I bring my coin purse with a photocard in it, just for good measure. That’s how superstition manifests for this generation, I think to myself. It’s miscellaneous idol-related items instead of charms and talismans and omamoris. I put on my late grandmother’s watch to “bring it home”—what an interesting phrase to use considering she’s not home anymore—the final step in this ritual of an atheist in desperate need of luck.

You’d think I’m going into some exams or interviews, occasions sophisticated and life-alteringly significant enough to warrant that kind of anxiety. You’d be wrong.

I’m applying for a Schengen visa at VFS Global.

I’d like to do this as a party trick at some point: ask all attendees at a social gathering whether they know what VFS does and watch that question divide the room. For now, I can only stand in the snaking queue that stretches far beyond the entrance and the barriers with those retractable belts, around the corner of the building, and down a side street. Bewildered and apprehensive faces hover. All kinds of questions are on the tips of our tongues and it boils down to one: Am I in the right place?

Behind me, a man wants to kindly know my scheduled time slot for entry. I was too early for my appointment, and him too late for his. Both of us are unsure if we should stay in the lane. I asked him to kindly keep my place in the queue while I go in front and check with a staff member. The answer is yes, we should wait to be summoned.

I silently remind myself to be grateful to even have a slot that I booked on my own laptop at its usual rates, without having to purchase an overpriced one from scalpers who snatch everything using bots. They would later resell them through group chats on Telegram or partner up with Chinese travel agencies that advertise “instant bookings” on Xiaohongshu. My friend and I didn’t want to aid and abet such behaviours, but she wasn’t as lucky. She still can’t find a slot.

Inside the waiting room, raw nerves tint the air with a slight hue and give it a density. Crisp, clean, snowy-white curtains shield each cubicle and ceremoniously grant some nonexistent dignity to all the voices that are desperately divulging details of our little human lives. The purpose and lengths of stays of our holidays, the age of our children, the well-being of our parents. We wait and wait with searching eyes and listen for the moment we are summoned again, not by our names but by a string of letters and numbers that dictate our place in the lane. We wait for the opportunity to prove that we are innocent, law-abiding, pure-hearted, obedient, exemplary citizens that won’t blasphemously overstay our welcome. It reminds me of the Ticketmaster waiting room where we have to prove that we’re authentic fans driven by the purest forms of love.

I sit down on an empty seat and the man next to me immediately apologises, for the tip of the strap of his bag is slightly astray from his place and touches my leg. He’s in an ill-fitted suit and mismatched leather shoes. It’s clear that he wasn’t dressing up for work, but for this. I recognise the tension in his shoulders and the caution between his brows, the constant fear of overstepping and inconveniencing others and making a scene in a place where the odds and the laws are most certainly not on your side. Practiced politeness and humility pulled taut. The need to impress and appear put together, to convince and persuade and ease any concerns.

People who look like me filter in and out, like we’re all in some firm’s diversity advertisement. From time to time you’d see people who don’t look like me, and they all have a similar look of reluctance and stiffness on their faces that said we don’t want to be here. We didn’t have to be here. Us being here is but a fluke, a misunderstanding, a rare occurrence like a full blood moon. I feel like the tide that keeps coming back.

Despite my meticulous double-triple checks, overprinting and overpreparing, I still fuck up the documentations. An Important Thing is missing. I am told that there’s a likelihood of refusal if I don’t submit them, but if I can get it within the next few hours, I can come back and they can still attach it to my file. I rush outside to call the all-inclusive trip organiser that I booked with, and ask for that missing paperwork to be provided. An amicable lady listens to my cough-riddled (still haven’t recovered from my flu) explanation of the situation, and tells me, in awe, that they had never dealt with a customer requesting such a thing. No one seemed to have needed a visa for this package? Yes, I said, but I’m Chinese. I’m not like them. She told me she’ll see what they can do.

While I wait for a call back, I find a “Xereox Prin & Potocopy” truck outside of the visa application centre. It’s like a food truck, but instead of deep fryers it has a cloudy-grey printer spewing out whatever people forgot to bring. It charges £1.5 per page if it’s under 10 pages. I forgot to check if they do a discount. Behind a counter, the owner stands on a slightly elevated platform, spreading out the pages of someone’s passport like he’s peeling us open. We watch wordlessly, waiting our turns to board this life raft. The man who was behind me in the queue just paid for his photocopies, and a loose page got blown away by the wind. He runs to catch it as it scrapes restlessly on the concrete pavement.

