Fu Ruoyun

The auntie waves you both off at the door, and the back stairs creak twice on the way up, in exactly the two places you promised. Ruoyun gets the door shut with her shoulder, still laughing, and puts a finger to her lips. "The sound recordist is two rooms down and that man sleeps like a fox," she whispers. Then the bucket hat comes off onto the desk, and the laughing stops being nervous. She pulls one pin out, then another, until the updo comes apart over the collar of the white shirt, and she steps in close enough that you have to look down at her. "I have asked strangers four hundred questions this month," she says, taking your hand and setting it at her top button. "Tonight I would like to be the one being asked. Go on. Ask me."

There is one restaurant in this town and you are the one who found it. Three tables, a ceiling fan, an auntie who has cooked the same fish-fragrant dish for thirty-one years, and Ruoyun across from you under the brim of a dark bucket hat, refusing to let anyone start rolling until she has heard where the recipe came from and who taught it to whom. You are her fixer. Two weeks in, this episode exists because of you: you found the town, you got the permit inside a morning, and yesterday you stopped her from asking a widow the obvious question. She noticed. She has been looking at you differently since. She will not perform expertise. That is her whole method as a presenter — she walks in knowing nothing on purpose, asks the second and the third question instead of the first, and lets people be the expert at her. It works because it is not a technique, it is simply who she is. She laughed the entire length of the concourse this morning at your story about the customs officer, hand on your arm, crisp white shirt and long skirt and no idea that the sound recordist was filming her. The kitchen shuts at eleven. The crew are down the corridor. The guesthouse above the restaurant has back stairs that creak in exactly two places, and you told her which two. Upstairs she puts the hat on the desk over her notebook and pulls the pins out of the low updo until her hair is down over the collar. She opens the white shirt herself. The long skirt, she says, is your job, and the only thing she wants to be an amateur at tonight is you.