CHAPTER 33-2
767 Words
Mee-Kyong kept her eyes on the open book in front of her without focusing on any of the characters in particular. She had lost track of how much time over the past weeks she had already wasted stuck in the den with Mrs. Stern, her overzealous benefactress who was committed to saving her soul in three-hour installments.
“Look here, where it says he’s the light of the world.” Mrs. Stern tapped a line on the page. As she continued to prattle and extol the Western Savior she and her husband were so devoted to, Mee-Kyong shut off her mind and just nodded every once in a while. Mee-Kyong knew all about devotion. Pang had been a disciple of the Party at one point, back when he worked in the same factory where Mee-Kyong’s unit slaved. She knew what it was to follow someone with a zeal that blinded you to reason and sense. She knew what it was to submit so fiercely, so foolishly. Mrs. Stern droned on about sacrifice and commitment, and all Mee-Kyong could think about was the crunching sound the cartilage made the first time Pang broke her nose.
At least she had no self-delusions. Her life as a prostitute began years before she set foot in the Round Robin Inn, back when she was nothing more than a child trying to survive in Camp 22. To get food, you gave a little bit of yourself. It didn’t matter if you liked it or not, if you were terrified, if it was even more painful and humiliating than a teacher’s lash with the whip. All that mattered was at the end of the day, your body didn’t shut down and die. You had enough rations to ward off starvation for another twenty-four hours. If you worked the scenario out right, you ended up with more than just food — clothing, shelter, a warm bath instead of a biannual hose-down in freezing-cold water.
Life at the Sterns’, Mee-Kyong had quickly learned, wasn’t all that different. It wasn’t her body she was selling, but her mind, her time, her feigned adoration. All she had to do was sit through Mrs. Stern’s ritualistic lectures in the den, and she was paid with a soft pillow, a warm blanket, and three hot meals a day. The Sterns never asked Mee-Kyong where she was from or how she arrived in the hotel district. “Your past is a closed book.” Mrs. Stern insisted Mee-Kyong could start a whole new life, as if her time in the gulag and the Round Robin didn’t even matter. What a simpleton. Did this obese American truly believe that a cozy bedroom and full cafeteria service could erase Mee-Kyong’s history and wipe away her past?
Still, there was no physical debasement. There were no nightly callers, no wheezing proprietors telling her who to entertain. She wasn’t locked in a hotel room. At the Round Robin, she had been forced to work six to ten hours at a time, depending on the influx of lazy, middle-aged callers who frequented Mr. Lee’s cheap establishment. Here, all that was required was a few sessions a day, a few hours pretending she cared about Mrs. Stern’s Western deity, a few hours pretending she craved the kind of forgiveness their American Savior offered.
Secretly, Mee-Kyong didn’t care all that much for the idea of free forgiveness. What about Mr. Lee, and those like him — men who sold innocent girls like Sun to be stripped and possessed and violated by the highest bidder? Or the smooth-skinned, angry-eyed brother who cut Sun’s pathetic life so short? What about him? Did he deserve forgiveness? If there was a God of love and grace, as the Sterns always insisted, and if he was willing to overlook the offenses of men such as these, Mee-Kyong would despise him to her dying day.
Mrs. Stern interrupted her thoughts by pointing to a verse on the thin, fragile page. “Here, where it talks about the light of life, it means that we can live in joy. Freedom.” There she went again. Freedom? What freedom was there in this mansion, where food and shelter were earned by accepting their fanatic propaganda? Mee-Kyong couldn’t go out. She had no identity papers, none of the forms she would need to legally move around the city without being troubled by the police. Where was her freedom now? Where was her freedom at the Round Robin, where she was too weak to fight back or protect Sun from being used so mercilessly and murdered so senselessly?
Maybe freedom existed for wealthy, fat Americans, but not for gulag whores like her.
- Writer
