Write your fantasy,
make it real.

At the Lakeside Hotel on Suzhou’s shore, thirty-two-year-old qipao tailor Shu Man sits by the floor-to-ceiling window in a black lace dress of her own making, saying nothing. The rule is hers: each time she undoes a frog button, the single man Cheng Jun may take one step closer; each time she fastens one back, everyone stops. Her husband Meng Yu stands outside the balcony door, his voice so soft it only ever offers suggestions—until he steps across the sliding track himself.

On the third day in Bali, Liang Zhiyuan and his wife Zhuo Ying walk into the tidal spa by the beach for a ninety-minute couples massage. The front desk makes it clear: no touching between therapists and clients. Zhuo Ying is thirty-three, thin-skinned, never able to say what she wants out loud—but her foot touches the male therapist Yono first, and the condom in her bag is one she brought herself. Her husband sees the condom on the nightstand, but not the moment she put it there.

Fu Yao, thirty, works the night shift on a customer service line. The washing machine at home is broken, so every morning at four she goes down to the self-service laundromat, where Niu Ben, the delivery station manager, is always there. She could still recite her mother’s rules at thirty; now she sets her own: while the drum is turning, anything goes, and when it beeps, she leaves. She never presses pause. Her husband You Kai, a day-shift programmer, fixes the washing machine. She still goes downstairs and presses sixty minutes. One morning at four, he wakes up.

Twenty days of picking season. Yu Lan, thirty-six, runs the kitchen at the family farmstay and feeds twenty workers, and she gives the new kid, Xiao Feng, one scoop more. She lays the rules out to his face: wages are paid by the day and have nothing to do with this; the fruit basket set under the trees means yes, the basket in her hand means no. The row at the foot of the hill ripens late, and nobody goes there. When the fruit is in, Xiao Feng leaves, the basket goes up on the kitchen wall, and her husband sets a half-used bottle of toilet water beneath it.

Yi Shan is thirty-three, a Chinese-lit graduate. When her magazine folded she took the front desk at Binhe Swim Center, teaches the evening adult class, and swims half an hour alone every dawn. Gu Zheng, the lane-four morning member, swam for the provincial team eleven years ago and only ever shows up from six to six-thirty. House rule three: cap on in the water. With the cap on she is the front desk. With it off, she is not. Her husband Lai Xu sells cars, has another woman at lunchtime, and has only one thing to say at night: “Dry your hair.”

Suo Min, thirty-one, plays bass for Low Pressure Trough. Her husband Ying Hao is the drummer, out with a wrist injury, not allowed to touch a single stick. At soundcheck for the Fengkou Music Festival, Da Li, the monitor engineer, pushes her low end up two notches. She sets the rule: with the pass hanging on her neck he can touch her; off and on the console, he stops. After the show, behind the black drape with close to ten thousand people still out front, her husband sits across from her with a bodypack on, listening, counting one two three four over the comms. A month later, at her husband’s comeback show, she hangs the pass on the drum kit.

A downpour strands wedding photographer Yin Duo and his makeup-artist wife Pi Xiaolu at a location base forty kilometers out. The female model never shows, so her husband puts her in a satin gown to be “the bride’s hand” for the sample groom, Hong Jin. When her makeup case is open she’s on the clock; when it’s shut she’s off. That day in the greenhouse she pushed the latch down herself, while her husband pressed the shutter from behind the viewfinder. The sample now hangs in the shop, and every day she touches up its dust.

Mai Qing, who runs a seafood stall, signs up with her husband Sha Cong for Kun Kee’s night-fishing trip, and the list has one extra name on it: Candy, who does nails. Under the white light at the bow, her husband teaches someone to cast with his hands over hers; under the yellow light at the stern, she squats sorting line with A-Kun, the forty-four-year-old skipper. Every time the glow bell on the rod tip rings, they have to stop. It rings three times. The fourth time, she takes the bell off. At dawn they come back to port, each carrying a fish.

