LEE
I know, Will. I know. I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but you know how it is. You’re an Asian Man. Your story was great, while it lasted, but now it’s done. I hope our paths cross again. Maybe somewhere else.
And you think: no. It won’t be somewhere else. It will be here, again, in Chinatown, next year, same place. To be yellow in America. A special guest star, forever the guest.
FADE TO BLACK
Behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to wear a single look, a naked unsocialized look, a look of concentration, a look of one who is privately engaged in a difficult, treacherous task.
Erving Goffman
ACT IV
STRIVING IMMIGRANT
Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.
You are not Kung Fu Guy.
You were close there for a moment. But then you died.
DEATH
When you die, it sucks.
DEATH, PART II
The first thing that happens is you can’t work for forty-five days.
By the coffee and donuts you run into a familiar face.
“Hey,” you say. “Attractive Officer.”
“Very Special Guest Star,” she says. “Here we are.”
“Surprised to see you here,” you say.
“Why would you be surprised?”
“It’s Black and White,” you say. “Thought you’d have a bigger part.”
“Asian Men aren’t the only invisible people around here, Willis. Look around.”
You see what she means. A bunch of Asian dudes and Black women, nibbling on bear claws, stirring powdered creamer into paper cups.
“We should do our own thing, someday,” she says. “Black and Yellow.”
“You’ll be, what? Ex-CIA?”
“Slash supermodel. Slash mother of four,” she says. “Their dad takes care of the kids.”
“And I’ll be?”
“Whatever you want, man,” she says.
“A guy can dream,” you say.
“Cheers to that.” You touch your small coffee cups to each other’s, a toast to something you both know will never happen.
DEATH, PART III
Why forty-five days? It’s the minimum length necessary, just long enough for everyone to forget you existed.
* * *
—
Because even though you all look alike, it’s still weird if you get murdered on Tuesday and by Thursday you’re showing up in the background of a street scene or as a busboy.
* * *
—
Who knows how they calculate these things but someone did and figured out the optimal amount of time. Optimal for them, of course, not for you. Not for anyone who needs to make a living as a Delivery Guy, or a Busboy, or an Inscrutable Background Oriental. Not optimal at all. It feels like an eternity and no matter how much you might need the cash, whatever your sob story, sick baby, hungry kid, Mom needs her medicine, casting won’t even touch you for the mandatory cooling-off period. Doesn’t matter to them. When you’re dead, you are nobody.
Some people think it isn’t the worst thing in the world to die. Because if you never die—if you play the same role too long—you start to get confused. Forget who you really are.
Your mother used to die all the time. You always knew when it had happened, because on those days she’d pick you up from school and she’d have taken the pins out of her hair so it fell down to her shoulders and you always thought she looked so glamorous, with her hair like that, with the makeup from work still on. You’d go back to the SRO together and while you washed your face and neck and hands and changed into your sleep clothes she would make you a bowl of fried rice with an egg and a few pickles. Some of the happiest times of your life were when your mother was dead, because you knew it meant she would be home for six weeks, you would have her all to yourself in the afternoons. You would play with a toy or watch television and she would sit next to you, practicing her English while biding her time between lives, always preparing for her next role, however small, for a day, to be someone, if only for a short while.
When she was dead, she got to be your mother.
INT. AMERICAN MOVIES—1950S AND ’60S
She’d once dreamed of being more. When she first started out, as Young Asian Woman. She imagined a life for herself, full of romance, glamour. One of the few American stories that had made its way to the silver screen of Taipei in the ’50s, an afternoon at the cinema with her father and nine sisters and brothers, sharing one Coke. Being the eighth of ten, she might get one good sip before it got taken back by siblings further up the chain, but that one sip was enough to savor, sitting up on her heels to get a better view, holding her father’s hand, and watching the perfect faces, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Natalie Wood, their luminous whiteness shimmering in the cool, darkened theater.
INT. THE MOVIE VERSION OF HER LIFE—NIGHT
She’s in a wine red cheongsam, Mandarin collar, short sleeves. Gold piping from neck to bottom. Slits rising up each leg. Nat King Cole on the jukebox, smoke rising from the tips of cigarettes held by men sitting in twos and threes, all heads turning as she descends the stairs.
And now her costar makes his entrance, Old Asian Man, but like her, he’s young, dashing. He sees her and is overcome by her beauty.
DASHING ASIAN MAN
I’ve been looking for you.
PRETTY ASIAN HOSTESS
That so? And now that you’ve found me, what do you have to say for yourself?
He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out.
She waits in anticipation for him, but there’s no line for him, nothing he can say. No stage direction, or action lines, or parentheticals telling them what they’re thinking. He looks back at the door, and at her, trying to remember, but it’s already slipping away. The outside, the world beyond. A life they could have together, if only they could figure a way out. Could rent a home or even, dream of dreams, own one. Find a job, new costumes, have names other than Asian Woman, Asian Man.