The Shore Is Behind Me

Chen Yuting left a small county in northern Anhui to take an exam in the provincial capital and became a teacher at a tutoring center, thinking she had finally found a "good job." But her salary, rent, cohabitation, civil service exams, interviews, resignation, and onboarding pushed her forward one layer at a time. Only gradually did she realize that what people called making it wasn't reaching a destination, but trading one set of constraints for another, more respectable one. Ten years passed before she finally understood that what she had been chasing all along wasn't stability, but a sense of security that others had named for her.