Twenty-three below. Yu Fei, twenty-eight, a dental receptionist, is marched onto the slopes by her husband Lang Xiao, thirty-four, and falls twenty-seven times. It is Lao He, the forty-six-year-old guesthouse owner, who carries her off the intermediate run and back to the heated kang. On the kang, her husband makes a proposal: goggles on means yes, and whoever pushes them up calls a stop. She changes one line. If I push them up to my forehead, you both stop. If you push them, it doesn’t count. The walls are thin. Next door can hear everything.

Black Rock Flats campground, 3,200 meters up. Camping blogger Bi Yang lies on the car roof shooting three hours of star trails, and not a single frame can break. In the tent, thirty-year-old coffee-shop owner Jing Lan pulls the door zipper down to halfway. Yue Chuan, the geological surveyor camping alone at the next site, told her: zipped to the top means stay away, zipped halfway means come in, and nobody says a word. Her husband can only listen from ten meters away while she counts zipper teeth. On the second night she says: I’ll leave the zipper for you. You come in.

No tickets together for the holiday rush, so Tong Rui, thirty-four, an administrator at an adult night school, takes the soft-sleeper lower bunk while her husband Qi Yuan sits in a hard seat in another car. On the bunk across is Wen Tao, forty-one, a pharmaceutical rep who lives on long-haul trains. When the lights go out he says: the curtain shut means one thing, open means another. After Qinggang it’s all tunnels, one after another. Before the train pulls in, she hands her husband her ticket, with the number of the man across written on the back.

Luo Xue, twenty-nine, is a nude double at Yunqi Film Studios; her face never goes on camera. Her husband Tian Yifan is the best boy on the lighting crew, and in three years of lighting her every scene, her face has always been on the far side of his black flag. In the Scene 47 bed scene, leading man Ji Bei gets hard through two layers of modesty shorts and says sorry. After wrap she borrows a slate and knocks on his trailer door: it starts when you call action, and whoever calls cut, we stop. The next day there is a tenth take on the lighting playback drive. It was not shot.

Moving day, and her husband is off waiting on a ticket number. Hao Sisi, thirty, a game concept artist, is left in the empty apartment with Da Zhuang, the mover. She sets the rule: boxes sealed with tape are off-limits, open ones are fair game. At the new place the mattress is still wrapped in plastic and the apprentice is unpacking next door when she rips the tape off her finger: “I’m open today.” A week later her husband finds a box in the corner that never got unpacked. The tape on it is new.

Coach driver Lu Qingshan is laid up with a bad back, and the company sends Jiang Dacheng, a night-route driver, to fill in. Three days on a mountain tour: guide Qin Wanqiu looks after all forty-seven passengers, and only the man who never talks looks after her, turning the heater her way, covering her lunch, draping his coat over her shoulders. The night the tour wraps, she pulls the little guide flag out of the dashboard: flag in, it’s the itinerary; flag out, it’s her. The engine at the back of the bus runs hot, and at home her husband listens to it idling in her voice message. When the week is over, she slides out from under the flag base a follow-up slip that has been pressed there the whole week.

Guan Xiaoman is twenty-seven, from the Northeast, three years streaming womenswear. Her husband Fang Yu sells cars and keeps a nail-salon girl named Tingting hidden in his phone. She doesn’t make a scene. She opens a late show, and her top gifter, “Beifeng,” drops ten sports cars in a row and DMs three words: Inspect in person. She writes back: I don’t want the cars. I want to see the man, and I set the price. The price isn’t money; it’s nine seconds of sign-off suona, and when the bell rings everyone goes home. In a showroom at the building-materials mall, she sits on a sintered-stone vanity and pitches the goods in her broadcast voice. The second time, the door isn’t locked, and her husband is standing in it.

Qi Ran is thirty-three and sells medical devices; her husband Liu Chong is a construction supervisor, and for two years he has made her send a photo of her hotel door plate before eleven every night. A storm hits Xi’an, the company botches the booking, and she ends up sharing a twin room with Xiang Dong, the new colleague on secondment. She sets one rule: I go back to that bed, you stop. The first night she photographs the door plate and doesn’t send it. The second night her husband video-calls; she answers, camera pointed at the ceiling. When the trip ends he goes through her phone at the airport: six shots of 1409 in the album.

