As a teenage girl stumbles upon a mysterious portal leading her to a utopian, magical world, her storyline converges with that of the author—a middle-aged, married mother of two who has come out as asexual to her husband—leading both to a reckoning with their unfulfilling romantic relationships and deepest desires.

A woman has an affair with a female lover who works in retouching models and imagines retouching the woman's face and body. The lover carries multiple selves inside of her, one of them a muscular, furry, aggressive man whose body hers (the lover's) sometimes resembles in bed.

After a frustrating date—upset by the way even sex between women is shaped by patriarchal forces—a lesbian in NYC has sex with a male friend from college, determined to prioritize her pleasure over her learned instinct to satisfy the interests and egos of men.

At a mundane dinner party, adults dance the night away while two ten-year-olds hide and explore their bodies together.

A young being describes coming of age on their planet. Though they spend most of their time without gender, when it comes time to get physically intimate, they meet at a kemmer-house for a short duration, as either female or male.

A young, intersex outcast struggling to find their place in society finds solace in a beautiful visitor from another world. Despite having thoughts and motivations beyond human understanding, the two bond over their shared experiences and trauma, all the while battling ghosts from their past.

A lustful, rhapsodic husband makes an unsuccessful attempt to seduce his distant wife and is surprised when the tables soon turn.

In an alternate universe where mermaids are critically endangered animals, a team of marine biologists off the coast of Jeju Island embark on a decade-long journey to revive the over-hunted, largely-infertile species. The researchers' hopes are set on one dominant female, but when their tampering crosses an irreversible line, their mission— and her life— become jeopardized. In an alternate world where mermaids are real and critically endangered, a team of marine biologists near Jeju Island embark on a decade-long mission to revive the over-hunted and overwhelmingly male species. The scientists set their hopes on one dominant female and her two male companions. However, as they study their sexual lives, the team learns just how complicated an "animal" can be— and how, sometimes, conserving a species comes at the cost of some of its members.

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 in a failing marriage embarks on yet another love affair with a married woman, teaching him about his own sexual escapist tendencies.