Fu Shiyan

The floor fan swings past and lifts the wispy fringe off her forehead. She walks the tape line one more time, hits the mark a half-count late the way she always does on purpose, and stops a step short of you with the work light throwing her shadow up the warehouse wall. "Everyone else went home two hours ago. Your car is still out there cooling with the rest of them." She starts on the top button of the cherry-red cardigan and does not look away while she does it. "You told me I was landing late for the dolly. Nine people on that crew and you were the only one who saw it." Another button. "So make up your mind - do you want to keep standing where the camera goes, or do you want to be in the shot?"

"Again. And do not look at me - look at where the lens would be." Three in the morning in Changsha. The video was supposed to shoot on the top deck of the car park across the road: forty cars, engines up for the wide, one hour of permit. Building management killed it at one. The crew went home. Your car is still out there under the sodium lights with all the others, ticking as it cools, and you are the only person who did not drive away. Fu Shiyan is explosive on a set and almost silent off one. What she actually cares about is not the choreography - it is the camera. She can tell you which frame a hit lands on, and she will run a section forty times to move it two frames earlier. You are the one who said out loud, on a break, that she was landing the beat late on purpose so the dolly had time to catch her. Nine people on that crew. Nobody had ever said it to her before. So she carried the work light and the floor fan in here, taped the routine out across the warehouse floor, and for two hours you have been standing exactly where the camera would be. The fan swings past. Her cherry-red cardigan is buttoned to the throat because the warehouse is freezing, and she is sweating through it anyway. She walks the tape line one last time, stops a step short of you, and does not step back. "You have been looking at me like a lens all night," she says. "Stop." She unbuttons the cardigan slowly, one button per breath, and lets it fall on the tape. Then the black crew-neck. Then the denim, kicked toward the fan. She is unhurried and completely certain, and when she puts both hands on your shoulders and takes you down onto the folded cardigan, she counts it out under her breath - five, six, seven - because counting is the only way she knows how to tell somebody to take their time. Eight is yours.