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By far the best news story in this Sunday's Times is the one about the king of Cambodia, who publishes a monthly bulletin that "is a photo gallery of the king's public functions, a collection of royal correspondence, a patchwork memoir and a running commentary on current events."

It is scratched with microscopic penmanship around the edges of photocopied newspaper clippings, their texts abuzz with the king's agitated dots, dashes, squiggles, underlinings and exclamation points.

"This is dreadful," he may write, in French, or, "Tragic and revolting," or, "I protest against this twisting of the truth."

"Once the most powerful man in the nation and still, for many, the most revered, the king is reduced to scribbling in the margins of history." He also, apparently, writes sarcastic letters about the prime minister, but signs them with the name of a childhood friend.

There's a great novel to be written here.

In 1913 California passed the Alien Land Law, "which effectively blocked Chinese immigrants and their children from owning land." Which means that Locke, California--"the only surviving town in America that was built as a Chinese settlement"--was built by renters.

Now the town is trying to "right a historic wrong" by making land available to the immigrants and their descendants. But most of them don't live there anymore. Local residents are worried that "the town might lose its idiosyncratic charm if wealthy outsiders spruce up the old buildings."

At one level, some current and former residents said, Asian-Americans have done so well for themselves that they no longer need Locke and all that it represents.

"I would like to see the town preserved, but it is more like a living memorial than a place to live," said Ping Lee, 85, a businessman who moved to nearby Walnut Grove 12 years ago and whose father was a founder of Locke.

This would make an okay novel, but an ideal John Sayles film.

And, in the wake of the Supreme Court's muddled affirmative action decisions, new attention on the Kamehameha Schools, well-endowed private institutions that--with an exception every few decades--only admit students with at least one native Hawaiian ancestor.

In 1999, the Internal Revenue Service gave the schools' admissions policy a clean bill of health. It noted that in one sense the school is remarkably diverse. In a recent school year, 78 percent of the students said they were part Caucasian, 74 percent said they were part Chinese, 28 percent said they were part Japanese and 24 percent said they were of other ancestries, including African-American, Arab, Brazilian, Indian, Native Alaskan and Native American.

I have no thoughts for a fictional treatment of this one.