I was handed a seven-year contract. Printed. Bound. With the company logo embossed in my future.
Fang snorted. "This clause says they can control our 'hairstyling and physical image in accordance with market trends.' That's not even subtle."
I stared at the signature line.
I signed it Foreigner, with the same careful handwriting I used when I wrote lyrics. And just like that, I wasn't mine anymore.
Training started the next day. In a basement studio, and a dance coach who didn't smile once in six hours.
"You sing well," she said in clipped Mandarin. "But you don't move like you believe you deserve the stage."
I nodded. Even though I didn't fully understand what she meant. Some trainees refused to speak to me. The company didn't let us go home often. Once a week, if we were lucky. Most nights, we slept in the trainee dorm, small, overheated, with peeling wallpaper and one working fan. Fang called it "the prison bunk for dreams."
He still snuck snacks in. Still brought me bottled water with post-it notes. He never said anything about the cold stares. Or the coaches who pushed me harder than others. Or the fact that I couldn't go anywhere without someone saying, "She only won because of the mask."
But I knew he saw it. He also saw my reaction when the company wanted to promote us internationally.
Fang leaned close.
"You good?"
"No."
"You want to bolt?"
"Yes."
"Too bad. You're wearing sequins and I memorized choreography. We're in this now."
I could've laughed if I wasn't about to collapse. After, reporters lined up to ask questions. Most were easy. Then one man leaned into the mic and asked in crisp Mandarin:
"Foreighner, do you feel you deserve to debut in China over native-born trainees?"
My heart slammed against my ribs. Fang looked at me. Not with panic. Just a quiet Are you gonna handle this?
I took the mic. And for once, I didn't hesitate.
"No one deserves anything just because of where they're from," I said slowly. "You deserve the stage if you can stand on it, and stay standing when people try to push you off."
Someone clapped. Then someone else. And then it passed. But the damage lingered. Later that night, I found Fang in the stairwell outside the dorms, flipping a coin between his fingers.
"Thought you might run after that," he said.
"I thought about it, but you signed the contract."
"Sure did."
"So now I'm stuck."
He grinned. "Yeah. With me."
We didn't get to pick our name. The company chose it, printed it on our teaser posters, and announced it to the press before we even had a chance to blink.
Scarlett and Fang. A French runaway and a boy from Shanghai with a reckless grin.
"They named us after a safety hazard," Fang said, staring at the poster plastered across the training room wall. "What do you think that makes us?"
"The warning label," I replied.
He was the only one who remembered the day I showed up with a crumpled boarding pass, a backpack full of secondhand clothes. He never let me forget where I came from.
Training was brutal. Not just the hours, but the way people looked at me. Some staff treated me like a PR stunt. The foreigner who had a spotlight before she had a bio.
The older trainees were worse. They whispered about me in corners, eyes following me like I didn't belong in the same room. They weren't entirely wrong.
I studied every night after training, when everyone else collapsed into sleep or gossip or tears. I sat in the corner of the dorm, scribbling Mandarin characters in the margins of my notebooks. I read textbooks from Shanghai open courses. I watched the news and mimicked their speech until I could answer interview questions without Fang having to step in.
I pushed for tutors. For lesson plans. For every scrap of structure I could earn without drawing too much attention. I was a trainee. But I was also a student. And the only one who took that seriously was Fang. He brought me snacks before class. Stole notebooks from other practice rooms when I ran out of paper. He even sat on the floor next to me during late-night study sessions, pretending to be bored out of his mind while occasionally correcting my tones.
"You don't have to learn all this," he said one night. "They only care if you look good and hit the high notes."
"But I care," I said quietly.
He didn't argue. The hardest part wasn't the exhaustion. It was the loneliness. Being a secret in a building full of people. Sometimes I wondered if I'd disappear completely behind the mask. If Scarlett would stop existing. But then Fang would knock on the dorm door, hand me a cup of red bean milk, and say, "C'mon, Foreigner. The sky's not gonna light itself."
And I'd remember why I stayed. Because even if the world didn't know me yet... He did.
One morning, three weeks into the next training block, I opened my locker and found a folded note taped to the inside:
You've been upgraded. Training room 3A. Today, 6AM.
When I got there, the room was dark. Cold. A giant mirror stretched along one wall. A folding table stood in the corner. Nothing else.
I turned, and there stood our vocal director, clipboard in one hand, phone in the other.
"You've been reassigned," she said.
I blinked. "What?"
"Mid-tier unit prep. We're fast-tracking Foreign Foreworks as potential quarterly leads."
Quarterly leads. My heart stuttered. That was impossible. That was years away for most trainees.
"Why?" I blurted.
She didn't look up from her clipboard. "You've earned it."
I stood in stunned silence as she outlined our new schedule.
He found me sitting behind the building after lights-out, headphones in, forehead pressed to my knees.
"You're doing that thing again," he said, nudging my shoe with his.
"What thing?"
"Trying to disappear in public."
He sat down beside me.
"You're gonna be fine," he said after a while.
"You don't know that."
"I do," he said, softer now. "Because I know you."
I looked at him. He wasn't like the boys I used to imagine in stories. Fang didn't save me. He stayed with me. And suddenly I realized: Fang was the first person who ever chose to stay without conditions.
The next week, our first pre-release dropped. The comments were ruthless. Some loved us. Some hated us. One stood out.
"Foreigner has no right to sing in Mandarin until she learns to sound like she means it."
I didn't show Fang.
But he found me pacing in the stairwell again that night.
As the lyrics were presented to us, I grabbed a pen and started scribbling over them, changing words, reworking lines.
Fang peeked over my shoulder.
"You're gonna get us in trouble," he said.
I kept writing. He didn't stop me. If I had to describe Fang in three words, they'd be: chaos with dimples.
By late 2009, he had fans.
Girls would wait outside the practice building just to catch a glimpse of him. They handed him candy, love letters, sometimes entire plush toys which he always gave to me.
And he was everyone's favorite. Except mine. Because to me, Fang he was the boy who once snuck hot sauce into my thermos because I said dumplings were too bland.
The one who texted me "you smell like mold" during vocal warmups.
The one who sang over my lines during rehearsal just to see me snap. But also, the only one who made sure I had a working charger. Who stayed up with me after nightmares. Who sat through my crying without trying to fix it. He was my greatest annoyance. And the only piece of home I had left.
The mask helped. But it also made me a target.
The company insisted it was marketing. That I was "the mystery girl" and "a symbol of talent beyond borders."
"Do you ever wish you hadn't uploaded that video?" I asked Fang one night as we sat on the roof. Fang shrugged. "Sometimes. But mostly no."
"Even with all this?" I gestured to the dorm below. The pressure. The gossip. The fact that I hadn't seen my actual reflection in weeks.
"You were already running," he said softly. "At least now you're running toward something."
That silenced me. Because he wasn't wrong.
"You know what your problem is?" he said eventually.
"I exist?"
"You keep thinking you have to earn space like someone's gonna take it from you."
I glanced at him. "Isn't that what this is?"
"You're not a guest here, Scarlett, you're not on borrowed time. You fought your way in."
That was Fang. The boy who made me want to stay. Even when the world kept telling me to go.