Mrs. Liang passed under the library window just then (she didn’t hear Claartija’s startled scream). She was picking a bouquet of flowers for her daughter. The sky was unsettled now, the ocean a dark tannin. A few yellow leaves swirled around her. She picked through the perennial bed, snapping stalks of bee balm, spirea, some fall-blooming phlox. With her left hand, she gripped the framed portrait of her daughter; in her right she held the bouquet. The whole flight across the world, she’d held the portrait on her lap. It was a head shot of Tien, taken when she was only seventeen at the photo studio on Chung Shan North Road. Tien looked beautiful in the color photograph, her lips glossed and bee-stung, her eyes dark and shining. She was wearing one of Mrs. Liang’s own dresses from the seamstress shop, a taffeta wraparound wedding dress, with tiny pearl buttons that ran in a tight row down the spine. Mrs. Liang was particularly proud of the design; Tien had helped with it too. So simple, so elegant, the legs looked as if they melded together, like a mermaid’s. Only a small bit of the dress was visible in the photograph; it showed mostly Tien’s face, the high cheekbones; the thin, arched eyebrows; the soft, pale shoulders. Mrs. Liang and her husband often wondered where Tien had gotten her good looks, her height. As young as thirteen, Tien had modeled dresses for Mrs. Liang in the seamstress shop. And it was there where the Hong Kong photographer had found her and left his card, with a Hong Kong address and a New York City address. Tien had talent, he told Mrs. Liang; she had natural looks. She could be a model. She could be in film. He wanted to take some scouting shots. Mrs. Liang was flattered; Tien wasn’t so sure (she was just sixteen). The man wore a kind of perfume, and round, black-rimmed, modern glasses and his head was completely shaved. He was renting a studio across town, and he wrote that address as well on the back of one of his cards. Tien was shy, in spite of (or because of ) her height. But Mrs. Liang pushed her. When would she have such an opportunity again? A foreigner with an American address. A photographer. Her husband protested: Why fill her head with such dreams? Better she study hard for her exams. But Mrs. Liang got her way in the end—she always did.