I am twenty-four years old, a graduate student in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and live in an apartment with a monthly rent of RMB 18,000. I wear cashmere sweaters from Loro Piana, the essence of La Prairie, carry a Hermès birkin on my back, and drive a Bentley to and from school.
It took me less than a year to get these things.
What's the cost?
The price is "myself".
---
Shen Wanting is a second-year graduate student in the Chinese Department of the 985 University.
A year ago, she was still working three part-time jobs to earn a monthly living expenses of several thousand yuan. She wore a doll costume and handed out flyers at the entrance of a shopping mall. She was kicked by children but did not dare to say a word.
A year later, she moved into the apartment of 42-year-old investor Chen Huaixu. There were eight cashmere sweaters hanging in the closet. Her supplementary credit card limit could not reach the upper limit. The monthly living expenses she received were more than eight times her previous part-time income.
She thought it was a deal where everyone gets what he needs - he buys her youth, she trades for his resources. We broke up after graduation, clean and tidy.
But what she didn't expect was:
The way her instructor looked at her changed, her classmates talked about her behind her back, and her ex-boyfriend sent three words: "Don't do this."
She didn't expect that she would secretly compete with another "female companion" on the private plane. She didn't expect that the 23,000 yuan mattress would make her sleepless all night. She didn't expect that when she finally could afford Van Cleef & Arpels and Hermès, what she missed was the girl queuing up at the door of the library to get a seat.
She used her graduation thesis to write about Foucault and Baudrillard, and her body to write about the alternative ending of Madame Bovary.
This is a documentary diary about material, dignity and self-tearing.
Concept: In the process of being raised, the soul does not disappear - it just shrinks into a ball, waiting to wake up one day. When a person exchanges her youth for material things, can she still find herself who once lined up at the entrance of the library to get a seat? Materials can buy away the body, but they cannot buy away the self who is still writing a thesis.