Princess sat in the same waiting room in the free clinic every six months or so.  The air conditioning chilled her, and she tried to pull her cropped Playboy Bunny t-shirt down to cover more of her stomach.  The carpet smelled like chemicals, and the paint on the walls was peeling behind the cheap framed portraits of babies wearing absurd daisy and bee costumes.  Sitting beside her was a fat Hispanic woman who seemed to speak no English and her fatter son, who intermittently hacked a rattling cough to break up the monotony of the top 40 radio station that blared through tiny speakers on the ceiling. 

The dancer read a fashion magazine the office provided in the basket by her seat.  An article reported it to be en vogue for East Asian women to undergo cosmetic surgery to make their faces appear more European.  Princess rolled her eyes and turned the page. 

The nurse called her name and led her back to have her height taken (5’4”) and to be weighed (105lbs), and then took her to a tiny white room with cracked tile floors where she asked the dancer several questions and told her please to wait patiently, her counselor would be in any minute.

She knew the routine of it.  Her counselor would give her a tiny strip of paper.  She would hold it under her tongue for a few seconds, then give it back and the counselor would leave the room for about twenty minutes.  There was always that instant of terror when the door opened.  She would think, maybe, maybe this time, but then the counselor would smile and say negative, and Princess would breathe a sigh and go back to work. 

Today, her counselor was a woman in her early thirties with short, sandy-blonde hair and dark lipstick.  She smiled at Princess and spoke to her in a soothing voice.  Princess took the strip of paper and placed it in her mouth, sucking and sucking.  The second hand moved and she extracted the strip and passed it back to the counselor.

“I’ll be back in twenty minutes.  Would you like someone to stay in here with you while you wait for the results?”

Princess shook her head no.  She put her hands behind her head and leaned back on the examination table, pulling her shirt up and leaving her belly stretched out and exposed.  She filled her lungs with air and exhaled.

During times like this, her mind would wander.  Sometimes it would draw her into a fantasy in which she was a real princess.  Alone in a castle she would sit while her oppressors feasted in halls below.  She would wait for years in those rooms with the birds and the rats her friends, and one day a scruffy young rogue would find her, remove her from her diamond encrusted prison, and whisk her off to a rugged, tumultuous life of adventure and rough sex.  This was not, however, where her mind wanted to go today.

It was a memory day, she could tell.  She knew that some of the memories were going to be painful, and some of them were going to be sad, but she also knew that she had seen them all before, so she took another slow, deep breathe. 

Princess was born Anya Korolov in a rural town in Russia.  She was abandoned at a small orphanage before she was three months old, making her one of thousands of unwanted children in the country.  However, because she was still an infant and had blonde hair and blue eyes, the nuns at the orphanage held out great hope that she would be lucky enough to be adopted.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Hiroaki and Risa Nakamichi had been trying for over a year to conceive a child of their own.  Risa had started to believe the couple’s inability to conceive was her fault, and she was not woman enough to bear her husband’s child.  (The actual reason was Hiroaki’s low sperm count from heavy teenage drug use, but neither he nor his wife considered that the problem could lie with him.)  Risa’s world grew so dark that she eventually couldn’t bring herself out of bed.  Hiroaki would leave her at six o’clock in the morning in their Western-inspired bedroom, and when he’d return at seven pm, she was still lying there between the white sheets, eyes open and staring at a cartoon sticker which decorated the phone on the nightstand. 

The businessman went to the internet and looked up everything he could about embryologists, in vitro fertilization, and fertility specialists, but the sites offered no guarantees on the success of the procedures.  If they spent millions of yen and Risa still failed to conceive, he could envision her depression growing even worse, and he couldn’t imagine having to clean house and cook his own dinner for much longer. 

At the top of one webpage, he saw a link advertising foreign adoption.  He clicked on it. 

That night, he threw open the door to the bedroom.  His wife lay like a corpse, her hair stringy and her face shining with grease.  Her breath which drew shallowly from her parted lips was unchanged by Hiroaki’s entrance.  The cartoon eyes of the torn sticker stared back at her. 

“Risa-chan,” he announced.  “I’ve solved our problems!”

