China World Introduction

Hot weather always brought more women into the salon.
	Penelope drank her protein shake for breakfast in her little efficiency kitchen, frowning at all the dishes that were piled up from days and days ago. Few of the dishes even matched and it irritated the girl to no end: that she couldn't afford to go buy a matching set of dishes despite how many hours she worked.
	They might not even let her into the stores that sold the nice silverware, not some gweilo like her.
	Penelope was sweating already – the air conditioner was still malfunctioning. Hot weather meant longer hours at Lotus Nails; so it was no wonder none of her roommates had energy left to do the dishes after they got home from work. All six women living in that apartment were manicurists – it was a very common profession among white women, so much so that people associated them with nail salons. Most of the women worked two jobs though, sometimes cleaning the apartments of the very same women that patronized Lotus Nails. Their clients were mostly well-heeled Chinese women, with marble floors and very particular notions of cleanliness and service. Penelope and her mostly white friends didn't even cook for themselves. Those dishes in the sink were from the meals they prepared for predominantly Chinese employers.
	The blonde girl looked down at her own kitchen floor: tacky linoleum peeling in a few places. Even with boiling water and bleach, it could not be made completely clean – an issue that the landlady would not address. Not that Penelope could even ask her to do something about it. That would be unthinkably rude of her to mention.
	The social rules of Guanxi dictated, among other things, how a white girl tenant should behave towards her Chinese landlady. It would be a serious breach of decency if Penelope were to comment negatively of her hostess, like by saying that the air conditioner didn't work or that the roaches were back. In fact, Penelope and her roommates were expected to bow and scrape before their landlady Li Hzu, offering her gifts along with their grossly inflated rent checks. The girls were thankful Mrs. Hzu didn't have any children, because it would certainly fall on her white tenants to provide free babysitting on demand if she did.
	"Ooh, Mrs. Hzu. You look so pretty today! Would you like to stop by for tea and a foot massage, we catch up?" the girls would ask when they saw her get home from her nursing job, sweaty and exhausted from a 12 hour shift.
	The moon-faced Chinese woman was always delighted to hear it – nursing was hard on her feet and she couldn't imagine anything better than coming home to an hour-long foot and leg massage given by a girl whose life depended on it. She would remove her scrub bottoms entirely and sit on the most comfortable chair in the girls' apartments, having them massage her feet and calves for an hour. She rarely bothered to wash her feet beforehand, but the biggest issue was they had to act differently when Li Hzu was in their apartment. She commandeered the TV and didn't like a bunch of girls speaking English to each other when she was around. She preferred they sit quietly nearby, in case she needed something.
	The role of the white woman was clear: she had no status, limited financial assets, and there was so little regard for her esteem that she was expected worship a Chinese woman's feet right in her own living room, asking for nothing in return but the joy of 'showing gratitude.' And Mrs. Hzu would make comments like, "Why can't all white girls be friendly and hardworking like you? Paris, can you do my shoulders while Emma does my feet? They're quite sore... Oh, and there won't be any hot water until Monday while they fix the pipes."
	White women were meant to serve Chinese women: this was the message repeated at every level of society in so many ways. It was enforced through the social policy of guanxi, with its emphasis on racial hierarchies and a culture of shame and punishment. Nor was it enough to serve – they must also show gratitude for Chinese women's stewardship over their lives.
	Naturally, there was a huge income inequality between white and Chinese households. Depending on how one looked at the statistics, white women had about one tenth the spending power as Chinese women. That was not even factoring the innumerable white domestic laborers who were basically penniless. Even in the highest-performing white women were fastidiously denied seats on planning committees and certainly not permitted at boardroom tables. If a white girl was doing too well, though, society would usually remind her of her place long before she could think of running a company. The idea was patently absurd.
	Racial segregation was coded into laws drafted by Chinese politicians, with new ones coming out every year to further restrict and exploit the poor white women. The white girls worked stitching shoes together, dusting bookshelves, and administering expensive beauty treatments for their social betters. They knew little in the way of luxury or relaxation themselves, too busy giving out massages to ever get one for themselves.
	It was like some twisted reflection of Penelope's own world, but now she was stuck here trying to make sense of what was going on. She hadn't been here long, but the everyday experience of subjugation and poverty was grinding her down already. Her thoughts nowadays revolved more around how to survive than how to find some way back to her old world.
	The blonde girl was waiting for the bus, cursing herself for switching shifts with Sarah last night.
	There wasn't much around to distract her from her grumpy thinking: her surroundings were just ads up and down the neighborhood in Mandarin text. Bright, bubbly, a little patronizing – advertisers filled every surface with ads, driven on by the fact that the white women couldn't mount a successful legal resistance to rich Chinese developers. And so they covered up the neighborhood's architecture, completely changing its sense of place. Now 'home' was just a rotating barrage of images reinforcing Xenocentric standards of beauty and telling women to buy more stuff and keep up the good work! Penelope could see through all of it because she had known another life, but what hope did anyone else have?
	She looked down at her smartwatch to see a notification: the bus was running late. Again.
	Every other borough in New Beijing was nicer than the one Penelope and her friends lived in. It would take Penelope over an hour to get to the nicer neighborhood where her job was located. But Yorktown was pretty much the only part of the city where she or any other white girl could afford to rent. So unless she chose to work as a live-in to some family, this was her best option: sleeping three to a room, in a place covered with ads.
