China World, Chapter 7

	Her circumstances only got worse in New Tehran, starting with her job.
	One of the biggest problems was that New Tehran was obviously a poorer city than New Beijing. Levels of white poverty were about the same between the two, but the poorer mistresses were more demanding, less patient, and more likely to use their servants in 'illegal' ways such as putting them in strip clubs or seedy massage parlors. Penelope (who introduced herself as Heidi now) luckily escaped being put in such lurid establishments, but her job still wasn't much to celebrate.
	Here she was, crouched uncomfortably beneath a small tea table with a Persian woman's bare feet resting in her lap. Penelope had to contort her entire body and bow her head so that she could fit there, sharing the tiny space with another white girl. It was hardly big enough for one person – they had no choice but to rest their bodies against one other which made the heat all the worse. The stench of her client's feet were overpowering in that cramped little space; the Arabic women even had the nerve to leave their smelly flats down beneath the table, amplifying the pungent aroma that was Penelope's entire world.
	In addition to being the woman's foot masseuse, and foot rest, another part of their job was to clean the women's hands as they ate their food. The custom here was for people to eat food with their bare hands, which occasionally got messy. The solution for this was to have white girls sitting nearby so that they could lick the women's hands clean every so often, to prevent them from getting too dirty. So here Penelope sat, massaging this woman's feet as she ate a delicious lamb dish, waiting to be used. Whenever the fat Arabic woman presented her right hand beneath the table, Penelope had to lean forward and use her mouth to suck off every morsel of food and oil from the woman's fat fingers, licking her fingertips and her palms like she was the lowest sort of animal.
	If the humiliation of this weren't enough, it also rubbed it in her face how well the Arabic women lived compared to Penelope. As in New Beijing, she never enjoyed such dishes except for the small traces that she would eat from their dirty hands. A particularly rude client might wipe her hand on Penelope's clothes when she had finished 'cleaning' it – more than a few women even had the audacity to wipe their hands on Penelope's hair, her clothes, even her face afterwards. As angry as she got about this, she didn't dare speak out.
	She had seen how cruel the women were to 'farangs' who stood up for themselves.
	Penelope looked down at the woman's scuffed flats, which were quite old and bore deep, dark imprints of her feet. There wasn't much else to look at; just her client's thick calves, her chubby feet, and the legs of the various women who were working and patronizing the tea shop. The girls weren't allowed to talk to each other during work so although Penelope had sat right beside this girl for four hours now, she knew nothing about her.
	Penelope's stomach grumbled, which was a reminder of the other bad part of living in New Tehran: the hunger.
	People in this city were obsessively fixated on the physiques of all women, but particularly white women. Whereas Persian and Arabic women were deemed beautiful if they had full, buxom figures, white girls faced the opposite pressure. They were told to remain thin, often to the point of being clinically underweight. A white woman was considered 'pleasing' (never beautiful) if you could see the bones in her hands and her hips, and if her thighs didn't have a trace of fat. It required neurotic levels of attention to one's own weight; a neurosis that was socially encouraged to the point of being compulsory. Penelope stepped on the scale every morning and she was expected to report the figure to her employer.
	Her boss was a plump lady with pendulous breasts, who would demean her over gaining a half kilogram, often suggesting that she drink only three quarters of her nutritional shake. Penelope would then have to pour out that much of her meal in front of the domineering woman, to show that she was serious about being pretty. She always had a pathetic expression on her face as she watched it go down the drain; the almost constant pangs of hunger had a tremendously negative impact on her outlook. It felt like she was giving up some crucial part of her self-determination, silently reinforcing the idea that her body just existed to please her Persian mistresses and masters.
	Yes, men were allowed in New Tehran. The dynamic took Penelope a while to get used to, especially considering the fact that they usually treated her with the esteem they would show the lowliest of prostitutes. She felt like a hidden job was to act as a surrogate to absorb the abuse that the men probably wanted to direct at Middle Eastern woman but couldn't due to notions of 'propriety.' She swore some of the men got off on it, having the power to stop a helpless woman in the street, make some comment about her clothes, and insist on being told where she was going. It didn't help matters that white women were kept so frail, so waifish that they couldn't possibly stand up to an aggressive man. Did it feed their ego, to know they could overpower a woman so easily?
