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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Patriarchy" data-source="post: 72091" data-attributes="member: 162"><h3 style="text-align: center">Chapter 2: The First Humiliation</h3>The hold was the color of dried blood. Everything in it glistened—the floors, the benches, the knives, even the overhead lamps wept condensation and fish oil like glands. They’d thrown me down here because I was slow with the nets and useless with the winches, and because some part of Ma Guanyu’s leadership style depended on putting the least dangerous man closest to the danger. It was that, or maybe he just liked watching people wither. Either way, I had become the permanent second station on the gutting line, which meant hours of standing in a ditch sluiced with every chemical and body fluid ever produced by ocean creatures or men.The stench worked its way inside your head until you started tasting it even in your sleep. Sometimes I’d find myself gagging for air, panicked, and only then realize I was upright, alive, still in the hold, still working.That morning—was it even morning? There were no clocks, just the whine of the compressor cycling up and down—I’d cut my left thumb three times before break. Each time, it bled right into the line, indistinguishable from the hundreds of liters of gore already in the trough. There was an etiquette to injuries: you didn’t slow down, you didn’t wrap it unless the bone was visible, you definitely didn’t ask for help.the only other white guy in the hold, if you could even call him a guy, was cosmicx16. He worked two stations ahead, breaking spines and yanking out the viscera with a rhythm that was almost hypnotic. He never looked back, but I could feel his awareness like a heat lamp: always watching for when I’d fuck up, always ready with a comment or a shove.Every ten minutes or so, a crewman would cruise by the line with a mop and say something in Mandarin. It always sounded like an insult, and sometimes, when I let my attention slip, I could feel them all looking at me, the slow white monkey on the assembly line, mangling the fish and himself with equal incompetence. Sometimes the words broke into English, sharp and simple:“Your knife is too soft!”“He so weak he cut self, not fish.”“Need baby glove?”There was a rhythm to the abuse, too. After a while I stopped hearing it as speech and started hearing it as percussion—BAO BAO BAO!—smack of fish on steel, whack of viscera in the bins, the hiss of the hose when someone missed and painted the bulkhead with a jet of offal.The job itself was simple enough. You took the fish from the ice bin, slammed it headfirst onto the block, then stabbed and pulled, the insides peeling out like a pink rope. My first week, I’d hesitated, always thinking of Sun Yuxin and her food aversions—how she’d never eat anything with the head still attached, how even a photograph of a dead fish would make her gag and fake a cough until everyone in the apartment felt sorry for her. Now I didn’t hesitate. The only part of me that hesitated was the nerves in my hands, which by day five had started to die in patches. If I squeezed too hard, the knife would slip, and sometimes I’d keep going even after I felt the burn of steel on bone.One time I cut so deep that I had to fish the knife back out of the body. The blade came up painted with something gray, like a tongue, and the rest of the line just paused and watched me, mouths open, as if they couldn’t believe I was stupid enough to keep going.But I always did.A week into the shift, my gums started bleeding. At first I thought it was just from the scurvy rumors—everyone on the crew had a story about someone losing teeth or going blind—but then the blood just wouldn’t stop, and every time I spat, it was flecked with bits of old rice and what looked like iron filings. I tried to keep my lips closed when I talked, but the taste leaked out. It was worse than the hold, worse than the fish stink, worse than anything.The food didn’t help. Every meal was a rehash of the same three buckets: rice, salted fish, pickled cabbage so sour it gave you cramps. The rice always came with little black weevils boiled in, and I used to pick them out one by one, until the hunger got so bad that the protein actually felt like a treat. By the end of the first month, I was so hungry I started having dreams about chewing on my own fingers, dreams where I’d suck the blood out and it would taste like childhood, like home.Today, my hands were shaking more than usual. I’d run out of tape days ago, and the blisters had gone soft, not quite scabbing, just peeling back in layers until every inch of skin on my fingers was a different shade of pink or red. I tried wearing gloves, but they’d soaked through so quick that it just made everything worse. The worst part was the way the blood and guts got in under your nails, lodging there until the next soak, when it would rot in place and send up a little halo of stink with every motion.There were two kinds of fish on the line: the big pelagic ones, silver and muscle-bound, which required a real effort to wrestle onto the block, and the smaller, slimy ones that slipped through your grip no matter how careful you were. I hated the little ones most; their eyes