One needs a tremendous amount of courage to face their most embarrassing memory. He took a deep breath and clicked the replay button of the recording of the scene he was practicing for and would perform next month. The city was burning and the sky was covered by the smoke of war. A majestic king was delivering an impassioned speech to his soldiers while the enemy invaded the city and set fire to every house they could see. His crown shone, and his cloak fluttered in the wind. Although he was old and frail, the firmness in his eyes had not wavered in the slightest. While that’s only his imagination, his crown is made of paper and the clock hangs loosely from his shoulder like a curtain. When he raises his arms to call for hope and future, he looks like an injured bird about to fall into the ocean. There wasn’t a trace of hope or a solid sense of the future in his gestures, eyes, or facial expressions. He was about to surrender and leave his people behind. He closed the video and buried his face in his palms, too embarrassed to take another peek. A king in a beggar’s outfit still acts like a king; a beggar with a crown on his head is still innately a beggar. He would definitely put himself in the second category: he was the beggar who wanted to become the king, but he couldn’t see through the king or act like the king if all he worried about were his three meals a day. "Natural" is the greatest compliment an actor can get, but does acting naturally just mean acting real? Acting comes from real life but it’s superior to real life. Recognizing the wall between fiction and reality, and learning how to balance both so you can  bring fiction into reality is a subject every actor needs to break through in his own way.  But it didn't mean acting was one just becoming the character’s puppet. Every muscle of his face, every movement of his eye, and every twitch from the corner of his mouth not only satisfied the audience's imagination of the king in the fictional story but also reflected the shadow of himself being a king in reality. The character and actor, fiction and reality together, composed the figure on the screen. If these two parts corroborated so well that the audiences couldn't tell if the person behind the screen was a real person or the actor who is called “natural.” It seemed like he still had a really long distance to go. He pulled himself out of the reflection and picked up the script which he had read countless times. He still had an idea of how a king thought, how he acted, and what he valued more: his country or his people.  Without figuring these out, his temperament would still just be a college student, not a king. There’s an actor he admired. His thoughts wandered to the scene of himself taking political major classes in the role of king and he laughed suddenly at this unrealistic thought. He took off the paper-made crown and carpet from his shoulders and headed out. There‘s an old saying that the number of books you read is the number of people's lives you have passed. He stopped at the gate of the library, wondering how many lives of kings he needed to go through.