by Kim Fu
Dina thought she had a great voice, the kittenish vibrato of a pop star. When she finished, Linda was squinting at her from the piano bench, like she couldn’t quite bring her into focus.
“Well?” Dina said.
“Next,” Linda said, “why don’t you tell me why you want to take singing lessons?”
Dina explained about the talent search. “I want to prepare for it. Refine my voice.”
“How soon is this competition?”
“About three weeks. I have three lessons with you booked.”
Another long silence. Linda looked down at the piano keyboard, ran a finger over the keys without depressing them. “There are some exercises we can do,” she said at last.
So it went. Two hours of breathing and scales, Linda holding Dina by the hip bones and turning her pelvis one way or another, prodding a tight, almost painful muscle just above the waistline of Dina’s jeans. One hour of practicing the song Dina was going to sing at the talent search, while Linda struck the same high piano key and clapped and hummed aggressively, sending a signal Dina couldn’t understand. “Should I pick a different song?” Dina asked, frustrated. Perhaps her voice was better suited for something higher or lower, something simpler or grander.
“The song is fine,” Linda said.
At the start of their lessons, Dina had expected to be told she was a natural, for Linda to be ecstatic and awed at having Dina as a pupil, to have finally found true talent. By the end, Dina would have settled for a pat on the back and a simple “You’ll do great.”
Dina arrived at the mall an hour before sign-up began. She’d meant to come two hours early but getting dressed and primped had taken longer than she expected. She was given a slot about midway through the competition. She paced and breathed, she double-checked the instructions to the technician and the CD with her backing track, she sipped at the tea with honey she’d brought in a metal thermos.
Finally, it was her turn. As she climbed onto the small stage to face the table of judges and the smattering of people in fold-out plastic chairs, she didn’t feel nervous. She felt the stage lights hit her, along with rays from the mall skylight, making the sequins in her white halter top and the jeweled pin in her hair sparkle. Waiting for the music to begin, she wrapped her hand suggestively around the microphone stand. She bent one knee and did a quarter-turn to the side. She smiled at the judges, who, in spite of their boredom and the long, torturous morning, smiled back. For Dina, they perked up and leaned forward in their seats.
A camera was trained on her, her image projected larger immediately behind her head, with two large speakers on either side. Shoppers stopped and stared, arrested by her image.
The backing track began. She swayed side to side. The judges’ smiles grew.
From the first note, she was startled by how loud her voice was, booming from the monitors behind her. Loud and unfamiliar. A wholly different voice. Not the voice she heard in the shower, or layered atop the radio, or with Linda in the music school. Not at all the voice she heard reverberating in her skull.
This voice had almost no melody at all. Almost talking instead of singing, with a horrible falseness, like a bad affected accent. It went shrill and broke on high notes. It rounded eerily on low notes, like whale vocalizations in a nature documentary.
It was the worst thing she’d ever heard.
She sang the whole song. She even held the last note as she’d practiced, hearing now how off-key she was. The bland, blaring unpleasantness of the held note like an air-raid siren. Her eyes filled, beading on her waterproof mascara.
She stumbled a little on her white pumps as she hurried off the stage. She pushed blindly past the stage techs and their clipboards, past the rows of fold-out chairs and gawking faces. In the last row, the seat closest to the aisle, something caught her eye, caused her to falter momentarily. Her mother. She’d seen. She’d heard.
Mrs. Chang pushed swiftly up on her cane and her good leg. She loped after Dina, who let her mother catch up, allowed herself to be guided into the parking garage through a blur of tears, climbed into the Lexus on autopilot.
In the artificial night of the garage, orange safety lights and enclosed dark, Mrs. Chang let Dina cry for a few minutes before she said, “I’m going to tell you a story now.”
“Once, there was a baby chicken who got lost,” she began. “His mother got chopped up for stew. The baby chick wandered around the yard, confused and alone. He found his way down to the pond at the edge of the farm. There, on the shore, he found a nest of ducklings. The mother duck took him in. She fed him. She cared for him like the rest of her babies. The chick didn’t know what he looked like, and for a while, he was happy. Then, when the ducklings were big enough, the mother duck led her family into the pond for their first swim. The baby chick drowned.”
Mrs. Chang turned the key in the ignition and the engine shuddered to life. “Do you understand?”
Dina didn’t speak for the rest of the drive home. As soon as they got back to the condo, she went straight to her room and shut the door. She took off her clothes and stood before the mirror. She examined her face and body, every inch of it, where there were straight, unfettered lines of bone and where it curved gracefully, the swoop of a swan’s neck. Where she had stripped it of distracting hair, where she had evened out the color, where she had smoothed out the roughness. What she had perfected. Which was a talent. Which was a gift. She had a dim sense of what her mother was trying to say, but she blocked it out. She was no fucking chicken.
3
Dina finished high school, somehow, more than one 59 bumped up to 60 just to get her out the door. Her mother had a third knee surgery to correct the damage done by the first two surgeries. Her back and hips were shot from overcompensating on the right side. Mr. Davies pushed her around town in a wheelchair. They bought a second car, a luxury SUV with a chair lift. Dina thought of her mother as only temporarily weakened, a wounded dragon.
