uch to my surprise, Violet called me the next week. I don’t believe we have anything to talk about, I said. He reconsidered your advice, she said. I noticed that she actually used complete sentences with me this time. He’s tempestuous and doesn’t take criticism well, as he’s the first to admit. But after he cooled down, he thought there were some usable ideas in your notes. More than that, he respects you for standing up to him. Not too many people are willing to do that, which makes you an ideal candidate for what I’m proposing. We need a consultant who can get things right when it comes to Vietnamese matters. We’ve already researched the history, the costumes, the weapons, the customs, anything we could find in a book. But we’ll need that human touch you can provide. There are refugees from Vietnam in the Philippines who we’ll be using as extras, and we need someone to work with them.

From far away floated the susurrus of my mother’s voice: Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything! Despite all the disadvantages of my poor, muddled heritage, my mother’s endless encouragement and fierce belief in me meant that I never backed down from challenge or opportunity. Their offer was four months of paid vacation in a tropical paradise, six months if the shoot went over schedule, and perhaps not so much a paradise if the local rebels got a little too overconfident, and perhaps not so much of a vacation as a working jaunt, and perhaps not so much paid as underpaid, but the upshot was that I needed a respite from my American refuge. Remorse over the crapulent major’s death was ringing me up a few times a day, tenacious as a debt collector. Also always there at the crowded back of my mind, front and center in the Catholic chorus of my guilt, stood the major’s widow. I had given her only fifty dollars at the funeral, which was all I could afford. Even underpaid, I would be able to save money, given how my room and board would be included, and from this provide some support for the major’s wife and children.

They were innocents to whom wrong had been done, as I had once been an innocent child to whom wrong was done. And not by strangers, but by my own family, my aunts who had not wanted me to play with my cousins at family gatherings and who shooed me away from the kitchen when there were treats. I associated my blood aunts with the scars they inflicted on me during the New Year, the time all other children remember with such fondness. What was the first New Year I could remember? Perhaps the one when I was five or six. I huddled with the other children, solemn and nervous, facing the prospect of approaching each adult and making a little speech wishing him or her health and happiness. But although I forgot not a word, and did not stumble like most of my cousins, and radiated sincerity and charm, Aunt Two did not grace me with a red envelope. The entire maternal family tree was watching me, on its gnarled branches my mother’s parents, her nine siblings, my three dozen cousins. I do not have enough, this wicked witch said, towering above me. I am one short. I stood immobilized, my arms still folded respectfully across my chest, waiting for a magical envelope or an apology to appear, but nothing more was forthcoming until, after what seemed to be several minutes, my mother laid her hand on my shoulder and said, Thank your aunt for her kindness in teaching you a lesson.

Only later, at home, on the wooden bed we shared, did Mama weep. It did not matter that my other aunts and uncles gave me red envelopes, although when I compared mine with my cousins’, I discovered that my sums of lucky money were but half theirs. That’s because you’re half-blooded, said one calculating cousin. You’re a bastard. When I asked Mama what a bastard was, her face inflamed. If I could, she said, I’d strangle him with my bare hands. Never in my life has there been a day when I learned so much about myself, the world, and its inhabitants. One must be grateful for one’s education no matter how it arrives. So I was grateful, in a way, for my aunt and my cousin, whose lessons I remember much more than many nobler things that passed before me in school. Oh, they’ll see! my mother wept, squeezing me with such force I was nearly breathless, my face pressed against one comforting breast while my hand squeezed its plush other. Radiating through thin cotton fabric was the hot, rich muskiness of a young woman’s body after a humid day spent mostly on feet or haunches, preparing food and serving. They’ll see! You’ll work harder than all of them, you’ll study more than all of them, you’ll know more than all of them, you’ll be better than all of them. Promise your mother you will! And I promised.

