We’re sculpting a life-size soldier out of papier-mâché in the kitchen, and it keeps growing, taking up all the space. We can’t get to the refrigerator or oven or cupboards. He started as part of my project on the Swamp Fox for the Revolutionary War unit in social studies. I’m not sure why we’re still building him. Soon he will have to move to the living room. I bet he won’t even fit through the doorway.

He drips with warm flour paste so that every time we pass him in that tiny space, he rubs off on us—on my white polo school uniform shirt—the only one with a badge that won’t get me in trouble with Ms. Golding my 6th grade homeroom teacher—newsprint smudges of the South China Morning Post and International Herald Tribune my father subscribes to and keeps in piles on the balcony.

We’re at it again. I dip a strip of newspaper in the salad bowl of paste, and I try to tell my mother the surface of the soldier is still damp. Hong Kong is so humid, the air so heavy, that he almost never dries completely from the previous night’s work. His face is taking shape though—hollowed cheeks—one much hollower than the other—and a dented forehead—but very specific eye sockets that read my thoughts.

“He’s a tough soldier, isn’t he?” my mother asks.

There is no war on. And living in Hong Kong in 1987, war is a distant noise I mostly see in movies.

“Who’s his enemy?” I ask.

“You, frowny-face,” my mother says, and she dots my nose with steaming paste. “He’s a soldier of joy. If we work hard, we might finish this soon.”

But the real enemy is my father, gone for days at a time on business travel, often barely announced, and the last time he kissed my mother and I saw it, we were living on a cul-de-sac in Omaha. We have quilts and pottery and paintings all around the house, some stacked on top of each other, more than the part-time housekeeper can manage dusting and now she’s also frowning every time she enters the kitchen.

“Lovely,” my mother says, draping a ribbon of soggy newspaper across his forehead. “Picture the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s. Like that. Like the Beatles. Like John Lennon. A soldier of the un-war,” my mother says. She loves the Beatles and talks about them all the time. When I was littler, I loved them too—I know the lyrics of all the songs on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from top to bottom, but now I associate it with my mother who makes me nervous.

“I’ll sew you a tremendous outfit,” she tells the soldier. “A bright, gorgeous uniform of silk I can get cheap from a place I know in Mong Kok.”

“Can we be done with this?” I ask, but my mom doesn’t listen.

“Put the music on,” she says.

That night in bed I can’t sleep because like other nights recently, I imagine the soldier coming to life, marching into my room with his dented head and hollowed, empty eye sockets. In my mind, I try to make him a soldier of the “un-war” as my mother calls it, but I imagine hugging him close, feeling the warm mush over the chicken wire, and he collapses with nothing inside him but the humid, busy air of Hong Kong.