“I could pay for two surgeries with what most room salon girls spend on alcohol in one night,” Sujin said to me once. “You don’t understand the scale of the money they make and throw away every week. I have to get there. I just have to.” She says she’ll keep saving until she can stop worrying about how to get through another day, another month. And whenever she says these things, I nod and smile so that she knows I believe her.