I have shared this story with only two people, Man and Bon, censoring just the part about my mother’s breasts. This was at the lycée, at separate moments of intimacy in our early adolescence. When Bon heard it, we were fishing in the river, and he flung down his rod in fury. If I ever meet this cousin, he said, I’ll beat him until half his blood is coming out of his head. Man was more measured. Even at that age, he was calm, analytical, and precociously dialectical-materialist in his attitude. He had treated me to sugarcane juice after school, and we were sitting on a curb, little plastic sacks in hand, sipping through straws. The red envelope is a symbol, he said, of all that’s wrong. It’s the color of blood, and they singled you out for your blood. It’s the color of fortune and luck. Those are primitive beliefs. We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do. They take advantage of things, like your cousins, and they don’t question things. As long as things work for them, then they support those things. But you see the lie beneath those things because you never got to take part. You see a different shade of red than them. Red is not good luck. Red is not fortune. Red is revolution. All of a sudden I, too, saw red, and in that throbbing vision the world began to make sense to me, how so many degrees of meaning existed in a single color, the tone so potent it must be applied sparingly. If one ever sees something written in red, one knows trouble and change lie ahead.

My letters to my aunt, then, were not written in such an alarming shade, even if the cipher I used to code my sub rosa reports disturbed me. Here was one representative example of Richard Hedd’s highly esteemed Asian Communism and the Oriental Mode of Destruction:

The Vietnamese peasant will not object to the use of airpower, for he is apolitical, interested only in feeding himself and his family. Bombing his village will of course upset him, but the cost is outweighed ultimately by how airpower will persuade him that he is on the wrong side if he chooses communism, which cannot protect him. (p. 126)

From these kinds of insights, I reported on my decision to take the Auteur’s offer, a job I characterized as undermining the enemy’s propaganda. I also coded the names of the officers in the General’s vanguard. Just in case my letter would be read by any eyes other than those of Man’s aunt, I kept my tone upbeat about life in Los Angeles. Perhaps unknown censors were reading refugee mail, looking for dejected, angry refugees who could not or would not dream the American Dream. I was careful, then, to present myself as just another immigrant, glad to be in the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing, which, when one comes to think about it, is not such a great deal. Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.

It was in the name of happiness, I told my aunt, that I helped the General toward the next step in his plan, the creation of a nonprofit charitable organization that could receive tax-deductible donations, the Benevolent Fraternity of Former Soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. In one reality, the Fraternity served the needs of thousands of veterans who were now men without an army, a country, and an identity. It existed, in short, to increase their meager measure of happiness. In another reality, this Fraternity was a front that allowed the General to receive funds for the Movement from whoever wished to donate, which was not primarily the Vietnamese community. Its refugee members were hobbled by their structural function in the American Dream, which was to be so unhappy as to make other Americans grateful for their happiness. Instead of these refugees, broke and broken, the main donors were to be magnanimous individuals and charitable foundations interested in boosting America’s old friends. The Congressman had mentioned his charitable foundation to the General and me at a meeting at his district office, where we presented him the idea for the Fraternity and asked if Congress might help our organization in some way. His district office was a modest outpost in a Huntington Beach strip mall, a two-story arrangement of shops on a major intersection. Drenched in café au lait stucco, the mall was bordered by an example of America’s most unique architectural contribution to the world, a parking lot. Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better? One could drive for miles along a boulevard and see nothing but parking lots and the kudzu of strip malls catering to every need, from pet shops to water dispensaries to ethnic restaurants and every other imaginable category of mom-and-pop small business, each one an advertisement for the pursuit of happiness. As a sign of his humility and closeness to the people, the Congressman had chosen such a strip mall for his headquarters, and in the windows were plastered white campaign signs with CONGRESSMAN in red and his name in blue, as well as his last campaign slogan: ALWAYS TRUE.

An American flag decorated one wall of the Congressman’s office. On another wall hung photos of him posing with various tuxedoed luminaries of his Republican Party: Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, John Wayne, Bob Hope, and even Richard Hedd, whom I recognized immediately from his author photograph. The Congressman offered us cigarettes and we partook for a while, canceling the side effects of the smoke by simultaneously inhaling good cheer, the healthy air of pleasantries concerning wives, children, and favorite sports teams. We also spent some time discussing my forthcoming adventure in the Philippines, which the Madame and General had both approved. What was that line from Marx? the General said, stroking his chin thoughtfully as he prepared to quote my notes about Marx. Oh, yes. “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” Isn’t that what’s happening here? Marx refers to peasants but he may as well refer to us. We cannot represent ourselves. Hollywood represents us. So we must do what we can to ensure that we are represented well.

