Months go by. Wai Lan does not spend any of her earnings on dresses or hats like Ga Ling does. Instead, she stuffs the folded notes in a cookie tin that she keeps under a wood panel in the floor. Each time, after she returns the tin to its secret place, she stands in front of the washbowl and rinses herself off. She keeps telling herself that she has to save, save for something more important ahead, that she needs this to get to the life that is meant for her. She doesn’t know what that life is yet, but she knows it has to be more than what she sees in her mother or in poor Ga Ling, whom she’s grown to pity. One day she looks at her friend and realizes how much she’s changed. Her soft, lovely face has become hard and worn; her eyes have lost their bright mischief and are permanently glazed from booze and drugs. When Wai Lan asks her one evening what she wants to do with her life, Ga Ling replies, “You think too much, Wai Lan. Enjoy life now, while it’s good.”

One day Wai Lan receives an offer from a client. He’s a businessman from Shanghai who has recently bought a club and is looking for new girls. He makes it sound decent—better money and protection, but not so good, she thinks, that she can’t refuse. That the offer comes at a time when she doesn’t consider herself desperate, when she can feel her own importance in having a choice and making a decision, makes the offer seem even more appealing.

In the end she can’t think of a way to tell Ga Ling and Kit about it. One evening she simply puts together a small case of her things. On her way out, she lets her hand fall from the doorknob and sets the case down next to the front door, turning back to the kitchen to tell them she is going out for a bit.

“Get me some smokes from the store,” says Kit, drunk and mildly irritated by Ga Ling’s arms, which are draped over his shoulders like a heavy scarf he can’t be bothered to remove.

“We need bread, too,” says Ga Ling.