She waves a hand in a general gesture toward my face like that’s answer enough. “You’re so confident and just, like, composed, you know? Like you’ve got everything figured out.”

It’s not the first time someone has called me composed in recent years, though my mom prefers the adjacent, less flattering Chinese term duanzhe. Literally speaking, it means “to hold” or “to carry,” which always conjures the image of someone balancing a bowl filled to the brim with water. One step out of line, one careless move, and everything will spill over.

I consider telling her that I’m not any of the things she thinks I am, but I don’t want to break the illusion. It would be like a magician showing the audience exactly where the rabbit is hidden.

I wouldn’t have the chance to, in either case. The bus rolls to a stop in the hotel parking lot, and we’re all ushered through the entrance in a mess of half-zipped jackets and straggling suitcases.

“Hurry up,” Wang Laoshi chides. “We have a whole evening planned out ahead of us.”

The lobby is larger and more impressive than any of the hotels I’ve stayed in before, with contemporary sculptures rising up to the highest floors and chandeliers lighting up the space. My attention skips from the pop-up stall near the elevators promoting pretty glass jars of tomato juice to the posters advertising the hotel’s afternoon tea service, before landing on the robots carrying bottles of water and clean towels and room service trays. I watch, fascinated, as they wheel themselves over to the concierge desks, their screens flashing. Nobody else even bats an eye at their presence, as if we’ve been living casually among robots since the beginning of time.

“We’ll be meeting down here in an hour to go on the night cruise,” Wang Laoshi says as he hands out our key cards. “Go take a quick shower if you must. Just don’t be late.”

CHAPTER SIX

There are plenty of things I can settle for, but a quick shower before a night out is not one of them.

In our lavish hotel room, I blow-dry my hair and straighten it, even though it’s technically already straight, because there’s a crucial difference between naturally straight hair and flat-ironed hair. Then I unpack three bags of makeup products, letting them spill onto my side of the marble counter. Daisy’s side is almost empty in comparison, and much neater: just her toothbrush standing in a plastic cup, a small tube of sunscreen, and moisturizer.