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Pirated disk sellers cross thin blue line The hiding As we were chatting, the light went out and the door was closed. There was a sudden silence and everybody knew it wasn't a technical glitch as lights from outside shone through the tinted glass of the doors. "Everyone, please be quiet," Cheng implored. In the semi-darkness, we could hear people rushing through the aisle outside. "All these disk booths sell fakes," thundered a man's voice. Footsteps stormed into the booth across the aisle. In the chaos there was begging and searching. Minutes later, there was the sound of cardboard boxes being dragged out. While this was going on, Cheng and her staff threw all the disks on display into boxes and placed a chair on top of a long trunk that was used as a kind of display desk. A young man jumped onto it and removed a tile in the ceiling. He whooshed into it. Then the women passed the boxes to him. They did not ask for any help, it seemed as though they were very practiced. It took about five minutes, after which, someone took out disks from a box left behind and placed them on one of the walls in a neat and "professional" manner. "Now I can tell which ones are legal," I figured. Then came the excruciating wait. I noticed there were six customers locked inside, all of which could have been cast by a Hollywood director. There was a professor type who was itching to leave. "I have something urgent to attend," he pleaded. "There's no way you're gonna leave this place before the bust is over," she responded sternly. There was a mother with a toddler. "We're just unlucky," she explained to her son, who was trying to complain about the absence of proper lighting. But the mother was silenced by the store owner, "We need everyone to be absolutely quiet and stand away from the doors." Ironically, the store phone and her mobile were ringing off the hook. Her ring tone had obviously been turned up so it could be heard in business hours, so now it was deafening. Every time it rang, one of the customers would shudder palpably. Cheng and her relatives discussed their counter-strategy in a dialect nobody could understand. "I thought you guys would have made some kind of arrangement and there would be a secret warning before a bust," commented a patron. "No, we couldn't. It's totally random. And we could only take care of the security guards," Cheng explained. "Will they search our bags? Will they put us in jail?" someone else asked. But there was no answer, as we watched the shadows moving up and down the aisle. For a while, I thought we would be spared as the police seemed preoccupied
with their current quarry.
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