The woman blinked slowly and wet her lips with her tongue, but said nothing.  He approached her and sat on the edge of the bed.  “Don’t worry!  We don’t have to rely on your womb for our child.  We’re going to go abroad and adopt one.  I’ve been researching it.  They all but guarantee a healthy infant to financially stable couples.  You see?  There’s nothing to worry about.  It’ll be better this way, besides.  So many children are orphans in the world, and now you won’t have to grow fat and unattractive like your sister did after her baby.”

A moment passed, then Risa turned and looked at him for the first time in days.  Her voice was dry and cracked when she spoke.  “You want to bring a gaijin into our house?”

Hiroaki paused.  “Well, you see, it’s very easy to adopt from poor countries.  I read there are many children in China and Korea…”

“Yamete!” Risa shouted.  Suddenly, Hiroaki recalled Risa’s father had lost the use of his right arm in World War II while fighting in China.  Images filled his mind of her parents’ house in the mountains, the traditional tatami floors and sliding paper doors.  He recalled her father’s swearing rants against the Chinese and Koreans in his deathbed delirium nearly ten years earlier, just after he and Risa had married.   

“Okay, okay,” he stammered.  “None of them.  But there are many children elsewhere.  Caucasian children.  There are many in Cambodia, many in Kazakhstan, many, many in Russia.”

Risa was quiet.  Her clouded, bloodshot eyes drifted to a short, white bookshelf in the corner.  She had studied world literature in school, and the shelves were filled with translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.  Hiroaki didn’t remember her fondness for Slavic literature, but he knew how to take advantage of his wife’s silence.

“Yes, yes,” he continued.  “Many, many children are in Russia.  I read about them.  Many beautiful children.  Yes, so many beautiful little girls, just like the ones in Western movies.  Y-you could have a beautiful little Russian blonde haired child to pamper like a doll.”

“No,” she said, but the word was just a little too firm, too immediate.  For the rest of the day she was silent.  The next day, she moved occasionally her gaze away from the staring cartoon eyes on her telephone.  On the third day, she drank the water and ate the rice her husband had left on the nightstand for her and turned on the radio.  On the fourth day, she got up.

“What do you know about this foreign adoption?” she demanded when Hiroaki walked in.  He stopped and looked around.  The house was cleaned, his dinner ready on the table, and his wife was showered and dressed in washed and pressed clothing. 

He sat down to dinner and told her all he knew about adoption in Russia.  She listened silently, nodding at intervals, until finally, when Hiroaki had finished his meal and sat back in his seat, she spoke.

“I’m not saying I like the idea, but maybe we could contact an agency and find out more.”

Four months later, they stepped off a plane in Russia.  They checked into their hotel and took a taxi to a small orphanage in Vladivostok.  It was a modest building, populated by modest women in kerchiefs and dull dresses.  The walls were covered in juvenile murals of colorful flowers and trees.  Risa and Hiroaki saw them as they followed a nun into a room and sat down in wooden chairs which were probably older than both of their ages combined.  The dull women paraded children of all kinds through, but they were all too dark, too fat, too old, or a little to unattractive overall.  As more and more children were carried or led into the little room, Risa felt her despair returning, creeping over her again like oily tar as she pictured herself returning to her still childless white house. 

“There is only one more,” the Japanese-speaking nun said.  “I hope you find her nice.”

The door opened again, and she saw her.  The most delicate example of occidental perfection Risa could have imagined.  Thick blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and creamy skin.  She was ideal.

“My doll!” she exclaimed as she sprung up and extended her arms to the child.  “My baby!”

She held the seven-month-old to her bony breast, caressing the whitegold strands and breathing in the scent of powder.  Around them, new mother and daughter, the nuns tittered with excitement.

The Nakamichis would have to leave their little girl and return in three more months to testify in front of a judge before she could be brought home.  Nevertheless, as they boarded their return flight, Risa’s eyes were wide, white, and shining.

When the legal issues were dealt with and Risa and Hiroaki the legal parents of Anya, the tiny child accompanied her new guardians away from Russia and back to her new motherland.  She was walking now, though wobbly, and on the plane Risa annoyed the other passengers with her attempts to get the confused, frightened child to mimic her voice and intonation as she said “Mama.”