Last week, I was standing in the pit of TXT’s first concert in London, running and scavenging fallen confetti. It’s a tradition of theirs to blast a handful of fake dollar bills for their song, LO$ER LOVER, and fans collect them (and sell them) like real money. We had never been so close to the stage before, so we were determined to secure them this time round. Among us, hundreds of other General Admission fans kneel and crawl on the drinks-spilt floor to collect a new kind of star confetti that they recently introduced to their shows. It has each member’s printed autographs on it, and you obviously HAVE to get everyone’s. In the end, security guards had to link arms to form a barricade to prevent us from lingering and exploring the floor further.

It is an absolutely preposterous scene. Everyone dehydrated and faint from exhaustion, makeup running wild, turning on their phone flashlights and getting on their hands and knees to snatch pieces of flimsy paper. Me and Abby (yes, it’s her again) curse at the insanity of this primitive, raccoonish hunger for soggy garbage, but in those moments you think of little else and act on an impulse that’s strangely, and comfortingly, simple. I want, and I want, and I want. Confetti is the only tangible thing you could touch and hold onto in a dream. The company is well aware of that, so they make iterations to drive up the demand and the resale prices shoot up. I have a friend of a friend who messaged me on Instagram and wanted one of the stars I picked up. Other people are, once again, spending a fortune on paper.

I recall this video clip taken from NCT Dream’s group documentary that made me cry. The members watch a compilation of their fans cheering them on outside of their concert stadium. Girls and boys who look like me all shouting their wish for NCT to eat well and sleep well and be healthier and happier. They write their messages down on sticky notes. Then, the camera cuts to the members, and thousands and thousands of sticky notes fall from the ceiling and drown the boys in their bright, piercing and screaming love. The lyrics says “I really love you, and no one else’s love can measure up to that”. Incomparable love and want that gets abused.

It also sounds insane to draw a parallel between my trip to the VFS and fanning, but so much of fandom is about paying your way in and out of things, and therefore about exclusion, defeat and shame. Being spiteful about being at someone’s mercy, and succumbing to it. Wanting and being prevented from it. Wanting and being interrogated because of it. Humiliated.

I am too exhausted to wait by the printing truck, so I step into a cafe next door. The sign boasts authentic Puglian focaccia, wines, cheeses and avocado-on-toasts. I order a (very shitty) latte, and the cashier says they’re serving lunch, so they withhold the right to kick me out if someone else wants my table to eat from. Sure, I said.

A man and a woman munch on their sandwiches beside me. The man talks of designing “laser-focus strategies” and “holistic solutions” for the stakeholders, and investing in Deepseek, and the financials of Bytedance, and the Chinese government owning the coal mines and all the miners. That’s where the action is going to be next, he said. The woman nods along.

On my way home, I float through Moorgate in my rattled state and feel a dizzying anger. All the bankers are speedwalking, holding their boxes of takeaways to eat at their desks. Most of them don’t look like me, and the VFS workers hired by the consulate to labour on their behalf do look like me, and I feel an unnerving urge to wage a war on everyone who doesn’t look like me. It’s terrifying how quickly a law-abiding citizen can teeter on the very edge of it. I entertain that thought for a while, me the cowardly goody-two-shoes as an outlaw. I wonder if that man and woman would remember me in a few years when they see me on the news and I talk about my villain origin story.

I type this piece out from the scribbles in my Writer’s Notebook, where I sometimes keep track of potential newsletter materials. Rage protrudes through the words, and they dent the backside of the page like braille. I wonder if I sound whiny or bitter, or dangerous, and too dangerously honest. I wonder if it is an act of betrayal to write this piece in English, and to whom I’m the traitor. I wonder why I couldn’t express all of this in my mother tongue.

I open the glassy door, descend a set of glassy stairs and check into my 17:45 “Cycle Ride” class. As a new member, I am entitled to a free Energy Shake that would be ready for me when the class is done. I get changed and waddle into the studio wearing my studded spin shoes.

The room is uncomfortably dim, save for the neon light strips around the ceiling as if this is a nightclub. Three LED screens blare violently by contrast. It displays every attendee’s full name, arranged into a neat table yet to be populated with our cycling statistics. Gusts of sterile air rush forward from every direction, a coolness I will later go on to appreciate. Well-groomed people, mostly men, appear blurrily in various mental states of idleness and fixations, already pedaling away and straining to look at ease, as if they belong.

