China World, Chapter 9

"Ah! That feels amazing!"
	Yvonne moaned as Penelope massaged her enormous size 11 feet during another Daughters meeting.
	"I'm jealous! I want to go next!" the Nordic hostess said, the one dating that Arab guy. Her name was Clara.
	"Uh, there's a line," another woman announced, indicating that she had been waiting for her turn to get a foot massage.
	All throughout that small apartment, white women were taking turns giving each other relaxing beauty treatments. They set up little stations: Fiona was using a jade roller to give facial massages over by the kitchen, and Dana was doing a demonstration of a back massage (on a very grateful model) for people to observe and learn from. Women had partnered up and were kneading each other's bodies according to her instructions:
	"Use the palm of your hand, and walk it all the way up her back, like this."
	Her model was topless, but had herself covered from her thighs to the lower part of her back via a flimsy towel.
	"Be careful to avoid touching any bruises. Even a gentle touch can be painful."
	This had been one of Penelope's ideas. It was a way for the Daughters to connect with each other and enjoy some much-needed pampering. They had an impressive collection of skills in that group: some knew how to wax, do makeup, create hairstyles. And it was such a different dynamic doing this for 'one of their own' so to speak, instead of for a demanding Chinese or Persian mistress.
	Penelope dug her knuckles firmly into Yvonne's soles, which were covered in fine-smelling oil that made them glisten.
	"What do you do for work, Yvonne? You never said," Penelope addressed her friend.
	"I'm a Feng Shui student," Yvonne replied.
	"Oh, I'd like to learn that! Maybe you could teach it to me one of these times."
	Yvonne laughed.
	"They haven't taught me anything interesting in my classes. It's more like a way to have me visit a bunch of homes without people getting nosy."
	"Like, when you are doing work for the Daughters?" Penelope asked.
 	"No. Like Arabic men want to have sex a white girl, so they ask for a 'feng shui' decorator. They don't care what I say about arranging their furniture. Sometimes, they won't even let me use the furniture, to make clean-up easier. And I have to do the clean-up, too."
	"Oh," Penelope said, focusing on doing Yvonne's foot massage better now because she was uncomfortable talking about this stuff.
	But Yvonne didn't seem to feel ashamed over it. She complained:
	"And sometimes, I get stopped by some idiots on the street and they'll dump out all my condoms to teach me a lesson or stop me from doing my work. Except, I still have to make my appointments, so you can imagine how that goes."
	She tried not to.
	"Mm, can you do my calves too? I had these high heels on all day and.."
	"Yvonne, come on. She's been with you for the last 20 minutes! Let me go, please!"
	This was Ariel chiding her.
	"Fine," the Amazonian blonde said, slowly lowering both feet to the floor so the maid could take her place. Which Ariel did, almost immediately thrusting her size 5 feet into Penelope's lap.
	"Thank you, Heidi."
	Ariel started in right away:
	"Ugh, my boss, she installed cameras in her home, so she can watch me while she's away. Now if I take even the slightest break, she gets angry and says I'm being lazy!"
	Penelope's goal here was to ingratiate herself to the Daughters so that she could get back to New Beijing. The idea of adding a 'spa party' vibe to their meetings was to help accomplish that goal, but it also made life much more enjoyable. She started it a while back by offering Yvonne a foot massage, then Ariel, then another person.
	As she did those first few massages, she talked to whoever was on the receiving end. She would pitch her idea to them: 'wouldn't it be great if we all did this for each other? I know some of us just want to rest, but you have to admit this feels nice!' And the idea caught on with people. Not everyone gave equitably: Ashley and Victoria in particular were receiving treatments much more often than they gave something out. But they were all Daughters here, so they tried to be charitable with each other.
	That was a part of the ideology: they were supposed to think of themselves first as Daughters, then as white women.
	'If we call ourselves white, we are playing into the Chinese worldview that we're different and inferior. If we call ourselves Daughters, we are creating our own identity on our own terms. Sure, we still have to jump through their hoops, but it feels so much better to be a Daughter than to be just another Katie.'
	Ariel was still talking about her lousy day:
	"But it's still not as bad as when my boss's mother was visiting... Ugh, and they were talking about having her move in – which no one is happy about, and they'll take it out on me!"
	"How awful!" Penelope said, focusing on the task of massaging Ariel's tiny feet.
