Free Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende Page A

Lucky—the boy was proud of his origins and had no intention of ever leaving Chinatown.
    Lynn adored her father—impossible not to love that gentle, generous man—but she was ashamed of her race. She realized at an early age that the only place for Chinese was their quarter; they were detested in the rest of the city. The favorite sport of white youths was to stone the Celestials or cut off their queues after beating them up. Like her mother, Lynn lived with one foot in China and the other in the United States; they both spoke English and dressed in the American style, even though at home they usually wore silk tunics and trousers. Lynn had little of her father about her, except for her long bones and Oriental eyes, and even less of her mother. No one knew where her rare beauty had come from. Her parents never let her play outdoors, as they had her brother Lucky, because in Chinatown women and girls from proper families were recluses. On the rare occasions that she walked through the quarter, she held her father's hand and kept her eyes lowered to keep from provoking the almost exclusively male throngs. Father and daughter attracted attention: she for her beauty and he because he dressed like an American. Tao Chi'en had years before renounced the typical queue of his people, and he wore his hair short and combed straight back; he dressed in an impeccable black suit, a shirt with a celluloid collar, and a top hat. Outside Chinatown, however, Lynn went around as free as any white girl. She attended a Presbyterian school where she learned the rudiments of Christianity, which, added to the Buddhist practices of her father, eventually convinced her that Christ was the reincarnation of Buddha. She went shopping alone, as she did to her piano lessons and to visit her school friends; in the afternoons she sat in her mother's tearoom, where she did her homework and entertained herself rereading the romantic novels she bought for ten cents or that her aunt Rose sent her from London. Eliza Sommers's efforts to interest Lynn in the kitchen or in other domestic activities were futile: her daughter did not seem cut out for everyday chores.
    As she grew older, Lynn kept her exotic angel face, but her body began to round with perturbing curves. For years her photographs had circulated without major consequences, but everything changed when by fifteen she was fully developed and had become aware of the devastating effect she had on men. Her mother, terrified by the consequences of that tremendous power, tried to tame her daughter's bent for seduction, driving home the norms of modesty and teaching her to walk like a soldier, without moving her shoulders or hips. But to no avail; men of every age, race, and condition turned to stare at her. Once Lynn understood the advantages of her beauty, she stopped cursing it, as she had when she was young, and decided that she would be an artist's model for a while until a prince on a winged horse came along to lead her to matrimonial bliss. During her childhood, her parents had tolerated the photographs of fairies and swings, thinking of them as an innocent caprice, but they considered it an enormous risk to let her show off her new womanly image in front of the cameras. "This business of posing isn't decent work, it will be her ruination," Eliza Sommers determined sadly; she knew that she could not dissuade her daughter from fantasies or protect her from the trap of beauty. She presented her qualms to Tao Chi'en in one of those perfect moments when they were resting after making love. He explained to her that every person has his or her karma, that it isn't possible to direct others' lives, only sometimes to amend the direction of one's own, but Eliza was not prepared to allow misfortune to catch her daughter off guard. She had always accompanied Lynn when she posed for photographs, making sure of their decency—no bare calves using the excuse of art—and now that the girl was nineteen, she was