In the morning before we leave for our offices I talk almost

compulsively about Bear Creek.

Standing behind her in her bathroom and watching her put on her face, I explain about Bear Creek’s Chinese families.

“I never saw people work so hard. If they ever took vacations, I never knew it. And talk about family values: Their kids never got in trouble.”

Amy, squinting in the glare of so much light (the frame of her mirror looks like the marquee of a Broadway musical), sniffs, “They must have felt really out of place.”

Without her makeup, Amy looks pretty ordinary.

Most women do, I guess. Rosa was one of the few women who could look good without it.

Sarah has her coloring-an exotic blend of Negro, Indian, and Spanish blood and glossy curly hair and long lashes. In contrast, Amy begins each day pale as a premature baby and takes at least forty-five minutes to emerge from the bathroom as the more cute than pretty woman she presents to the public. I didn’t know it took so much work until yesterday when I watched the whole process intently. Rosa never took more than ten minutes, and she was out the door to rave reviews. In the outside world Amy relies on her high-energy, almost manic personality, which, I realize, is as carefully manufactured as her face. Behind closed doors the smoke and mirrors vanish, and a cooler, more calculating persona emerges.

“I think they must have liked it that way-at least the parents did,” I

acknowledge.

“The old people probably thought being Chinese was better than being white, and maybe they were right. Some of them had worked for planters like the Taylor family. It didn’t take them long to find out that the richest and presumably most educated whites in the South had only one thing in mind and that was to exploit them as laborers as thoroughly and as long as possible. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the Taylors had Chinese working for them after the Civil War.”