At home, the Nakamichis outfitted their new daughter with the latest in toddler fashion, her own pink and white bedroom, an overflowing basket of plush and electronic toys, and a new name.  The sugar pink in her cheeks reminded Risa of cherry blossoms in the springtime, and she named her daughter Sakura.

Risa dressed Sakura in bright and fuzzy baby clothes.  She paraded her around in a stroller amid voices ringing “Kawaii!” erupting invariably from all directions as they passed.  Girls and women crouched down in front of her daughter’s stroller, openmouthed and cooing.  “She’s my daughter,” Risa would say, and the observers would look at her with wide eyes.

By the time she was two, she had forgotten the few Russian words she had known and had begun to learn Japanese.  She called Risa “Mama,” and Hiroaki “Papa,” and was mastering the proper intonation of “etou….”

By the time Sakura started school, her hair had grown thick and wavy, but she barely noticed that hers was the only blonde head in the classroom.  She listened to the teacher and did her lessons, and when the day was over, she walked out to the street where her mother picked her up and brought her home.

But as the year progressed, an odd tension began to grow.  The other students stared at her unabashedly in class.  During lunch, she approached children to be friends, but they would turn away from her.  “Henna gaijin,” one said, short and male with glasses.  It was the first time Sakura had heard the word.

As she grew, people stared at her everywhere she went.  Grandmothers, businessmen, young hostesses, teenagers, and shop girls without discretion.  Sometimes the watchers would talk about her, believing she didn’t understand Japanese.  “Mama, Mama!” children would cry pulling on a parent’s sleeve and pointing at Sakura.  “Mite!  Chicchai gaijin!”

In early childhood she was not oblivious to stranger’s eyes, but hadn’t yet realized that the watching was something unique to her own life.  The cruelest revelation came at seven, when it dawned on her that it was not merely a part of shared human experience to be perpetually stared at.  No lost parents or homeland could compare to the loneliness of realizing that being watched was something that only happened to her.

Sometimes she would shout back at the watchers in perfect Japanese and see their faces change, but most of the time she just turned red, suppressing tears, not wishing to make herself more of a spectacle. 

As school went on year after year, the other students found it even less acceptable for a gaijin to be in the same class with them, and even less acceptable was the fact that she learned at the same pace as the rest of them.  Even at eight, watching a blonde child write kanji in perfect stroke order with the ease of a native struck strange terror in their little nihon no hearts.

Her mother insisted on dressing the girl until she was eleven, when Sakura won a wall-rattling screaming contest.  After that, Risa barely spoke to her daughter, but the silence and eye-slanted passings struck the girl as an improvement.  Whenever the two did speak, Sakura had gotten the impression that her mother assumed she was stupid. 

Also, her teachers assumed she was stupid.

Her classmates assumed she was stupid.

Strangers she met every day assumed she was stupid.

“I’m not an idiot, you know!” she shouted one afternoon at her teacher, who presented her with remedial kanji lessons while the rest of the class was reading literature.  The teacher slapped her hard across the face, leaving a red handprint on cherry blossom skin.

Around the same time, another sort of watching manifested in the people around her.  At eleven, with only the tiniest suggestion of a woman’s breasts, she began to feel her body being perused by the eyes of men who saw her race as an Occidentalized boon, and her age as the fulfillment of forbidden pornographic fantasies. 

She grew to loathe these burning, hungry stares even more than the slacked jaws of homogenous children and the titters and subtly pointed fingers of women in stores.  She glared at the men who leered at her on the streets and stood too close to her on the subway trains. 

By the next year, the unwanted attention had grown beyond mere glances.  Men’s hands traveled up her skirt on crowded public transport, and some called at her as she walked to school.  Once there, teachers still condescended to her, most students still ostracized her.  At home, her mother barely looked at her.  Her father had never looked at her.  Wherever she went, she was a freak.

When she was thirteen, she had started to eat lunch with a girl named Megumi, who was more culturally enlightened than most of her peers.  One afternoon as they shared Megumi’s mother’s homemade dumplings, Megumi motioned for her to lean in.  She pulled out a Hello Kitty wallet and produced what must have been ten thousand yen.

“Eeeeh?  Where did you get that?”

