My arms are pink -- Toph

For the second day in a row, I have returned to the hotel with pink and white paint flecks coating my arms. More than coating. As I drive the scraper along the walls, sometimes the paint separates easily: a two-inch wide scar running along the wall for the length of my arm, showering me in tiny particles of pink and white dust, which covers my gloves, my forearms, my head, my shirt, my trousers, my shoes. Sometimes it won’t leave the wall, so I spray some water on it, let it sit, and work at it more slowly, pressing extra hard, gaining new territory for the underlying concrete, inch by inch. This victory over the recalcitrant paint doesn’t yield the celebratory shower of flecks to the same degree, but they still do fall.

And the dry pink and white dust stays on my arms, until I notice my sweat causing it to congeal. And there is so much sweat—my shirt and trousers haven’t been dry since 8:30 in the morning—and now the sweat is caking the paint flecks into a chalky mass on my arms. It gets under the gloves, and at lunch I find my hands finely dusted with the remnants of the brothel’s paint.

Regretfully, I understand the colour. There is no doubt that the pink is meant to signal to Western pedophiles a girlish playfulness, an innocent femininity. It doesn’t. It is not a bright princess pink—it is not a clean colour at all. It is various hues of nauseating rosiness that I imagine can only symbolize Western expectations of what was once in these rooms. The colour begins eighteen inches off the floor: the hard wooden bed was not moved when the painting was done. And it reaches up about eight feet, but not to the ceiling; that would have been too much work.

Above and beneath the pink, is a dingy grey with brown streaks. Perhaps it was once white, but now it is stained with so many substances, and with time. This colour is harder to remove, less willing to yield to the metal scraper.

Nothing about these colours is wholesome. Nothing about them is innocent. We have knocked down the interior walls, but the colour remains on the perimeter walls, and upstairs, and so we scrape scrape scrape scrape scrape.

When I wash the paint flecks off back at the hotel, I notice that my arm has reacted to the paint, and I have small allergic splotches. I am grateful for this: my body rejects the colour as does my mind. I've spent today thinking about pink: this colour is there because of my culture, because Western white men used to come to this building for sex with children. Nobody on the team suggests that we simply paint over the walls; the unspoken understanding from everyone is that this colour must go.

And so my arms are pink.