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.

Twenty-year-old Pei Rui lost a year retaking her college entrance exam, still can’t breathe in the pool as a freshman, and her boyfriend in the next city hasn’t touched her in two months. Kofi, a Ghanaian classmate in her major, teaches her at the lane rope to tuck her chin and breathe, and once they add each other on WeChat, the chats get filthier and filthier. One Saturday morning in the empty new pool, he asks her under the water, “Can I?” and she presses his hand down herself.

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.

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.

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.