Had she not taken Tien the following week to the studio on Chung Shan North Road, things might have turned out differently for Tien. The floors were bare pine in the studio, the ceilings high. There were covers of European magazines framed by the elevator. Girls in exquisite dresses, in bikinis (some nearly naked). A zinc table stood by the entranceway with one pink flower in a green vase. The man’s business cards, printed on vellum, lay spread out in a delicate fan.

What happened that day to her daughter on the fifth floor in front of the umbrellas and the Hasselblad and the strobe lights, Mrs. Liang never found out. She’d been left in a separate room. But inside the main loft, flushed from the heat of the lights, the slight chaffing under her arms from the taffeta, and the tightness of the dress around her breasts, Tien felt a little dizzy at first. The photographer was small and encouraging, and he spoke barely any Mandarin. And there was something about the way he moved gently around her, tucked her hair behind her ear, adjusted her limbs, spread out part of her dress, showed her how to pout or hold her chin at just the right angle; something about his face—smiling, engrossed, responsive—that allowed her to open up. Perhaps because they didn’t speak the same language; or perhaps it was all the equipment, the lights, the loft, the electronic music piped softly over speakers, or the many rolls of film and different cameras, all focused on Tien and Tien alone. By the end of the two hours, she was laughing with the man from Hong Kong, drinking a bottle of imported spring water; and she’d let him photograph her in a way she’d never imagined before, her dress completely loosened in the back and falling down her shoulders.

So afterward, on the way home, when Mrs. Liang changed her mind and decided it was wrong, she shouldn’t have taken her daughter, her husband was right (again), it was too late. Tien had a slight blush on her forehead and perspiration under her arms. She told her mother nothing despite her endless queries. Tien was already thinking about the thick, glossy magazines the man had heaped upon her—the ones he said she could easily model for—and the vellum card stuck in her pocket. She certainly didn’t tell her mother about how she’d posed for the photographer, just as, years later, she couldn’t tell her about the other magazines she posed for—and in what positions.