	The hunger made her feel lightheaded, loopy, out-of-sorts. And when the fat woman reached her hand beneath the table for Penelope to clean it, the girl was actually excited that a scrap of lamb meat was resting on her fingertip. It was her body betraying her – telling her that this demeaning 'gift' was something to be excited about. Regardless of her opinion, though, Penelope stuck out her tongue and lovingly took the woman's finger into her mouth, vigorously sucking and licking the oil from the offending digit. She had to flick her tongue all across the underside of the woman's finger multiple times, and finished by kissing the fingernail before moving onto the next one.
	The food must have been delicious; Penelope could taste the turmeric and cumin. But when she had finished licking the woman's palms, she was no less hungry before. If anything, her hunger was even worse. Like she had ramped up her digestion for no reason, and her stomach was knotting up in protest of yet another disappointment. Blonde Penelope continued massaging the woman's bare feet, tiring out her arms because the client was here for quite a long time.
	When she had finished eating, the woman leaned back in her comfy chair and rested one ankle on either of Penelope's shoulders. She put the full weight of her legs onto the unfortunate girl as she lounged with her friend, smoking cigarettes and chatting lazily as the food settled. It was physically demanding work to support the woman's thick legs, mostly because of the hunched position that Penelope was required to take. The woman wore a red kaftan that emphasized her voluptuous figure, showcasing the sort of paunchy waist and large thighs that men went crazy for here. Meanwhile, Penelope had lost six pounds since being here and she was a thin girl to begin with.
	The customer would absentmindedly play with Penelope's hair by grabbing it between her toes and flossing it between them. It made goosebumps stand up on her neck, but she tried not to cringe in such a way that the woman would detect it.
	"Sarah," Penelope fumed, cursing the red-haired woman with all her heart.
	"It's because of her that I'm a fugitive. I covered her shifts, and how does she thank me? By forcing me out of my home, without any money, to help with our 'liberation.' But all I do is worship fat Middle Eastern women's feet, and they're even worse than the Asians were!"
	Her thoughts went on like this. Being hungry played in to how upset she was about everything, like it sharpened every barb that the world thew at her. After an uncomfortably long time – Penelope's lower back was aching – the women finally left. But they were replaced by others, who expected the same sort of treatment while they lunched.
	It was expected for a white girl to do that sort of labor here. In this culture, women were not expected to wear hijabs – that interpretation of the holy teachings didn't stick in this world. The interfaith dialogue had fundamentally changed when masses of Christians, Catholics and Protestants perished from the White Plague. Their belief systems were relegated to so many unmarked graves over which Chinese women built their homes and were served tea by the surviving Caucasians who, being destitute, had to accept whatever mandate came from the mouths of their social betters. A portion of the submission that a white woman owed a Chinese person was allotted to Middle Easterners as well, although the specific things they placed importance on were quite different.
	It was written of the white woman, "Paradise lies at the feet of her mistress." Some even believed that the white woman's spirit followed her mistress into Paradise, but only to continue pampering her and doting on her for eternity – this was seen as a reward for a good life. 'Humility,' that was the bedrock behavioral principle for white women living in New Tehran, even if that humility was matched by ostentatious demands from an opulent ruling class.
	Through the piles of ankle socks, Penelope could see another young woman fast asleep nearby. She was close enough that her gentle breathing was audible, and she had a pained expression on her face as she slept. It looked like she was having a dream where she had broken a priceless dish, and someone was berating her about being carelessness. Occasionally, the girl would flinch like she had been hit – this is what made Penelope notice her in the first place.
	"Is this the only life she can know? Does she even have the capacity to imagine something better, a life that isn't just perpetual exploitation?" Penelope thought as she looked at the the petite woman's body, which was only covered with a white blanket thin enough it might have been made of gauze. All of the woman's muscles were strained, showing a great amount of physical stress. Looking at it closely, her sleep didn't look very restful.
	Seeing people treated this way was offensive to Penelope because it was such an affront to the values she had been raised with, the ones about prosperity and opportunity and equal treatment before the law. Here in the New Kingdom, she would never 'succeed.' No amount of weight loss, no level of debasement, no act of service would ever guarantee her safety, comfort, or material success. Regardless of how well she tended to a woman's feet, she would have to do another, and another. Not only did she have to show complete enthusiasm, but it was also compulsory to think of new and additional ways of serving the citizens of New Tehran; A rule obviously set up to prevent the white woman from falling into complacency or thinking she had done 'enough.' Her work would only grow with the demands of her mistress, it would never lessen. She was trapped in an entire city full of plump, needy women who wanted nothing more than to kick off their flats and have a white girl massage their sweaty feet while they sipped chai tea and mocked her in a language she wasn't even allowed to speak. Worse, because there were fewer white girls relative to the population here, they were put to work that much harder.
