Jocko Weyland left the USA for the Orient. The reasons for this departure are his own and so his choice of Beijing. My prerequisites for a place to live are good food, warm weather, and beautiful women. Guess I’m shallow as an evaporation stain on an Arizona Highway. Jocko went for a world-class intellectual city, however hiss high school Spanish was useless in conversations with the residents of the 2008 Olympic host. Undaunted by this communication chasm he started teaching English and in his spare time roamed the increasingly colder city in search of a muse. He found one accordingly to his story BEHIND THE GREEN CURTAIN.
This story appeared on 12/20/2007
https://www.mangozeen.com/behind-the-green-curtain-by-jocko-weyland.htm
Jocko was okay with that even though he would have liked a heads-up. His more pressing issue was my editing job. After all he’s a published author. See THE ANSWER IS NEVER, A SKATEBOARDING HISTORY OF THE WORLD.
So I had to take his comments in stride.
Jocko wrote
So….embarrasingly I was looking up my name on the internet, and found tomy surprise that “Behind the Green Curtain” was on mangozeen!
Which made me laugh. Thanks– uhmmm….though maybe a head’s up next time? Actually I don’t mind that you did that at all…and I don’t mind your unsolicited edits, which give it this weird Smith/Weyland composite feel But— it was very particular about being NOT in the first person And you changed it to the first person It’s not big deal.. As I said, I don’t mind your additions.. Some of them Iquite like…but is there anyway to take out the first person part? Just keep it like the original? As far as that goes? And maybe the mistakes could be fixed?
“a faint drizzle drps fro ” To “a faint drizzle drips from”
Also, it says that she is watching TV– But then says that there is no TV in the room.
So kind of contradictory Sorry to be persnickety.
Mea culpa, Jocko. mY apologies ARE in Latin, since no one ever says kor thot or sorry in Thailand and that’s where I’m living far from the cold of Beijing.
Jocko’s right.
I make lots of typos.
This manual dysleixia is extremely embarassing and if I had a time machine I would go back to my high school English class and slap that 15 year-old version of me in the face. Twice and tell ‘me’, “Pay attention to grammar and take a typing class.”
Either one would have made my life as a writer easier.
Anyway here’s Jocko’s story as he intended it to be read.
Behind the Green Curtain
She works off a muddy street in the far Northeastern outskirts of Beijing inthe scrappy, dirty slums that arenıt on any tourist maps. Along the road areone-story linoleum-floored buildings where people live in rooms that are bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms and kitchens all rolled into one.
In front of many of them are bicycle tire fixing shops or tables where the inhabitants sell liquor and cigarettes. The street is really more of a track, wide enough for one car, where dirty rainwater and human and otherwaste collects in the troughs between the buildings.
Since there are no sidewalks jumping from front step to front step is advisable. Down a ways there’s a putrid public restroom surrounded by a murky pond of effluvia andurban detritus, and between the cigarette stands and tire shops are storefronts with faded red awnings.
At these shops the doors are open in the humid, fragrant summer heat and two or three women in their 30s can be seen listlessly staring out the window, talking on their cell phones, or watching TV. You wonder about all that waiting, all that TV watching and staring out the window, the boredom of it all. Even though the environs are distinctly third world everyone has a television set, all of them emitting various sounds that populate the street as much as the sounds of people talking.
A few doors down under another faded red awning there is a woman sitting on a couch, eating noodles with a young girl who at a word promptly gets up and skips down the street. The room is about twelve feet wide by eighteen long,with a plastic green curtain separating the front three-quarters from what is in the back.
It starts to rain and the drops make a pleasant tinkling sound on the tin roofs up and down the alley, and as the humidity rises even higher than usual that pattering mixes with the exaggerated explosions and breaking glass of an action movie playing next door. On the wall there is a calendar adorned with pictures of kittens and a poster showing an old man with a Fu-Manchu beard. There are plastic food containers, some green, blue and pink plastic tubs, a sink, and a tired old chair next to a tattered redfelt-covered desk that looks like it’s about to fall apart. Hair products are lined up in front of a mirror, three hangers dangle on a string, onec ooking pot is on the floor, a little can with a toothbrush in it is under the table, and a head of lettuce sits on the desk.