I see where this is going, the Congressman said with a grin. He rubbed out his cigarette, leaned his elbows on his desk, and said: So what can this representative do for you? After the General explained the Fraternity and its functions, the Congressman said, Great idea, but Congress isn’t touching that. No one even wants to say the name of your country right now.

Understood, Congressman, the General said. We do not need the official support of the American people, and we understand why they would not be enthused.

But their unofficial support is another matter altogether, I said.

Go on.

Even if Congress will not send money our way, there’s no preventing civically minded people or organizations, for example charitable foundations, from helping the cause of our traumatized and needy veterans. They’ve defended freedom and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the American soldier, sometimes giving blood and sometimes giving limbs.

You’ve been talking to Claude.

It’s true Claude planted certain ideas in my head. During our Saigon days, he mentioned that it was routine for the CIA to fund various activities. Not in its name, as that might be illegal or at least quite questionable, but through front organizations controlled by its agents and sympathizers, oftentimes respectable people of varied careers.

And the lucky recipients of such money were themselves often front organizations.

Indeed, with all these front organizations professing to help the poor, or feed the hungry, or spread democracy, or aid downtrodden women, or train artists, it can sometimes be difficult to know who does what and for whom.

Let me play devil’s advocate. There are many good causes to which I, for example, might donate. But to be frank, there is only so much money that I, for example, might have. Inevitably, self-interest comes into play.

Self-interest is good. It’s an instinct that keeps us alive. It’s also very patriotic.

Absolutely. So: What is my self-interest in this organization of yours?

I looked at the General. It was on his lips, one of two magical words. If we possessed the things these words named, we would propel ourselves to the front rank of American citizens, able to access all the glittering treasures of American society. Unfortunately, we had only a tentative grasp on one. The word that identified what we did not possess was “money,” of which the General might have enough for his own use, but certainly not for a counterrevolution. The other word was “votes,” so that together “money votes” was “open sesame” to the deep caverns of the American political system. But even when just one-half of that magical combination floated from my aspiring Ali Baba’s lips, the Congressman’s eyebrows rippled ever so faintly. Think of our community as an investment, Congressman. A long-term investment. Think of us as a small, sleeping child who has not yet awaken and grown. It is true this child cannot vote. This child is not a citizen. But one day this child will be a citizen. One day this child’s children will be born as citizens, and they must vote for somebody. That somebody might as well be you.

As you can see when I attended the wedding, General, I already value your community.

With words, I said. With all due respect, Congressman, words are free. Money is not. Isn’t it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued? So please permit me to be blunt. Our community appreciates your words, but in the process of becoming American it has learned the expression “money talks.” And if voting is our best way of participating in American politics, we must vote for those who deliver the money. This would hopefully be you, but of course the beauty of American politics is that we have a choice, do we not?

But even if I, for example, give your organization money, the irony is that I myself need money in order to run for election and to pay my staff. In other words, money talks both ways.

That is indeed a tricky situation. But what you are speaking of is official money that must be accounted for to the government. What we are speaking of is unofficial money that circulates to us, which returns to you in all officialness as votes delivered by the General.

That is correct, the General said. If my country has prepared me for one thing, it’s dealing with what my young friend describes so imaginatively as unofficial money.

Our performance entertained the Congressman, we the two little ingenious monkeys and he the organ-grinder, watching us hop and beg to a score not our own. We were well trained in this show from our previous exposure to Americans in our homeland, where the plays were all about unofficial money, i.e., corruption. Corruption was like the elephant in Indian lore, myself one of the blind wise men who could feel and describe only one part of it. It is not what one sees or feels that is confusing, it is what one does not see and does not feel, such as that part of the scheme we had just laid before the Congressman that was out of our control. This was the part where he found ways to funnel unofficial money to us via official channels, that is to say, foundations that had on their boards of trustees the Congressman, or his friends, or the friends of Claude. These foundations were, in short, fronts themselves for the CIA and perhaps even other, more enigmatic governmental or nongovernmental organizations I did not know of, just as the Fraternity was a front for the Movement. This the Congressman knew full well when he said, I just hope this organization of yours doesn’t engage in anything illegal when it comes to its patriotic activities. Of course he meant that we should engage in illegal activities, so long as he did not know about them. The unseen is almost always underlined with the unsaid.

