While I was dragging myself through those numb, meaningless days, the police swept in and arrested me.
The newly appointed official in town was obsessed with public morality and strictly enforcing rules.
He was determined to clean up the streets by wiping out every unregistered working girl.
Meanwhile, the officially licensed prostitutes were allowed to do business as usual.
They paid their taxes on time and were properly logged in the government registers.
As long as you paid up, your business was deemed legitimate, perfectly matching their definition of morality.
After my arrest, I was sent straight to the reformatory.
People inside were assigned to teach us various domestic trades.
I learned it all—laundry, cooking, meal prep, knitting, and needlework.
Yet if a woman could actually make an honest living off these basic trades, I would never have walked down that painful, humiliating path in the first place.
I tried telling the staff the raw truth about my life.
“If this paid enough to survive, I wouldn’t have ended up here,” I explained.
Yet not a single soul was willing to listen or believe me.
They simply pointed fingers, scolding me for being lazy, hopeless, and morally corrupt.
They forced me to learn the skills and insisted that I love the hard labor with all my heart.
“Work hard,” they kept telling me, “and you can stand on your own two feet in the future.”
They promised we could either make a quiet living or marry an ordinary man and become a proper wife.
They held an absolute, beaming confidence in this grand narrative of redemption.
Yet inside my chest, there wasn’t a single grain of faith.
The administrators loved to brag about their achievements.
They boasted that they had reformed over a dozen girls, helping them marry off into respectable lives.
For a man wanting to claim a woman from the institution to start a family, it was shockingly easy.
All he needed to do was pay a two-dollar fee and find a reputable local shop to act as a guarantor.
To those men, it was an incredibly cheap, lucrative bargain.
To me, the whole system was absurd and laughable.
I resisted their fake reform program with every fiber of my being.
During a high-level inspection when a top official came to review the facility, my anger boiled over.
I stepped right up and spat directly into his face.
They refused to let me go after that, declaring me inherently wicked, incorrigible, and dangerous.
They gave up wasting any more effort trying to reform my soul.
Instead, they transferred me out of the reformatory and locked me away in an actual prison.