“I earned it,” Megumi said.  “It’s mine.”

“Where did you earn that much money?”  Sakura’s long blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail, and she had loosened the tie of her school uniform, slouching in her chair and chewing a mouthful of dumpling. 

Megumi looked over her shoulder, coyly.  “Can you keep a secret?” she whispered, squinting at her friend. 

“Unn,” Sakura said with a definite nod.

Megumi smiled wide.  “I sold my virginity at a telephone club.  I got over three hundred thousand yen.  I’m rich!”

Sakura reeled back in shock, dropping a dumpling she had been holding with her chopsticks.  “Megumi-chan!” she shouted.  Then, realizing she had attracted attention, waited a moment before saying in a lowered voice, “A teleclub?  Aren’t they dangerous?”

“No,” said Megumi.  Moist dough stuck out from between her teeth when she spoke.  “It’s very safe.  You call the man and you decide if you’ll see him or not.  You can talk to him for a long time before you meet.”

Sakura couldn’t speak, but somehow, Megumi seemed more beautiful to her now than she had before.  What was usually an oversized mouth seemed to fill her face with vibrancy, and her eyes, which had always seemed too small, glittered with life as she sat poised and adult, eating her lunch.  Sakura knew she could never, ever do something so scary, but was suddenly ashamed to still receive an allowance from her parents instead of working for what she wanted.

Six months later she slumped in silence in the kitchen with a can of iced tea.  Her mother sat at the table across from her, slicing fish.  The rhythmic glide of the knife was both hypnotic and annoying, and finally, Sakura spoke.  “There are these cool Gucci shoes in Harajuku, but I’ll never be able to afford them.”

Risa’s eyes stayed unblinking on the fish.  “We give you a big allowance, if you already spent it on junk, that’s your fault.”

“Okaasan,*” pleaded Sakura.  “Please!  I’ll do extra chores!”

Risa paused and breathed, then shook her head, eyes still lowered, and exited the room.

It may have been more out of contempt for her mother than desire for the shoes (which were cool, but maybe not that cool) that she decided to seek out Megumi the following day at school.

“Hora, Megumi-chan!” she called across the cafeteria.

Megumi brought her lunch over and sat next to Sakura.  The past year showed itself in both of their bodies, and Sakura was beginning to display the curves that would prove so lucrative in years to come. 

After they had spoken a bit about class work and teachers, Sakura took a breath.

“Are you still doing the teleclub?” she asked with a lowered voice.

Megumi glanced around just like she had the year before.  “Yeah, I still do it every once and a while when I need extra money.  Why?”

Sakura considered briefly whether she really wanted to say what she said next.

“Well, I was thinking… I’m low on money right now, and you said you got so much for your virginity…  I mean, if I’m going to lose it anyway, I figure why not make some money while I’m at it, ne?”

Megumi nodded.  “Well, if you’re serious, I could give you the number.  All you have to do is call and they’ll connect you with a man.  You could see if you want to.”

“Sure.”  She took a deep breath and a sip from her can of Pokari Sweat. 

Later that week, after walking by a store and spying a Versace handbag she knew she could never pay for with her allowance, Sakura made the decision. 

At home, she sat cross-legged on her bed with a box of chocolate Pocky and made the call.  It only rang for a moment.

“Moshi moshi.”

Words caught in Sakura’s throat, but she forced out.  “Oh, good afternoon.  My name is Sakura.  Nice to meet you.”

The man grunted.  “My name is Shoji.  Pleasure to meet you.”

There was a pause.  Then Sakura remembered what Megumi told her to say and continued.  “Etou, I’m fourteen, a second-year junior high school student.  I’m a hundred and fifty-two centimeters tall and weight forty one kilograms.  I’m of Russian descent, and I have blonde hair and blue eyes.  Most people think I’m very pretty.  I have never had a man before, and I’m looking for that special someone to be my first time.” 

Shoji coughed.  “And… how much would that special someone have to pay?”

