A young woman begins to work for an influencer, Seraphina, who she secretly hates. After vicious gossip about Serphina and the young woman pops up on anonymous message forums, the young woman must decide just how far she'd compromise herself for this job.

An aspiring reporter must obtain an interview with a guarded and mysterious former classmate in order to be taken seriously as a working journalist.

A woman on a grand jury hears the case of an older woman who was brutally raped by one of her former students. She attempts to understand the different ways the story disturbs her.

A teacher on the Lower East side meets a friendly man with a presence resembling a dead English poet.

A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.

A complex web of human relationships is presented in the form of an algebraic expression.

A businesswoman has her daughter edit her report for the next day because even though she’s eleven, she “excelled at things like that.” In the morning, the business meeting is cancelled because of a sexual assault investigation. The man accused is someone the businesswoman used to sleep with. Thinking of that makes her think of another man she used to sleep with, the numerous affairs she’s had. She “enjoyed the feeling of different lovers, the newness of strangers.” While she’s waiting for the interview, she checks on her daughters. She thinks about how they “were mystified by her English. It was one thing about her that seemed to both entertain and perturb them. They deployed her expressions to taunt her and the world at large. ‘I have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice,’ they shouted at each other, at their dolls, at strangers on the street.” Her affair with the guy who’s being investigated had lasted three months. “[T]hey agreed…on the importance of seeking out risk and pleasure, and the joy of a temporary room with its own evolving rules.” She thinks about the other man she used to sleep with, how “[h]e was the lover she never would have turned away from.” But this guy, the guy who was her superior in the company, it seems she was not the only one who slept with him. Some of her female co-workers seemed affected by him too. And yet, he’d vouched for the businesswoman, even before their “brief affair, John had lauded her. He had argued for her to be further promoted, which would have meant a better salary, an easing of financial burdens, a three-bedroom apartment for the family, but she had been left to twist in the same position for ten years. Despite her tireless efforts, Lu had stayed near the bottom of the ladder.” The investigator tries to get her to blame the guy, but the businesswoman wonders, “Who was it who demanded shame? Fourteen years at the company. Where had all that time gone? Was John Sadler responsible for that?” She decides not to divulge anything. The man who’s being investigated calls her to apologize. She wonders what it means to be a mother, to be responsible for others when you want to be free. She looks at the questionnaire the investigator gave her. She tries to figure out how to answer it. Starts by writing, “I saw other woman grieving,” deletes that and then writes, “I never grieved.” She then writes in Cantonese, tries to answer why she had an affair. She thinks about having her daughter answer the questionnaire for her, but figures “[i]t was out of the question to ask the child. Was this something, after all, that a mother should do?” She ultimately writes, “Two people had an affair. Nothing more. But also nothing less.” The man who’s being investigated gets hospitalized. Nobody knows why. “Some people in the company pitied him, others didn’t.” His position gets filled by someone else. Life goes on. The businesswoman wants to tell her daughters that, that “[y]ou wanted to change [life] but it changed you, remodelled you for every age. One day, you were an immigrant, loaded down with inexplicable shame; the next you were middle-aged, a mother, and all the risks you’d taken—to live freely, to not be subdued—also made you feel ashamed, as if you’d done nothing but kick the tangerines around.” She realizes she may never understand how the world works. “She’d eaten from the bowl and turned it over; she had been unfaithful and yet faithful, wrong and yet right, lonely and yet beloved, and that was the bitter, that was the sweet quandry of it all.”

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.

A man reflects on the past week while an unexpected storm rages outside, and he compares the events that follow with the fall of the Roman Empire.

In the depths of his mind, a writer tries to uncover the autonomous, nefarious motivations of his own characters.