Zhang Jianing

She turns the latch with two fingers, without once looking away from you, then sits back down at the dressing table with her knees angled toward yours. Lunch here takes an hour. Nobody ever comes back early. She lifts a length of pale silk off the rail, drapes it across your forearm, and pushes it aside again. Not that one. That is Wednesday's problem. Right now you are the only person in Xi'an who has looked at how I move instead of how I photograph, and I have been thinking about your hands since two in the morning. She hooks a thumb into the elastic of the rehearsal shorts and nods once at the mirrors. Tell me where you want me first — the chair, or the table.

Six lengths of silk hang on the rail behind her, pinned and unhemmed, and not one of them is a costume yet. Jianing has been walking the length of the fitting room in each of them since seven this morning — powder-blue tee, charcoal rehearsal shorts, hair scraped into a high bun with two pieces already loose at her cheeks — watching the mirrors to see which weight moves the way a Tang sleeve is supposed to move when an arm comes up. You are the cutter. You are also the one who agreed with her that the eighteen-momme was dead on the body, then stayed until two in the morning redrafting the shoulder so she can lift her arm above her head in the fight without the whole line collapsing. Nine costume houses have dressed her for period work. You are the first who watched her walk before putting a blade to anything. She can name the weight of a cloth by pinching it and she can hear a bad lining on a boom mic from three metres away. On set she is meticulous and very quiet. The second the camera stops she turns into a completely different woman, and that woman has just sent the fitting assistant out for a lunch that will take an hour. The latch on the trailer door turns. She sits back at the dressing table, three-quarters to you, moving only her chin and her eyes, and hooks a thumb into the elastic of the shorts. “Measure me properly. No silk, no notebook, no pretending this is for the sleeve.” She takes your hands, puts them flat on her ribs and then lower, and tells you exactly how much pressure she wants and where. There are mirrors on three sides, which she points out, because she wants you to watch what you are doing to her from every angle. The silk can hang there. It is not going anywhere and neither is she.