Three short ones (also: "vida miserable") 1. Sam, whom I know by name and who runs a small pharmacy down the corner of the street, is a nice, warm, and congenial guy. One day he came to me and said: "Let's have sex on your bed, man." I was totally surprised. Raised in a normal, Catholic family as I am, I would never imagine one day a man would propose such indecent thing to me! Even though I went to bars regularly. 2. My girlfriend left me when I was 17. Then I felt absolutely desperate. I called my mom, and cried. Mom said nothing but her motto: "es la vida," which in Spanish means "that's the life," or in French, "c'est la vie." Sammy, who had been with me for five years since we left primary school, had always been a wonderful girl. She didn't have big breasts, but she was cute in her own particular way. One day she said, "I had been sleeping with other guys. There's one, who everybody calls Winfred, is actually a transsexual who had been a girl." 3. I have known Sam ever since I moved to this neighborhood, in the summer of 1994. New York City was a mess then. The crime rate was so high that when my landlord finally handed in the key to me, he sort of sneered: "I think I should say good luck; you ain't a native down here, yeah?" I shrugged. Sometimes I heard sounds of gunshot in the middle of night, some time between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. Really, no shit. And it was really annoying. Anyway, not long after I moved to this neighborhood had I become acquainted with Sam. As I said before, he was that kind of warm, nice, and congenial guy. And you would never imagine that a seemingly decent guy like him would dare to propose such indecent thing! But somehow I was dazed. Tuesday, 3 o'clock in the afternoon. That day I had no class. School was over. And I had no papers to hand in anymore. I still got my M.A. thesis to write but that was long way to go and I was in no place to hurry. Anyway, that was a whole week after Sam had made his indecent proposal. I was thinking over this for no less than a hundred times during the past whole week. Really, can you imagine that. I did think it over. But why should I do so? I could just said something like "oh, shit" or "fuck that" or simply "get lost" or "fuck yer own ass!" and forget about the whole thing; yet I thought about it over, and over, and over. Somehow I felt I was haunted: the images of me buggering with Sam could not escape me -- no, they did not let me go, and I was indulging in it, unable to explain why. Perhaps there was some cord in me that had been struck by this single proposal. As I said, I was raised in a normal, Catholic family, where the topic of sex was limited to the moralisitic scrutinizings of my godfather and the ideal marriage between husband and wife. Was I tempted? I couldn't say that, since Sam did nothing more than a single ousting of expression. Somehow, there was something mystical in it, those simple words. Too simple. It was as if there had been an aura around it: there was something behind it, yet that I could not comprehend. That evening mom called me again, around dinnertime. As usual, I cried, like a helpless baby, but mom was quite cool, saying nothing this time, not even her motto. Somehow the words were failing me, or is that perhaps I that am failing the words? I couldn't tell anymore, for, at that moment, my tear almost inundated the receiver.

-- Dennis Deng Liu