They took me to a small alley behind a street lined with Chinese restaurants. Waiting for us at the back door of a place called Shanghai Chinese Restaurant was Uncle Lou, the head chef. He took one look at me and shooed me inside. He called out someone’s name and told her to take me upstairs and get me showered and changed.
For the first couple of weeks I didn’t speak to anyone else who lived there. I ate all my meals alone in the prep room at the back of the kitchen. When the doors were locked at one a.m. and everyone else had gone home for the night, I was left behind to clean the kitchen and the front of the restaurant on my own. It usually took me until well after two a.m. to finish. Then I would cover the prep table in the back with a plastic sheet and sleep on top of it with only a single blanket.
Those were unbearable days. I never got more than a few hours of sleep all night, and I was on my feet working all day. My job in the prep room was to clean and chop the vegetables and wash and scrub the dirty dishes that never ever stopped coming. I would scrape off the leftover food, scrub the plates and bowls with dish soap and stack them neatly in the dryer, only to find more endless stacks making their way in. And when lunchtime ended, I had to clean the entire place front and back again, and get it ready for the dinner rush.
It was several months before I could manage simple conversations with the young employees who worked in the front, and finally saw the face of the man who had purchased me from the snakeheads.
The restaurant was closed for three days at Christmas when Uncle Lou showed up unexpectedly. He told me he was meeting someone there. He handed me a sandwich that had been pressed flat and grilled, and asked for the first time where I was from. I told him I was an ethnic Korean from China. Most of the people who worked there were from southern China, so as long as I said I was from the northeast, my accent wouldn’t arouse any suspicion. Lou told me he had come to London illegally from Hong Kong on his own over twenty years earlier. He’d stowed away on a ship like the rest of us. Then he let out a long sigh and shook his head.
“I could never do that again. Took me eleven years just to get a residence card.”
He asked about my smuggling debts. I had no idea how much had been paid before I left China, or how much still had to be paid.
“What kind of work did you do in China?”
“Foot massage. But I didn’t have a licence for it.”
“That licence would be useless to you here anyway.”
Uncle Lou told me there were others in the neighbourhood who employed people like me, people working to pay off their smuggling debts. He also said that the boss liked me. Based on what he’d seen of other people my age, my zest for life meant I’d have my debts paid off within a year or two of hard work.
“If I were you,” he added, “I’d find work at a foot massage shop. With tips, you’d be making a lot more per week.”
I shrank into myself and muttered in a small voice: “I don’t know if I’m allowed to change jobs as I please.”
“No, of course you’re not.” He looked determined. “As the boss is giving your wages directly to your creditors.”
That year, there were non-stop fireworks and firecrackers for a week all around London on account of the twentieth century coming to an end. Chinatown was relatively quiet, as everyone there observed Lunar New Year, but the restaurant was even busier than before with tourists and other out-of-town visitors. The quiet days returned after the first of January, and Uncle Lou started dropping by the prep room where I worked to have a smoke.
One day he said: “If things go well, you’ll be able to find a new place to work.” Uncle Lou had a Vietnamese neighbour who owned a nail salon. He had told her he would vouch for me, and suggested we visit the salon together when the restaurant was closed on Monday.
“You’re young and you work hard, so there’s hope for you, despite that stupid debt of yours. If you can make better wages, you’ll pay it off within a year.”
I bowed deeply to him in gratitude. I thought about Uncle Salamander that day for the first time in a long while. It was as if he’d followed me to London to watch over me. Tears poured out of me. It had been so long since I’d felt overcome with emotion that I thought I’d used up all my tears. Uncle Lou held out a freshly laundered napkin for me to wipe my eyes with.
“I left a daughter behind in China years ago. She must be about your age now.”
That Monday, I left Chinatown for the first time since arriving and took the London Underground with Uncle Lou. I was so afraid of losing him in the crowd that I clung to the hem of his shirt each time we got on and off the train. I learned later that the name of the station we were going to, and the neighbourhood it was in, was “Elephant and Castle”. We went out one of the exits, crossed several streets in front of the plaza and arrived at the Tongking Nail Salon. Like the restaurant we worked at, it appeared to be open all week except Mondays. My life had been limited to Chinatown, where almost everyone was East Asian and resembled each other; there was the occasional white tourist, but they were just passing through. But as I walked around Elephant and Castle, I saw all kinds and colours of people. I saw yellow faces, brown faces, black faces and occasionally a few white faces — but they weren’t British; they blended in well enough, but were actually construction workers from Poland and the Czech Republic. Everyone else was a person of colour, like us.
Uncle Lou tapped on the glass door of the empty nail salon. A man who’d been reading a newspaper in one of the massage chairs looked up, smiled and came over to unlatch the door. He was small and wiry, wore a white gown over his clothes and looked Vietnamese. He and Uncle Lou spoke English to each other. I could tell from the way Lou gestured and glanced back at me that he was making an introduction, so I bowed and greeted the man. This was Uncle Tan, the owner of the salon.
“Let’s show him what you can do,” Uncle Lou said.
Uncle Tan placed a stool in front of the chair and set his feet on it. I offered to start by washing his feet first, but Lou replied that Uncle Tan only needed a preview.
I squatted down before Tan’s thin, bony feet and closed my eyes for a moment. The paths he had walked came to me faintly at first, but then they stood out clearly and began to move past, scene by scene. A cement wall collapsed, and a horde of people surged through the break. I spotted Tan amid the crowd, dressed in a black leather jacket. Then I saw him crossing hills and fields in another country, then taking a boat down a canal.
“Kid, what’re you doing?” Lou asked. “Why haven’t you started yet?”
I opened my eyes.
“This man came from a place with a broken wall. He climbed over a mountain and rode a boat.”
Uncle Lou translated, and their eyes widened.
“How do you know that?” Lou asked. “Tan was in East Germany when the wall came down. Then he crossed the border into the Netherlands, and lived in Amsterdam for several years.”