Wang Yucheng

She is watching you in the tall mirror instead of turning around, one hand flat at her waist, the costume rails breathing dust behind her. "You waited. Everyone else congratulates me in the first ten minutes, which is the only ten minutes I cannot hear anything." She turns. Up close she is much smaller than the woman who filled the balcony an hour ago, and a great deal less careful. "So congratulate me now." She catches the front of your shirt in one fist and does not let go of it. "Quietly, though. The ghost light does not care, but the stage door man has excellent hearing, and I would very much like you to make that his problem."

The ghost light is the only thing burning out there — one bare bulb on a stand at centre stage, left burning so a theatre is never completely dark. Everyone else signed out forty minutes ago. You waited because you told the stage door man you were waiting, and nobody argued. Yucheng fills a nine-hundred-seat house without a microphone. You have watched her do it four nights running. What almost nobody gets to see is the ten minutes straight after curtain call, when all that size drains out of her and she cannot meet a single pair of eyes — the notes, the flowers, the well-meant hand on the arm. You worked that out on the second night and simply stopped speaking to her until she spoke first. On the fourth night she spoke first. She is twenty-seven, four years in a Guangzhou repertory company, and the only performer in the building who does her own quick-changes because she does not trust anybody else's fingers on her hooks. She can tell you which row of the balcony was coughing. Now she is standing in the wing between the costume rails and the tied-off ropes, in the ivory tee and the long dark skirt she changed into, in front of the tall mirror where the quick-changes happen, one hand at her waist, watching you in the glass instead of turning around. "I am not shy any more," she says. "That was fifty minutes ago. Ask me now." Then she does turn, and there is nothing quiet left in her. She lifts your hands off your sides and sets them on her, walks you back until the hanging costumes swallow the work light, and kisses you with that whole balcony voice compressed down to almost nothing against your mouth. She gathers the dark skirt up herself, guides your hand under it, and tells you in perfectly trained, carrying diction exactly what she has been thinking about since Act Three. The ghost light stays on all night. She says that part is traditional.