Sanyue Street is Dali's red-light district. At the edge of the old town, a stone road leads straight toward Cangshan Mountain. On either side are gaudy KTV parlors and hidden alleys. Microphones and smiling Caucasian women are printed across the walls, though the wallpaper is riddled with holes. It is like an old man at the end of his life remembering a woman in red whom he met on a street corner when he was young: the desire remains, but the image has mottled and blurred.

Late every night, middle-aged men begin roaring songs inside these rooms, adding a flavor of apocalypse to the decay. But the men lose themselves in drink and dreams. They refuse to imagine the end drawing near.

"The women on Sanyue Street are all beautiful," Old Yang said. "It was always lively here. The rules are stricter now, so they have to be discreet. But if you're looking, I can definitely find someone for you. Every kind there is—teenagers, women in their early twenties. If you want a young one, there's even a fourteen-year-old. How about that?"

Old Yang drove an unlicensed taxi. Whenever I needed a ride, I called him. As he spoke, he seemed confidential and warm, as though the two of us shared a secret compact between men that went beyond language.

Born in 1968, Old Yang was a local Bai man. Like many men approaching fifty, he wore his hair in a crew cut and was fat. From every angle, he brought the comedian Guo Degang to mind. His own face was flatter, though. It always made me think of a slice of toast about to spring from a machine.

"So you moonlight as a pimp?" I asked.

"Of course not. I've just been playing here so long that everyone knows me. Things were tense a while ago, so the girls all went into hiding. You might not find them on your own. With my help, it's much faster."

Old Yang spoke with such sincerity and ease that, for a moment, the sudden brotherhood nearly moved me. He first paid for sex at seventeen, he said, and Sanyue Street was already bustling then. Thirty-one years, counting this one. He was old now and came less often.

"Where do the women here come from?"

"They're girls. What kind of background would they have? Some are local, but these days more come from Sichuan, Guangxi, places like that. One group comes, another goes. They make their living from youth. Once they're old, no one wants them."

"Where do they go? Home?"

"How would I know?"

Old Yang's battered car bumped its way uphill. Dark-red light seeped from black alleys.

Old Yang set out to make his way in the world at thirteen. Still a child, he saw no future in school and went to a quarry on Cangshan. The quarry had long since become a wasteland of broken stone. Boulders sealed the mine entrance, and two characters painted in red above it said ABANDONED. Hikers detoured around it and, if they were careless, slid downhill with the rubble.

Young Yang was small then. He pushed a two-wheeled cart back and forth. On days when he had energy, he climbed to the summit in one breath to gather rare medicinal herbs.

At sixteen, he became a bricklayer. A year later, when work dried up, he changed trades and went to Tibet to collect discarded tires. He did that for four years. During a youth spent drifting from place to place, he began to regret leaving school. For the rest of his life, he would suffer for his lack of education. Even signing a receipt embarrassed him.

There had never been spare money at home, he said, so he could only conduct business by crooked means. He stripped bark from thousand-year-old trees, bought at six yuan a jin, hauled it to Lijiang, and sold it by the ton. He dug out tree roots too: roots four meters long that had grown for more than a thousand years, sold to other people to make tea tables. The police might inspect the loads. If they truly caught him, he was finished. But ten thousand yuan slipped into the right hand got him through every time.

More than a decade later, telling me about it in the car, he was calm, candid, and exact in every detail, like a humorless killer confessing to a priest.

"I've done plenty of good things in my life," he said. "Bad things too."

"Do you regret it?"

Old Yang held the wheel and kept his eyes on the road.

"No. No regrets. People are what they are. Back then, you couldn't fill your stomach three times a day. Now that there's food to eat, of course you wouldn't do those things again."

At sixteen, young Yang first stepped onto Sanyue Street. From then on, he led two lives: paying for sex and laboring to survive. At thirteen, had he imagined this path? Did he blush? What did he dream love and sex might be? The first time he came, was he drunk and full of fantasies about the adult world, or trembling with nerves?

Over the next thirty years, he became an expert. Night after night, he came looking for women's bodies and pretty faces. With a note of pride, he said he had slept with more than a thousand women here and spent over two hundred thousand yuan. His only rule was that every woman should be visited once. Forget her the next day. Never get entangled.

