UC San Diego

FULL TIME LOVERS is a speculative literary novella that blends myth, science fiction, and psychological realism to explore the commodification of intimacy, the structures we inherit from colonialism and patriarchy, and the thin lines between fiction and reality, care and violence, human and nonhuman. It’s 2087, and Taiwan is occupied by both U.S. and Chinese forces, forty years into a stalemate between the two global superpowers. Yōkai—supernatural entities, spirits, and other mythic creatures—are instrumentalized as specialized labor in a transpacific economy involving state forces, private industries, and local crime syndicates. Chiang Kuo-rong, a lonely Taiwanese male scion to intergenerational colonial wealth, leases a woman named Rika as his rental lover. His sole motive, he says, is to find “real love,” though his desires seem inextricable from the final wishes of his mother, who is dying from a disease contracted from a defective experimental skincare product derived from the hormonal extract of female phoenixes. At first, Rika seems to embody everything Kuo-rong could ask for in a lover: she’s beautiful, witty, genuine, and unafraid to stand equal to him despite his power over her. Unbeknownst to him, however, Rika is a three-hundred-year-old kitsune—a shapeshifting fox-spirit—and has histories and plans all her own, far beyond the enclosure of his gaze. As Kuo-rong falls increasingly for Rika and discovers her true form, he must reckon with the contradictions of their arrangement and ask himself what structures can truly make space for “real love” in an age of abstracted violence.