Chinatown Beat by Henry Chang

faces pushing the far side of forty.
    The mommy gave him a playing card, a yellow jack. Men were waiting about, sexual tension leaned up against the walls, and then a few more girls came out of the back maze of cubicles, carrying baskets of mouthwash, condoms, KYJelly, and paper towels. There were Cubans, a Venezuelan, a Panamanian, a Colombian, but mostly they were Dominicans fresh off the tarmac at LaGuardia, jetting in via the Santo Domingo pipeline.
    For the merciless dollar they'd surrender themselves up to desperate men they'd rendered faceless, shapeless, colorless, just a trick tube of flesh invading their vaginas, their mouths, but not their souls.
    The Panamanian. Young and tall, bottle-blond. He gave her the playing card and followed her inside.
    "Pon na ma?" he asked.
    "Si papisito, habla espanol?"
    "Poquito." He smiled.
    "Chino, no?" she said as she rolled down her top. Big brown torpedo nipples.
    "Si," Lucky said, undressing. "Chino."
    They were naked on the mattress and she was licking him. He heard himself moaning, watching her tongue working him, then sucking him into Chinaman heaven.
    "Ma mao bicho," he whispered, blow me, holding her by the neck. He got rock hard and turned her over, entered the rich brown of her, doggie style.
    "Mi amor," she was whispering, his lun cock stroking her.
    "Mamita," he groaned like the low growl of a dog, and came long and angrily, deep inside of her.
    Memory
    As was her routine on Sunday afternoons, Mona pressed the Discman's plugs into her ears, adjusted the volume, then wrapped the Hermes silk square over her head and knotted it under her chin. Shirley Kwan sang a ballad into her brain as the elevator descended, and before Mona stepped out onto Henry Street, she slipped the black Vuarnets over her eyes.
    She took the side streets south, away from the China Plaza, went as far as the Seaport and turned west toward the Hudson River. She didn't know the names of the streets but followed landmarks from memory, walking distance from Chinatown recalled. The way led through the steel-and-glass canyons of the Business District, pass a gwailo American department store where she found designer lingerie, toiletries, household items. Farther down that street was a travel agency she recognized by the pictures of ships and exotic locales, and a model airliner, displayed in the show window. On one occasion she had noticed a Chinese woman inside, wearing the red uniform blazer of the agency. Lucky red, she'd thought, and jook-sing, born American, she'd guessed.
    Her route took her toward the river until she reached the World Financial Center. The promenade was deserted, as she had expected. She looked out over the harbor where the rivers met and mixed into riptides.
    In the near distance she could see the Statue of Liberty, and she considered the word freedom, but remembered Uncle Four's bitter remarks about the exclusion of the Chinese, especially Chinese women, from these shores. She switched off the Discman, peered out beyond the choppy expanse of water, and began to wonder about liberty, and what she would need to do to gain it.
    Out on the wet blue shining, the ships and boats reminded her of Hong Kong, the fragrant harbor, and as she stroked her piece of jade her mind reeled back to lost youth and forgotten hopes.
    In Hong Kong she had crowded into cousins' bunk beds until she was sixteen, when she feared uncle would come into her room at night, herself the only girl there. She remembered wanting to be a movie star.
    The memories that came after were mostly about jobs she had had long before she'd managed to work her way up from Wanchai to Central, in Club Volvo, in TsimSha Cheui, the tourist sex ghetto, before she'd wound up on Nathan Road.
    She'd worked component assembly at TongKai Precision, in the beauty-care industry, making devices called Beauty Facial Sauna, Eye Massager, Deep Heat Body Massager, Scalp Stimulatortouted to improve blood circulation, cleanse the skin, eliminate