Sakura thought.  Megumi had received 325,000 yen in exchange for her virginity.  She was a cute girl, but nothing special, and both she and Sakura knew, though neither of them said it, that between the two of them, Sakura was the much more beautiful.  Megumi had suggested Sakura ask anywhere from five-hundred-thousand to a million, her Caucasian race, hair, and eyes adding a premium to her already impressive statistics.  She was about to quote her price at one million, then, on a whim, and with the knowledge that if Shoji refused, she could call the teleclub back at any time, she said, “two million yen,” and waited for the man at the other end to laugh and hang up.

But he didn’t laugh.  He mumbled something incoherent, coughed again, then quietly, he said, “Well, if you are telling the truth about yourself, it sounds like you just may be worth it.”

Sakura lost her virginity in an expensive hotel room after dinner in one of the trendiest new restaurants in Tokyo.  The intercourse lasted about forty-five seconds, and when it was over, Shoji, a man whose face was heavily creased for his forty-some years of life, gazed with slight, visible satisfaction at the few drops of blood that stained Sakura’s inner thighs and the sheets below.  Before she left, he gave to her not only their agreed-upon fee, but also a ring with a real ruby.  The whole thing was over before ten pm. 

When she got home, she called Megumi.

“Do you want to go to the mall tomorrow?  I can buy anything I want!”

“Sakura-chan, did you do it?”

“Yes, and you’ll never guess how much I made.”

“A million?”

“No, go higher,”

“Higher than a million?”

“Double it.”

“Wait… no!  No way!”

“Yes way!  I made two million yen!”

“Wow… lucky!  I’ve never heard of any girl making that much before.  That might be a new record!”

“You think so?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, can you go shopping tomorrow?”

“Sure.  Congratulations, Sakura-chan.  Welcome to the world of working for your money!  Now we don’t need to rely on our parents.”

With Megumi’s final words, Sakura’s chest swelled with pride.  The girls went out the next day after school and Sakura bought a dress which would have taken her a year to pay for with her allowance.  When she came home, she modeled the dress for herself in the mirror, her reflection beaming back to her.

Quickly, almost immediately, Sakura developed a taste for very expensive clothes and accessories.  After school and on Sundays, she would dress in Gaultier, Prada, Chanel, and Louis Vitton, which began to draw even more attention to the blonde teenager.  The difference was this time, she crafted and created it.  It was hers. 

By the time she started studying for her high school entrance exams, she was receiving regular personal solicitations to her cell phone.  The extra pressure in her studies led to the development of another expensive taste.

Amphetamines were her first drug.  Many of the other students took stimulants to help them put in the long hours to get into their top choice high school.  When Sakura took the speed, her problems fell away, and whatever she was doing at that precise moment, often studying, sometimes sex, seemed to be the most important thing in the entire world.  It also helped her get into her second choice high school, which had even cuter uniforms than her first choice. 

In high school, other girls who did enjo kosai introduced her to cocaine, which was even cleaner than speed, and allowed her to make almost twice as much money and get even better grades.  The drugs and her continuing appetite for designer fashion sucked her wallet dry almost as quickly as prostitution filled it, but it seemed that the cycle would go on happily uninterrupted until she became an old woman, and would have to find some other means of supporting herself.  Perhaps she would marry. 

But that was a long way off, and though racism persisted in people around her and the alienation from her parents was practically the only aspect to their relationship, she was the most powerful creature in the world. 

When she was nearly seventeen, her parents asked to speak with her downstairs after dinner.  A slight flicker of unease, a mild nausea rose in her stomach.  She held her breath silently as she sat at the kitchen table, her parents forming the points of a right triangle with her at the other side.

Finally Hiroaki took a deep breath.  “We’re moving, Sakura-chan.”  He didn’t look at his daughter when he spoke.

Sakura let the tension in her body release in air through her parted lips.  “Oh, that’s all?”  In her mind, like flashes, fantasies of living in a mansion like the idols on TV.  With a tiny Chihuahua and a flashy fur coat she’d sip champagne while cascading down her marble staircase.  The camera shutters flashed.  “Where?”

“To America,” Risa interjected.  “Your father was transferred.  It’s a great honor, and we are going to follow him.”  She said it simply and firmly and sat back in her chair.  The right triangle was thrown off slightly by her movement. 

“What?” Sakura exclaimed.  “I can’t move to America!  I – everyone I know is here!”

