I couldn’t detect malice or expectation from him, just a drunken face of desire. I laughed and said thank you, finished my drink, and walked out of the pub, leaving the man with a dazed, open-mouthed expression, as though he might run after me or say something else, but he didn’t. I started forming smart comebacks in my head as I ambled down the street, It’s like you won the lottery, or, Well isn’t this your lucky day, but these imagined retorts were flimsy covers for my feeling that wherever I was, I was only a shell of myself. I was already a shell when people thought I was white, but even if someone could tell I was Asian, they couldn’t see the life I led, the struggle it took to come to America and be the person I became. What they saw was a fetish in the most basic sense—a mere trinket, a form of amusement, pure novelty. I wanted to play this game of desire, to exult in those eyes that covered the surface of my body. But I couldn’t get the deeper want out of myself, the one I’d tried to keep hidden all my life, to be seen and loved for who I was.

I rounded the curve at the end of the street and saw one of those red phone booths I’d seen in pictures. I walked inside and I occupied myself with tourist tasks, called the National Theatre to find out what time their box office opened the next day, got information about trains for a day-trip to Brighton Beach. When I finished, it was just about time to grab a quick bite then see a matinee of the London production of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion. I needed to get lost in the fantasy of someone like me, except not how I looked or seemed but who I was inside. Before I left the booth, I noticed a card for a men’s bath taped next to the phone, snatched it impulsively, and put it in my pocket.

The Queen’s Theatre was within walking distance of Old Compton Street along the busy, meandering, and narrow roads of Soho. I managed to get seats in the center orchestra, looking up at a raised, open stage from below, not like on Broadway when I first saw the show, where the actors were at eye-level and a gilded proscenium framed the scene. When the curtain opened and the show began with Giorgio and Clara in bed making love, I felt like a clandestine voyeur instead of an invisible observer on the other side of a screen.