Polyamory Day 2.190K
Everyone has two lives: their public life and their private life. Interesting people have a third life—a secret life. This is a life separate and hidden from both their public and private lives. The more intriguing a person is, the more secret lives they have lived.
Clara Smith, like most people, has her two typical lives. Orphaned and raised in the foster system, she juggles two part-time jobs while majoring in psychology at the community college, all while struggling to make it on her own. At twenty-two, she's two years younger than me.
Her digital and social footprints cater to her public and private personas. Her computer doesn't have any ties to anything that could be a clue into her disappearance. Her phone must be with her, but I can't pin her location. Either it's turned off and the battery is taken out, or it has been damaged.
My preliminary investigation leads me into her secret life. I'm hired as a hostess at a private members-only Japanese hostess-inspired gentleman's club attached to a five-star hotel in downtown Los Angeles. A regular at the club, Mr. Wong, hires me to find Clara Smith who was a hostess there until her disappearance.
Japanese hostess clubs trace back to the days of geishas in Japan. Like traditional geishas, hostesses at these bars drink, dance, sing, converse, and play various drinking games with their clients in private rooms, billed by the hour, and get tips. Culturally, Japanese men prefer the companionship and interpersonal experience of hostesses over the overtly sexual displays of women in strip clubs. Often, business meetings are conducted in these hostess bars as part of the Japanese and Korean business cultures. Diverging from tradition and cultural references, Akira Lounge is essentially a gentlemen's club where the ladies wear tight club dresses and party with wealthy men for tip and paid by the hourly rate.
This undercover job sounds similar to others where I end up making more money with the job than with the payment for the PI case. I'll end up with two sources of income. I'm excited for this new world. If being a hostess is fun, I'll continue working there after the case—like the other times.
Ace out.
Mom's footsteps stop at my bedroom doorway. "Ai Chan Yeol, why haven't you cleaned your room?" she asks in Chinese.
Hearing my full name, a sign she is in a reprimanding mood, I tense up as I turn to her.
"That screen again. What are you doing?" she asks in Korean, speaking the only other language she knows.
I stare at my laptop screen, displaying the series of green codes I created when I was fifteen, derived from fifteen different languages.
She's picking up the stack of folded shirts from the carpeted floor and putting them away in my drawers.
Writing my diary, journaling my private investigation cases, in secret codes and storing it on a website that only I have access to, while pretending I'm a Star Trek captain on a mission. What else could I be doing on a random Tuesday night?
Conjuring up my most innocent smile, I speak in Chinese, "Computer science homework."
"What?"
My smile vanishes. Oh right... she has no idea what a computer is. "Hmm... homework... on my computer because I'm studying how computers work."
She comes over to my desk and squints down at my laptop screen. "What does that mean?"
"College stuff. Do you need something, Mom?"
The new smartphone I bought her is shove in front of my face. "It's broken."
I take the phone, inspect it, and then turn it on. "What do you mean?"
Her eyes widen. "It's not broken?"
"No. You have to turn it on first. This here is a power button. You press and hold onto it until the screen lights up. And you need to charge it too—there's only eight percent left."
"The other phone doesn't need to be turned on."
"That's because it's a landline. This one is a smartphone."
"It doesn't seem smart to me if it needs to be turned on every time. How do I make a phone call? There's no number."
Actually... that's a valid point. Wait, it's not! It's smart because...
Looking at my sixty-nine year old mother, I can't tell if I'm my parent's downfall or if they are mine. I have a bachelor's degree in computer science and psychology at eighteen and am in a master's program now, and I still can't figure out how to explain to either of my uneducated, ignorant parents what computer science is in any of the two languages I speak other than English. Though, I wonder if my English technical issues explanation to my friend is passible sometimes. I can't explain what polyamory is either, or what I really do for work as a PI. Is my life too complicated or is theirs too simple? Enough false dichotomy for one day. Continue to... lie mostly then since... I can't explain about 87.4% of my life to them.