Disorder, chaos, naïveté, confusion—the human body is torn apart, not a single piece remains whole. The moon looks at me. I grow shy, too embarrassed to meet her gaze.

She had curled up on the couch, shrinking from his hand, while Psycho played on the screen. She couldn’t remember ever agreeing to watch it—only that something had guided her there.

Using the Dalian Polytechnic case—expelling a woman for sex with a foreigner—the essay argues that under patriarchal nationalism the nation’s frontier is drawn on women’s bodies: either “national assets” to be protected or “national shame” to be policed. Moral panic is algorithmically weaponized; a named woman is stripped of agency and reduced to bare life. The piece contends that feminism is fundamentally incompatible with nationalism, urging a refusal of the state’s claim over bodies and a dismantling of patriarchy—up to the radical gesture of “claiming national shame” to break the narrative.

In a world made of images, a woman's gaze must no longer be passive—it must return, resist, and remember.

In the Fruit Class, children are said to ripen into heavy, gleaming fruit. One morning I follow the insects into blotches of sticky color; when I reach out, it’s a tentacle—I am an ant. The classroom swells into a land of giants. I flee, drown myself, wake again, still in the Fruit Class. My classmates say no one ever promised we would ripen. Growing up is a metamorphosis where sweetness and fear arrive together.

In language, you become another. The self slips away. In Borges’ library, you do not exist. You are nothing but the repetition of others.