On 23rd June we returned to the Elephant Club where the Boss said he had been waiting with our contract and salary on 20th, and so his excuse was that he couldn't give us the salary since we didn't do the show.

We said we were asking to be paid for the month before, and not the show we missed due to factors largely not of our creation.

We went home, leaving our Bosses to sort out the mess of their miscommunication and assumption that being tired and feeling as cared-for as a used condom was motivation for us to spend our money getting to perform at a venue where we are invisible to the audience.

20th June, that also was supposed to be the day we got our overdue pay-the verbal agreement says 15th, but when the Boss came back at 1:00 am, it was understandably not the best time and mood to broach the subject.

Last week we left, fighting for an ideal had cost me a salary. Reason? Refusing to stay home waiting for an unnecessary police call because our Boss who once told us he would deduct salary if we even said we forgot to bring a CD to a performance had forgotten to register us with the Police, hence the ensuing fracas.

Todate, the Police are yet to visit.
I had also awarded myself a day off, primarily because in issuing a missive for me not to dance the Boss had transplanted our difference of opinion from the Police station to the stage, and also because if I was literally paying for it, I figured I might as well make a merry night of it.

Should I have felt penitent, or proud that I stood up when all around me chose to sit down? Was it a case of being insubordinate or was it refusing to let someone else's problem become my emergency? The story giving context to these questions is a sequel to the police drama we experienced on 6-6-2010.

The prologue is that our new Boss did not bother with village registration until the Police semi-arrested, warned, and let go of us. This all happened the day a pal returned from Uganda with goodies sent by our families.

Until recently, it has been to other people that Life's inevitabilities happen. It is other people that go abroad and live in conditions of near-squalor as the opportunity cost for earning more money to return home with. Until recently, that is.

After Reverend XP (Xiaoyan Pang) and her husband made hand-me-downs of us to new management, the first thing the money god demanded was us re-defining our sense of what is "tolerable" for us as semi-migrant African workers in over-populated we-make-everything China.

After we were expelled from Zhangjiakou for refusing to wear any less clothes than the shortest costumes we already have, our first abode became an address-less place in a Kisenyi called Huilongguan. Only after a visit to a police station did we learn the village's name, Qilubei in Changping district. Police station details later on.