Already feeling intimidated and overwhelmed, I find my bike towards the end of the room and hop on. The door locks and the class jolts to a start, and I get assaulted by screens and sounds and artificial lights from the get-go. We cycle to an ever-flowing stream of EDM tracks, slowly upping the gear of our bikes on a journey through imaginary hills. We also have the choice——the FREEDOM——to “stay where we are” and do “what’s most comfortable”. On the screen, there are animations of our digitised selves clad in spandex, competing against each other on a computer-generated motorway. Our bike number flashes on top of our faceless avatars——I pedal harder to see if it’s actually real-time——and the avatar with my number lurches forward in tune to my hard work. A fleeting moment of triumph.

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My legs start to burn, but I am told to try even harder. I’ve always wondered why they keep these places so dim. To focus more on the “grind”? To create communality? To hide our grimaces? To “respect” our differences in capabilities and, simultaneously, absolutely shaming and blaming those who struggle? The screen flips onto the next page, which is filled with our bike numbers in boxes that are colour-coded by our real-time speed. The instructor chants “YELLOW” and we escalate on cue to hit the target RPM range. A dollop of yellow diffuses across the screen, and the ones who didn’t meet the target become eyesores. Then, a fierce red, then back to green and grey as the music relaxes, the colours of weakness, passivity, laziness, incompetency.

It’s very much like an underground rave, but the painful kind, every second of it hypnotising and dehumanising in equal measure. We grunt under immense physical exertion for our names to move up and down on a screen. The third page is our performance summary, a real-time ranking of everyone’s “miles travelled” and “maximum RPM”. I pedal harder to see the numbers jump up, but I still need a lot more mileage to overtake the person above me. An active fault line lies between us, if you will. I stop trying.

I lose all sensations in my lower body as I enter writer mode and draft this piece out in my head. I now know why the demographic of D Fitness drastically differs from my previous spin class titled Taylor Swift Sunday. I had been acclimatised then to a room of sweaty Swifties spinning away while screaming “fuck the patriarchy” at the top of our lungs.

Here, D Fitness is playing into the hands of the affirmation-seeking finance bros. The Alpha males who are trying to become Sigma males, in their Rab down puffers, Patagonia vests, Ralph Lauren suits and Huel-fueled bodies. The target demographic is those who believe in numbers that hold all possible answers and the invisible hand that will right all wrong. The victim and beneficiary of meritocracy whose life’s worth has always been quantified and not experienced. People who have been ranked all their lives and told they should ascend at all costs.

I have accidentally stumbled into this stock market of theirs, except we are ourselves the livestocks that are being priced, dissected, exposed and judged, ascending towards a hollow goal with our flesh and bones. Fuck the actual grind: you’re supposed to be distracted by the numbers on the screen and excel through it. Fuck communality: this is a winner-takes-all world and people who waddle gets eliminated. Fuck inclusivity: didn’t you hear me the first time when I said the winner takes all? And fuck pain: you’re supposed to enjoy this. You’re en route to your dream body, dream lifestyle, dream class and dream status.

I later found out that more intermediate classes feature timed “challenges” that translate into points, which then accumulate to form your overall “level” at D Fitness. They have their own championship league, and people eat it up. The place is popular, the after-work hour classes often sell out. Statistics are addictive, and if I were a decade younger with an ego ten times more fragile, it would have worked on me. I would be showing up here every week, just driven by pure spite and determination, because even though I tried my best I was still ranked No.48 in the class. There are 50 bikes in total. Now I just laugh and write a spiteful essay on it.

I sip my horrendously-tasting Energy Shake on my way out. My thigh and calves are particularly numb, but the endorphins cloud my consciousness like butter smearing on a hot pan. If I ranked any higher, I would probably find myself conflating the biological high from a workout with the psychological high from winning, and then winning with a statistical outperformance. Maybe that was their trick so you’d keep coming back, but it is dangerous all the same. You’d equate joy with victory, and attribute that victory to better data. My numbers are me and they mean everything.

This is a parable of fandom too. Success doesn’t mean anything nowadays if there are no numbers to prove it. You constantly see fans of younger idol groups saying that G-Dragon has flopped because his Spotify streams didn’t surpass however million in the first 24 hours. People get addicted to numbers as a shorthand of gratification. Big data platforms like “云合” are cited in neiyu fan wars now to prove a celebrity’s popularity. Fans make up metrics to secure a win that wasn’t there to be won in the first place. Then, they associate the win with their labour and societal value.

Places like D Fitness feed on this trend and this mentality. It makes you feel like the “Cycle Rhythm” (No Data) class next door is for losers, oldies or worse: women. Data craze in fanquan fuels endless chart-beating, overconsumption and waste, comments controlling, inauthentic reviews and more. I heard that fans of Bai Jingting and Zhang Ruonan flipped at the PR team of “难哄” because they mistakenly posted a Douyin reel with the official account and not the actors’. This had directed “traffic” to the wrong place because it could’ve boosted their follower count. Fans are becoming self-taught data analysts and marketing specialists, because data means victory, and victory is joy and self-worth.