“It’s not a choice, Sakura,” Risa said from where she sat.  “We’re leaving next month.  Consider yourself lucky you get that much time to say goodbye.”

Sakura pushed down on the table and stood up, destroying the triangle entirely.  “This is ridiculous!  I’m not going!  I can’t even speak English well!”

“Sakura-chan,” said her father, reaching out a timorous hand to the girl, “try to look at the bright side of things.  Maybe… maybe you’ll fit in better in America.  You’ll look more… normal.”

Instead of shouting, instead of crying, Sakura turned from creamy cherry blossom white to cherry red, slammed her fists down on the kitchen table and stormed upstairs.  Her parents glanced at each other when she was gone with sullen, remorseful eyes.

“What a spoiled child,” said her mother. 

Within the next month, she said goodbye to her few friends and many clients, packed bags and bags of clothing and accessories, and generally made a dramatic, moping show of her dissatisfaction around the house.  Nevertheless, soon she found herself walking through American streets in an American city full of people of every imaginable race.  She saw Chinese and Japanese people, white people, black people, Middle Eastern, Indian, and many whose race she could not determine at all.  Walking through the streets, she saw a broader mixture of people than she’d ever imagined.  Families with one black and one Asian parent, creating a new race of children who would grow up to mix the gene pool even more.  Families like hers, with two homogenous parents with adopted children of one or more obviously different racial background.  And there were blonde girls!

Blonde girls everywhere!  Young ones, old ones, pretty ones, ugly ones, bookish ones, artificial ones, natural ones, accidental ones; everywhere she looked, she saw them!  She didn’t garner any more stares than any other lovely young girl in expensive clothing walking down the street, though her wardrobe (and her drug habit) was waning in her new surroundings.  There was no organized system of enjo kosai in the US, and prostitution was not an accepted de facto means for teenagers to earn spending money. 

She attended her junior and senior year in an international high school which catered to foreign students who spoke English as a second language.  Her English skills improved, and she was soon more or less fluent in the language, though she spoke the words she knew with a thick, almost exaggerated Japanese accent.  Strangers would cock their heads when she spoke in public.  The act of purchasing a pack of gum or a box of tampons could turn into a lengthy explanation of her background and descent, or if she refused, a chastising speech about how inappropriate it was to mock Asian-Americans with such an offensive caricature.  Or it could simply end with a head shake and “Dude, stop fucking with me,” or an eye-roll and “Whatever, honey.”

But at the international school, things were different.  For the first time in her life, she was surrounded by kids her age who felt more or less out of place.  She made a friend, an Indian girl named Sangeeta with a stud in her left nostril and long wavy hair.  Together they decided to take a class senior year to apply for American citizenship.  They studied hard, without drugs or exhaustion, and on the weekends they would go to the movies or go dancing.  The two girls had sleepovers and shared desires and plans in their common language of fractured English.  Sangeeta dreamed of becoming a pediatrician, helping sick children and bringing hope to the world.  She looked to the ceiling when she talked about it, clasping her hands and drawing her elbows together before twisting her forearms over one another in excitement.  Sakura admitted softly with a downward gaze that her only dream had ever been to be famous, an idol on TV, and for everyone to love her and look up to her.

“I think that is a very beautiful wish,” Sangeeta said in her crisp, musical accent.

Sakura shook her head, causing wisps of blonde to move and attach themselves to the sticky gloss on her lips.  She pulled them off as she spoke.  “No!  Don’ rie to me!  I know it’su baddo dreamu.  It’su serufish.”

“It may be selfish in a way, but it shows how much being loved is important to you.”  Sangeeta moved a mouthful of cookie dough with her tongue to the sides of her mouth.  “Besides, stars have a lot of power in this country.  You could help many people by being famous.”

They wore flannel pajamas and sat cross-legged on the beige carpet in Sangeeta’s living room.  They faced each other and took turns scooping mounds of homemade chocolate chip cookie dough from a mixing bowl with one shared spoon.  A movie was playing on the TV, but the volume was low and neither of them were watching.

“You wan to know my rear dreamu?” Sakura said after awhile, the television glow lighting the right side of her face.

“Sure.”

The smallest suggestion of tears glittered in the corners of her eyes.  “I wish I cou’ be a pulincessu.” 

