THE WORLD OF FORM: THE PRESENT - Chapter 1

A few centuries ago, Spanish missionaries looked at the hovering clouds over this basin and thought them angels, giving this city such a hopeful name. In more modern times, the Angels would be in Anaheim and the haze would be called smog.

Los Angeles is filled with contradictions and subcultural contexts that either coexist in ignorance or collide disastrously.

Here men can be called Angel, women may wear commemorative angel broaches, a ghastly creation of enormous pulchritude called Angelyn is famous for being famous and angels are played by hairy men like John Travolta and Nicholas Cage.

This is a city with no notable lakes that hosts a basketball team called the Lakers. Like so many, they are immigrants from colder states who have come to stay.

Considering the traffic, frequent bank robberies and drive-by shootings, one can easily see why Los Angeles would be home to the Dodgers. Kids don't consider playing dodge ball a game; it's practice for everyday life.

This is a city that supposedly defines Southern California--palm trees sheltering buff and beauteous long-legged blondes in bikinis. Yet this is a city where Caucasians make up only 40 percent of the population and the average Los Angeleno is actually ethnic and brunette.

In one section of town, bouncy young teenage girls get together to have their noses done while others celebrate quincineros with frothy dresses modeled after Barbie doll birthday cakes.

It's a place where bilingualism is increasingly necessary for successful job seekers, but where residents recently voted down bilingual education.

Overly bright smiles and touchy-feely phrases like "Have a nice day," are as commonplace as waiters waiting to be discovered, but this sunny temperament somehow translates into road rage and indiscriminate highway shootings.

This is a place where bald is not beautiful and even a rug (also known as a hair replacement system) like William Shatner's is better than a beaming red pate. Yet other bodily hair is mercilessly stripped. Those unwanted follicles are electrically singed or ripped out by the roots with wax--bikini waxes for both sexes and full body waxes, presumably for men only.

This is a place where both men and women suffer deep emotional scars when they realize that the most beautiful woman in the room is in fact a man. More gender bending than any Shakespearean comedy, Los Angeles has men who would be women and women who would be men and some from either sex who would be neither or both.

In other areas of the country such people might be relegated to the nether parts of the society, but here they seem to create the culture. The Laker girls may be on TV, but the West Hollywood cheerleaders--those burly men of false buxomness and hairspray-hell big hair--seem to have more fun.

This is a city where silicone is a major resource, a place where the human landscape can too often be described as carefully liposuctioned plains and slopes set off by silicone mountains. It's a place where people's breasts, lips and chins may outlast the rest of their body, much to the consternation of crematories.

This is a place that has survived various disasters: firestorms, rainstorms, earthquakes, riots, Magic Johnson's talk show, Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the Dodgers and the O.J. Simpson trials.

It's big enough to encompass a Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Little Bangkok, several Chinatowns, but too small to bridge cultural misunderstandings. The closest to cross-cultural exchange some people get is ordering at their local ethnic restaurants.

It's a place that worships cars and sunshine. The cars manufacture more of those angels the missionaries saw and the sunshine wreaks a slow revenge on the light-skinned foreigners who came to rule this land called Los Angeles.

It is a place where I was once single and dating, entangled in the Web, searching for my inner geisha in the unknown wilderness of Cyberspace and in the coffee shops and small restaurants of the brick and mortar city.

The search was a directive, indirectly willed into my consciousness by the disappointed emails and phone calls of men, searching for their perfect woman, unsullied by what they believed as Western ways, unencumbered by the need to be treated as an equal, unaware that the 20th century had opened on this global community and unwilling to enter the 21st century when it would open. Geisha as imagined by these American men had probably never existed and yet the Edo period institution had come to represent Japanese women to these men and centuries of real, notable Japanese women, anarchists and rebels, feminists and artists were completely erased from the Japanese history and culture in their minds.

Because, after all, Japanese women were rare and precious jewels that shine with a demure light of submission.

Returning, unexpectedly to a reunion, I thought of those days. I thought of those women I had known then, our little group of Asian Americans women and girls. Who would have thought?

Really, who would have thought?" Paige said when I called her.

"Tiffany, really?" Tina screeched over her cell phone before the connection dropped.

"Who would have thought Tiffany would finally settle down?" Martha commented via text messaging on her cell phone.

Who would have thought? Yet in the land of celluloid and silicon, Botox and liposuctioned buttocks, a land of lounge lizards and painted lovelies with better facades than a Hollywood movie set, anything is possible. I thought I'd never return after the second funeral until I got the phone call. Weddings and funerals, a time for bonding and angels.