The manipulation comes down to them knowing you want to feel better about yourself, and you need to feel real shitty first to have the room to “bounce back” up. You are coerced, even bullied, into self-loathe and then self-betterment. You need to manufacture failure before you manufacture relational success.

My friend and I come out of the class laughing and cursing at the tyranny of it all. She told me she once tried to use the “accessible lift” because her legs were giving out after the class, but it was “out of service”. She peeked in, and the lift is actually used as towel storage. We laugh and curse a bit more. We are going to get malatang, and then milk tea. Just to feel better about ourselves.

Starting with some basics. This southernmost tip of the Hainan island is one of the nation’s favourite holiday hotspots. It is effectively divided into bays (湾), and all of them are touristy in different fonts. 亚龙湾 is the oldest with the most amount of traditional family-friendly attractions, the facilities croaky and rusty. 海棠湾 is billion-yuan-shiny, with a freshly made promenade of luxury hotels, a tax-free shopping “city” and Atlantis, a mega accommodation-aquarium-water park complex that lures in thousands of toddlers during summer breaks. Each of these deserves a separate ethnographic study, but that’s beside the point today. 

The broader context is that for the past five years or so, there has been a sizeable internal migration of northeasterners or Dongbeiren (东北人) to Hainan, mainly retirees escaping the long winters and coal-industry-driven smog that gave a lot of people rhinitis, bronchitis or rheumatism. Think Florida for China’s ageing population. The influx is so huge Sanya is nicknamed 吉林省三亚市, as people consider it a municipality that belongs to Jilin, a Northeastern province where my ancestry runs. I’ve been having Dongbei cuisine so authentic I thought I was home home, eating what my parents and their parents grew up with. Harbin, another major Dongbei city, has apparently built a police station here to deal with the amount of cases involving residents from their precincts. 

This tsunami of incoming Dongbei (and Northerners in general) population created new housing demands, and 清水湾 (Clearwater Bay) is born. This is what blew my mind: this whole area is almost entirely run by real estate developers. The provincial government has minimum jurisdiction (although I’m hearing talks of a handover). All public spaces are separately managed by the respective companies who built the houses in that neighbourhood. There are no speed limits or cameras when you drive, and streets are named after the developers. They build their own strip malls and maintain the cleanliness using their own workforce, each competing for potential (Dongbei) property buyers like warlords. A new social hierarchy is formed where your status and your identity directly correlates with your property.

It’s all glossy inside these enclosures. But once you drive further out, you’ll start to see how this burgeoning migrant community is encroaching on the locals. The surrounding villages, 新村镇 and 英州镇 remain underprivileged and under-serviced, with residents who rely on the primary sector. A lot of them, I suspect, were forcibly removed from grounds that are now owned by the developers. If their livelihood doesn’t depend on agricultural farming or fishery, they make up the workforce that keeps Clearwater Bay up and running: waiting tables in migrants-filled seafood restaurants, building high-rises that do not stop rising, selling durians on the street next to condos that sell for 70K a metre squared. Their attitudes to non-locals are visibly unenthusiastic. Conversing in the local dialect, they barely want to engage with people who drove the living costs up, gave them traffic jams and polluted their shorelines. On the cusp of Chinese New Year a.k.a the longest break for everyone in the country, the only highway of Hainan that connects the airport to all the bays has a daily congestion that stretches for 10 or more kilometres. This is not an island designed to accommodate three-quarters of Dongbei plus the usual tourists for two peak seasons a year. 

I wonder now, with international travel opening up again, if Sanya can continue riding the COVID-accelerated boom of domestic tourism and Clearwater Bay can retain its appeal. The new batch of apartments are set to finish in 2025. What will this place look like by then? 

A belated welcome to Slowburn, a new section of Active Faults if you’ve made it this far. I present to you a bubble of my occasional remarks on an aspect of China that needs a bit of attention. Think of it as a patch of soil at the back of AF where I attempt to grow some crooked veggies. I’ve taken another Archive of Our Own tag, “slowburn”, to indicate that this will be irregularly updated and quite frankly a long, long shot. A shot at airing a side of China that’s not necessarily in the newspaper headlines.

Thanks for being here and enjoy!

Em

*Cover photo: some of the best 锅包肉 I’ve had outside of Dongbei. If you know you know.