That summer, Dina won fourth “princess”—fourth runner-up—in a Miss Chinatown pageant. Dina posed for press pictures in a group of two dozen women, styled to look identical, their faces lightened to the same shade, moles and marks painted over, their eyes rounded by makeup, their chins contoured and their hair parted to give the impression of heart-shaped faces. They wore the same leopard-print leotard with a peplum skirt of feathers, a confusing hybrid-animal costume.
Then there were fashion blogs and local stores, who didn’t pay or paid in store credit, the clothes always a little too long, a little sloppier-looking than they should be, the camera always catching her in the middle of a fake laugh with too much teeth, or squinting into the sun, or her body in an awkward pose, her thin arms squashed outward in two dimensions. Or just revealing her bleary disappointment, the expression of someone on a bad first date. The images appeared on the stores’ websites and hung in their windows, images she’d always assumed were of professional, high-paid models, not a beauty-queen runner-up with a gift card worth one scarf or half a pair of shoes. Her highest-paying—her only paying—job was a commercial for the provincial government, where she played a college student, nodding earnestly at the actor playing her professor. American movie and TV productions rolled into town with their casts already complete, fake police cars marked CHICAGO PD or BOSTON PD or NYPD flanking the downtown streets, and the trades were filled with dinner-theater roles.
This city was the problem, Dina decided. This whole underachieving nation, filming ugly people on low-definition cameras and putting them on TV, failing to recognize greatness.
Time passed with unnerving rapidity, without school to demarcate the years, highlight and rarefy the summers. Mrs. Chang was running out of ways to call Dina useless, shiftless, hopeless. Eighteen blurred into nineteen. Twenty blurred into the rest of her life—the girls in the magazines seemed to be getting even slimmer and younger, emaciated heroin chic or a dewy, just-sprung preteen look. Dina couldn’t shake the feeling that she had finished high school only days a
go, that she was still growing, still almost a child, green on the vine. She was a diamond in an untapped mine, in the deep, dark unknown, ready to be unearthed and glitter in her first light.
Victor got married and moved to San Francisco. Dina was shocked when she saw Isabel for the first time in more than a decade. “You’re so short,” she said.
“I didn’t shrink,” Isabel joked.
Victor was goopy with love, and Dina struggled to see what he saw in her new sister-in-law. She did like Isabel, a bit irrationally, because Isabel had—through circumstance—opted out of what Dina now remembered as pointless, purely sadistic torture, a punishment for nothing she could recall. The other girls attacking her out of nowhere and Isabel absent, innocent. But even in Victor’s diminished, adult form, his glowing adolescent beauty all but erased, Isabel looked strange beside her husband. In her old-lady glasses and old-lady clothes, underdressed for her own wedding, she deflected attention almost to invisibility. Dina tried to be happy for Victor even as she wanted to whisper, You could do better. She noticed their mother’s lips thinning in disapproval as the meal went on, and knew that she saw it too. Maybe Mrs. Chang thought Dina was delusional and arrogant, but what Victor was doing was worse: selling himself short.
While Mrs. Chang was at physical therapy, Dina went into her study and found the series of marked envelopes containing keys and key cards. Dina almost couldn’t believe objects in one place could open doors thousands of miles away, magic that seemed like it should fade with distance. She took the envelope marked with an address in Santa Monica, California. She also pinched a wad of cash from the cookie tin at the back of one of the kitchen cabinets that her mother thought she didn’t know about.
After Mrs. Chang came home with Mr. Davies, who had driven her and stayed through the appointment, Dina said, “I’d like to go visit Victor. See his new house.”
Mr. Davies left his wife in a chair in the living room and went to start dinner. “Did he invite you?” Mrs. Chang asked.
“Well, no. I kind of invited myself. But he said he’s fine with it.”
“Is he paying for your ticket?”
“Uh, no.”
Mrs. Chang muttered something in Chinese. “Fine, whatever. Get out of my hair for once. Take my credit card and book it.”
On the day Dina left, after Mr. Davies dropped her off at the airport, she went to the ticketing counter and had her return flight changed to a flight to LAX, paying the difference and fee in cash. All she had to do was get to Hollywood, she thought.
Victor and Isabel’s house was on a street of nearly identical houses, in a neighborhood of almost identical streets. Wide, street-facing, single-story homes that spoke of an optimistic past, a country that had more land than it could ever need.
They were almost finished unpacking. Only a few boxes remained stacked against the wall in the living room. The house still seemed empty, the furniture from their studio apartment dinky and far apart in the larger space. But Dina found the house strangely claustrophobic, the low ceilings and long, low windows, the suburban silence of unshared walls.
On Dina’s first evening in California, they ate an early dinner at home, cleaned up, and watched a DVD together before Isabel rose and said she was going to bed.
“It’s not even nine o’clock,” Dina said.
Isabel yawned and gave Victor a peck on the cheek. “I might read for a bit. I’ll let you two catch up.”
After the bedroom door closed, Dina turned to Victor and said, “Really living it up out here, huh?”
“Hey, come on. That’s not fair.”
