I stare at the ticket and stare some more because it is too improbable to be believed. I finger the thick green paper incredulously. And then I start to cry.
Sujin lurches, spilling her beer, and automatically reaches over to rub my shoulders. “What’s wrong, Ara? What’s wrong?” she asks in a panic as I sit there with tears dropping onto my hands and the precious ticket. “What is the matter? You can tell me,” she soothes, the way she always has, ever since we were children.
Kyuri
My young friend Nami and I are drinking again. I’m avoiding Sujin, who I know will be home soon and knocking on my door.
We are sitting at my favorite pocha, where the fish cakes in the fish cake soup are just the right marriage of chewy and salty, and the owner always brings us free plates of food to go with our soju because he has a crush on me. Last weekend, he sat and drank a round with us and then had some fried chicken delivered from another store because I said I was craving gochujang wings. He’s one of those shrinking, gawky types that knows he doesn’t have a chance in hell with me, which is the only way I like them.
Nami and I—we drink together at least every other weekend. Getting drunk by ourselves is completely different from getting drunk when we are working. When the two of us are drinking, it’s “game over” from the beginning. Nobody else can keep up, although sometimes men try to join us, but they give up when we drink shot after shot while ignoring them. We see enough men at work, Nami and I. They need to leave us alone on the weekends. We wear baggy sweatshirts and baseball caps pulled down low and no lipstick, just eyeliner, but still they come talk to us. “You’re too pretty to drink by yourselves,” they say. “Can we join you?” And then when we ignore them, they turn nasty. “What the fuck,” they say, real manly, muttering under their breath as they slink away. “Stuck-up cunts.”
Nami is the only girl I still talk to from my red-light-district days. None of the other girls at Ajax know that I used to work in Miari, and if they knew, many of them would likely never talk to me again. It’s ridiculous—we are all doing some variation of the same work, even if you’re one of the “prettiest 10 percent” and don’t actually sleep with the clients. But they’d judge me all the same. It’s basic human nature, this need to look down on someone to feel better about yourself. There is no point in getting upset about it.
I wish I could share this sort of wisdom with Sujin but for now I’m avoiding her. She is wild-eyed these days because her nail salon has been flailing and her boss told her that she will probably have to let her go soon. It’s only been two months since her surgery and parts of her face are still inflated and she talks funny because she can’t open her mouth very wide, but she’s already hounding me about next steps to getting a job at a room salon. I have told her to just look for another nail salon job for now where she can wear a dust mask and no one looks at her anyway.
The problem is that Sujin feels obligated to take care of Ara. Yes, Ara is handicapped but she also has a job, even if the hair salon probably doesn’t pay much. But when I tell Sujin she should learn to look out for herself before worrying about anyone else, she tears up and says Ara cannot adjust to the real world and must be protected and Sujin has to make as much money as she can for both of them.
What she doesn’t understand is that I am trying to save her. Once money exchanges hands and you step into our world, things turn bad really quickly.
One minute, you are accepting loans from madams and pimps and bloodsucking moneylenders for a quick surgery to fix your face, and the next minute the debt has ballooned to a staggering, unpayable sum. You work, work, work until your body is ruined and there is