always popped out first, leaving them with these shocked cartoon faces even after they were decapitated. I tried to avoid looking at the eyes, but it was impossible. You couldn’t work here and not see everything.After a while, the line got so fast that I lost track of my own hands. It was just a blur: grab, cut, scoop, dump, repeat. The whole world shrank to a tunnel, with only the pile in front of me and the slowly rising pain as my fingers went numb and then came back to life, full of tiny white-hot needles. At one point, I hallucinated that I saw a hand on the line—my own, or someone else’s, I couldn’t tell—but when I blinked, it was just another fish, headless, staring at nothing.Sometime in the second hour, I started singing to myself. Not actual songs, just words, the same three words, like I was still on the dock that first day: I love you, I love you, I love you. Sometimes I’d get stuck on the second word, the “love,” and just mouth it over and over, tonguing the inside of my cheek until the taste of blood came back and snapped me out of it.Cosmicx16 turned once, just once, and grinned at me with a mouth full of sharp, stubby teeth. He didn’t say anything, just lifted his chin, a challenge. I didn’t meet his eyes. I didn’t want to know what he saw there.The shift leader, a guy everyone called Zhao but never to his face, did a lap around the hold at noon. He stopped right behind me, close enough that I could smell the menthol on his breath even through the haze. “You are slower today,” he said, English perfect but lazy. “Is your woman thinking of another man?”There was a ripple up the line—a suppressed laugh, a few elbows. I didn’t answer. There was no answer.He came closer, lowering his voice to a whisper: “You know, the crew, they all see. You watch the phone last night, yes? Maybe you watch again, after shift.”My body tightened, but I kept my face blank. The knife kept moving, even as my vision blurred a little from the humiliation. “I work,” I said. It was all I could manage.He snorted, but for a second, there was almost something like pity in his eyes. “Don’t cut your finger off,” he said. “Ma would make us eat it.”Then he left.I didn’t cry. I thought I would, but I didn’t. Instead, I focused on the job, on the endless gray muscle and the way the bodies resisted, then surrendered, every time the blade slid in. By the end of the shift, my shirt was soaked through and my fingers had gone stiff and pale, so numb I could barely peel off the gloves.At break, I climbed the ladder and sat by the air vent, knees up to my chest, shivering in the wind. The sky was a slab of iron, unbroken in every direction, but at least up here the air only smelled of diesel and salt.For a minute I closed my eyes and tried to think of Yuxin, but all that came was the image from the stream: her face, her voice, the way she’d looked right into the camera and said, “You see, New? You see?”I bit down on my tongue and tasted blood.The bell sounded, and it was time to go back down. I flexed my hands, felt the skin split a little at the creases, and went anyway. Because that was what I’d promised her. Because there was nothing left but the promise.When I reached the bottom of the stairs, cosmicx16 was waiting for me. He clapped a hand on my shoulder, heavy as a slab of ice. “Not dead yet, are you?” he said, and for a second his eyes were almost kind.“No,” I said.He nodded. “Good. Ma wants to see you.”That could mean anything.I followed him into the bowels of the ship, toward the next hell.<h3></h3>The lowest deck had its own weather system—every surface slick, every edge ringed in yellow-white crust, the air thick enough to feel, not just smell. The bilge didn’t sound like the rest of the ship. It was quieter, with only the plop and burble of God-knows-what backing up in the pipes. Most days, only the truly unlucky ended up here. Today, it was just me and cosmicx16, and he was whistling a tuneless nothing, already holding a length of chain in one hand.He waited until the door shut behind us before speaking, and then it was only to point at the deck plate by the rail. “Down,” he said, and it wasn’t a suggestion. I went down. The metal was cold even through the knees of my coveralls. There was a patch of grease or something worse right where I put my palm, and I didn’t have the energy to wipe it off.He looped the chain around my waist, twice, then snapped a padlock through the hasp. There was nowhere to go but maybe a foot in any direction—just enough slack to scrub the plates but not enough to even stand straight. I knew the drill: this was “punishment,” supposedly for dropping three fillets in the bin that morning, but really just because the crew needed something to laugh at, and I was the only show in town.He squatted in front of me, pulling a pair of cheap airline earbuds from his pocket. The cord was stained and one of the tips was missing, but the moment I saw them my whole body went hot and cold. “Time for lesson,” he said, and his smile was clean and empty, the way a doll might smile. “You listen good.”He shoved the buds into my ears, then produced a little black phone—probably the same model as the one I’d found in the locker. The interface was all Mandarin, but he knew exactly what to tap, and in a moment the only thing I