he grew up a tomboy, could swing a bat the way her younger brother couldn't, could kick the glasses off a guy's face, and was not, therefore, very close to her mother. Mother with her gossip and her housewifery chores and her hidden gambling debts and her heavy-set body was never interesting to her, was never outdoorsy, was too much involved with the family things to see the world, the ocean, for instance, the blue sky.

She, the tomboy who laughed and played, on the other hand, liked sports, liked kung fu movies, liked sparring, liked to be liked, liked men.

She especially liked hanging out with her Papa, once a sergeant in the South Vietnamese Marine Corps, a trained assassin during the war, or something dangerous like that, though she was too young in that country to remember for sure. It didn't matter really. All she knew was that he was a gentle man. From him she learned how to hook worms, how to cast, how to be silent so the fish would come. She learned from Papa to move with the rhythm of the ocean, feeling the boat bobbing this way and that, learned to appreciate his quietude, the old man was sometimes like a stone statue, an ancient being perhaps, yet, if a fish was caught, would become vigorously alive.

So scrawny and thin and small, who would ever thought she, the tomboy, was going to become a beautiful woman?

But then at 16 she bled. And the blood oozed out of her like a stream of snapdragons and daffodils. A late bloomer, everyone commented, and late bloomers last forever. So beautiful she became, so elegant; grew breasts and ass and grew hair so long and dark and silky and possessed a smile that dazzled and the agility of a gazelle and the breathlessness of a dove in flight.

At a dinner party thrown for her father's sixtieth birthday all the men were trying hard not to look at her when she served them drinks. That couldn't be her, they kept saying, and her father laughed and said, but it is, it is my little tomboy. One man, the youngest among her father's army buddies, now a successful real estate broker and recently divorced, flirted with her openly. Marry me, he said, you are the most beautiful thing on earth. Sure, any time, she said and sat on his lap the way she used to when she was younger, and I want you to buy me a castle up in the hills. Anything, he said, anything, and they all laughed but she saw her father's eyes trained at her for a second and they were dark. She's my little tomboy, her father said to his friends again, and she said, of course, Daddy, always, you know that. But afterward, when the men were gone, her father slapped her. You acted like a whore, he said, but it was her father friend's departing whisper—You're so fuckin' gorgeous!—that she heard echoing in that slap.

So fuckin' gorgeous such that her beauty became a kind of curse for her, no longer fitting in the way she used to in her own home, how she moved in her crowded house was all different now, so fuckin' gorgeous that a unspoken tension between her and her sisters, who were not gorgeous, grew, so fuckin' gorgeous that her brothers averted their gaze upon her approach and stopped sparring with her, so fuckin' gorgeous that her mother grew more cold and distant, so fuckin' gorgeous that at seventeen she fled.

It was time, in any case, for her to see the world. Quietly she packed her bags and afterward said good-bye to her family and they protested but she wondered if the females of the household weren't secretly a little happy to see her leave.

They wept and she wept but away she went. To college to the North where she met a man and then another man and then another. In fact, men of all sorts and all kind of colors and striped flocked to her. Men so strong and young and sensual and handsome and intelligent and ambitious, rich and poor men. Men who fell in love with her and she, she thought, with them. She had all the grace in the world. Intelligent and possessing a vivid imagination, exciting and fun and she could dance the cha-cha-cha and do the pasodoble and perform the tango on the whim and she could stretch her legs effortlessly the way a swan stretched its snowy wings and would smile and coo as a lover entered her and she, when it rained, could sigh with a profundity that made poetry worthwhile - wouldn't she make a wonderful companion to any man, an extraordinary wife to the son of a bitch who happened to win her heart?

But where, pray tell, was her heart? Strange but she would always feel unattached to these men afterward, always feeling alone, feeling unhappy and the sex and the embrace were only fleeting moments and the men and their beauty and their talents and their future evaporated with the wind and or swept away by the rain and the fog that drifted down from the hills in the early morning.

Her girlfriend would ask, how is it going with so and so? And she would sigh and say rather vaguely, Oh, it's all right, but...

