“So pretty,” she whispered.

Two days earlier, Marina had arrived in KL from Lahad Datu, Sabah, with nothing more than a small gym bag of her best clothes and a piece of paper scrawled with three items:

1. Blue Boy—behind Regent Hotel.

2. Chow Kit Drop-in Centre—ask for Tini.

3. Kak Min—for cheap room.

She had emerged from the cheap flight into a futuristic-looking airport. The bus ride into the city—45 kilometres, so she’d been told—cost nine ringgit and took two hours. The seats were comfortable and she immediately fell into a deep sleep, later waking up with a sore neck. She got off at a bus station and asked around for a bus that would take her to Chow Kit.

She had 400 ringgit to her name and paid a 200 ringgit deposit for a room next to Kak Min’s place. It was in the heart of Chow Kit, on Lorong Haji Taib, where transsexual sex workers like herself found work. Young men from Sabah, in Malaysian Borneo, who had no choice but to come to the Peninsula or Semenanjung as they called it, to work.

The first thing she needed was a pair of shoes, and that was what she bought from the shoe shop from Sungei Wang, the shopping mall Kak Min took her to. She was not used to wearing heels, not ones with a stiletto. These had a high arch and had cost fifty ringgit, the most she’d ever paid for a pair of shoes. But they were from that shop that all the drag queens went to for their shoes and she had paid in cash. It felt good.

The taxi came to a stop and Marina straightened her feet and stretched her calves as she got out of the car. The driver kept his eyes down as he took the ten-ringgit bill from her and straightened the white kopiah on his greying head. Quietly, he uttered a Bismillah. “More of them now than ever,” he muttered to himself, then sighed and eased his car into the busy street.

She started walking down the dimly lit alleyway. She was told to follow the street “until you see them”. “Mainly older white men and young Malay boys,” so she was told. Marina didn’t want a sugar-daddy, she wanted to make her own way in life. But, she was “open to options”, as she’d told others from time to time. Life presented itself in ways that she had to embrace. And if a man presented himself to her in more ways than just wanting to fuck her in the mouth or her ass, she would be open. Open to his condo, his chequebook, his car, his leathery, hairy balls and his eager cock. The greedy looks came soon after. Like the looks from those men on the street, stuck against each other, eyes raking her up and down as she smiled at them and sashayed in.