	There was an unmistakable difference between the feet of a white woman and the feet of a Chinese or Persian woman. Penelope had never seen a white girl whose feet achieved that level of dainty softness that Chinese women prided themselves on with their smooth, buttery soles that seemed to invite a thumb to go that much deeper during a massage. That was actually a standard of beauty here: how soft and pampered a woman's foot was. Ariel's feet were muscular and calloused and her toes were very slender, almost bony. It took considerably more effort to do Ariel's foot massage because of all the tough muscle she had developed on her soles. So Penelope had to use a lot more pressure to create that pleasant 'deep tissue' feel that she requested.
	"Yeah," Ariel went on,
	"And they're so wasteful! My boss, she heard of this special foot soak and she made me do it for her. I had to pour liters of milk with sweet cream into her foot bath, then add grapes and cucumber slices to float around in there and make it pretty. Then I had to scrub each of her feet while the other one soaked. It took more than hour, because she had me massage her hands and shoulders while she soaked, to make an afternoon of it. Then afterwards, I had to pour all of that milk and fruit in the garbage – it was such a waste of food!"
	"Not like I would have drank it anyway. But if she wants to do it again, I'm the one who has to run to the store to buy more milk for her... Mm that feels so good, Heidi!"
	"Thanks," Penelope smiled.
	"I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the Daughters," Ariel said, then paused.
	"I wish things were better."
	Penelope had been in New Tehran for many weeks now, and fall was coming on.
	She had managed to avoid being scooped up by some Middle Eastern woman and turned into a domestic. This was important because she had learned that when you worked in someone else's home, it was too easy for them to notice you were missing. This meant that the unlucky girl could no longer sneak away to a Daughter's meeting, on top of all the other stressors of being a live-in domestic servant. A couple of women had been pushed into accepting live-in roles, and during their meetings they would have a moment of silence for each one because it might be years before they could see her again.
	Ariel enjoyed complaining about her life more so than other girls, and she went at it for a while longer. Penelope became distracted by her own emotional duress: the longer she spent here, the more painful it was for her to think of her old life. Once, she had started to cry uncontrollably at one of these meetings when she thought of her little sister getting the news that she had gone missing. But it was common for women to cry in these meetings, and Yvonne and Ariel just tried to comfort her. It only made her feel worse.
	'I'm not one of them,' Penelope would think to herself at such times,
	'Not really. I'm only here until I can get the hell away from all of this. Their problems, their beliefs – none of it matters. I just want to go home.'
	After she had massaged Ariel's feet and calves for about fifteen minutes, another person started getting antsy for her turn. It was Victoria, who kicked Ariel off the sofa and rested both her feet in Penelope's lap, wheedling her for an extended massage because she had 'such a hard day.' This was seriously annoying – Penelope was just about to wrap up so she could go get a facial, but raven-haired Victoria was insistent that she get her turn.
	"Come on, Heidi," the woman begged, "I was dancing for hours today! My feet are so tired. Make my feet feel good!"
	And as she said this, she kept jabbing Penelope's legs with her bare feet, wriggling her toes in a way that demanded a response. It made Penelope's blood boil: Victoria must know that this was insulting when an Arabic woman did it, so why would she think it was okay for her to do the same thing?
	 "Okay, I'll do it for you," Penelope acquiesced, "but I wish you'd bring something to our meetings next time."
	She noticed a few women nearby smile – like she had said what everyone was thinking. It went right over Victoria's head, of course.
	"I tried!" the melodramatic woman said, "I had an entire bag of oranges I was going to bring. But some random guys stopped me and said I had to give it to them, so now I have nothing."
	Through the corner of her eye, Penelope saw Yvonne shake her head. She wasn't the only one who doubted this story but if Victoria noticed, she didn't care. In fact, she placed both of her feet expectantly on Penelope's lap and cleared her throat in a bratty way. With a sigh, Penelope started rubbing Victoria's feet with the same level of care she would have shown for someone she actually liked. Penelope kept dwelling on the fact that now, in addition to being forced to do more work, she was also missing out on getting the reciprocal services from the women she had already given massages to.
	She looked over at Dana, who gave her a sympathetic expression as she dug her thumbs into her model's shoulders.
	"I just don't understand," Penelope wondered aloud,
	"Why do they need to control our lives so much? Is it seriously that big of an issue, if a bunch of Daughters spend time together? Why can't they just let us do this, but we would still work for them most of the time?"
	"They are afraid of us," Yvonne answered,
	"They don't want to imagine a world without a white girl kneeling at their feet, afraid to tell them 'no.' They think that if we spend too much time together, we will start to get more powerful. So they cut us off before we can even try."