Qin Yutong, thirty-five, runs a bookstore. Strictly raised, she never takes off the sandalwood prayer beads her grandmother left her. Divorced five years, she visits her ex-husband once a year, on his birthday, to bring a cake. This year she put the prayer beads in her bag. On her carpenter ex-husband’s elm workbench she argues every step with her grandmother while the beads rattle in the bag to his rhythm. Her current husband sees her location, does not call, and simply buys a new string of beads and lays it on her pillow. She goes wearing that string, does it wearing that string, the string breaks, and of eighteen beads she picks up seventeen.

Five days and four nights in Sanya. Xue Hong, thirty-six, spent four days in meetings on the balcony, and Qin Yue, twenty-eight, spent four days by the pool being watched by A-Hai, the twenty-four-year-old lifeguard. She is good to her husband, he is even better to her, he just never looks at her. She put on her sunglasses and asked A-Hai what time he got off, then picked the lounger right under her husband’s balcony. Sunglasses on, keep going; sunglasses off, stop. On the flight home, her husband put his hand on her knee, and she took the sunglasses off.

Wen Shuyao, thirty-two, restores ancient books. Six months after spinal surgery, her husband Sheng Lang still cannot make love to her. He suggests his oldest friend Gu Yihang: the best man who handed over the ring at their wedding, the surgeon who stitched him closed. She refuses three times. The fourth time, she takes off her wedding ring herself and sets it on the nightstand. Ring on the nightstand, he comes in; ring on her hand, nobody does. Through the wall, her husband listens to her recite the Book of Odes. The scar aches. Below it, he is hard.

Lan Zhi, thirty-one, a contracts assistant at a law firm, hears her husband Qi Ming say in bed that he wants to watch her with another man. The next day she produces a five-page, seven-clause Performance Agreement: Party B qualifications, Party C’s seat, ownership of the recordings, the Clause Seven termination clause, nothing left out. Qin Ye, a personal trainer at her gym, is interviewed like a supplier and signs under Clause Seven. Thirty days, thirty rows of signatures, and the husband retreats from the chair to the lobby, until he ends up as “Party C (Informed Party).” The day it expires, she brings out the renewal.

Ji Tang, a florist, is twenty-nine. Her husband Wu Feng drives a truck and is away four days a week. The spare key lives across the hall with Lao Xue, a forty-five-year-old man who has fixed locks for twenty-two years and lives alone. The night she forgot her key she went over to get it, and Lao Xue came down to fix the lock at her shop and said a locksmith can hear loose from tight. From then on the brass hook on the door frame became a rule nobody said out loud: key on the hook, he comes in; key in the drawer, he opens his own door. Until her husband changed his route to come home on Wednesdays.

At the college reunion Li Xiangdong has only two drinks, and stone sober he bets a bottle of Macallan against his old roommate Nie Chuan: “Three dates with my wife and you won’t lay a finger on her.” Du Xiaoran is thirty, teaches English to adults, and tells bad jokes when she’s nervous. The next morning she messages Nie Chuan herself: bet, date one, Wednesday, you pick the place. The whisky sits unopened on top of the fridge, and the rule is hers: the game ends only when she says “I’m drinking this bottle.” She lets him all three times, so by her rules she won. The trouble is she finds she doesn’t want to stop.

Nine years into their marriage, Zhou Yu hid an absurd “cuckold manifesto” under the takeout menus on the fridge door and never found the nerve to bring it up. Lin Wan found it first — and went through it line by line with the red pen she uses to edit manuscripts. Some points she cursed, some she struck out, some she marked “open to discussion.” That night they talked about sex for the first time in their lives, set three rules, and invited to dinner the older classmate she never quite said no to in college.

Her husband keeps scrolling through those forum posts about taking a wife while she sleeps. Lu Yao reads one and says only this: I won’t sleep. I’ll pretend. She sips a Long Island iced tea with no alcohol in it and plays drunk, lies on a hotel bed with a black silk scarf over her eyes, and sets a safe word: “thirsty.” A stranger in a white cap walks through the door. He knows she’s awake. But he has to treat her as if she’s asleep.