In the city of Macau, somewhere in the labyrinth of one of the largest casinos in the world, I was sitting at a high-limit table with my colleague Glen. The game was baccarat. We were playing in the V.I.P. section, after buying entry with nearly thirty thousand dollars. The money was not ours. We were on assignment for a niche consulting company, there to evaluate the resort’s luxury services. The work is akin to that of secret shoppers; we’d been hired to pose as high-roller customers, to test the quality of the services that we received in the suites, restaurants, and bars, and at the gaming tables.

We found ourselves on the kind of streak that lives in fantasies, the kind that obliterates from memory a hundred old losses of equal magnitude. Glen (whose name I’ve changed) was giddy, but we would have stood out even without his euphoric exclamations. He is white, and I am a woman. The table was otherwise occupied by silent Chinese men, who continued playing, it seemed, almost against their will. With each round that we won, the rest of the table took a hit, and we’d been winning for a half hour straight. Some dealers would feign happiness for you when you won, or commiserate as you lost. Ours, a Chinese man in a shiny vest, was—perhaps intentionally, given that a foreigner was having a wild run at the expense of other Chinese men—unreadable. One of the players kept sucking in his cheeks, giving his face a hollow expression. I struggled to manage my feelings of dread. How can I explain it to someone who has never weathered the moods of a Chinese father? Imagine driving into a tunnel during a hard rainstorm—the sudden absence of sound, louder than the onslaught that came before.

A sum greater than our yearly salaries could now be scooped up in our hands and sifted through our fingers. But it was nothing—Macau’s revenue from gambling is six times that of Las Vegas. Glen pounded the table. He was grinning, practically panting. Partly, he was putting on a show. But I knew that he was also caught up in the moment. He was delighted by his rise to prominence at our table, and by his apparent skills in a game that he had previously called unskilled. He sported a blue—almost turquoise—blazer, purchased especially for this trip. It accentuated the exact things that made him out of place here: his paleness, his youth, his unbridled joy.

I’d found the job on Craigslist. For the first year, I worked as an editor, tucked behind a white desk in the company’s minimalist office. Consultants travelled to hotels and resorts around the world and generated lengthy evaluations, which I marked up with a red pen. I was allowed a single photo on my desk and two fifteen-minute breaks. Nothing much was expected of me, which was exactly what I wanted. But, in the second year, my boss asked me to make a few phone calls in Mandarin. My language skills proved useful and, eventually, so did my ethnicity. I began, very occasionally, to fly with the company’s consultants to parts of China that I’d never visited: a metropolis for the nouveau riche, an ancient capital, a city famous for its beer, a resort island studded with high rises. Each time, I was assigned a different persona. I packed accordingly: suits and heels when I was a businesswoman, what I thought would pass as leisurewear for the affluent when I was vacationing. I carried fake business cards.

At the baccarat table, my persona was a woman who was entertaining a man—that is, a woman who owned a company, showing one of her male investors a good time at the gaming tables. But I cannot imagine that that’s how anyone saw us. My mind flitted to the prostitutes we’d seen outside. In any event, Glen and I often appeared at the tables together, and those around us made sense of it in whatever way they wanted.

I look Chinese and speak Mandarin well enough to pass, on the mainland, as someone who lives in Hong Kong or Taiwan. When you look like ninety-eight per cent of a hotel’s clientele, people don’t go out of their way to imagine that you might be an imposter. I possessed a kind of invisibility that I didn’t in the U.S; people had fewer preconceptions of me based on my appearance, and therefore there was little for me to disprove. In a sense, this was a relief, an unburdening, a sweet break from the constant struggle to be seen more accurately. Instead of being seen as someone I was not, I simply was hardly seen.

But, as much as my job was to blend in, and to help my co-workers blend in, it was also, simultaneously, to puncture this anonymity. I was playing the role of a guest who demanded to be seen—the kind of person who sent dishes back, or sniffed the cork of a bottle of wine, or delighted in being singled out as a V.I.P. Being seen, of course, requires that someone else do the seeing. If I rubbed my bare arms as if I were cold, someone might rush over with a shawl. If I tapped my watch because it had stopped working, someone might offer to take it for repairs; that night, my watch might appear on my nightstand, ticking away in a velvet-lined box.

For a different kind of person, I’m well aware, these stints could have been fun or even liberating. I visited the Chinese hotels, casinos, and resorts with one or two other colleagues at a time, almost always white American or European men. They had an easier time of it, I couldn’t help thinking. Was this role less of a leap for them? The root of the word “pretend” is the Latin tendere: to stretch. Maybe I had farther to reach, or was simply less stretchy. Or maybe I was held back by real life—in which people had assigned me a type, a role to play, and I had worked for decades not to play it. I had spent my whole childhood and young adulthood trying to be seen and accepted as American, and now here I was, swimming in the opposite direction, pretending not to be.

“Pretend” is a word we use with children, and there’s a playfulness associated with it. Make-believe. But there is a deception, too, a menace: I will make you believe. When I was six or seven, visiting family in Taipei, I twisted a candy wrapper around a piece of Styrofoam and gave it to my grandfather: a trick. Without a word, he unwrapped it and popped it into his mouth. Then he began to choke. I burst into tears. Would he die? But he was only pretending, as I had been.

In a way, everyone around us was pretending, all the time. The concierge pretended that an unreasonable request was perfectly reasonable. The waitress pretended that your joke was witty. The Italian restaurant in the Chinese hotel pretended to be authentic, even while it sprinkled your pasta with cubed instead of grated cheese. The massage therapist pretended that the spa treatment you had chosen was beneficial to your health, including the part where she lightly brushed your body with an ostrich feather.