	"But it must be something deeper," Penelope replied, "Because they could still have us work for cheap, while also letting us live better."
	Penelope was drawing from what she knew of her own world, where the underclass was kept perpetually renting things with the hope of one day doing better – which seemed marginally less cruel.
	"If we do better, they do worse! Come on... Would you really work twelve hour days if you didn't have to? They need to continue paying us nothing – how else could they live such comfortable lives for so cheap?"
	"But what's the point of any of this, then?!" Penelope snapped. She was offended by how blithe Yvonne came across about all of this.
	"Because of moments like this, Heidi... I wish I could tell you something different – that the future would be better. But it probably won't. If anything, it will probably be worse: The prophets are all dead."
	"There were no prophets," said the rest of the girls, Penelope included.
	More than the abuse that Chinese and Arabic women put upon her, more than the surveillance state she could barely escape, more than the abject poverty she suffered beneath; the hopelessness affected Penelope most of all.
	Was it because she had known a different life? A life of bottomless mimosa brunches followed by patronizing her favorite nail salon where pretty Korean women waited on her hand and foot for a three dollar tip? Her loving family, her financial security, her bright future – if she hadn't known any of these things would she, too, reject hope like all the other Daughters? And was hope even a good thing, or just another shackle to keep her in line?
	"I'm not feeling well. I want to go home," Penelope announced, unceremoniously shoving Victoria's feet from her lap.
	"Uh, rude?" Victoria said, then she began scouting around for her next service.
	Penelope wished one of the other Daughters would try to stop her on her way out, or say something to make her stay, but nobody did. On her walk home, an unfamiliar emotion started to bloom within her. It was part anger, part helplessness, part fear. It was becoming increasingly difficult for her to contain these kinds emotions and constantly put forward the 'face' of a happy, docile, ignorant slave girl. But did she have any alternative?
	**
	Although she did it full-time, Penelope never got used to her work. Every time she walked into the cafe and had to crawl beneath the table, it was a fresh annoyance. Especially this morning, when there were already women seated at her table who gave her a dirty look because they considered her late.
	Soon, a Persian woman's feet were in Penelope's lap, and she was required to vigorously suck on each of the client's chubby fingers to clean every bit of oil and food from them. Recently, a new trend had caught on among the clientele: it was to have a white girl suck on their fingers for much longer than was necessary to remove the food from them. That was what this woman expected – Penelope had finished sucking on the woman's thumb and tried to pull away so that she could kiss it and move on to her index finger. But the woman didn't allow it; she forcefully kept her thumb in Penelope's mouth and rested the rest of her fingers on the side of her face.
	"You keep going," the woman said, and it took all of Penelope's determination to not bite down on the bitch's thumb.
	Instead, she kept sucking on the offending digit, furious that they had found yet another way to keep her busy.
	It didn't happen with this client, but occasionally a woman would have dirt on her fingers or beneath her nails, and they expected her to swallow it. And if she didn't show enough enthusiasm, a particularly mean client might dip her fingertips in the tray of ludicrously spicy chili oil before lowering them down for her to 'clean.' Then while poor Penelope's eyes watered and her throat burned from this punishment, the wealthy brown women would have a nice conversation about their weekend plans – that or gossip about the people in their lives. The oil was probably designed to be bad: in addition to being spicy and bitter, it coated her tongue for an obnoxious amount of time. Then, when she drank her nutritional smoothie later, it gave it this sharp alkaline flavor that turned eating into yet another torment.
	She observed that the Arabic women never used this oil to season their own food, it was so unpalatable. It existed purely as a means of punishing the white girls. And if a customer was particularly mad at her white servant, she could even pass down the entire dish of oil for her to drink beneath their stern gaze. Naturally, they expected the poor girl to show the right amount of contrition as she did this: apologizing profusely before she gulped down the burning oil and then thanking her mistress for correcting her attitude.
	Penelope had a new co-worker with her beneath the table that day, being that the turnover at this restaurant was pretty high. A few of the women literally couldn't handle how spicy the new chili oil was and when they proved incapable of working here, they were out of the job. She still got angry thinking about that day a while back when the white women, with tears in their eyes, were berated by the cafe's owner for failing at their job. And because they were unemployed, they were immediately scooped up by some of the wealthier patrons of the cafe who wanted domestics.
	"We will get you used to the oil," a condescending, fat Middle Eastern woman had said to her new live-in servant,
	"Go get a two liter container of it from the kitchen, and you bring it home with us."
	With a pitiable expression, the white girl went to retrieve a half-gallon bottle of the oil and carried it out of the cafe, following a few steps behind her new boss who looked very pleased at her acquisition.
