The narrator, 17-year-old high school senior Alexander Jackson, comes home from school one day to find his animated father talking away in his home office, clearly excited by something he is reviewing on the phone. A new Betacam sits on the floor beside his desk, a clue to Alex that something interesting is afoot. Alex decides not to wait and instead heads to his room to examine the display of miniature soldiers, all neatly aligned in formation. Admiring them, he thinks inwardly: “There was six months’ research and then a year’s work of casting, finishing and painting. Now the display was almost ready” (3). The display Alex is working on is of the terra cotta soldiers from the Qin dynasty, discovered in a burial site at Xi’an, the ancient capital of Northwest China. While Alex is admiring his craft and thinking of the spring competition he plans on entering, his father walks into the room to tell Alex that they are going to China. Alex is proud of his father, as Ted is “one of the top news cameramen in the country” (2), but Alex wishes “he’d realize that there are other things in the world than cameras and film and lenses and video cassettes” (3).