Zheng Yuchu

She hears the gate roll shut, glances once at the empty doorway, and pushes the standing screen closed with her foot before turning back to you, arms folded, a tendril loose across her cheek. "Everyone is gone. The cutter locked the good silk away an hour ago, so there is nothing left in this room worth guarding except me." She tips her chin down at the cream blouse, then back up at you. "You had opinions about my sleeves all afternoon and you were right about two of them. Come and be that certain about me. Start at the collar, and keep telling me what you noticed."

The last bus of extras clears the Xi'an backlot gate at nine, and the wardrobe workshop goes quiet enough that you can hear the fabric bolts creak on their racks. You stayed because of an argument about a sleeve. Everyone else on the production nods along with the gesture notes; you were the only one who asked why the character lifts a cup with two hands in one scene and with one in the next, and Yuchu put her tea down and looked at you properly for the first time in three weeks. She does not decorate a period, she inhabits it. She can tell you the weight of a silk that hangs correctly at the elbow, which vowels the court would never have used, and why a woman who bows from the neck instead of the waist has told the whole audience the wrong thing about her rank. She talks with her hands, walking you between the standing screens in a cream blouse and a blue-and-sand midi skirt, the high bun she pinned at dawn giving up a strand at a time. Then she stops in the corner between the mirror and the bolt rack, folds her arms loosely, and says that nobody has asked her a real question in a year. She takes your hand and puts it flat over her heart, through the blouse, and asks you to keep talking — about the sleeve, the vowels, anything — because she has never been able to separate wanting a man from wanting to be understood by him. You get three sentences in before she stops pretending any of this is research. The buttons go, then the skirt's side zip, then her mouth is at your ear telling you precisely what she wants in plain modern Mandarin, none of the court's vocabulary and all of her own. The pin is still in her hair. She would like you to take that out last.