AD | Chapter 1

My name is Zhuang Xiao Qin. I’m twenty-two.

I’ve been making my way through the giant Rubik’s Cube that is Beijing for two years now, all on my own.

I have no household registration, no steady job, and nothing but a pen to my name. My profession is a fashionable one these days: I’m a ghostwriter.

Yes, a ghostwriter.

But don’t get the wrong idea. I’m probably the gentlest ghostwriter in the world. To put it plainly: have you ever noticed how many celebrities seem to have books on the shelves these days? I wouldn’t dare claim that none of those books were actually written by their supposed authors. But I’d bet that more than sixty percent were penned by ghostwriters like me. Nobody comes forward to fight for the copyright, and as long as the money finds its way into their pockets, nobody much cares whose name is on the cover.

When I first started doing this, I used to comfort myself with a little logic: selling my words to someone else was better than letting them rot quietly in a corner. And if a celebrity was willing to lend me their name without charging me a fee, well, what a bargain. Eventually, I stopped even bothering with the self-consolation.

The more important fact was that I needed money.

I needed rice and clothes. I needed bus fare. I needed air-conditioning in the summer, which meant paying electricity bills high enough to make your heart stop. As for owning a home—well, with Beijing’s insane property prices, I could only fantasize about marrying some rich man with a house and a car. Otherwise, under this bright and beautiful sky, earning enough to put a roof of my own over my head was practically a delusion.

My agent, so to speak, was a man named Chen Hao. “Agent” was really just a nickname for him. Officially, he was an editor at a second-rate publishing house. Because of his job, he could often steer decent assignments my way.

Of course, there was more to our relationship than work.

I’d always found it strange that the money I got from him was usually more than I expected. Maybe it was because I was exceptionally good at what I did. Or maybe there was a little emotional capital mixed in with the business arrangement. Or perhaps it was both. Why overthink it? Self-deception is a perfectly legitimate human privilege.

As for whatever real feelings might have existed between us, I thought about those even less. I didn't have the time. Or, to be more brutally honest, Chen Hao simply didn’t inspire me to think about them.

Naturally, I had my own Prince Charming tucked away in the back of my mind. I had all the beautiful, dreamy fantasies about love that any young woman might have. Reality had beaten every last one of them to a pulp, which was probably why I wrote novels in the first place. Sometimes, while writing, I’d even shed a few bourgeois little tears. But more often than not, my heart was hard. Time had forced me into becoming someone I had never wanted to be, and now and then, I couldn’t help feeling lonely.

I never read the novels afterward.

I wrote them, handed them over to Chen Hao, collected my money the next day, and that was that.

I usually worked at night, which meant daytime was my sleeping time. Chen Hao was generally very understanding about that.

But on this particular morning, the shrill ring of the telephone dragged me out of sleep. I glanced at my phone. It wasn’t even ten.

Yawning, I answered. Chen Hao’s voice was practically bursting with excitement.

“Xiao Qin, your luck is finally turning around!”

“I haven’t bought a lottery ticket lately,” I said. “Unless you’ve discovered that I’m secretly the illegitimate daughter of some Indian maharaja? Or a gold brick just fell out of the sky and landed squarely on your head?”

One of Chen Hao’s greatest virtues was that he never paid the slightest attention to my nonsense.

“Come out. We’ll talk face-to-face. I’m at the nearest Starbucks to your place. I’ll wait for you.”

He hung up.

With that much fanfare, I was expecting something extraordinary.

What I got was a disappointment.

“It’s just some minor celebrity publishing an autobiography,” I said, taking a sip of my milk tea. “I could finish the whole thing in two weeks. What’s all the fuss about?”

“Minor celebrity?” Chen Hao sucked in a breath.

“Tell me, Comrade Zhuang Xiao Qin, how long has it been since you had absolutely no contact with television, newspapers, radio, the Internet, or any other form of media?”

He reached over to the newspaper rack and pulled out a paper. He began flipping through it with great purpose.

Ten seconds later—

Slap!

He slapped a page down in front of me.

“Minor celebrity? Look at this!”

I looked.

An entire page was devoted to a special report. One of the bold headlines was particularly sensational:

LIN JIAHUI’S GUANGDONG FAN CLUB EVENT ESCORTED BY POLICE CARS; FANS’ ENTHUSIASM SPARKS RIOT

I stared at the black-and-white photograph. A whole entourage of bodyguards and assistants surrounded a young woman. Huge sunglasses concealed almost all of her face, leaving only a glimpse of her features: a sharp little chin and an expression that looked both proud and cold.

Lin Jiahui?

Who the hell was that?

I went back to Chen Hao’s place with him and opened Google. I typed in “Lin Jiahui.”

The search results were so numerous they made my eyes widen. There were more pages than I could even count.

I clicked on a random result and found her photograph.

Sure enough, she looked like a star.

Once the sunglasses were off, she was almost unnervingly beautiful—like a real-life Barbie doll, with impossibly delicate features. I studied her résumé. A Canadian citizen. One-quarter British ancestry. Impeccable family background. Impeccable education. Nothing in her résumé could be faulted.

Then I saw her age, and nearly lost my mind.

Twenty-two.

The same age as me.

Chen Hao was practically fanning the flames beside me.

“Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve seen a celebrity this hot? Nobody even knows where she came from. She just appeared out of nowhere and suddenly became insanely famous. And now she wants to publish an autobiography—reveal the truth about her family background, her whole story. Everyone is fighting for the chance. Do you have any idea how much work I had to put in to get this assignment—”

“How much?” I cut him off.

Chen Hao held up a hand.

“Fifty thousand.”

Good Lord.

I nearly fainted.

Fifty thousand yuan for a manuscript of fifty thousand words. Did these people have so much money they could climb to the top of the China Millennium Monument and throw it around like confetti?

Chen Hao took advantage of my dazed expression and shoved a thick stack of printed pages into my hands.

“They’re paying you, so you’re going to have to work for it. All the background material is here. Go through it carefully.”

I stared blankly at the stack of papers, but inside my head, the numbers were racing.

Fifty thousand yuan.

One yuan per word.

At my typing speed, that worked out to roughly 4,500 yuan an hour.

At that rate, my annual salary would be…

Chen Hao’s phone rang.

The tacky ringtone shattered my beautiful dream.

He hurried over to the window to answer it, suddenly adopting an extraordinarily deferential tone. When he hung up, he turned back to me, grinning from ear to ear.

“Come on. Miss Lin’s manager wants to meet you.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m only responsible for writing the manuscript.”

“He says he absolutely wants to meet the person who’s actually writing it.”

“Tell him not to worry. I have professional ethics. I’m not going around telling everyone her secrets.”

“That’s not what he means,” Chen Hao said. “He has some specific requirements for the book. He’s worried I won’t be able to explain them properly.”

I looked at Chen Hao.

He held up his hand again.

Five fingers.

Fifty thousand yuan.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I nodded.

I really didn’t have a choice.