no way out but to keep working. Even though you will seemingly make a lot of money, you will never be able to save because of the interest you have to repay. You will never be able to get out of it entirely. You will move to a different shop in a different city with a different madam and a different set of rules and times and expectations, but it will still be the same, and there is no escape.
* * *
—
I WOULDN’T HAVE made it out of Miari myself if it wasn’t for one of my oldest customers—a balding, stooped grandfather, who fell in love with me and actually gave me the money that I needed to pay off my debts—fifty million won cash. The owners of the place I worked, they would have tried to scam me into working there even after taking the money, but the grandfather was a retired lawyer and he made them sign all these documents confirming that I was debt free. The mixture of the two—cash and fear of the law—was the reason they let me go.
The grandfather still comes around every few months, but I always make sure my roommate, Miho, isn’t at home when he does. All he asks is that I do a little show removing my clothes and then stay naked during our time together so that he can touch me and look at me. He doesn’t even want to have sex or a blow job. He’s too old to take that kind of excitement, he says, adding that he doesn’t want to die on top of me. I don’t know if that’s out of consideration for me, or to save face for his family. It’s nice to have him look at me so fondly and call me “art,” without me having to do anything.
He doesn’t know, though, that I’ve started racking up debts again because of my recent touch-up surgeries. They’re just small ones here and there but they add up. I’ve decided not to tell him. He thinks I am going to school to become a teacher. He is so proud of how he has changed my life, and often, his eyes water when he looks at me. He loves the story that he saved me.
* * *
—
WHEN NAMI FIRST came into that place I worked in Miari, I tried to tell her not to take money from the pimps. That money was never the casual gift they always made it seem. But she had already started and like the rest of us, she couldn’t stop.
She was just a kid, one of the youngest at that joint, and she looked even younger because of her dumpling cheeks and buck teeth. I think she was thirteen or fourteen when she first showed up. She wasn’t attractive at all back then, just a chubby kid with no breasts whatsoever. But men would choose her again and again because of her age, if nothing else.
I don’t know why I took a liking to her. I usually don’t like the girls I work with, but Nami was so homely and so young that it was hard not to feel for her. It bothered me, the fact that she sat with no smile on her face and she would just stare at us, the girls and the men. And I could tell that the men who chose her were the types who wanted to punish her for looking like that.
* * *
—
WE BOTH LOOK so different now, Nami and I. Sometimes she says she wishes she had a photo of us from those days. “Are you joking? Why would you want any evidence?” I say, appalled. I would kill someone and rot in jail before I’d let them see what I looked like pre-surgery.
Now that I’ve been working for a few years in Gangnam, where everything is so chic and subtle and the goal of every surgery is to look as natural as possible, I cringe to see some of her recent choices. Her breasts, for example, are cartoonish, jutting out like grapefruits on her otherwise boyish body. The entire effect makes people ogle openly or look away in embarrassment, especially when she has that hangdog expression on her face, her