The second time I saw Azure was in a restaurant. I was having lunch with our mutual friend. Azure came over to say "hi". She had a deep voice that sounded like a teenage boy reaching puberty, undergoing changes in his voice.

The third time I saw Azure was in a gym where I recently joined as a member. Azure worked as a personal trainer there. In tank top and jog pants, her masculine build fitted right in among fitness buffs and gym regulars.

***

Azure was picked to be trained as a swimmer at the age of 7. By 10 she's good enough to join the national camp. She left home to live, train and study with a bunch of other kids in Beijing under the care of a head couch and an assistant couch who's also a chaperone to the girls who giggled and smuggled snacks into their dormitory. The government paid for the trainees' accommodations, fed them, clothed them, hired tutors to teach them languages, math, geography and history, and gave them allowances. For two years, she and her dorm-mates were trained hard four hours each day in the pool plus, one hour weight and resistance training and one hour endurance training. They were given half a day off each week to stroll the city, and two weeks off every year to visit their families.

At two year's end, a few of them got picked to join the national team, a few stayed on to train for another two-year and the rest were sent home. Azure got picked for the national team, moved to the Olympic-readiness training camp and started competing in international meets. Azure came close to winning a medal once in Canada but fell short. Competitive swimming created an intensity and focus of life for the swimmers. When their coach suggested they took performance enhancement substances, nobody objected. Everybody wanted to have more powerful strokes, to swim a bit faster and to have a better shot at the medals.

Swimming for the nation had its benefits, seeing the world was one of them. The allowances, the dormitory and the training facility were all better. But after six years of nothing but swimming, Azure started to feel tired. She talked it over with her coach who supported her inclination and helped her get a scholarship to study in University of Nevada in Reno. 

The American ways soon grew on Azure. When the Tien An Men incident created an opportunity for many to seek asylum, Azure grabbed it. After college, Azure was introduced to the growing market of personal fitness. When someone suggested that Azure tap in the huge young Asian professional population in the bay area, Azure  listened. It was the right move. She had grown a clientele in three month's time to keep her comfortably employed. To her surprise, though, she had not only the Asian clients, but quite a few Caucasian stayed on to have her as their trainer. 

Sue was one of Azure's Caucasian clients. It was the Thanksgiving holiday. The gym was quite deserted the day after Thanksgiving. Most gym staff took the day off for this family holiday. Azure stayed on to fill in as the trainer on duty for that day. Sue came in at about 2 p.m. Azure helped Sue adjusted the weights on various workbenches. Sue would picked up a conversation or two while Azure tuned the workbenches. Azure was usually quite chatty with her clients but she felt uneasy with Sue. It was not so much the conversation that made her uneasy but the way Sue looked at her. It was a loaded look, full of inquiries and even insinuation. After their first meeting, Sue arranged to have Azure to be her trainer four times a week.

Summer came. Azure could not resist the beckoning of the pool and took on the swimming instructor's job at a local YMCA. Most of the classes were for young children from age 5 to age 10. Seeing those little swimmer so eager and so energetic reminded Azure of her own happy times in the pool. Actually, it was still fun for her to swim. It was the training that she had grown tired of. One day she was at the lobby in plain clothes about to go changing for one of her classes. A mother was registering her daughter for the swimming classes. The receptionist pointed Azure out to the parent as the swimming instructor. The mother took a look at Azure and promptly asked if there was another instructor and that they would like to sign on for another class. Azure overheard everything. She frowned a bit and went on to swim a few laps before the class began.

Six months into their training sessions, one day Sue left an invitation for Azure. It was a luncheon for bay area lesbians. Azure took the invitation and it's been sitting on her desk at home since. Azure did not go to that luncheon. She did not say anything about it to Sue either and Sue did not bring up the subject again. They just kept on their training sessions.

There were times when Azure did had doubts about her own sexuality. She remembered when she was 13, living and training as a competitive swimmer on the national women's team, she had a crush on her fellow teammate who was 4 year senior than her. The teammate had a masculine built, pretty much like what Azure was now. But the feeling was not sexual. It was simply a teenage girl's crave for attention and friendship. That had completely faded anyway. When Azure was studying in U.N. Reno, she had enjoyed the attention and company of her male classmates. In fact, she had a brief relationship with one of them. After the invitation incident, whenever Azure was in training session with Sue. Her curiosity was aroused. She wondered what it would be like to have a relationship with Sue. That remained a curiosity however. She had no intention of finding it out.

After all the children had left, Azure swam laps in the full-sized pool. She went back and forth in free-style and butterfly style like a dolphin breaking waves in the ocean. She could go on forever if not for the next swimming class scheduled for this pool. She emerged from the water, all the tension gone in her muscles. She still felt the happiest in the water. To her, swimming was simple. It's a stroke, a kick and a breath following one another. It's going from one end of the pool to the other. Swimming was also nurturing, purifying and forgiving.  When she's swimming, the water around her seemed to have merged with the water in her and transformed her to be another creature who had no identity, no appearance and no facade. As long as she could swim, she thought, nothing really mattered.