Three months later I was en route to the Philippines, my rucksack in the overhead luggage bin, in my lap a copy of Fodor’s Southeast Asia, a tome as thick as War and Peace. It said this about traveling to Asia:

Why go east? The East has always woven a spell to enchant the West. Asia is vast and teeming and infinitely complex, an inexhaustible source of riches and wonder... Asia still holds, for the mind of the West, the lure, the challenge, the spell, and the rewards that have drawn generation after generation of Westerners from their snug, familiar lives into a world utterly different from everything they have known, thought, and believed. For Asia is half the world, the other half... The East may well be strange, but it doesn’t have to be frustrating. Once you have actually been there you may still find it mysterious, but that’s what will make it really interesting.

Everything my guidebook said was true and also meaningless. Yes, the East was vast, teeming, and infinitely complex, but wasn’t the West also? Pointing out that the East was an inexhaustible source of riches and wonder only implied that it was peculiarly the case, and not so for the West. The Westerner, of course, took his riches and wonder for granted, just as I had never noticed the enchantment of the East or its mystery. If anything, it was the West that was often mysterious, frustrating, and really interesting, a world utterly different from everything I had known before I began my education. As with the Westerner, the Easterner was never so bored as he was when on his own shores.

Flipping the pages to the countries that concerned me, I was not surprised to see our country described as “the most devastated land.” I, too, would not recommend going there for the casual tourist, as the book proscribed, but I was rather insulted to read the description of our neighboring Cambodians as “easy-going, sensuous, friendly, and emotional... Cambodia is not only one of the most charming countries in Asia, it is one of the most fascinating.” Surely that could also be said about my homeland, or most homelands with spa-like atmospheric conditions. But what did I know? I had only lived there, and people who live in a given place may have difficulty seeing its charms as well as its faults, both of which are easily available to the tourist’s freshly peeled eyes. One could choose between innocence and experience, but one could not have both. At least in the Philippines I would be a tourist, and since the Philippines was east of our homeland, perhaps I would find it infinitely complex. The book’s description of the archipelago only made my mind salivate further, for it was “old and new, East and West. It’s changing by the day, but traditions persist,” a description that might have been written to describe me.

Indeed, I felt at home the instant I stepped from the air-conditioned chamber of the airplane into the humidity-clogged Jetway. The spectacle of the constabulary in the terminal with automatic weapons slung on their shoulders also made me homesick, confirming I was again in a country with its malnourished neck under a dictator’s loafer. Further evidence was found in the local newspaper, which had a few inches buried in the middle about the recent unsolved murders of political dissidents, their bullet-riddled bodies dumped in the streets. In a puzzling situation such as this, all riddles lead to one riddler, the dictator. This state of martial law was underwritten once more by Uncle Sam, who was supporting the tyrant Marcos in his efforts to stamp out not only a communist insurgency but also a Muslim one. That support included genuine made-in-the-USA planes, tanks, helicopters, artillery, armored personnel carriers, guns, ammunition, and kit, just as was the case for our homeland, although on a much smaller scale. Toss in a heap of jungle flora and fauna and some teeming masses and all in all the Philippines made a nice substitute for Vietnam itself, which is why the Auteur had chosen it.

The base camp was in a provincial city of the northern Luzon Cordillera, which played the role of the mountainous Annamese Cordillera that separated Vietnam and Laos. My hotel room’s amenities included a stream of water that did not so much run as jog, a flush toilet that gave a depressive sigh every time I pulled its chain, a wheezy air conditioner, and an on-call prostitute, or so said the bellboy on first showing me my room. I declined, conscious of myself as a privileged semi-Westerner in an impoverished country. After tipping him, I laid down on the slightly damp sheets, which also reminded me of home, where the humidity soaked into everything. The workmates I met later that night in the hotel bar were less thrilled about the weather, none of them having ever been mugged by the full-force humidity of a tropical climate. It’s like getting licked from throat to balls by my dog every time I go outside, the unhappy production designer groaned. He was from Minnesota. His name was Harry. He was hairy.

