this place?"
"No, I'll probably head out to Indonesia. The madam thinks I'm bad for business because I'm not too friendly. And I don't do everything the clients want me to do. I don't go home with them after the club closes. That's a lot of extra money lost."
"I have to imagine that even doing this job for a short period of time damages the way you look at people," I raised my eyebrows and tilted my head. "C'mon. Be honest."
"It does. You do pay a price. You're not the same again."
"Do the girls look out for each other at the place where you work?" I asked.
"No." She looked at her drink and lit a cigarette. "There's a lot of competition. They don't care about each other."
I've heard that from a few other karaoke girls. I was a bit saddened. People should look out for each other when they are in the company of creepy businessmen.
"So what are you going to tell your parents when you go back?" I asked.
"I don't know."
"Well, I do go to Hong Kong to visit a dear friend once in a while. If you need a pretend husband, Xi'an is only a short plane ride away. Gimme a call, who knows? We can schedule your homecoming along with my HK visit. Here's my phone number in America." I scribbled it down on a sheet of paper.
Our time was up. We got a good amount of English in. But now I had to get ready to head for the airport. My relatives were already buzzing me on a borrowed cell phone. "Where are you!?"
"I'm giving English lessons. I'll be back on time. Leave me alone."
I noticed that Helen had kept her sunglasses on the whole afternoon wherever we walked. She would glance around as if she was on a lookout for someone who would recognize her. We walked down a busy stretch of Orchard Road to meet my cousin, who was already waiting in a parking lot. I think he had someone install a GPS in my khakis.
A brief smile came across Helen's face. She looked like someone who had found a toy on the street. She boxed my arm cynically: "My pretend Husband!" Then she looped her arm around mine and we walked together the rest of the way, heads held reasonably high.
Everyone deserves a chance to live honorably. I am in no position to grant that privilege for a lifetime. But I do know that it helps to give people a remembrance of the respect we all deserve. I try to aid their memory in recalling the fact they didn't always have to chug cognac and let anonymous men put their hands all over them to collect a paycheck. And that not all men are bad.
My cousin picked me up and we let Helen off at her apartment. She will be arriving at the Karaoke club at 6 for happy hour when the businessmen get off from work, I thought to myself. Its another nine, maybe ten hours of work before she'd get to leave the place to come home again. I'll be on the plane flying over Kabul by the time she got back to her place. What worry is it of mine? Especially when she told me not to worry.
I worry.
Sister, I worry.
Epilogue
Someone told me that I was a fool to give my phone number out. They told me that my phone would be ringing off the hook even before I got home. Plans of deceit and trickery to get to the promised land were probably already in the works before I'd even touch down at Newark Airport.
It has been two weeks here in the promised land.
The phone has not rang once.
Silence, and stillness throughout the house.
Silence, the summation of all disturbances not seen.
Silence. The rebirth of my faith in people.
© October 17 2002 f.n.g., WordNasty Ink Pub.
*Casual westerner strangers who are not acquainted with my writings may want to take note that "cow-sai" is my hokkien double-entendre on the actual mandarin slang for f**king. Of course, I'm not going to tell you the word that was communicated to me! I would never promote the Asian skin trade by helping westerners -or anyone, for that matter - learn the street language for dealing a one night stand with a farmer's daughter who came down from the clean living of mountains to become an indentured sexual servant.
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