China World, Chapter 3

	Penelope was comforted by the way Council women gave her water to drink and allowed her to brush her teeth after she threw up. It only reflected their own self-interest; they knew a servant girl functioned at her best when she was healthy. Riddled with neurosis and anxiety, sure, but physically healthy. Her nausea was gone, but the headache and fatigue kept up. One woman asked if she was bulimic but not in a way like she was offering help.
	After Penelope got done in the bathroom, they led her to a room that almost made her laugh out loud. It was designed like a schoolhouse from the 1920s! Hard-backed wooden desks were bolted to the floor in orderly rows, and Penelope was instructed to sit at one towards the front. The room had quite a few women sitting at these desks; and it was absolutely absurd to see adult women occupying desks that were clearly meant for students a century ago. Each of these penitent women had a stern expression on her face. They each had their hands clasped together in front of them, resting on the desk in a supplicating gesture.
	Right away, Penelope found the desk painful. The seat was little more the width of a two by four board, with sharp edges that bit into her legs. Every edge of the desk was sharp and it defied any effort of hers to get more comfortable. No talking was permitted; the women sat in uncomfortable silence waiting for a teacher to arrive. Many of them squirmed in their chairs, but as soon as the schoolteacher arrived they sat bolt-upright and didn't move a centimeter. Was this seriously the Council's punishment? Did they have so little regard for white women that they would subject them to detention?
	"You are here because you have committed a crime against the Council," the woman said.
	She was a plain-looking Vietnamese woman with a thick accent. She had on a white blouse and a back skirt that went past her knees, and her hair was pulled into a ponytail.
	"This can take many forms: maybe you were late too many times, or you were found to have a bad attitude towards your superiors. It doesn't matter, really. I am here to show you the Council's mercy... That we will correct your behavior before you are sent to beg on the streets for someone to take care of you. Or worse, sentenced to jail."
	None of the women responded.
	"I had a girl once who didn't take this seriously. You know what happened to her? She got adopted by a terrible lady. This lady, make her clean her shoes using just her tongue! Big, fat lady too – really bad smelling feet. All her friends were fat too, and they make her do the same for them!"
	The teacher pantomimed that she was licking a pair of shoes with a ridiculous expression on her face and several of the women in the class laughed. Apparently this was alright with the teacher, who was being really over-the-top.
	"We joke, but it's kind of serious... You don't want to have a low rating. If it gets too bad, they'll kick you out of New Beijing. You spend one summer in Feng Kong, you'll do anything to come back here! You'll take that fat lady's shoe right out of the girl's hands!"
	She pretended to lick an imaginary shoe again, acting like she had just stolen it from another woman's hands first. Penelope even laughed this time.
	"So let's get started with the Five Principles."
	 With a piece of chalk, the woman wrote out the five guidelines that white women were expected to live by.
	Taken together, they created two distinct racial groups: white and yellow. Yellowness was associated with beauty, truth, and success. All virtues belonged firmly in the domain of the Chinese woman (and man, but in a different way). The yellow woman was burdened with sharing these virtues with the white woman, but this was difficult because whites were so prone to moral weakness. 'Katie' was a nickname for a white girl, but it was also created a specific conception of whiteness. 'Katie didn't get the stains out of my skirt... again!' 'Katie over there, drunk and throwing dice against the wall! Why do they do that?'
	Whiteness was associated with ignorance, laziness, and every manner of poverty. It was bad to such a degree that it justified the most stringent 'intervention.' Functionally, this meant that the Chinese woman controlled the white woman's life by giving her an endless amount of busy work. Through working, she would elevate her consciousness – as though by massaging a woman's feet, a white girl would become a better person! The social etiquette of guanxi was there as well, to create a system that helped over-police their behaviors. Even if the white woman failed to elevate herself (which she never did), she had performed an important act of service to the help make the yellow woman's life easier.
	'Katie better not be making more money than I do.'
	To all the other women in the schoolroom, this was quotidian stuff. They had heard about the five principles since birth. They were treated this way for so long, they had internalized it. They fully believed that they were meant to act as beasts of burden, and pleasure servants for each and every Chinese woman or woman of color. The yellow woman was too important to dirty her hands on lowly tasks; she was nearer to Paradise and the mental spheres. It was the white woman's job, who was nearer to Earth (which also translated as 'dirt'), to perform tasks such as massaging hands and cleaning toilets.