While the Auteur and Violet would not yet arrive for another week, Harry and his all-male production crew had already been sweating in the Philippines for months, building the sets, preparing the wardrobe, sampling the massage parlors, and being waylaid by various illnesses of gut and crotch. Harry showed me the main set the next morning, a complete reproduction of a Central Highlands hamlet down to the outhouse mounted on a platform above a fishpond. A stack of banana leaves and some old newsprint constituted the toilet paper. Peering through the round porthole of the toilet seat, we could see directly into the deceptively calm waters of the fishpond, which, Harry proudly pointed out, was stocked with a variety of whiskered catfish closely related to the ones of the Mekong Delta. Really ingenious, he said. He had a Minnesotan’s admiration for resourcefulness in the face of hardship, bred by generations of people one very bad winter away from starvation and cannibalism. I hear there’s a real feeding frenzy when someone’s taking a poop.

I had sat on exactly such a splintery toilet seat throughout my childhood, and remembered very well the catfish jockeying for the best seat at the dining table when I assumed the position. The sight of an authentic outhouse stirred neither any sentimental feelings in me nor any admiration for my people’s environmental consciousness. I preferred a flush toilet with a smooth porcelain seat and a newspaper on my lap as reading matter, not between my legs. The paper with which the West wiped itself was softer than the paper with which the rest of the world blew its nose, although this was only a metaphorical comparison. The rest of the world would have been stunned at the luxurious idea of even using paper to blow one’s nose. Paper was for writing things like this confession, not for mopping up excretions. But those strange, mysterious Westerners had exotic ways and wonders, symbolized in Kleenex and double-ply toilet paper. If longing for these riches made me an Occidentalist, I confess to it. I had no desire for the authenticity of my village life with my spiteful cousins and my ungracious aunts, or the rustic realities of being bit on one’s behind by a malarial mosquito when visiting the loo, which might be the case for some of the Vietnamese extras. Harry was planning to make them use this toilet in order to nourish the catfish, while the crew would bask in a battery of chemical toilets on dry land. So far as I was concerned, I was one of the crew, and when Harry invited me to be the first to bless the latrine, I regretfully declined, softening my rejection with a joke.

You know how we can tell that catfish sold in the markets come from ponds like this?

How so? said Harry, ready to take mental notes.

They’re cross-eyed from looking up at assholes all the time.

Good one! Harry laughed and slapped my arm. Come on, let me show you the temple. It’s really beautiful. I’m going to hate it when the special effects guys blow it up.

Harry may have loved the temple the most, but for me the pièce de résistance was the cemetery. I saw it for the first time that night and returned to it several nights later, after a field trip to the refugee camp at Bataan, where I recruited a hundred Vietnamese extras. The trip had left me dispirited, encountering as I did thousands of ragged fellow countrymen who had fled from our homeland. I had seen refugees before, Commandant, the war having rendered millions of the southern people homeless within their own country, but this mess of humanity was a new kind of species. It was so unique the Western media had given it a new name, the boat people, an epithet one might think referred to a newly discovered tribe of the Amazon River or a mysterious, extinguished prehistoric population whose only surviving trace was their watercraft. Depending on one’s point of view, these boat people were either runaways from home or orphaned by their country. In either case, they looked bad and smelled a little worse: hair mangy, skin crusty, lips chapped, various glands swollen, collectively reeking like a fishing trawler manned by landlubbers with unsteady digestive tracts. They were too hungry to turn up their noses at the wages I was mandated to offer, a dollar a day, their desperation measured by the fact that not one—let me repeat, not one—haggled for a better wage. I had never imagined the day when one of my countrymen would not haggle, but these boat people clearly understood that the law of supply and demand was not on their side. What truly brought my spirits down, however, was when I asked one of the extras, a lawyer of aristocratic appearance, if the conditions in our homeland were as bad as rumored. Let’s put it this way, she said. Before the communists won, foreigners were victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. Now it’s our own people victimizing and terrorizing and humiliating us. I suppose that’s improvement.

