Write your fantasy,
make it real.

Thirty-one-year-old Su Wan, a Chinese language instructor at the county workers’ spare-time college, had been passed over for a mid-level title for three years. She deliberately left that button undone, locked the principal’s office door, and made a deal with him: only saying “red pen” meant a real stop—every other “no” was part of the act. Being forced, having no choice—that was the script she wrote for herself. From the principal’s sofa to the section chief’s back seat, then to Room 1806 at the Jinjiang Hotel, she kept crying “no” all the way while delivering herself to their doors.

Zhou Meng, a twenty-seven-year-old teller at a rural commercial bank, asked one question through the glass: Boss Cao, how much does that money lose you each year sitting in a demand account? Thirty million came in, and her quota was done twenty days early. That day she drove herself up the mountain and locked the door of the tin shack from the inside: Today I’m the one who slides the bolt in, not you.

Married a year. Her husband runs a courier station and hauls parcels till past midnight every night. Lin Shan is twenty-seven, a course consultant at a vocational training school; the group leader post was decided by the school affairs committee on September receipts, passed on Thursday, the announcement already queued. For eight hundred eighty she rented ten hours at a recording studio off campus. The owner is fifty-seven, minds the machines and doesn’t teach, and doesn’t know a single person where she works. The first time, she undid her own buttons.

Zhou Yu, twenty-nine, contract clerk at the district court, her bar certificate locked in a drawer for two years. Getting on staff comes down to one written exam in April, and nobody can lend her a hand. And it is the Political Department that sends her to compile the oral history of Yan Song, a judge two years retired: an apartment full of old case files, and his robe hanging in the wardrobe. The first time, she was the one who put the robe on and climbed on top of him.

Song Jia, twenty-eight, a sales consultant six months married, is three units short of her annual target. When Old Jin from Wenzhou comes to see the model unit the director has assigned someone else, so she walks into his office and says: I want this client. In the master bedroom of the model unit the curtain stays open, and she says, whether you buy is your business, and this is this. By year-end she is a manager, and on launch day she walks to the Maybach at the door herself.