The World Keeps Its Own Accounts, I’m Not Playing Along

[Realistic female coming-of-age | East Asian human relationships | Workplace dilemmas | Urban renewal | Ensemble cast | Slow-burn romance]

In the emergency room before dawn, Chen He pushed back a form she couldn’t understand for the first time. She never imagined that one unsigned piece of paper could crack open the life she had thought was secure.

Her boss said she was difficult to work with, her boyfriend urged her to give in, her mother said she was being unreasonable, and her friends asked why she had changed. Transferred to another position, unemployed, and separated from her boyfriend, she began learning how to live again through vegetable prices, rent, and a hot meal.

Meanwhile, Qingheli, where she had grown up, was aging too: leaking roofs, loose handrails, people who couldn’t afford to move and couldn’t bear to leave, and a renewal project that was supposed to make life better. Chen He gradually realized that even good intentions could go awry amid targets, personal ties, and fear; that a person could lose herself among countless declarations of “I’m only doing this for your own good.”

Later, she stopped fighting every battle. What was hers, she took; what wasn’t hers, she wouldn’t carry; and what wasn’t worth it, she wouldn’t entertain.