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.

Ruan Li is thirty-three, an English tutor for grad-school entrance exams, in a flat marriage to a husband who is always on the road. He Chuan was once her one-on-one student—twenty-one, a college junior—and nothing happened during those lessons; the chats just got dirtier afterward. The summer he graduates at twenty-three, he asks her to dinner, and she goes knowing exactly what it means. Four times in one night. Then her husband leaves on another trip, and at eight on Friday morning a message lights up her phone: Free tonight?

Zhong Ke is thirty-five, the section chief everyone at the Japan branch fears: baggy sweaters, long skirts, and a vocabulary that mostly consists of one word: redo. On the second glass at the Osaka celebration drinks, her twenty-five-year-old subordinate Yi Chen asks her cup size. She says D. He doesn’t believe her. She says: if you don’t believe me, come feel for yourself. At eleven that night, wearing nothing but a hotel yukata, she takes the stairs up to the twelfth floor.

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.

Lin Lan, twenty-nine, four years an off-establishment grid worker for the sub-district. The district ran an open recruitment, she came first in the written exam, and on August 21st her name went up for public notice — thirty days with no letter of complaint and the post is hers. But the second week the red paper was up, she found she was not happy at all. On the third evening of the posting she went up to the fifth floor herself, knocked herself, undid the buttons herself. Reading off the roster under the Party flag, the basement, the property monitoring room — and the Tuesday and Thursday slots were hers to schedule.

Jiang Xue, thirty-two, company cashier. Her husband blew up his stock account and her credit card is days from going on her credit report. She knocks on the finance director’s door and borrows thirty thousand of his own money, writes the IOU herself, and clears it in one payment the moment the year-end bonus lands. The month-end she tears that IOU up, she is the one who stays behind to reconcile, and she is the one who locks the finance room door. He tells her: walk out now and tomorrow nothing happened. She says, I am not here to pay money back.

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.

Xu Wei, thirty-three, acting head nurse of Obstetrics at the municipal women and children’s hospital, eleven months in the job. The selection is scored by a panel of seven, two of them brought in from another hospital; the department director holds one vote, and losing only means going back to her old post and four hundred a month less. He says all of that to her face first — and then she locks the on-call room door herself. Eleven months of scheduling seventeen people, and the only empty square is her own. The day the roster becomes hers alone, she fills it with seven days of leave.

Ye Nan, thirty, is the first Party secretary posted down from a municipal bureau, eleven months into her village assignment. The road is built and the lamps are up; the county assessment team brings in a third party, draws sixty households at random, and the score comes back ninety-one, signed off that same day. At the celebration dinner she does not touch a drop, and after everyone leaves she bolts the second-floor meeting room door herself and climbs up on that long table herself. After that she goes up to the second floor every night. The loudspeaker pole at the village entrance was her choice, and the order of the three men was hers to set.

Shen Qing, thirty-six, has sat in the archive room of the municipal water group for ten years. Thirteen hundred people’s promotions, penalties and marriages have passed through her hands, and her own line has been one line of text for ten years. Her husband’s case closed in three days, and the deputy secretary of discipline inspection was left holding nothing on her at all. She went up to the ninth floor herself, undid her own shirt, and bent over in front of her husband’s file cabinet. After the resignation letter went in, the rules for the annual party were hers too: when each man is finished, she says Thank you, Leader.

Seven names on the layoff list, and the seventh line she typed in herself. The next day the boss lady crossed that line out in red pen and wrote “renew for three years.” With the contract settled, the thirty-four-year-old HR manager pulled her leggings down to her knees in the factory gym, looked back and said: my contract is already approved — don’t think this is a trade for anything.

Marriage was like a room held at a constant temperature — until, that summer, someone pushed the window open. All adults, purely fictional. (Adult NSFW zone.)