	Penelope thought of how many times this doctrine was reinforced in the minds of the white and yellow woman alike. It definitely served the interests of the ruling class: that the white woman was forever trapped in a diminished position where she was expected to work against her own interests. All this for the vague promise of salvation from her own accursed nature! It made it a virtue for a Chinese woman to exploit a white girl, and a crime for the white girl to have too much self-respect. This was the spiritual foundation of the New Kingdom; it laid the foundation for a legal and economic system that would manifest these values in the appropriate ways.
	"Okay so that's that," the teacher Miss Phuong said when she finished going over that lesson.
	She was an animate speaker, with an obvious passion for her job. She was probably the nicest nonwhite woman Penelope had dealt with so far.
	When they got to lunch time, Penelope was disappointed to see that they were just being given shakes at their desks. Miss Phuong, however, excused herself for a half-hour lunch break. Boredom set in as soon as Penelope drank her shake. None of the women were talking to each other, so she just mimicked them and sat up, eyes forward, hands folded neatly in front of her. It was maddening, in a way, being made to sit and do nothing.
	The teacher came back with a little of her leftovers and gave them to a random woman sitting in the front row. She started talking on a different subject, and gradually Penelope's anxiety went away. She figured that she had been dumped into this group of low-level offenders and they were just serving time right now. In any case, Miss Phuong did seem nice.
	She spoke of the history of the New Kingdom. She spoke of the armed struggle against mainland China, to achieve their independence and how the world deemed it impossible for the fledgling New Kingdom to win.
	"We taught the women to fight," Miss Phuong said, "that's how we did it. You white girls, you deserve credit for this too! Foreign soldiers would arrive at a town full of women, thinking they could just loot and fuck everything. But we knew the land. We set traps. We had rampaging animals and snipers. And we were a people united into a country."
	Penelope wondered if it could happen that quickly; a country could change identities as drastically as that, so long as it still had an underclass to exploit.
	"We had the edict of heaven. And we have it to this day. That's why it makes me sad to see so many of you girls here. We are trying to share the edict with you, the best way we can. When you refuse the gift, it hurts our shared purpose. That's what we mean when we say you have committed a crime against the council. When you talk back, or run late, or act ungracious you are undermining the Council's will and our ability to keep the edict."
	It was yet another metaphysical component, some spiritual law that would help to justify and guide all the other ones.
	"I'm going to leave off on that," Miss Phuong said. She switched gears, acting like this idea just occurred to her:
	"Let's do a tour of the jail, today. The class is small enough. Girls with green bracelets, follow me."
	Each of the women in the class had on a smartwatch since a person couldn't live without one. Each of their watches flashed a solid red color, except for six or so whose watched flashed green. Penelope was one of those girls, her watch display so bright green it hurt her eyes a little to stare at. She followed the lead of the other women, standing at attention to the side of her desk and then walking out of the room in a single file after Miss Phuong.
	To get to the prison, they had to walk through one part of the Council's Office.
	It was a pleasure palace! They had taken the 'open office space' idea and reduced it even further: this place was more like a day spa, or a lounge at an upscale resort. The councilmembers, who were all Asian women, worked wherever they pleased. One councilwoman was seated on a leather chair, sitting up with her eyes closed. There was a statuesque blonde woman standing behind her with a hairbrush that she was slowly, lovingly running through the Asian woman's long hair. The serious-faced blonde was very careful to be gentle in brushing out the knots, even massaging and tickling her mistress's scalp with the ivory-backed brush to make it more pleasant. She had to be careful; the Asian woman could spank her with that very same hairbrush if she didn't do a good enough job.
	Elsewhere, there was a pretty Thai girl reclining a divan. She had her feet outstretched so one white girl could massage them even though she hadn't taken her stockings off. Another white woman stood behind the petite girl and was massaging her neck, her shoulders, sometimes down to her chest. This really was ridiculous: the Thai girl wasn't working at all! She was even wearing a black sleeping mask that contoured to her face in an attractive way.