Dina stood and shook out her limbs. She’d been sitting with one leg tucked underneath her on the overstuffed couch, and her foot had fallen asleep. She felt pent-up and restless, the way she had in their childhood home, conscious that there was nowhere to go and nothing to do for miles. “Why don’t we go get drunk somewhere?”
“We can go to a bar, but one of us will have to drive. I can make us drinks here, if you want.”
Dina paced a circuit of the room. The curtains had been left behind by the previous owner, a heavy brocade in mustard yellow. She tugged one back and peered into the backyard, visibly shaggy and overgrown even in the dark. “Mom said your house was like a zillion dollars. It’s not what I expected. It reminds me of our old house.”
“Yeah, me too,” Victor said, smiling.
She put her hands on her hips. “So you’re happy? Living like an old person?” She meant it as a joke, but it came out straight.
“Sure. I mean, I don’t love my job. But it’s just a job, and it pays really well. And I get to surf almost every weekend.”
“But you’re at work, like, forty hours a week.”
“More like fifty or sixty. More with the commute.”
“Right. Basically your whole life. Why don’t you become a—what’s it called? A sponsored surfer. Some guy from high school did that. One of those dudes you used to hang out with.”
“I don’t think he pays his bills with that. He just gets free boards and gear sometimes.”
Dina looked down at Victor, who sat dead center on the kind of plush, rounded, too-soft sofa that their father had liked. “It just seems sad,” she said, “that you spend all your time doing something you hate, so you can spend a couple hours doing something you actually like.”
“Everybody does that. And I don’t hate my job.”
“But what do you want? What do you really want?”
“What do you mean? I have what I want.” Annoyance had finally entered Victor’s voice, which seemed like an improvement to Dina, better than complacence. “I wanted this house. I wanted Isabel. I wanted to be a programmer. I wanted to live in California. Why are you trying to shit all over my life?”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do!” She took a breath. “I’m sorry. If you’re happy, I’m happy for you.”
The movie they’d watched had been a mediocre romantic comedy, two big stars and a forgettable summer script, beautifully shot but so poorly written that Dina and Victor had spent most of it mocking the lines and chatting about other things. The story made no real argument for why the two leads should be together, other than their initial dislike and that they were, of course, the two loveliest people in this universe, too gorgeous to belong to anyone else, their less-attractive friends, family, and red-herring romantic interests mugging on the sidelines. At the climax of the film, after ninety minutes of unlikely obstacles and misunderstandings, after the female protagonist fled weeping from a wedding and was chased to a cliff above the Hollywood Bowl at sunset, after a metaphor-dense declaration of love that had made Dina and Victor howl, Dina had seen, out of the corner of her eye, that Isabel was tearing up.
Dina then turned her full attention to the screen, to the image there divorced from its context. The camera closed in slowly on a man and woman, from his impeccable suit to his blond stubble and perfect chin, from her plunging emerald bridesmaid gown to her wetly shining green eyes and mile-long eyelashes. A cathartic swell in the score, the sky an unlikely combination of pale violet and orange cream, the valley filled with earthbound stars. The kiss! A kiss that could only exist between those two people—the actors, not the characters. What made it romantic wasn’t the thinly drawn story, but the sheer aesthetic, charismatic sublime of movie stars.
Their kiss had moved Isabel. And Dina, out of genuine affection for her brother and his wife, wanted, but did not have the words, to say: Then don’t settle for this! For beauty only on the other side of the screen, for your ugly house in the middle of nowhere where you’re already letting your bodies soften and turn, for a settled and dreamless existence so early in life. You can be those people on the TV. You can look like that, exist in a scene like that, have a moment like that one. If you didn’t believe that, what was the point?
Victor said, now, “You’re not going back.”
“What?”
“You left your passport and stuff on the counter. Your ticket. You’
re going to L.A.”
Dina crossed her arms. “You’re going to tell me it’s a stupid idea. That I’m being stupid.”
“No, no. I think it’s great. I think . . .” He paused. “I don’t know anything about modeling or acting or whatever, but you’ve always had something. Something everyone can see, something that they want to be around. More than just being pretty. Some kind of magic.” He gestured at the TV, where the menu screen for the DVD persisted, an image of the central paramours standing nose to nose. “Like them.”
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Dina wondered if her gifts were more useless and common than she could bear. For now, the thought always dissolved by morning. And even if it was just her sentimental, weak-hearted brother, at least someone, at least once, had said what she’d always wanted to hear.
Dina took a shuttle from LAX to the Santa Monica Pier and walked to the address on the envelope she’d stolen from her mother. The building faced six lanes of Ocean Avenue, a line of palm trees, and the ocean itself beyond. Her mother knew the value of waterfront property. The lobby was so cold that opening the door felt like opening a freezer, the air-conditioning prickling her skin immediately. String lights dripped from a modern silver chandelier, reminiscent of icicles. Potted ferns and bamboo smothered the windows.
The woman behind the concierge desk looked like a model. Blond, vertiginously tall, in a lacy white dress and a navy blazer, face and body defined by straight slices of an artist’s knife. “May I help you?” she asked. She had a faint, implacable accent. Dina was in the right place, she thought, the place where all the world’s most beautiful people gathered.
