Summary

The second story in "The Fortunes" is titled Part 2: Silver - Your Name in Chinese. The story is told in third person limited perspective alternating between events in present tense and prior events in past tense. The story is structured into named (e.g. "Riveting") fragments organized in a mostly linear fashion. Some of the fragments are short, just a paragraph or two, while the strongest stretch to three or four pages. The section opens with the quote, "The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. / Life is dull without it" by Pearl S. Buck (103).

The story opens with the segment, "Riveting," by describing a young woman in 1926 who helped break ground for Grauman's Chinese Theatre. She starred in a film, "The Thief of Baghdad," with one of the theater's backers, Douglas Fairbanks, two years earlier...