For the party they take the furniture from the front room up to the roof and cover it with tarp. They move Ga Ling’s cot out of her side of the bedroom and into Wai Lan’s so that Kit can run a poker and dice game out of it. They buy rice wine by the gallon, which the girls sell for a half mun a glass to the dozen guests crammed into the apartment. They drink and dance to the radio until early morning, when someone in the building complains about the noise and has to be paid off while the guests stumble out drunk. At the end of the night, Kit fans out the hundred mun he’s taken on his own, just from the games.

“You’re so smart!” says Ga Ling, and Kit laughs as she throws her arms around his neck.

“Let’s do it again,” says Wai Lan.

They throw another party, then another. Wai Lan learns quickly from Ga Ling, a natural host—flirty, persuasive, and charmingly authoritative. By the third party, they have netted some twenty-odd guests, added gin and whisky to the bar, and hired some of Kit’s jazz musician friends to play.

But it’s the games that pay them all so well, and they make this their specialty. Ga Ling and Wai Lan, wanting to secure their clientele, go to clubs and make the acquaintance of eager young men with cash in their pockets who sit alone looking as if they’d like a good time but have nobody to have it with. They give the men handwritten cards with information about the party and tell them to drop by the apartment.

They also invite several pretty girls from the factory, teaching the ones who don’t already know how to wheedle drinks and food out of the men. If they get the men to spend more than usual, Ga Ling and Wai Lan give them either a small percentage of the proceeds or a gift—a pair of stockings, a vanity case. Most of the time, Wai Lan notices, they don’t have to give the girls anything; everyone’s out looking for a good time, and when they come to the apartment, they can have it for nothing.