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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Four years married, and her husband hasn’t touched her in three months. Chi Yue, a buttoned-up back-office clerk at an insurance company, has always played it safe, until her coworker Jiang Man offers to take her out to play with men. On the first night Wang Ye only holds her while she sleeps; the second time, she’s the one who says no condom. Rope, a collar, anal: she learns them one by one, until the night she pushes open a hotel room door to find three men waiting, and, flushed red, she says: “Go ahead.”

A-Lan is thirty-two, Lao Song thirty-five, ten years married. This time what he wants is: she pretends to sleep, and the other man, A-Kai, slips into the room in the middle of the night. She sets the rules, and one “lights on” stops everyone. Ji Hotel, room 1207, room 1210 diagonally across the hall; the lights go out, and a black shape comes in through the crack of the door. She was never asleep, and the moment he pressed down on her she panicked for real: one punch, and Lao Song’s nose was pouring blood. Lights on, three people frozen for half an hour. Then it was she who said it: go on, him first, leave the lights on.

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.

Ten years married, and at the dinner table my husband said he wanted Fang Zhe, the man he shared a dorm room with at university, to be with us. I did not answer on the spot; I sat on it for two weeks. The day I answered I brought a sheet of paper and read four rules out to the two men, and only when I had finished did I say: then we start. Later he moved into our own compound, the schedule lives on my phone, three days a week.

Eight years married, three of them with him impotent. That night he stood in front of the wardrobe and said he wanted to find a man to fuck me while he watched from the side. I said yes in ten minutes, with three conditions only: I pick the man myself, I set the rules, and in the room you watch and you do not speak. After that the hotel was booked by me, the condoms were bought by me, and the notebook was written by him because I told him to write it.

Ten years married, and the hundred-and-forty-square-meter apartment is hers alone most of the year. Her husband is out of town twenty days a month, and under every single thing she posts there is exactly one man who likes it: the chairman of the homeowners’ committee, twenty-sixth floor of her own building. The night the prep meeting broke up he said he was going her way, the car was on B2, and the back seat was stacked with undistributed supply boxes. Three months later she is vice chair, and when the dinner breaks up three men are standing at three doors, waiting to see which way she goes.

Zeng Xue, thirty-five, creative director at an ad agency, E cup, one nodule in her left breast. Her husband is a corporate executive, eighty flights a year. A colleague tells her to go for a breast lymphatic detox; the manager says the best therapist is a man. Xiao Kai is twenty-eight. He says: Sis, you’ve got a nodule here. The first time he does the deep-tissue, she comes clutching the sheet. After that, every Wednesday, Room 3, extra sessions, deep-tissue, doubles.

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.

Qin Lan, thirty-three, head nurse at a top-tier hospital, 85G. Her husband is an attending surgeon: once a month, three minutes. In the night-shift break room she stumbles onto a forum: Old Zhou, a retired PE teacher, takes in married women as bitches, lives by rules, keeps a notebook. The interview is ten minutes on her knees before she’s sent away, and back in her car she tears right through her pantyhose. From then on it’s two hours every Wednesday: call him Master, report before every shower, cut open the pantyhose under her nurse’s uniform and kneel by the exam table swallowing in time with her heartbeat. The notebook grows thicker and thicker. One observer comes, then another.

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.

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.

Wang Qi, twenty-nine, a tour leader for a travel agency, 75E, one meter sixty-eight. Her husband is a middle school PE teacher: twice a month, three minutes a time. She takes a group to Bangkok, the whole group goes for Thai massage, and so does she. Ah Ti, a thirty-year-old Thai masseur, jams his knee in and spreads her legs apart. The next day she goes back to the shop on her own and tells the front desk: I want the special. On day four, with her group singing next door, she gets fucked front and back by two masseurs at once in a private room upstairs.

Eight months divorced, her ex-husband stood outside the civil affairs bureau and said she was like a plank of wood in bed. Wu Nan, twenty-seven, caught the eye of gallery owner Ji Lan, who liked her legs. The first Friday was only shaving, a bath, and photos. The second Friday she put on a collar engraved with her name, ate from a bowl, slept in a dog bed, the master took her from behind while the mistress sat on her face, and the two of them kissed over her. On the day the gallery opened she stood in the middle of the hall in a transparent raincoat, the only living piece among thirty-seven works.

With her husband posted to Saudi Arabia for six months, she is the only one who can keep an eye on the renovation of 1602 next door. On day one the foreman, Old Li, says: you do what I say. Hauling bricks, serving water, squatting to hold a level, she does it all in her stockings. On day eight, in a bathroom with no door yet, he says two words: kneel down. On completion day she is cable-tied to the newly installed Jomoo shower bar while four workers line up for the inspection. Her husband comes home, gives the bar a tug, and says: solid.

At twenty-six I flew to New York alone and rented the garden floor of an old Upper East Side brownstone. The landlords were two brothers: Julian, cold as a Wall Street winter, and Leo, warm as a Brooklyn afternoon. All winter long, the two of them took turns undoing my heartbeat.