could hear was the sharp, too-loud voice of Sun Yuxin.At first, it was just her humming. She did that when she cooked, when she showered, when she was about to say something mean. The sound cut through everything, even the stink. Then her voice, a little tinny, a little distorted:“Today is Friday, I think,” she said, in the voice she used for streaming—bright, slightly put-on, but not fake. “We are making noodle for a guest. Special guest! Maybe you remember him, New. He’s the one you met at KTV, the one with the tattoos? So big, right?”A man laughed in the background, a snort, and then Yuxin’s giggle, sharp as broken glass.Cosmicx16 patted my cheek. “You work now,” he said. He pulled a battered scouring pad from the rail and dropped it in front of me. The expectation was clear: I was to clean the metalwork while listening, while chained up, while the rest of the crew watched from the shadows. I started scrubbing.On the phone, Yuxin’s voice went up an octave: “He’s very strong. He can pick me up even with the baby, not like some people. Maybe you get stronger on the boat? I don’t know. But don’t worry—I always think of you.” Then, switching to Mandarin: something fast and dirty, punctuated by the new man’s voice, low and growly. I didn’t need a translation.The pad burned into my hands, stripping off the last layer of skin I’d built up on the line. I scrubbed harder, partly to drown out the sound, partly because I knew if I slowed even a little, cosmicx16 would have a reason to hit me again. He didn’t move far—just sat on the ladder above, arms folded, waiting.The stream cut to video. I couldn’t see it, but the audio was enough: Yuxin narrating, breathy, sometimes breaking into English just to make sure I understood. “He is in my bed now,” she said, voice syrupy. “He says you are very lucky, but I think maybe I am the lucky one.” A slap, a yelp, then moaning. The bed creaked in a pattern I knew too well. “You can listen, New. You can imagine. You always had good imagination.”My dick twitched, unbidden. Even here, in hell, my body could not betray itself fast enough. I wanted to cut it off. I wanted to turn inside out and be nothing. I scrubbed harder, feeling the pad slip on the gore, fingers starting to tingle.The door opened, and Zhao walked in with two other crew, all carrying plastic mugs of something brown and strong. “Punishment time?” he asked, grinning at cosmicx16.“Almost finished,” cosmicx16 said, and nudged me with his foot. “Listen good?”I didn’t answer. My jaw was locked so tight I thought my teeth would shatter.Zhao leaned in, put his face inches from mine. “She sounds happy,” he said. “You want to see?”They propped the phone on the rail so I had no choice. The angle was fucked, just an arm and a flash of skin at first, but then the camera tilted and I saw her—hair wild, skin flushed, eyes so wide you’d think she was terrified if you didn’t know her tells. The man was behind her, face hidden, but his arms were around her hips, squeezing until her stomach folded over the waistband of her underwear. Her belly looked enormous, round and red where it pressed against the sheets.She moaned. I realized, with horror, that I had never heard her make that sound before.“Do you miss me?” she whispered to the phone, as the man thrust into her slow and deep, hands gripping so tight I saw nail marks. “Say you miss me, New.”I said nothing. I scrubbed. I scrubbed until my hands were raw, until the smell of bleach rose above the rot, until the blood from my fingers made the water pink.The man behind her spoke, something in Fujianese, then switched to English: “He like to watch?” The accent was thick but the meaning was clear. “He watch you now, same as we fuck.”Yuxin laughed, then started talking in Mandarin, the words running together like rain down a window. She reached between her legs, found her clit, and looked right into the camera. “This is for you, New,” she said. “You can come too, if you want.”I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to more than I’d ever not wanted anything. But my body was heat and shame, and the sound of her moaning, the vision of her fucking someone else in my bed, with my baby between them, was too much. I pressed my forehead to the rail and bit down hard, but the pressure built anyway, slow and awful, until I came in my pants, the pulse hidden by the noise and the filth but undeniable, the aftershocks like shrapnel.When I finished, I started shaking. I kept scrubbing, but my arms were trembling so bad I couldn’t even keep the pad on the metal. For a second, everything went gray, and I thought I might faint.The crew clapped and hooted. Someone said something in Mandarin that I was glad not to understand. Zhao crouched down and lifted my chin with two fingers. “You are the best show,” he said, almost kindly.They let the phone play, audio looping, as if I needed the reminder. Yuxin’s voice trailed off, breathless: “It’s okay if you cry. I like when you cry.”I cried.Cosmicx16 unlocked the chain and dragged me to my feet. My legs buckled, but he kept me upright. “Go clean up,” he said, not unkindly.I staggered to the wash room and rinsed the worst of the slime off, though nothing could touch the stink inside me. I stripped my coveralls and tossed them in the bin. My hands shook so badly I could barely work the latch on the next set.I sat on the toilet, face in my hands, and let it all out. Not just tears, but the sound, the animal sobbing I’d always hidden from the world, the sound I’d heard my father make only once, the night my mother left for good. Now it was my turn.When I’d finished, I washed my face, splashed water over my eyes, and stared at myself in the mirror. I didn’t recognize the man looking back. His eyes were ringed in red, skin sallow, lips chewed to nothing. He looked older, but also hollowed out, like something essential had been scooped away and left on ice with the rest of the guts.I didn’t dry my face. I didn’t want to feel clean.The next shift would start soon. I had a job to do.I would not quit.