Of course he had become entangled.

At twenty, he kept a girl of sixteen or seventeen on this street for two or three years. Perhaps there was love. In the end, it nearly destroyed his marriage, so he told her that he had a family. However much he liked her, he could not possibly abandon it. Perfectly reasonable. At the crucial moment, men always became lucid and rational, while women were creatures ruled by feeling.

Two days ago, the Sichuan woman he had once kept called him. By now, they were both middle-aged and wrapped in excess flesh. They had children, and their children had children. The little ones looked up at Grandpa or Grandma, kindly and magnanimous, never knowing how recklessly they too had once lived.

"How are you?" she asked over the phone.

"Good. You?"

"Good."

As the car turned little by little into an alley off Sanyue Street, my heart pounded. The last time my face had burned like this, I was probably six, peeking at my deskmate's test paper. I knew it was wrong, but I could not stop myself from craning my neck. At the time, I thought my life was about to be ruined.

The car stopped at 8:43 p.m., on my second-to-last day in Dali. That afternoon, I had called Old Yang and tried to sound worldly.

"Old Yang, introduce me to a girl tonight, will you?"

"Ah, all right. I'll pick you up at eight thirty. I'll call them all together and you can choose. Nothing to worry about."

In fact, I had paced my room for half an hour before making the call. Of course I knew I would not actually have sex with anyone. Merely entering a brothel embarrassed me enough. My older schoolmate said, "Relax. Imagine you're a journalist." I thought that if I truly relaxed, I would become a customer.

I was also afraid that my excessively gentlemanly behavior would make the women take me for an undercover officer and summon some large men to cut off one of my hands first. This was plainly unnecessary. I always imagined myself in far too flattering a light.

When we parked, Old Yang noticed my unease and began patiently guiding me.

"We men can't live only for our families. While we're alive, we have to live for ourselves too..."

The sympathy between men moved me. Warmth flooded over me again. We got out of the car.

Eight forty-three. A half-concealed house. Dim red light. Silk curtains. The cheap smell of desire, like sewer oil dripping from a red high heel.

Three women sat inside, arranged in a circle on a black sofa whose skin had split. The girl on the left was slightly plump and wore a short dress with blue and white stripes. The sharp-faced woman in the middle was far more mature: white dress, black stockings. Her eyelids drooped as though she had lived an entire weary lifetime. On the far right sat a young girl in a striped shirt beneath a coat, the sleeves very long. She wore knee-high boots. They talked and laughed. None seemed nervous.

"Which one? Want to look at another place?" Old Yang said.

I shook my head and swallowed the words whole.

"Anyone. Just choose anyone."

"How can it be anyone?" Old Yang laughed at me.

"You, then," I said to the young girl on the right.

"Quick service or overnight?" she asked, looking up.

"Quick. How much?"

"Here or taking her out? Four hundred if you stay here," the other two women rushed to answer.

Old Yang stepped in to help.

"We're old friends. Three hundred."

I wondered whether he would return for a cut the next day.

"Pay first," the sharp-faced woman in the middle said.

I took three hundred yuan from my wallet and gave it to her. The young girl on the right gathered her things, walked out, and motioned for me to follow. She opened an iron door and locked it behind us. Then a smaller door, locked again. It seemed to suggest that now only two people remained, and the stronger could do whatever he pleased.

Inside were two beds, one covered in blue checked cloth, the other gray. They were untidy but not wrecked. There was no strange smell. A wooden cabinet had a broken lock. Beside the small door hung a sign:

Dear Guest: Please take care of your personal valuables.

Before she finished locking the door and turned around, I said, "Can we just talk today?"

"That's fine." She smiled.

"Bugu. My name is Bugu.

"I'm Yi. We all have compound surnames, so my full name has five characters. How did you know I was from Sichuan? I come from Xichang. My family is in the countryside. My father has always worked away from home, and my mother looks after the household.

"An only child? There are five children in our family! I have three older sisters. They're all married. And one younger brother, still in middle school.

