![]() ![]() Soon she is leading a man back upstairs - an officer working undercover - as her closely held cellphone casts a glow about her face. She heads downstairs to stand at her building’s entrance, a necessity of her job. ![]() She has been on the phone with friends and clients, unaware that she is in the sights of a 10-member police team working vice. She has tried calling her younger brother in China, but he is asleep. She has returned from a market with provisions. It is the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and SiSi is in a shabby building’s top-floor apartment, for which she pays her “boss” a hefty fee. ![]() Among her competitors, she is considered territorial and tireless. A youthful 38, she is in a platonic marriage to a man more than twice her age harbors fading hopes of American citizenship and is fond of Heineken, Red Bull and the rotisserie chicken at a Colombian place on Kissena Boulevard. She toils in the netherworld of Flushing massage parlors, where she goes by the street name of SiSi. Strivers and dawdlers and passers-by, all oblivious to what is transpiring above.īut before the pavement ends the woman’s descent, a few feet from a restaurant’s glittering Christmas tree, imagine her fall suddenly suspended - her body freeze-framed in midair. Chinese restaurants and narrow storefronts, and dim stairwells leading to private transactions. With her long dark hair in a ponytail and her black-and-red scarf loose around her neck, she is plummeting from a fourth-floor balcony, through the neon-charged November night.īelow awaits 40th Road, a gritty street of commerce in the Flushing section of Queens. “Coming out to bask in the sunshine.” Todd Heisler/The New York TimesĪ woman begins to fall. “Feeling depressed for a long time,” Song Yang, known on 40th Road as SiSi, posted. ![]()
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