	It might even be a status symbol for a Middle Eastern woman to have a white servant here; she hadn't seen enough to know.
	What Penelope did know was that while she could not expect a reward for doing well, she would absolutely be punished for under-performing. Even the perception of of 'slacking off' was enough to warrant a slap to her face, or to her backside. Her new roommates spoke casually of the abuse they suffered: "Oh, Minu hit me with the back of her hairbrush because I took too long washing her slippers," and "It took me a week to sit down, she went so hard!" Their tone was casual, without any sort of disdain.
	Conversations weren't very common here, though. So many people were trying to sleep that it felt rude to talk too much, and there was about the same stigma against talking that she might expect in a library. The commensalism of this place; the way that everyone treated it like a quiet place to flop, saddened Penelope. Like it was more like a dormitory or a slave's quarters than it was an apartment. They kept their clothing in piles and on garment racks scattered about the place, which people used for makeshift walls. It gave her feelings of impermanence and destitution.
	She couldn't even keep track of all the people living in the apartment, and she didn't know if women had arrived or left, she interacted with them so briefly. Their 'living room' was filled with sleeping rolls, with women using them in shifts. All Penelope had seen were attractive young women, mostly underweight, like a house full of models who needed a lot of beauty sleep. When Penelope left for work that morning there was a beautiful young woman with long, curly blonde hair asleep on the sofa from her night shift. When Penelope got back tonight there was a different girl there. This time it was a petite woman with her chestnut hair up in a bun, sweating a little bit from the heat. It wasn't even a full sofa; everyone who slept there had to curl up so they could fit, and the taller women seemed to ignore it altogether.
	"They could easily be slipping drugs into our nutrition shakes here – these women sleep all the time. At least, the few hours they aren't working!" Penelope thought to herself as she got home that night.
	She was feeling sleepy, herself. Most of the lights were off, making it difficult to see all the women she had to step over to, looking for a vacant bed.
	"I haven't met with one person from this revolutionary group. It looks like they just stuck me here, where there are fewer Council members walking around. Won't they notice that I disappeared from work, when it was the Council that ordered me there in the first place? Will this give Niko more evidence in her suspicion against me? I wonder what they did with her.."
	The aroma of so many women living in such close proximity was something to behold. It was almost unreal for Penelope to find herself in these circumstances. Here she was, living 8 to a room, and her biggest concern wasn't the moral outrage of it; she was just concerned about finding one of the nicer bed rolls. One that wouldn't further aggravate her already sore back. The only bed she could find had piles of women's socks around where she had to rest her face, the aroma of which was so bothersome that she wanted to move. But maybe that was the reason this bed was open, because she couldn't see anywhere else to sleep that wasn't taken. She rolled her eyes and wondered why the women would do something so strange as to leave their socks in one communal pile. And were they just constantly re-wearing these socks, too? Having them pass from girl to girl without even washing them except for every once in a while? Which of them ever had energy to do that chore, after coming home from doing hard domestic for 12 hours already on top of a 2 hour commute each way!
	Her smartwatch automatically set an alarm for the next day. New Tehran was exhausting her. The city obviously had less money than New Beijing. If that meant that the Middle Eastern women lived a little worse, it meant that the white women lived in significantly worse conditions. The city was significantly dirtier than New Beijing, with litter and graffiti problems that made Penelope think there were serious holes in its surveillance network. But as long as the Arabic population had white girls to whip and press into servitude, it helped them them to make peace with the fact that they weren't doing so well as the Chinese here. Penelope didn't know a lot about this world yet, but she knew it wasn't a coincidence that even here in this city, 95% of council members were of Asian heritage.
	She went to sleep early, annoyed by the fact that at this moment, wealthier women were having nights on the town and exciting life experiences while she was too exhausted and too poor to do such things. All Penelope could do was rest, so that she could better serve the Arabic women the next day when they came in for coffee and leisurely foot massages. She hoped she wouldn't dream that she was at her place of work again tonight.