	Before she could see much else, they got into an elevator and went downstairs.
	It was a jail, or more like an asylum. The first door they passed looked like it belonged on a bank vault or in a blast chamber. Miss Phuong directed their attention to a window in the hallway they were walking down, and all the girls crowded around.
	Several dozen feet below them, looked like an enormous spin studio! There were compact exercise bikes in rows, many of which were occupied by white women. The bikes were set on a fast pace; not one of the women wasn't sweating and breathing heavily as they peddled. Up and down the aisles walked prison guards; severe-looking Chinese women in green Council uniforms. Wherever the guards went, women started cycling harder. The guards all seemed to carry long metallic wands with scepter heads.
	"This is one of the physical exercises you do in jail," Miss Phuong explained.
	"The hard part is: that every day, they want you to do better than the day before. So, you can't really slack off. Ever. And they're really strict about it, they know as soon as you are off-trajectory to do better than yesterday. It notifies them automatically, and then they have to do something about it. Watch."
	Penelope remembered spin studios in her own world, where women would pay $30 or more to get on a fake bicycle like these and do a fun group exercise. This was something totally different; none of these women looked like they were having fun. Dressed in minimal orange workout clothes, they looked exhausted and afraid – always staring at the screen to make sure they weren't falling behind.
	One girl stood out because she looked like she was struggling. She was a large woman, tall and thick. Her blonde hair was a mess, frizzed out and she was coated in perspiration. The redness was so obvious on her white skin that Penelope noticed it, as far away as she was. Soon, the thick woman's screen in front of her bike flashed a red warning, and one of the guards came over to her.
	The unsmiling guard brandished her scepter-wand device. Its tip glowed with a sustained electric arc, but that was pink in color. Penelope was horrified: was she going to deliver an electrical shock to this poor woman?
	"Faster!" the Chinese woman yelled, prodding her scepter into the blonde woman's exposed lower back. The blonde woman's entire body jumped up like she had been zapped, but she was laughing uncontrollably.
	"Hahahaha! Ok! I'm sorry!" the Midwestern-looking girl called out. But the guard just prodded her again.
	She burst into a fit of laughter, and had to grip the handles of her bike very hard to endure it. The way she jerked her legs away from the guard, to no effect, made Penelope think that her shoes might be locked into the bicycle. Wasn't that how the shoes worked in Penelope's spin class? After the third jolt, it became obvious that the Chinese woman was tickling the white girl, not shocking her. It wasn't much comfort.
	"We used to use electric shocks, but then we discovered this tickling idea. Would you believe it actually works 22% better than electric shocks? It uses less electricity too: a battery on this thing can do days of sustained use."
	Sure enough, the heavy white woman was peddling much harder now, desperately watching her own improvement in the screen in front of her bike. The guard stood behind her, watching, letting the scepter run idly so it kept making that electrical noise. 'That woman is going to have a hard time beating her score tomorrow,' Penelope thought.
	They continued down the hallway, and looked out a window on the opposite side.
	It was a large garment factory staffed entirely by white prisoners. Some women were sewing, others were doing leather work, some were practicing how to make alterations, apparently. Penelope thought she heard an outburst of laughter from the bike room, but maybe she was imagining it.
	"Here is where women can do career education to become seamstresses or re-upholsterers. We also give classes in dry cleaning."
	Down the hallway, there was a stairwell that lead to the smaller classrooms, each with a large widow facing in. The prison had a very high occupancy rate.
	They came across a classroom that looked very nice: it was a sort of massage parlor, with about eight massage tables, each occupied. What impressed Penelope was that several of the women receiving massages were white, not Chinese! Obviously, the jailers got the best treatment; the two who were in there right now each had two women working on them. But Penelope was totally jealous of the women who just got to lie there and get massages.
	"This is the unit everyone wants to land," Miss Phuong said, obviously seeing the girls happy expressions. One of the white prisoners was getting a hot stone massage that looked wonderful.
	"They only take the best, though."
	She got a vicarious joy to see women much at ease. She wanted to stay and watch, imagining herself in there, but Miss Phuong continued the tour. They walked by a room where girls were administering foot massages to each other – apparently this was a different enough skill to warrant a separate class. In another room, the prisoners were gathered in a rough circle, standing on top of a wrestling mat.