“A what?  A pilot?”

“No.”  Sakura turned her face toward Sangeeta.  “A pulincessu.”

“A police officer?”

Sakura’s mouth fought its way around the words.  “No, a pulincessu, rike in faily tairs.”

Sangeeta squinted at her, blinked, then said, “Oooh!  A princess!”  A laugh, not even a laugh, puffed through, then she stopped herself.

Sakura’s face dropped.  She put another spoonful of cookie dough into her mouth, chewed and swallowed.  “Eeeh, it’su just a dreamu.”

On a Friday in May they received the news that they both passed their US residency tests.  They celebrated that night by going to a club and dancing to live music until dawn.

The years of enjo kosai and cocaine was another lifetime.  It was as if Sakura had been reincarnated into this new country.  She hadn’t had any boyfriends at all since she came to the US.  For fun, she and Sangeeta would go to museums or listen to music – not to the flashy pop groups she had favored as a teenager in Japan, but to old rock ‘n roll, to hip hop, to modern bands with men who sang until they cried and women who wrote their own songs.  She could listen for hours, not doing anything else, hardly moving, just letting the music and words enter, fill, and pass through her.

Before she knew it, she was a high school graduate and had moved into her own apartment on the other side of the city from her mother and father.  Sangeeta was seven states away studying for her pre-med degree, and Sakura was learning more week after week that she had no chance at all of being an actress.

After months of practice, of posturing and reciting lines in front of a mirror, of dieting, of acting classes, of auditions filled with identical slim, large-breasted blondes, of crying in her studio apartment with the soft stereo running, of hiding from phone calls from her parents and high school friends, of coffee and grilled cheese made with stale bread, of her stiff, lonely, desolate twin mattress, of the four barren off-white walls, of the grey city streets and skies, of isolation in the midst of thousands, of the beating of her heart at night so loud and drum-like in the silence that she was sure she was about to die, of the dark quiet of loneliness day after day stretching out across summer and into fall, of holding her phone close, never hearing ever a thing from any audition she went to, she approached a gaunt director in a low-lit auditorium. 

“You’re no’ goin to hire me, light?”

From behind black plastic glasses the director looked at her and shuffled the papers on the long table.  He cleared his throat.  “I’m sorry, but no, we’re not.”

“Is i’ because ob my accento?”

The director moved his eyes slowly from the papers to Sakura.  He couldn’t have been older than thirty.  “Well, largely yes.  It would just be too distracting.  It’s just… strange.”

Sakura felt tears welling up, but she smiled, thanked him, and bowed before leaving, the other actresses shaking their heads.  So unprofessional.

 

Six months later, after her first night of stripping, with her first night’s worth of tips, she found an all night tattoo parlor and drew a character in her own calligraphy.  She asked the artist to ink it big and bold on her lower back so it was always following her, so she could never forget her dream.  It rested there proudly, in the perfect stroke-order she learned as a child, the kanji for princess.

In the waiting room, she slid a hand behind her back to feel the familiar decorated spot.  She jerked it away when the door opened and her counselor re-entered the room.

Princess sat up straight, she felt the terror and felt it relax, but then she felt something else.  The terror rose up again, only it was calmer this time.  The expression on her counselor’s face was not a reassuring smile, but tightened lips and a wrinkled brow.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman with the dark lipstick said, her mouth framing the words as they rang through her like a church bell, “but you’re positive.”  Thick, heavy silence poured over them, filling the tiny white room.

Princess’s mouth, suddenly dry, muttered one word.  “Kuso.”

The woman explained to Princess her options in counseling, in support groups, and what treatments and preventative medication was available.  She told her that she should alert any sexual partners she’d had in the last six months of this development.

Princess listened, and nodded, and understood.  Tears flowed hot and constant, her nose running steadily, more fluid releasing each time she tried to dry it.  She took with her the pamphlets and the support group schedule and the office’s phone number, and when she left, she hugged the woman who felt for a moment closer to her than her adopted mother, and walked out alone into the wet summer air.

She had nothing to do but go back to work.

 

---

* She hadn’t called Risa “Mama,” in three years.

Filed under: Money, Princess, clothes, sex, the city by Jade