	Although Karima, the owner of the restaurant, was angry to lose employees this way, there wasn't much she could do. She couldn't afford to deny her Arabic clientele the privilege of abusing white women in this new, trendy way – it would be bad for her business. It was for this same reason that Karima couldn't spare the time to 'train' this woman to tolerate the oil herself, because it would reflect poorly on her in the meantime that some of her employees wasn't up to par. She was only partially consoled by the fact that she would make money by selling the white girl's labor contract, which she could presumably use to hire someone else.
	As Penelope sucked on her customer's index finger, the woman laughed obnoxiously loud at some comment her friend had made.
	'What sort of job do they have, that they can afford to spend two hours getting lunch in the middle of a work day?' Penelope wondered.
	Meanwhile, she and the rest of the white girls were kneeling on the restaurant floor, beneath the tables, doing humiliating drudgery. All of a sudden, the woman pulled her finger out of Penelope's mouth which she was grateful for, until she saw why. A couple of Councilwomen had come in – she knew them by their green military uniforms. The place got noticeably quieter, and Penelope's customer stopped using her mouth to clean her hands, instead choosing to wipe them on a napkin as she could have done all along.
	Karima immediately went to greet the two officers, and Penelope couldn't help but notice how fat she was compared to the two Chinese ladies.
	"Ah, welcome! You have a seat, I bring you my best kebab."
	"Are you Karima Abdi?"
	"Yes."
	"Our records indicate that you owe back taxes. Your stated income is lower than our calculations. This is a serious issue."
	"I'm sorry," Karima replied, "It must be my accountant—"
	But the Councilwomen didn't care. They walked through her restaurant, surveying it. Occasionally, they would glance beneath a table and Penelope was terrified they would discover her. They were getting closer.
	"How many gweilos do you have, working here?"
	"A-about ten, madam."
	Penelope could only see the Councilwomen from the hip down, being that she was beneath the table. But one of them had stopped right next to her – she had never been more afraid in her life. That, was, until:
	"We will be taking one with us to settle this... Hey!"
	The Councilwoman cried out in a fierce tone, and judging by the fact that her stilettos were pointed towards her, they were addressing Penelope and her co-worker. The woman even banged her first on top of their table a couple of times, to emphasize who they were talking to.
	"Come out from there, now! We need one of you to come with us."
	And that was when Penelope did one of the ugliest things she had ever thought of.
	She took a brief look at her co-worker: a brunette in her 20s with big doe eyes, and shoved her from out beneath the table, so that the Councilwomen would take her instead. The girl landed sprawled at the Chinese women's feet, and immediately stood up to bow to her new mistresses. During all of this, Penelope was hyperventilating – she silently begged, 'please don't let them look down here. Please! Please!'
	The only people who witnessed Penelope's cowardly act were the other white women kneeling beneath their own tables -- and they looked more relieved than anything, that they hadn't been picked. How could the Councilwomen make such a big decision in such an arbitrary manner? Did they have such low esteem of the white women, that it literally didn't matter who they abducted and pressed into servitude? Karima spoke with the Councilwomen for a only a short while longer – and only to settle the logistics so they could take this white girl with them. Her name was Emily.
	'I'm sorry. I'm so sorry!' Penelope thought, now that the fear was fading away and the shame was coming on.
	She dared a glance at some of the other white girls who had watched this scene unfold. They didn't seem to judge her for it, but this was only a cold comfort. Penelope wanted desperately to believe that she had made the right decision: after all, she was facing a life in prison whereas Emily was only facing a job change.
	When the Councilwomen had departed, Penelope was awash in guilt and humiliation for her own unprompted actions. To twist the knife even further, her Arabic client again lowered her hand beneath the table, indicating that Penelope should begin where she left off. With flushed cheeks, Penelope leaned forward to take the woman's fat middle finger in her mouth and began sucking it with mock enthusiasm. As she did this, she reflected on one of the meaner stereotypes they had of white women here. It went something like, "they have no loyalty among themselves. They'd sell each other out to stay comfortable."
	And for all that, Penelope wasn't even comfortable! With Emily gone, she had to clean both women's hands, alternating between them in an utter show of submission. She was the only girl working a table all by herself that day, and she was ashamed to think that it was because her co-workers considered her a traitor that would throw them in harm's way to save herself.
	'Would I have done the same thing if I knew Emily was a Daughter?" Penelope asked herself, but she couldn't bear to answer the question honestly.