One of the continual surprises of America was the prostitution laws. The prostitute was almost a cultural icon, a player character in any prime time drama worth its ratings, always fetishized and, more likely, brutalized either in a childhood trauma to make her the sick person she had to be to lower herself to sex work, or by the never quite as grotesque people she worked for. They were always men, occasionally murderers who would leave her in a shallow grave or nervous youths to contrast her depravity, but always far better developed than the prostitute. She was one dimensional, not a real person, something to be pitied or laughed at and then thrown away to get on with the story. America loved to use these women. It was so far from reality, and sometimes so heartbreakingly close. Li Hua had heard enough from the outcast women of America's sex trade that it was always viewed as their fault, the victim's, when they were hurt or misused. They deserved to be raped, they were asking for it. They never got help.
Li Hua stopped dead in front of the woman sitting for all to see on her cushion with her crude sign, hands on her hips, head cocked. Didn't she know she could get arrested for that? She did appreciate the boldness, though. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the group from the shelter run into a sticky patch in the wet spring ground, laughing nervously as they skirted around it and fanned out in tentative directions for their frisbee game, but not getting too far yet. She asked, "Don't you have a price?" with a strange accent, Chinese taught the language by someone English but long enough in the country to make them both fade. "Or does it depend on the wish?"