"I'm nineteen, born in 1996. Actually, I've only been here half a month. I left home at sixteen before finishing middle school. My grades weren't good, and my family didn't have much. Of course, I couldn't have started out doing this. At sixteen, I worked on an assembly line in a factory in Zhejiang. After a year, I went home and sold clothes with my sister.

"I came here half a month ago, October 17. I remember it clearly. In our line of work, someone you know always introduces you. My cousin is here. She was the one sitting on the left just now. She's a year older and came before I did.

"We both lied to our families. I said I'd gone to Zhejiang. No matter how poor a family is, they wouldn't want their child to do this. Even if you need money, this isn't how you're supposed to get it. Right?"

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"No. How could I have one here?"

"Have you been in love?"

"Of course."

"Does he know you're here?"

"How could he know? How could I ever let him know?

"There are usually six girls here. Only three came today. There's an auntie who should arrive in a while. She takes about three percent from the customers we see. Of course, Auntie wants us to see as many as possible—keep doing it, more than ten every night. But we can't possibly want that. Especially someone new like me. Two or three a night is already more than I can stand.

"My first time was here, with a customer. He wasn't especially rough, but giving it to someone you don't like feels terrible. In half a month, I've met every kind of customer. Some are savage. They get drunk and torment you without stopping, muttering that they paid for it. Some are like you. They do nothing, just sit and talk.

"Aren't we all doing it for money? Everyone knows the money comes quickly. Without the money, who would do this? Everyone in this line has a hardship of her own. The woman sitting in the middle outside is thirty-three. She has a child to support, seven or eight years old, who doesn't know what her mother does every day.

"Life isn't easy for anyone. You live only to keep living. None of us has a road back."

"What about you?"

"When I was little, my family arranged a child betrothal. I was promised to someone when I was still a baby. It costs fifty thousand yuan to break the engagement. The only way to be free again is to pay his family. November is New Year where we're from. If I go home without all fifty thousand, I'll have to marry him."

"You don't like him?"

"Of course not. It isn't because he's ugly. We've hardly even met. I simply don't like him. Once I've done this and paid the money, I never want to come back. All I want is freedom.

"Ah, someone's knocking outside. We have to go."

"Already? How long is quick service?"

"Twenty minutes."

"All right. That's good."

"What? You think this line of work is good?"

"I mean it's good that you were willing to tell me these things. I think you're very innocent."

"In our line of work, no one is innocent."

I had originally asked Bugu to go out for coffee. She refused. I offered to pay another two hundred yuan just to talk, but she kept shaking her head and said she did not want me to waste my money.

Later, we added each other on WeChat. Naturally, I gave her the spare account I had prepared. The moment she saw its location was Dongguan, Guangdong, her suspicions deepened.

"I really did work there before," I said.

She half believed me.

Bugu used an iPhone 6, a thin slab with a glittering gold design stuck to the back. When she spoke, she often did not dare meet my eyes. She turned her head away. Her voice was hoarse, but when she laughed, she sounded like a child. It feels heartless to put it that way. She still was a child.

For the whole half hour, she clutched her long sleeves, as though if her hands let go she would have nothing to hold her up.

We agreed to have coffee the next evening after she woke. At first she said yes. The next day, no word came. It was my last day in Dali, and I wanted to see her once more. When I finally knew she would not answer, I felt a sudden relief. I had not met her honestly in the first place. Naturally, I did not deserve her trust.

At least Bugu knew how to protect herself. The world was dangerous; here, disorder multiplied. Along the long stretch of Sanyue Street, only sex and money were real. Everything else was a lie: sweet talk, practiced poses. The spells of night scatter in daylight.

Women became a collective symbol. The old ones left and new ones took their places, while particular lives disappeared behind false names. I imagined Bugu would leave before long. Or perhaps she would return later, with a new name and an easy command of men.

I hoped she would not return, would never set foot on Sanyue Street again. Better that she run away with a man she loved and never speak of the past. Just as the customers forgot the women they had slept with the night before, let her forget everything here.

Let Sanyue Street rot and shrink by degrees, until the narrow rooms can no longer contain potbellied men and their false cries.

But sex and money are immortal. And so Sanyue Street thrives. People come and go.