Nanfu Wang hoped that a woman called Ye Haiyan (“Hooligan Sparrow”), who had offered free sex on the Internet to draw attention to the plight of poor women selling their bodies to support their children, would lead her to the prostitutes she wanted to interview for a documentary film. Very quickly after meeting Ye for the first time in May 2013, they attended a protest in Hainan, the island province off the south China coast. They called for the punishment of a school administrator accused of kidnapping and raping six teenage girls. All of Wang’s ideas about her project changed.