	It was covered in cameras, too. And Wi-fi sensors that interfaced with the smartwatch she wore on her wrist. Her watch screen told her which bus lines to take, and tracked her movement to let her employer know when she would arrive. Additionally, the smartwatch acted as her wallet, her cell phone, and her primary device for accessing the Internet. At least, whatever fragments of Internet that the Chinese women allowed them to use. Again: mostly ads, things to buy, and beautiful models that represented China-centric standards of beauty. White girls couldn't even operate full-sized smartphones; they were trapped using those tiny  watch-sized screens, with all the limitations it came with.
	Would this become normal for her?
	Penelope was thinking about this as she swiped her watch against the fare reader on the bus. She inhaled sharply when she saw the amount. Due to it being a "surge rate," her ride would be three times as expensive today! She was careful not to show emotion, and especially not to show ingratitude towards the driver who was a bored-looking Chinese woman well into her middle age.
	"Thank you for the ride," Penelope said, bowing a little to the woman, who smiled back at her.
	She walked to the back of the bus, sitting next to a girl with pale skin and very red hair. She was sleeping with her head against the window. She had on a simple waitress uniform: black skirt and white blouse with some kind of stockings that would get quite hot in this weather. Her name tag read "Rachael" and her patent leather flats were a little scuffed.
	Penelope had a friend who looked just like her, back where she was from. It was her home world where the US had enormous political power and Eurocentric values were the dominant ones. But in this other place, this current world? Things were very different.
	She lived in New Beijing now, and if she talked about a city called New York people would think she was batty. She might even be arrested, depending on who heard her say such a thing. While it was bad to malign any Chinese woman, it was practically treason to question the power or the legitimacy of the People's Council. Council members were everywhere and commanded special treatment. Sarah navigated a world where she was a prisoner in plain view. She had to remain deeply subservient to her employer and the state, and she was powerless apart from certain frivolous decisions about purchasing and brand loyalty.
	How did she get here? Through a tanning bed, it seemed: she entered it in New York and climbed out in New Beijing, in a totally different reality. She had no idea what happened to that tanning machine since then, mostly because she was arrested so quickly after her arrival.
	That was a terrifying day for poor Penelope: walking up the street to random Chinese women who scowled at her when she impetuously asked, "Where is Williamsburg? Just please call me an Uber and I'll Venmo you the money when I get home" to women who would only give her shocked looks in response and hurry away from her.
	All her personal effects were left behind in New York. She was literally wearing a gold-and-white bikini walking barefoot up and down the sidewalk asking random people for help. When the police arrived, it didn't look good for her.
	Penelope had no I.D., no money, and a crazy story about how she needed to get to some Brooklyn city nobody had ever heard of, but was apparently right across the river for the past 300 years. They gave her a blanket to cover her modesty, but otherwise the female officers treated her like kind of a nut job. Penelope debated about if she should tell them about the tanning booth, but fell apart under questioning and told both women exactly where she had emerged from.
	It looked like a squatter's den, which Penelope had kind of realized when she first stepped out of the booth and that was what caused her to run into the street wearing just a bikini to begin with.
	It was not a nice place. Apart from the two tanning booths, there were sleeping bags, sofas, and a jury-rigged kitchen. Then it really didn't look good for Penelope. The officers established that Penelope was at least an undocumented citizen and maybe even a spy. To make matters worse, since no one was paying rent for this basement, she was probably squatting here as well. And was she running an unlicensed tanning establishment, with those machines?
	The dark Chinese legalism was on full display for Penelope, that day.
	They took her to a corrections facility where she was processed with lightning speed. 'Invasive' doesn't do justice to what Penelope experienced there. The State took her fingerprints, her toe prints, scanned her retina, took a swab of her saliva, some blood, and even fitted her with some microchip in her neck, like she was a stray animal!
	Then the sentencing...
	Penelope's mind wandered: faces of family that didn't exist here, vague fantasies of escape. Her roommate Sarah's increasingly obvious drinking problem that was affecting everyone they lived with.
	Sarah got way too drunk last night, and it was a Tuesday. She was probably going to be too hungover to come to work at all, so Penelope would have to do a double shift. Maybe longer, if there were women still wanting services after Lotus Nails was supposed to be closed. Why was Sarah so irresponsible? And if the smiling, laughing drunk girl kept missing work like this, how would she make rent at the end of the month? Most bitterly: how far would this set Penelope back, yet another day of her life spent working for slave wages instead of finding a way home?
	Then there was the question she could not bring herself to think about: was it even possible to get home? To her own Earth, with a different history, where she went to NYU and worked at a prestigious advertising firm?
	The blonde girl stared out the window with her sapphire blue eyes, envious of the Chinese women who were chatting away on their doorsteps, or sipping lattes on the way to their way to well-paying jobs. She was starting to get to the nicer neighborhoods now. The Chinese women were hailing town cars, jogging, catching up with friends, lounging in coffee shops while staring at computers. She was so jealous of their leisure time, remembering how much she enjoyed her own. It hurt to think about lazy mornings spent in bed, half days at work, vacations.
	The bus pulled up to Penelope's stop, and she began walking to work. She was sweating already, and her smartwatch told her to pick up the pace because already had a client waiting for a deluxe pedicure.