Thorny Jasmine

This is a short story, and it's complete.

Her name was Lin Mo. Her English name was Molly.

She was the most expensive girl in the dance hall. Cold and aloof, she never smiled for the customers.

She set a trap, became Zhao Rujin, and married into the Qi family as their young madam.

The childhood sweetheart he married had become cold and unrecognizable.

He wanted to get back the thirty million she was worth, so he used his tender affection to overcome her coldness, only to lose himself in it.

Then one day, she suddenly told him that his childhood sweetheart was dead.

She was nothing but a dancer.

She would drive her sharpest thorns into the world, tear away its hypocritical face, even if she burned everything to ashes.

During the Republican era, the Nanjing Nationalist Government called the dance girls of Shanghai the source of moral decay. But no one told them what path to take or what kind of life they ought to live. They were flesh to be bought and sold. Amidst the dazzling nightlife and extravagant pleasures of Shanghai, prosperity was only another form of humiliation.

At the time, the Nanjing Nationalist Government was lost in its fantasy of using foreign powers to fight other foreign powers, while the people of the country lost their dignity. The foreign concessions were isolated enclaves, women were reduced to commodities, and on a single kilometer-long street stood rows of women forced into prostitution.

Then, in the summer of 1949, the pleasures and pageantry of Shanghai finally faded away. At last, someone told those women that they were human beings, and deserved to live the lives of human beings.

But she didn't live to see it.

Theme: I love you with all my soul