“It’s okay. If he wanted you dead, you’d be gone by now. I‘ll think of something, but I can’t get you out tonight. I’ll talk to some of the girls and see if they can help.”
“Make it quick.”
“What about Peter?” Shi Shi asked. “He will come looking for you sooner or later.”
“I hope so.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow or the next day. As soon as I can get out without getting caught.”
“Hurry.”
“Take care.”
Shi Shi kissed Wei Ling’s hand as Wei Ling caressed her face with her fingertips. The meeting through the window ended suddenly, the crate supporting Shi Shi’s small frame creaking once before giving way with a violent crash. Shi Shi’s arm was ripped out of the window and a muffled cry slipped out.
“Shi Shi?” Wei Ling repeated several times with no reply. She stretched to shut the window, her flesh cutting against the handcuff. Wei Ling sat down on the bed and continued to cry.
Hopeful tears combined with hopeless ones. ***
Shi Shi’s weight crashing through the crate brought the night guards out of their poker shed, whiskey and beer bottles in hand. Not detectives to begin with, their observation skills were further numbed by alcohol, their ambition robbed by greed and the chance to take money from each other through five card stud, deuces wild.
Shi Shi hid behind the building that housed the sweatshop floor and waited for the three guards to finish their half-hearted search of the back of the facility. When the cussing started again in the shed, Shi Shi limped across the small patch of wet ground to the seamstresses’ quarters and opened the door.
She limped down the hall, blood and mud trailing behind her. Her ankle was already starting to swell, a faint blue ring forming around the outside of the bone. She grimaced when she walked, the pain telling her something was broken.
Her roommates heard Shi Shi before she reached the room—the panting sound of the injured girl dragging one leg behind her. “Shi Shi!” her roommates said, turning on the small light next to the door.
“Shhhhhhhh, the guards are outside,” Shi Shi responded, flopping her butt onto the mattress of the lower bunk bed. Blood ran down her leg from her knee to her foot, a deep gash that everyone agreed would need stitches.
The roommates, dressed in light shorts and t-shirts as sleeping apparel, hurriedly tended to the wound with soap, water, and a stream of small Band-Aids. It was all they had.
“Did you find Wei Ling?”
“Yes. She’s in the storage room of the infirmary. They have her chained to a bed. She’s pregnant.”
Curses flew out in Chinese, English, and Thai.
“She’s in serious trouble. Lee Chang keeps telling her the doctor is coming and that they will take her to the hospital to get an abortion. But we know the doctor is dead.”
Shi Shi told the girls what she knew. It was a story no one wanted to hear. It could have just as easily been one of them. They had all been used as a tool to drum up business for Chang Industries. They would have to help her. She was family. And she would do it for any of them. ***
Lee Chang took his morning walk around the grounds with a cup of black tea. He spot-checked the fence out of habit, looking for holes or places where the fence had been pulled back. No one had tried to break into Chang Industries since a group of thieves had stolen a shipment of silk nearly two years earlier. The police were subsequently put on the payroll, and patrols of the road leading to Chang Industries increased enough to thwart any further crime from outsiders. He walked behind the building, checked the security of the sheds, and headed toward the sweatshop floor to see if everyone was in place. Heading back to his apartment for his morning shower, Lee Chang passed the broken crate under the window. He took two steps before the green-trimmed sandal registered in his mind. He set his cup of tea on the top of an empty blue plastic barrel and reached into the broken remains of the crate. He looked up at the window to the storage room and his heart skipped a beat. He slapped the bottom of the sandal against the palm of his open hand. “Son of a bitch.” He looked at the sandal closely, knocked off some dirt, and squinted at the faded Chinese characters. Lee Chang read the characters to himself, and then aloud with one addition, “Shi Shi fucking Wong.”
Shi Shi had her head down, sewing through her fifth jacket in the bottom half of the hour. A breakneck pace. Beneath her sweatpants, her leg was swollen, her cuts bleeding into the tissue that encased the lower leg like a soft-sided cast. She ignored her leg as best she could, putting the energy from the pain into her work. She thought about herself and then thought about Wei Ling.
She never saw the baton or the hand holding it. Lee Chang dragged her from her seat by her hair, Shi Shi’s screams bringing the work floor to a halt. When Shi Shi found her feet, Lee Chang punched her in the face until she lost her balance. It was the vicious beginning to a permanent vacation.
Chapter 8
The ladies packed into the bathroom, the only forum in the seamstresses’s living quarters large enough for a mass audience. The barracks-style living quarters were a squat two stories—twelve rooms on each floor, four girls in each room. With girls standing in the showers and draped on the sinks, most of the seamstresses were present and accounted for. Wei Ling and Shi Shi Wong’s roommates, twin sisters from Thailand with unpronounceable names, laid out their plan and asked for volunteers. The punishment for being caught was going to be severe. Physical abuse, fines they couldn’t afford to pay, and the continued suspension of privileges that began when Wei Ling moved into the infirmary.
The women nodded. They understood.
The girls returned to their rooms and began quietly and methodically looking through their belongings for anything made of paper. The writing tablets were first to go, followed by napkins, paper towels, torn pieces of tissue boxes. Nothing was considered too outrageous and nothing was turned down. Old letters from family members, envelopes, the borders from old newspapers. They were all ripped into manageable pieces.
The girls stayed up all night. With cramping hands and watering eyes, they wrote identical sentences on every piece of paper. They shared the pens and the half dozen short golf pencils someone had brought back from a trip into town. Eyeliner worked well, and was in plentiful supply. They finished twenty minutes before the morning wake-up call, split the piles of paper among themselves, and waited for an opportunity. They didn’t have to wait long. ***
The emergency shipment of khaki shorts was nothing short of a catalogue order from God. The summer fashion season was in full swing and the popularity of the knee-length, double-pocket, Army-drab-green shorts was a surprise hit at the Republic Outfitters. Every store on the East Coast was sold out and the backorders were growing at an outstanding rate. A rush order for twenty thousand pairs sent the busy sweatshop floor into a pace of delirium rarely seen. The fabric was scheduled to arrive the following morning and the ladies were told to prepare for serious work. They had two days to complete the order. Twenty thousand pairs of shorts. Ten thousand pairs a day. Sleep was optional, dictated by Lee Chang.
The smell of oiled machinery and the acrid stench of dye filled every corner of the vast sweatshop floor. Dust hung in the air, tiny particles of fabric sent into motion by the relentless crisp snipping of scissors powered by calloused hands. Each worker hunched over her identical workspace—a sewing machine, a single drawer, and a two-square-foot chunk of smooth tabletop that was barely enough room to sew a pair of pants. Heads down, they silently ran fabric under the bobbing needles of their machines, the non-stop mechanical hum as constant as the summer heat. It was tedious, carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing work. Conversation was limited to work-related topics, and there wasn’t much to discuss when you are sewing fabric at a pace of one pair of shorts every five minutes.