Emotional black market of Fifth Avenue

The emotional black market of Fifth Avenue

As a "scene designer" in a private club in Manhattan, my job is to build a fairytale castle with lies. I always have three sets of personality masks in my bag: a rebellious curator in the Chelsea art circle, a down-and-out niece of old money on the Upper East Side, and a cleaner who eavesdrops on insider information in the bathroom of Wall Street - it all depends on what kind of redemption illusion the client needs that night.

The fake gallery in the Flatiron Building

The Chinese mine owner always asks me to play a contemporary artist in the gallery converted from an abandoned bank vault. "It should look like Yayoi Kusama but with more oriental charm," his assistant said while sticking rhinestones on my hands. When I stuffed the fragments of gas alarms from Shanxi coal mines into the installation art, the curator suddenly lowered his voice: "Don't let the client know that these 'works' were scrap metal from the Brooklyn garbage dump last week..."

Memory surgery at Rockefeller Center

The VP of Deutsche Bank hired me to play the upgraded version of his first love. "She should wear a 1998 Chanel suit, but speak blockchain terms from 2023," he said, adjusting his VR glasses in a Four Seasons Hotel suite. The most absurd thing was that when I "accidentally" found antidepressants in his drawer according to the script, this elite who manipulated tens of billions of funds trembled like a college student caught cheating: "Can this be kept in the service?"

Ghost Wedding on the Hudson River

Executing a "marriage of convenience" for gay heirs was the most sophisticated business I have ever taken on. We rehearsed 32 times on the converted yacht: how to make the Wall Street Journal reporter believe that he "accidentally" fell in love with the escort girl, and how to reveal the flaws in front of the New Yorker photographer - after all, the Generation Trust Fund needs a decent heir, and his boyfriend is using my lipstick to alter the equity agreement in the cabin.

The underground decompression cabin in Chinatown

The one who made me sleepless was the Korean beauty group girl. She booked the entire mahjong hall and transformed it into a basement in Seoul in the 1990s, and asked me to read the complaint letter of the failed plastic surgery in dialect. "This is the real thing, safety tips..." She dripped the dissolved hyaluronic acid injection into my bubble tea. The silk nightgown hanging on the fire escape outside the window was suddenly blown into the shape of a spirit-calling flag by the wind.