He’d made it to fifty-nine, Sai Go mused, what the hell. He’d led a decent life, generally speaking, and hadn’t committed any evil he couldn’t face up to.

There were no relatives to notify. He wasn’t leaving anything to anyone, and his plot in the old Chinese section of Peaceful Valley cemetery had been paid in full years ago. Now he needed to spend whatever he had left, and try to avoid a painful death, even though he’d quit the meds, and canceled the chemotherapy.

Three or four months?

If he were a family man, there would be many other considerations, but he was alone. So the question was did he really want to go on a vacation to die, or to hang around Chinatown until the end? He could stop taking bets and just enjoy the final days. Take a junket to Atlantic City or Connecticut and play some cards games with the Chinese high rollers. He’d get comped with a lot more bang for the buck, and it would be only a three-hour bus ride from Chinatown.

The thoughts went back and forth inside Sai Go’s head even as he slurped hot jook, and chewed the crisp fried crullers at Big Wang’s. He read his Chinese newspapers and couldn’t help but scan the racing sections.

At the U.S. Asia Bank, his Happy Valley payout had been wired, and now his account had grown to over thirty-eight thousand. Even minus the six thousand for the dailo, he still had over thirty thousand to spend during his last months. There was another two thousand on the street he had to collect, but he didn’t anticipate a problem. These bettors were his family: the waiters, cooks, kitchen help, the street vendors and deliverymen. Ten-dollar bettors and hundred-dollar players, he’d treated them all fairly, with a savvy blend of camaraderie and no-nonsense. He never let his credit get too far in front and had built a loyal following. None of which mattered anymore, Sai Go knew, the game was over.

He went east on Catharine Street toward Henry, those streets crowded even in the cold with sidewalk vendors of fruit, vegetables, and seafood stores stacked against meat and poultry markets and a string of bakeries. Trucks and vans idled at the curb, their exhaust pipes steaming, as they rushed their deliveries with one eye out for the chow pai ticket of the brownie traffic cops.

On Henry Street, the buildings were turn-of-the-century brick tenements, mostly Jewish back then, but now overwhelmingly Chinese. A section of the Manhattan Bridge rose up in the near distance.

The New Canton Hair Salon had a blue awning with a cartoon of a pair of scissors and a comb drawn across the front. It was a small storefront sandwiched between a noodle shop and a poultry market on a dilapidated block of Henry Street.

The salon was unlike the new and shiny hair, nail, and massage “emporiums” that dominated Pell and Doyers Streets. There was graffiti on the outside of the New Canton. Inside was a run-down room with six barber chairs and a small counter near the door. There were mirrors on the walls, and shelves full of shampoo, lotions, and towels. The helpers washed hair at two basin stations, side by side behind a plastic partition.

As he approached, Sai Go could see there were two barbers on duty and no customers in the shop. One cutter was a vampy-looking Chinese girl with reddish hair, who showed a lot of skin and a tattoo of a cat on her shoulder. The other was Sai Go’s regular, a woman he knew as Bo, which meant precious. She’d been trimming his hair once a week for almost two years now.

Ms. Chu Bo Jan.

Bo was not one of the full-time stylists, the pro hair designers. Instead, she rented one of the barber chairs three to four days a week for a sixty-forty split between her and the salon owner. The owner, KeeKee, was an occasional bettor with Sai Go, and she had explained Bo’s situation when he inquired, privately, why an older woman, still handsome, had come to be a part-time haircutter.

Precious

Bo was indebted to the snakeheads, one of many thousands who were paying off a thirty-thousand-dollar deal with Chinese human traffickers, for passage to America. The deal involved bogus passports, fraudulent paperwork, and sometimes the promise of jobs. The illegals placed relatives in China as human collateral against breaking the contract.

Bo Jan was twenty-eight, already considered an old lady, when she’d married a factory worker ten years older than herself. This was during the times of the One Child Policy. Bo had wanted a child, and her husband Kwok grudgingly agreed that a child would be okay if it were a boy. The option of an abortion was already in the back of his mind.

It was a girl.

The marriage quickly became strained. Kwok wanted to give up the baby girl to an orphanage, as many Chinese had done. He hoped they’d have another chance at a coveted boy child.

Bo could not bear the thought.

The orphanages were flooded with baby girls. Americans, who’d declined to adopt black American babies, were flocking to China to adopt yellow babies as fast as they became available. China was selling its unwanted excess population at ten thousand dollars an adoption. This new global baby trade was sanitized, and legal. The Asian women sex-slaves who arrived packed in the holds of cargo ships had no such protection.

Rather than allowing the clan bloodline to end, Kwok abandoned his wife and child before the baby girl was a year old. Bo took her daughter back to her family village near the Pearl River. There, a series of unsuccessful relationships with local village men caused her to lose hope of a future for her in China, where she would be doomed to wind up a spinster, with a mother and a young daughter to care for. She began to hope for a new start in America. After the girl’s third birthday Bo left, alone, smuggled by snakeheads to New York City by way of Canada.

Now, after two years of slaving in Chinatown, she was still struggling to pay off her passage, the specter of prostitution ever present.

At first the snakeheads tried to convince her to become a whore, to work for an escort service, saying it was a much faster way to repay the debt, adding that she was not such a young woman anymore.

She had politely declined their offers and never bowed to their intimidation. Bo explained to these heartless men with no souls that she was a devout Buddhist, and prostitution was a grave sin. The snakeheads ridiculed her, called her crazy, chi seen, but by slogging through a succession of small jobs, she managed to pay her monthly installment to them without fail. She worked in a Chinatown bakery during the day, supplementing her salary with piecework, cheun gee, at home, where she strung beads into necklaces, or assembled gift baskets. The payments to the snakeheads continued, as did the funds she wired to her mother and daughter in Toishan.

After a year, the bakery job became a supermarket cashier post, which became a gift-shop clerkship, the jobs declining in desirability, requiring longer hours for less pay. So, in rapid succession, she snipped threads off piecework in a sweatshop, pushed a steamy dim sum cart in a restaurant, gutted tilapia in a fish market. On Canal Street, she hawked knock-off designer handbags. In between, she washed hair and swept up the shorn locks that piled up beneath the rotating chairs in the barber shops that lined Doyers Street. She taught herself how to cut men’s hair, and learned to include a free ten-minute neck and shoulder massage.

She waited until Sai Go was seated comfortably in the chair before she draped the plastic sheet over him.

He observed his haggard reflection in the mirror, noticed when she glanced at him. She held her small smile.

“I didn’t see you last Saturday, you weren’t here,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Of course not.” He smiled quietly. “How could you see me if I wasn’t here?”