Chapter 2

I was very obedient at Yifang House.

When the madam told me to greet customers at the door, I stood in the bitter wind and kept smiling.

When she told me to drink with them, I drank until I foamed at the mouth.

She said there was a difficult customer who liked to hit people once he’d had a few drinks. Perhaps I could go, since I was so good-tempered. I went and came back covered in injuries.

The madam looked at the finger marks on my neck, turned away, and sighed. After a long while, she picked up a pot of ointment. “Take your clothes off. Let me put this on.”

I lay quietly on my stomach.

The ointment was meant to soothe my wounds, but her tears fell first. They stung terribly.

“Xiaoqiao, you foolish child,” she said.

She set down the pot, helped me sit up, and studied my face. “Why are you so obedient?”

I looked at her. For the first time, I saw something in her eyes besides calculation and the desire to please.

I had seen that look in Mother’s eyes.

After that day, the madam stopped sending me to difficult customers. She said I was too meek to fight back. One day someone would beat me to death, and I wouldn’t even cry out.

She had a dancer teach me.

“You’re soft-natured, and you’re supple too. Learn to dance well, and you’ll still draw men in.”

I learned quickly and practiced hard. Before long, I was the house’s leading girl.

That year, with better food and care, my skin grew fairer and smoother. The madam said I had grown into my looks and was at my prettiest.

She gave me a room of my own and stopped calling me Xiaoqiao.

Everyone in the house called me “Miss Qiao.”

The madam asked whom I wanted to attend me.

Standing on the second floor, I pointed at the figure chopping wood in the back courtyard. “Her.”

My sister-in-law stood before me, looking uncomfortable. “Xiaoqiao, they’ve taken such good care of you.”

I lowered my head and said nothing.

After a while, she began to cry. “I’ve wronged you.”

I didn’t know whether she meant selling me to Yifang House.

Or the time, just after she’d arrived, when a man tried to force himself on her. She had cried for help, and I had stopped him for her.

My brother had told me to protect her. That day, I knelt before the madam and begged her to let my sister-in-law do heavy work in the back courtyard instead of receiving customers.

The madam looked at me and sighed. “Then you’ll have to take all her customers from now on.”

“All right.”

I didn’t know how to refuse. I didn’t know what to say. I only knew how to agree.

Just as I often dreamed about my brother but never told anyone.

I dreamed of him smiling at me, promising to bring home a big pearl.

I had never seen a pearl. Neither had he, really. He had only heard that you could dive for them in the sea and make them into jewelry, and that young ladies in the city liked them.

After I became Miss Qiao, the madam gave me a pearl hairpin. Its round, pinkish pearl had a soft luster. It looked lovely in candlelight.

My sister-in-law was still crying. I picked up the hairpin and showed it to her. “This is what the pearls my brother promised to bring us from the sea look like.”

She reached out and touched it gently. Then she closed her eyes and sank to her knees, crying even more desperately.

My brother had promised her a pearl too.

But he could never come back.

And we could never get out.