She sat by the doorway of the teahouse smoking and waiting for customers, with heavy metal lipstick on her lips and a cold smile frozen on her face, while her belly swelled with the panting of men and menstrual cramps.

   After graduating from junior high school, she drank naked with customers in a tourist hotel in Taipei, displaying her fresh, pure and innocent face, as well as her delicate and touching vital statistics. In the intoxicating time of dreams, she mended her hymen again and again to guard the narrow passage providing the only means of access to love.
   Love is a pimple that cannot be hidden; the sudden sorrow, the whispered oaths, tender and shy; it is, in fact, the embarrassed tumor of one’s youth.
   Pawned to the red light district for her boy friend’s gambling debts, she owned a curtain, a basin of clean water and a wooden bed on which she worked and slept, and a window with iron bars on it; the window opened onto the dusty road, to a mortal world at dusk.
   Two years later, she found refuge in a call girl center in Tokyo. Day after day, she was busy in a bar and a salon; finally she realized the loneliness after a dream hangover. The small room she rented contained only a spring bed and the leather suitcase she carried to wander about destitute in a foreign country. Hidden inside her suitcase were her meager savings and leftover dignity, as well as an expired passport and tourist visa.

   Standing in the doorway of the teahouse, she solicited customers with heavy metal lipstick on her lips and a cold smile frozen on her face, while her belly was roiled with menstrual cramps and the semen of strangers.