Buddha Baby by Kim Wong Keltner Page A

eventually asked the inevitable question:
    "Are you married?"
    She kept her eyes on the painting and sighed, ignoring him in hopes he would saunter away. Instead, he walked in a circle around her and waited for her reply.
    The security guards seemed to have a running bet over her exact ethnicity. Last week as she studied an Yves Tanguy surrealist painting, a guard popped into her field of vision. "Filip-ina?" he inquired with a tinge of hope in his voice. A minute later, over by the ladies' room another blue-uniformed gent sauntered by and ventured, "Korean?" Then, by Rauschen-berg's
Erased DeKooning
, "Thailand girl?"
    Lindsey felt a sense of deja vu as she glanced now at a different but equally persistent guard.
    "Married?" he said again, stepping closer. Annoyed, she stood up and walked away. She contemplated alerting security to the routine harassment she'd been enduring, but she supposed that would have been futile.
    Her fifteen minutes were up, so in a huff she got into the elevator to head back down to the lobby. As the doors shut, she found herself squished behind a group of rowdy twentysomethings. They jostled and shoved one another, paying no mind to the few passengers who were not part of their herd.
    Someone said, "Hey, press 'two,' wouldja?"
    Another guy responded, "What do I look like, a freakin'
Chinaman
?"
    Smashed against the elevator's back wall, Lindsey was taken aback by what she heard. She fumed and wanted to say, "Let me up front, I'm Chinese! I can push the button!" Instead, she stayed quiet and silently hated them all.
    Back in the gift shop, she slipped her apron and white gloves back on. After de-dandruffing a Warhol wig, she blew out the bangs with a can of compressed air and used a pick to tease the synthetic strands to rat-nest perfection worthy of the pop icon. Placing the wig back on a Styrofoam head, she saw someone approaching in her peripheral vision. He came forward and was zapped by a crackle of static electricity as he touched the counter. With a spastic motion, he jumped back.
    "Ow!" he said. Then added, "Yang!"
    She jerked her head up.
    Yang
was right. Her hippie aunt, Shirley, referred to sexy guys as "yummy and
yang
," as opposed to "
yin"
which meant feminine. Dustin Lee struck Lindsey at this moment as a good blend of both—handsome and muscular with masculine
yang
but also graceful and well-groomed with perfect skin and feminine
yin
. Either way, there was no denying this time that he was the hottest Chinese guy she had ever laid eyes on, and tonight he was a welcome sight.
    "Hey, Miss. I'd like to complain that your carpet just gave me a terrible shock," he said.
    "Well, you shouldn't shuffle your feet, then go around touching things. Didn't you learn anything in science class?"
    He smiled. "I don't know if you remember, but I was here before."
    "Yeah, I know."
    "So, do you have any idea who I am?"
    "Let's see," she said. "Your name is Dustin Lee, and you may or may not be a direct descendant of the great general, Robert E. Lee. When you were twelve you were uprooted from Texas and went to St. Maude's Elementary School, where you accused other Chinese kids of being rat-eaters and in your spare time worked on your Devo impersonations. Am I right?"
    He smiled and leaned in close. "You're fantastic, you know that?"
    She allowed a small smile to show, but with trepidation.
    "I was so happy when I bumped into you last week," he said. "You turned out really, um, all-right-looking."
    Lindsey blushed. Not only had Dustin turned out to be not bad-looking himself, but as they chatted, she noted a certain charisma that made other patrons in the store turn around and notice him. He carried himself like a celebrity, and said, "How's it goin'?" to complete strangers who nodded and smiled, seeming to feel immediately better about themselves because someone far more beautiful than they had just acknowledged their existence.
    Dustin leaned over the glass counter and said, "You really do look