Looking up at the ceiling, Karen strains to wiggle her fingers and toes. They feel thick and dull, as if wrapped in cotton wool, but at least she can feel them. She imagines her mother standing in the doorway, stunned into silence by the tableau of destruction before her eyes, then coming to her senses and rushing to her side so she can begin checking for wounds, tut-tutting all the while at this display of foolishness. Karen hopes she will somehow realize that her daughter can’t possibly be solely to blame for this mishap. Her poor father, perhaps, will be faulted for renting the mou hap videos in the first place—pirated recordings of Hong Kong shows that are delivered to their house each Saturday morning. Karen knows her mother considers this an extravagance, especially since the driver charges extra for coming all the way out to the suburbs from Chinatown. But with any luck, some of her mother’s ire will be directed at Karen’s younger sister Maria. Every weekend, the girls act out fight scenes from The Return of the Condor Heroes, running around the garden and swinging broom handles at each other, landing kicks and punches while their mother occasionally looks up from her weeding to shout, “Avoid the head!” (She doesn’t mind so much that they hit each other but insists that they avoid brain damage.) At first, the sisters would toss a coin for the coveted part of Dragon Girl, who was beautiful and heroic and could boast the best weapons: an army of jade bees commanded with a series of whistles; poisonous needles used as deadly projectiles; and a long sash that shot out from her waist to attack an opponent’s pressure points in both long- and short-range attacks. But Maria soon monopolized the role of Dragon Girl by refusing to play unless she was guaranteed the part, forcing Karen, unwilling to lose her only collaborator, to accept the villainous role of the Scarlett Immortal. The signature weapon of the Scarlett Immortal, a man-hating Taoist nun, was a flywhisk, a ridiculous-looking object that resembled a giant brush. Surely her mother would be able to see the injustice that had set her on the path to this ill-advised endeavor?

But to Karen’s surprise, her mother doesn’t tut-tut when she sees the mess in the bedroom. She doesn’t demand an explanation or reel off a list of culprits. She simply sweeps her hands slowly over her injured daughter and proceeds to lightly press her fingers along her body, checking for breaks, sprains, cuts. Years later, Karen will think back to this moment—her mother, squatting down beside her, her face darkened. But right now, all that Karen knows is her fear that her mother’s silence is somehow connected to the severity of the injuries.

“Silly girl,” says her mother. Karen detects an unfamiliar trembling in her voice. “You should know it’s not real.”