I trembled at hearing her words. For a few days my conscience had been purring smoothly, the crapulent major’s death seemingly behind me in the rear view of my memory, a smear on the blacktop of my past, but now it was hiccuping again. What was happening at home, and what was I doing here? I had to remind myself of Ms. Mori’s parting words. When I told her I was taking the job, she had cooked me a farewell dinner where I almost gave in to the sneaky suspicion that perhaps I really did love her, even if I did have feelings for Lana, too. But as if anticipating such weakness on my part, Ms. Mori preemptively reminded me of our commitment to free love. Don’t feel obligated to me, she said over the orange sorbet. You can do whatever you want. Of course, I said, a little saddened. I could not have it both ways, free love and bourgeois love, no matter if I wanted to. Or could I? Society of any kind was well stocked with satin bilinguals who said and did one thing in public while saying and doing another in private. But Ms. Mori was not one of those people, and in the darkness of her bedroom, clinging to each other in the aftermath of our exercise in free love, she said, You have it in you to do something wonderful with this movie. I have confidence in you that you can make it better than it could be. You can help shape how Asians look in the movies. That’s no small thing.

Thank you, Ms. Mori.

Sofia, goddammit.

Could I really make any difference? What would Man or Ms. Mori think, knowing that I was little more, perhaps, than a collaborator, helping to exploit my fellow countrymen and refugees? The sight of their sad, confused faces had undermined my confidence, reminding me of the ligaments of sentimentality and sympathy that twined my tougher, more revolutionary parts together. I even came down with the hot fever of homesickness, and so it was that when I returned to the base camp, I sought comfort in the hamlet that Harry had created. The dusty lanes, the thatched roofs, the earthen floors of the cottages and their simple bamboo furniture, the piggeries with real pigs already snorting softly in the night, the warble of the innocent chickens, the soupy air, the bite of the mosquitoes, the plop of my unsuspecting foot into a mushy cake of buffalo dung—all of it left me dizzy with the vertigo of sadness and longing. Only one thing was missing from the hamlet and that was the people, the most important of which was my mother. She had died during my junior year in college, when she was just thirty-four. For the first and only time, my father wrote me a letter, brief and to the point: Your mother has passed away of tuberculosis, poor thing. She is buried in the cemetery under a real headstone. A real headstone! He had noted it to say in his own way that he had paid for it, since my mother did not have the savings to afford any such thing. I read his letter twice in numb disbelief before the pain struck, the hot lead of sorrow pouring into the mold of my body. She had been sick, but not this sick, unless she had been hiding the real state of her condition from me. We had seen so little of each other over the past few years, what with me hundreds of miles away at the lycée in Saigon and then thousands of miles abroad. The last time I saw her was the month before I left for the States, when I returned to say good-bye for four years. I would have no money to return for Tet, or for the summer, or at all until I finished my degree, my scholarship paying for only one round-trip ticket. She smiled bravely and called me her petit écolier, after the chocolate-covered biscuits I loved so much as a child and which my father blessed me with once per year on Christmas. Her parting gifts to me were a box of those imported biscuits—a fortune for a woman who had only nibbled on the corner of one once and saved the rest for me each Christmas—as well as a notebook and a pen. She was barely literate and read out loud, and she wrote with a cramped, shy hand. By the time I was ten, I wrote everything for her. To my mother, a notebook and a pen symbolized everything she could not achieve and everything I, through the grace of God or the accidental combination of my genes, seemed destined for. I ate the biscuits on the airplane and wrote all over the notebook as a college diary. Now it was nothing but ashes. As for the pen, it had run out of ink and I had lost it at some point.

What I would give to have those useless things with me now, kneeling by my mother’s tomb and resting my forehead against its rough surface. Not the tomb in the hamlet where she had died, but here, in Luzon, in the cemetery built by Harry just for authenticity’s sake. When I had seen his field of stones, I had asked to have the biggest tomb for my own use. On the tombstone I had pasted a reproduction of my mother’s black-and-white picture that I carried in my wallet, the only extant image of her besides the rapidly fading ones in my mind, which had taken on the quality of a poorly preserved silent movie, its frames cracked by hairline fractures. On the gray face of the tombstone I painted her name and her dates in red, the mathematics of her life absurdly short for anyone but a grade-schooler to whom thirty-four years seemed an eternity. Tombstone and tomb were cast from adobe rather than carved from marble, but I took comfort in knowing no one would be able to tell on film. At least in this cinematic life she would have a resting place fit for a mandarin’s wife, an ersatz but perhaps fitting grave for a woman who was never more than an extra to anyone but me.