	"Oh, sock wrestling! Wait here, I want to see who wins," Miss Phuong said, watching the game unfold.
	Two girls stood across the mat from each other, wearing workout shorts and athletic bras. One of them had the clear advantage: she was half a foot taller than her opponent and had tied her red hair into a ponytail while her opponent's dark hair was wild and untamed. They lunged at each other and started wrestling, each one going for the lower leg of her opponent. The crowd was cheering, especially when the red-haired woman tickled her opponent when the girl head nearly reached down the woman's ankle.
	Without mercy, the red-haired woman body slammed the brunette onto the mat. While she was stunned, she locked one arm around the girl's leg and quickly snatched off the little white ankle sock she wore on her left foot. Now the brunette woman was looking angry, she was scowling as she opened her mouth and allowed the red-haired woman to stuff her own sock in there! Miss Phuong explained they were playing a variant of the game where these were the stakes. Even more demeaning, the red-haired woman put her hand on the girl's jaw, signalling her to close her mouth.
	Now the brunette was at a clear disadvantage because she couldn't breathe through her mouth as well. She fought valiantly for a while, but got taken down with some kind of judo move and had her other sock taken from her. Her bare feet and pink soles looked very exposed, and her body language immediately shifted in response to her defeat. The red haired woman made her kneel this time, stuffing her other sock in her mouth. This made the brunette blush furiously, and she gave a baleful look to the woman who had just defeated her. But the red-haired woman was only smirking.
	"Sometimes prisoners make side bets over games like this. Piercings are a common bet – usually in the ears."
	Penelope looked to see that the brunette girl had three piercings in the top of her ear. The red-haired woman had none.
	"Once I heard that a woman agreed to get her tongue pierced, if she lost!"
	Another room reminded Penelope of the classroom she had just come from. The desks did, at least. But this one was different in that the women had on virtual reality headsets and large noise-cancelling headphones. It had an altogether sinister appearance; those screens were too sleek, and they took up the entirety of a woman's vision. These women sat with their hands clasped together on top of their desks, except they had small handcuffs on their wrists which also locked them to the table. Looking down, Penelope saw that their ankles were bound together by some kind of fabric looped over itself again and again. Similar bands went around their knees and their thighs, effectively locking them in one position.
	"This is four hours a day, you'd spend doing this, if you misbehave down here."
	 The teacher let them watch it for a reasonable length of time. What happened to those women at the end of class? The technology looked very strange, and pernicious. She was thankful when they left, but it left a bad impression on her. What sort of budget did this place have? Was this the place they perfected the mind control techniques that let them keep control of the world? They walked into the dining hall, which had many long tables but only stools to sit at, where everything was attached to the floor.
	All the prisoners were barefoot, Penelope noticed, while the guards strutted around in high heels that she thought were totally impractical for the job of a prison guard. But the prisoners were controlled by other means, and controlled so well that a Balinese woman weighing no more than 45 kilograms could manage a cell block of dozens of women. She could probably run the entire prison, actually, as long as the automated systems and biometric defenses stayed online.
	Interestingly, many of the women had pedicures, and there was a large selection of colors to choose from for their polish. The women were talking in cliques, careful not to huddle too close together. Some of them looked towards Penelope and her classmates, some just seemed to be marking time.They only had the pink sludge to eat, of course. That and leftovers from the food that the guards would bring into the jail. She noticed that some women didn't sit on furniture, but on the floor. These women seemed to be lowly-regarded by the prisoners; they were often acting as footrests or providing foot massages. They had a lot more piercings than the general population.
	Miss Phuong took the students across the room to another elevator going down, and Penelope was seized with this awful feeling. Like if they wanted to keep her down here, she would truly have no way to escape. This level was quieter. A guard looked at them impassively as they walked by another blast door. The guard was obviously just messing around on the Internet, but it was considered rude for a white girl to look at an Asian woman's screen so Penelope didn't look but for a glance.