Surprisingly, there is no TV set in this particular room.
A fake leather purse hangs from a nail near the mirror and the pale green paint is flaking off the walls and ceiling. Outside the rain starts coming down harder and harder, splashing the muck and making a racket as it hits the roof.
The room’s floor is weathered, though a straw broom and grey mop against the wall are evidence the yellowed linoleum has been swept and mopped many times. Now alone, the woman sits on a dingy foldout bed that doubles as a sofa beneath a photograph of her in the mountains north of Beijing. There is a smile on her round face and a gleam of happiness in her eyes, and she appears to be on the verge of laughing. For all intents and purposes just another typical Chinese tourist on a typical day trip, and just like everyone else getting her picture taken with the mountains as a scenic backdrop. The photo was taken by one of her customers, a computer technician who later became a friend. The woman on the couch is about thirty-five years old, with kindly, pretty but not beautiful face, and she wears an athletic sweat suit with ‘Cidhlia’ written in white lettering across the front. Her jet-black hair is tied in a ponytail and she possesses a slightlymischievous, coquettish manner. The room is a supposed hair salon, though no haircuts have been given here in quite some time because this is the woman’s place of business where customers who might turn into friends come to pay for her favors. She is a prostitute, and behind the green curtain there is a single bed, or more accurately a cot, and a knee-high stool next to it. The stool is where she sits to perform oral sex on men lying on the cot. The service costs 50 Yuan, about seven dollars, and she says she always uses a condom.
She’s from the southeastern province of Zhejiang and came to Beijing about ayear ago. Back home she mended clothes, but there wasn’t any money in that. She worked as a clerk in a grocery store for a while but still could only barely make enough money to survive, and then a friend suggested washing hair and that segued into turning tricks. She gets one or two customers a day and her busy time is from seven to nine in the evening. As she talks she stretches, luxuriates, puts her feet on a customer’s legs, and stretches some more.
“Some are good, some are bad,” she says about her clients, very matter of fact. If they come in stinking of liquor she sends them away, and thirty percent of her earnings go to her pimp who comes by once a day to collect. She lives in the room with her nine-year-old niece who is in Beijing for her summer vacation the girl who was sent outside. She wants to know why anybody would want to talk to her and is curious to know if ‘they have people like her’ in America. She seems mystified and slightly suspicious that anyone would be interested in what she does, in her hopes and aspirations, but then shrugs off her doubts and says, “Itıs ok to talk about life.”
Part of her motivation behind getting into this line of work is that she needs to make money to help a sick relative back in Zhejiang who has some sort of kidney problem that requires a 30,000-Yuan operation. She says theword ‘kidney’ but can’t write it down because she is illiterate. When asked she won’t reveal her name because “They’ll catch her.” The Police, that is, who haven’t demanded any bribes lately. Once someone robbed her with a knifeand took her phone. The whole time she holds the phone in her hand as if it was some kind of talisman and while she’s talking the little stuffed teddybear attached to it by a small chain bounces and jumps. She mentions that she misses her six year old daughter who lives with the woman’s husband intheir home province, and that he doesn’t know what she does for money but that she still loves him. Does she like some of the customers? “Some.”
“What’s your big dream?”
“To sell clothes,” said with a shy smile. She doesn’t like doing this and isn’t happy but there is no other choice. She says she’s only going to do it for a few more months, and that she wants to go to Hong Kong or Taiwan and sell clothes.
THE END
For some more Jocko Weyland stories click on this URL to get Vice Magazine.
http://vice.typepad.com/vice_magazine/2008/01/fiction—jocko.html?cid=97760158#comment-97760158
I fancy a trip to Beijing this summer.
Nothing I like better than Synchronized Swimming.
Poetry in motion.
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