Steve Fiffer, my compadre in writing Dancing with the Dragon, sent me this New York Times headline from 8 August 2024: A Chinese Woman Sued to Freeze Her Eggs. She Lost.

Besides 8/8 being an auspicious day for Chinese, “8” being a lucky number, writing stories like this can help Chinese escape some of the Communist Party’s oppressive practices.

A single woman, Teresa Xu, wanted to freeze some of her eggs. PRC officials told her to marry and have kids instead. She sued. After losing, she said that the Chaoyang (a district in Beijing) Intermediate People’s Court’s adverse ruling exhausted her legal options in a six-year battle for reproductive rights. As you’ll learn in Dancing with the Dragon, I learned quite a bit about protracted legal battles with the PRC.

Articles like this one in the New York Times help highlight the PRC government’s distrust of its people and intrusiveness into their lives.

Americans should write more stories about people like Ms. Xu.