<h3></h3>The next day the sky broke open. Thunder shook the trawler like an empty can, and the surface swelled to jagged hills, each one higher than the last. When the wind cut the deck, it felt like it might shave the flesh right off your bones. All of us shuffled around in our rain suits, hoods cinched down to little pinholes, boots sticky with salt and old blood.The haul started at dawn. Nobody said it, but everyone knew this was going to be a big one; the nets had been dragging behind us for almost twelve hours, scraping bottom, scooping up anything dumb enough or dead enough to stay in the path. The winch whined, pulsing, the cable quivering like it was holding back a secret.Zhao yelled from the pilothouse. “All hands!” That meant even me, even now, with my hands half bandaged, half raw, the bones in my wrist still shuddering from the night before. I went to the rail and braced, just in time to see the net surface.It looked like a tumor, bulging and twitching, shreds of black weed stuck to the mesh. When they winched it up, everything inside fought for air—crabs crawling over dead fish, eels biting anything that moved, even a small shark thrashing so hard it snapped its own tail. At the bottom of the pile was a lump of something blue and impossible, a color so wrong it had to be alive.Someone cut the cable. The net hit the deck with a splatter and the world went white with spray. I shielded my eyes and coughed. When the mist cleared, I saw what the blue thing was: a turtle, enormous, shell scored by the mesh, flippers battered into ribbons. It lay on its back, mouth opening and closing, a long thread of snot trailing from its nose.Nobody moved to help it. That wasn’t the way here. Anything that came up in the net got sorted: keep, toss, or ignore. The turtle was in the “ignore” category, too big to sell, too ugly to eat.I watched as the rest of the bycatch got shoveled off—dozens of reef fish, two more sharks, a rain of crushed starfish and the white goop that came out of their bodies when they broke. The deck ran red. The turtle just stared, one lid half-closed like it was trying to fall asleep.After a while, someone got tired of seeing it flop around and kicked it, hard, right in the head. The thump echoed down the hull, followed by a sharp spray of laughter. “Football!” one of the crew yelled.I knew I should look away. Instead, I kept watching as two guys picked it up and heaved it over the side. I heard the splash even over the diesel thrum.I had no idea if turtles could survive being hauled up, bashed, then dumped back in open water. I thought maybe I’d ask Yuxin, if she ever talked to me again. She liked animal facts, the weird kind, like how turtle hearts can keep beating for hours after they die. She’d always say, “Like zombie, but romantic.” I tried to imagine the heart still pulsing, deep in the Gulf, drifting down and down.The rest of the day passed in that state—half present, half ghost. I worked my station, packed fillets, iced the bins, bled from new cuts I barely even felt. Every so often the crew would walk by and slap my ass or throw a scale at my neck. Sometimes they’d play the recording of Yuxin’s stream on a speaker, just loud enough for me to hear the sex noises over the engine.I wondered if she was thinking about me. If she knew what the inside of this place was like, what I’d become to buy her a future. I tried to remember if she ever loved me, or if that was just a thing we both agreed to believe until we ran out of reasons.That night, I crawled into my bunk without even washing. The stench clung to everything, but I’d stopped noticing. Around me, the other men snored or coughed or masturbated quietly, and the ceiling sweated water onto my pillow. I turned to the wall and stuck my hand under the mattress, found the photo I’d taped there the first night on board.It was Yuxin, mid-laugh, hair whipped around by the wind on the dock. Her eyes weren’t looking at me, or at anyone. Just past the edge of the frame, as if already planning her next escape.I pressed my thumb over her mouth, traced the curve of her jaw with the cut pad of my finger. I waited for the hurt to come, but it didn’t. All I felt was a deep, slow kind of peace.“Honestly,” I whispered, so soft only the turtle, sinking somewhere far below, could hear. “Honestly, I still love her.”The next day would be the same. The next day, and the day after.But for now, I let the picture fill my whole world. For now, I held on.</blockquote>

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