Lily, a Chinatown Whore
‘Lily adjusted her form to more enticingly present the curve of her breast and hip.’
Sitting in the window, with her body barely covered in enticing lace and corset, Lily watched the sunset parade of red lanterns down Division Street, the Tong men taking over the entirety of the street in a display of power and dominion.
Among the Chinese, a few white men, dirty-faced laborers, tourists of the exotic and erotic world of Chinatown, with its alleyways of gamblers, morphine dens and whorehouses like the very one she in which she currently perched.
Lily adjusted her form to more enticingly present the curve of her breast and hip.
Carla — her mentor, guide, chaperone into the world to which she had been if not born than early deposited — had told her when she first arrived that it was this curve, the rounding hill of hip and buttock descending into a hidden valley of crease between belly and thigh and portending further valleys, that would ban reason in every specimen of male, regardless of education or social standing, and cause him, in contravention of the certain screeching suspicion awaiting him at home, to unsheathe his billfold, upon which whores like them, Lily and Carla, would focus their immediate desire as well as their hopes for longterm survival.
Of course, Lily did not, at that time, comprehend the wisdom of Carla’s teaching nor of the teacher herself, nor the deeper teaching to transmute existence into flesh, could not comprehend it, being of such a tender age when she arrived in the junk on the docks of San Francisco, crated and uncrated, transported to the Queen’s Room and sold off to a vicious old woman who made a particularly lucrative living catering to the tastes of those men for whom the fullness of womanhood held scant appeal.
But now, a little older but not so old as to lose her market value, she still wondered at the white girls her age, walking with their parents down the Market Street promenade or riding gaily in a hansom cab, girls who seemed to know nothing of how their bodies could be used or how their lives depended on the tolerance and satisfaction of men.
What the little princesses did not understand but Lily did was the power of her body — its curves, its hills, its valleys, its secrets, its mysteries — a power, once discovered, she was more than willing to use for her betterment if possible, or survival if not.
Despite her most alluring efforts, the laborers, those sad, seared men, walked past her window, leaving her a moment to contemplate the march of the lanterns and the land from which they had all come, willingly or not, to extract value from America, to take part, if even just a little part, in the great riches being hauled out of the earth, far greater riches than the rice and ducks of China could ever impart.
Two memories of home occupied equal claims to her imagination, although both existed separate from her current existence, as if preserved in an amber portion of her mind, a refuge from the cold realities of current happenstance. In these places the roughness of men and the multitudinous violations of her intimate body would not degrade her soul.
One image preserved an Edenic existence of rice paddies and brackish waters, the tiered, sloping, arm-wrapping curve of green terraces, the embrace of parents and happy rests under a nurturing sun.
Equally valuable, equally treasured was the memory of her sale, when she stood barefoot and barely robed while her father bargained with the slave trader and her mother wailed in the closed house. From inside the junk, Lily saw her take the money from her husband, saw her count it, saw her assured they would profit from the sale. And the man, the trader, whom she stared at so long ago, uncomprehendingly but intuitively knowing the blackness of him, the cold locking away of heart or caring, the completed giving over of himself to money, the pursuit thereof and the price he paid.
Knock, knock. A rapping on the glass stirred her from reflection and brought her into a transactional frame of mind.
[to be continued]