	They were in a windowless hallway, and the doors on this level were much closer together. Their teacher stopped at no door in particular, opening a small hatch at her eye level. It let the girls look into the room, which was a padded jail cell that had four women occupying it. They each wore a vicious-looking straitjacket that pinned their arms tightly in front of them, locking them in place. Each woman was blindfolded, and two of them had on strange masks covering the bottoms of their faces, from the nose down. It reminded Penelope of the masks a person would wear to filter out dust or pollution, but these ones looked to be sturdier and have mechanical components.
	"These are the girls who just couldn't get in line with the Council's will," Miss Phuong said. There was a trace of sympathy in her voice; Penelope was horrified.
	"This isn't even the worst case, but it's bad. As you can see. They are sentenced to long-term sensory deprivation while under severe restraints. The cells get smaller and smaller. This is actually a big one. But if we kept going, you'd find the worst offenders trapped in the smallest cells. Curled up, in the darkness, alone."
	Looking at the women more closely, Penelope noticed something. Each woman's hair was perfectly styled, like she had just gotten an expensive blowout. One of them had a platinum blonde to black ombre that spilled down her body in loose waves. Another was a brunette with a playful bob cut, perfectly layered and frozen in perfection because of how little she could move. One woman had auburn hair in a beautiful, wild rings that made Penelope think of a princess of Ireland. Their legs were left mostly exposed, and there wasn't a trace of body hair.
	This was a truly odd thing: each of the prisoners had a fresh pedicure, with their toes all done in the same fuscia-red color. Penelope thought that they were treating these women like dolls; keeping them perfectly coiffed and pampered while trapping them away down in this asylum. They probably had on makeup, too. Miss Phuong shut the door after all the students had gotten a look.
	"Let's go back up to the classroom. I need to bring the next group of students through."
	Penelope breathed a sigh of relief to be getting away from that strange place. It made sense why the prisoners stayed in line, when there was this threat beneath them all the time. Back in the classroom, Penelope found her seat and Miss Phuong gathered the next group of students to tour the jail facility.
	"Girls with the green bracelets, follow me. If you were in the last group, you can leave now. You are dismissed."
	Penelope could almost laugh for joy – it wasn't even 2pm yet! This was practically a day off for her! The other students knew when to quietly and graciously disappear, and everyone hurried out of the building. On the steps down, they started talking.
	"Miss Phuong is so nice. I got her a gift for Christmas!"
	"She always lets us out early."
	"Way better than Miss Poon."
	One of the women had the idea to go to a bar and she invited everyone there. There were none nearby that would serve white women – Albion was the nearest one and it was several kilometers away. Some of the girls demurred at this point.
	"What about you, you want to come?" the girl organizing it asked Penelope. She had a pale complexion, dark hair and blue eyes.
	"Yeah, sure." Penelope said.
	She needed to find that Di Columbus restaurant. From there, she could find the tanning bed. But she couldn't ignore the voice in her head telling that the Council had seized it already. Of course they would have, in a totalitarian regime like this. Niko mentioned something about tunnels – were those part of an organized resistance?
	"Great! I'm Hannah," they shook hands, and were joined by a third woman Candace.
	On the way over, they found out they were all manicurists, although Penelope told them that she was being re-assigned to a foot massage place.
	She didn't like the looks Hannah and Candace both gave her.
	"They say that women in New Beijing walk more than ten thousand steps each day, and practically everyone wears high heels," Hannah said.
	She invited Penelope to look around. Sure enough, practically all of the Asian women on the bus wore high heels. There were pedestrians too numerous to count, mostly Asian professionals, wearing expensive stilettos and carrying smart briefcases or laptops. Except for the ones in workout clothes, most women's outfits included high heels in that city.
	"And the price is so low!" Hannah continued,
	"Depending on the spot, some women treat it like a public lounge. They'll stay there all day, acting like they own the place. I worked in a foot massage parlor, last winter. Every seat was full and they all wanted half-hour massages, like five days a week! They had these sun lamps, to help drive business. Very successful idea. I thought my hands would wear down to bones!"
	Candace laughed at this – she was an elfin woman built like a gymnast; chestnut hair and muscular legs but very petite. Penelope laughed too, despite her misgivings over her future job. They changed the subject and Penelope couldn't stop thinking about those women locked up beneath the Council headquarters. She wondered about what crime a person must commit to be locked up like that and she wondered what it said about this society, that they found it perfectly natural.