But it was not all right. She grew bored easily and would find faults in these men, because of course they, being only men, all have faults. But it wasn't because of their faults that her relationships with them didn't last. It was something else deep inside her, something that forced her to close her eyes or groan aloud, something that made her fear that her relationships would and would not last, which became after a while the same thing. And so, one by one, she left them.

"What's the matter, honey," one of the men asked. "Did I do something wrong?"

"Nothing's the matter, sweety," she said, sighing," maybe it's just the weather. Maybe it's just us being too comfortable with each other." And soon his heart was broken: She did not want to see him again. "We are just friends," she would say to one, or "our relationship has deviated and now we are brother and sister," to another. And soon another heart was broken. Then another. Then another. So many that she decided to do away with the noise of their hearts shattering in her answering machine. She disconnected the phone, gave away the machine that recorded the sounds of broken hearts, and while she was at it, cleared away cobwebs and debris in her apartment, threw out a table, a futon, two chairs, and all the boxer shorts and ties and shirts that have accumulated in her closet. Ah, there now, the peace, this space, this solitude, she said to herself afterward, this what I crave. From now on it's just me and myself.

Yet the sadness continued. And soon, out of loneliness, she had a new lover and reconnected the phone and some of the broken hearts continued to crash in the tape and some were done with their shattering and could be heard no more. But, really, who was counting? Not her. She remained unhappy and distant and the fog continued to drift some mornings past her apartment and already she wanted to flee from this new lover, a tall and handsome light skinned African American, but she resisted because she knew the routine would restart all over and she was beyond tired.

But what was the matter with her? Is she cursed by someone, a water witch maybe, the kind popular in Vietnamese folklore, to live the rest of her life in a pallid light?

She could find now answer for these questions for life had become a little blurry now, the way her audience appeared to her when she danced at this upscale strip bar and restaurant. But if she could just work, doing what she did well, a little dancing, a little flirting, a little flaunting of her exquisite flesh, maybe something else would emerge. Maybe if she went away again to some faraway place, maybe if she changed her apartment and had more sunlight, or maybe if she took up the offer of that young rich customer and flew to Paris on his private jet and consented to go to Hollywood with the fat one and ride his limousine and watch how he made fantasies come true, maybe it would solve some of her mysterious angst. Maybe...

Late one night after coming back from dancing she stepped out of a long hot bath and her favorite green towel fell from her hair and on to the floor. As she stooped to pick it up, something in the pattern of the crumpled fabric caused her to feel immense nausea and she, in a panic, fled to her bedroom to bury her face in her down pillows.

She began to see faces, some well known and some belonged to complete strangers. They crowded about her in a very dark room and she felt as if she were drowning. Then faintly she heard waves lapping against the side of a boat. Someone was calling out her name, her Vietnamese name. She tried to locate that voice from those sad faces in that crowded room and it was confusing at first. But slowly she recognized the one whi was calling out to her. It was a face she knew at a time before she became a beautiful woman and a dancer, before she spoke English and before America. It was, of course, her father's face and it came to her as she slept on this mat in the hull of this boat full of refugees in the middle of the Pacific, a tiny tot she way and dying of thirst. Her family was about her and the air was humid and fetid and a strange drowsiness was the curse on every one's eyes. Her father said, "wake up, little one, wake up and drink this milk before you die."

She remembered how the sun was bearing down on her and how the wind was blowing stronger now and remembered seeing out the corner of her eyes how blue the ocean was, how vast. Then she felt her father lifting her toward him and she tasted again that sticky warm liquid and the world entered her through those few meager gulps. She looked up to her father then and blinked and even tried to smile for deep down she knew she would survive, if only just for him.

And now in her bed, now a young beauty weeping, she knew that she was most happy then and not now. For there could be nothing truer than her father's gesture at that moment and everything else—America, the men who loved her, who cared, who wept, who danced, whose heart shattered like crystals in her answering machine, even the happy home from which she fled, even Paris and Hollywood and limousines and cold hard cash were a poor metaphor for what she desired. She desired that fleeting gesture on that ocean now more than ever, felt that frenzied thirst welling up from deep inside her, a thirst so potent, so exquisitely all-consuming that nothing in this world, not even love, could hope to quench.

© Andrew Lam