Sanctions

Olga was a rich and beautiful Russian girl, daughter of a famous oligarch. She was enjoying a life of luxury attending the most glamorous parties in the world when the international sanctions hit her and her family wealth.
Every asset was frozen and she barely had enough savings to live a dignified life for a few weeks at most.
Not being able to land any job to provide for herself, she panicked. By chance, she heard from a Chinese diplomat that his country was offering assistance to Russian citizens in trouble due to the sanctions. She provided them her credentials and was immediately offered help. She would be flown to China where they would take care of her.
Not having other choices, she signed some forms in Chinese she didn’t bother to translate and she almost immediately boarded to Beijing.

She was then administered a potent sedative on the plane and passed out.
When she regained consciousness her head was covered in bandages. She couldn’t see anything, all she could do was to scream and beg somebody to give her an explanation.
A nurse approached her, told her to lie down and rest. She added that there was nothing to worry about as everything went according to plan.
“What plan?” – Olga asked, freaking out.
The nurse was struggling with her English but referred to a contract she had signed and that she would be given the best chance to settle in the country.
Olga insisted she wanted to speak to the manager of the hospital, so she was granted an appointment with him. She also obtained a permission to remove her bandages, although she was not allowed to see herself in the mirror for some reason.

When she met him she was told she had agreed, among other things, to undergo a series of procedures meant to give her the appearance of a native Cinese girl. Apparently the government was exploiting cases like hers to do something about the gender imbalance that had been afflicting China for some time.
Her facial features were remodelled by fat tissue injections, she got a reverse nose job to flatten it, her natural blonde hair was permanently replaced by transplanting straight black hair in its place and her eyes were turned black by covering the irises with artificial pigments, after having altered their shape. The poor girl fainted when she heard all this but that didn’t stop the surgeons from finishing their job with the remaining procedures.
She had her vocal cords modified in order to gain a very high pitched voice tone Chinese society found attractive in women, without being able to ever lower her pitch to her old one. She would basically always sound like a cute kawaii teenage girl from now on.

As for her language skills, being Chinese one of the most difficult languages to learn, they decided to inject her nanobots replacing her Russian and English knowledge with Chinese. In a matter of a few, shocking minutes she could only speak or think in flawless Mandarin Chinese.
At this point Olga realised her old life was completely over. Even if she managed to escape the country, she would always be seen as a stranger even in her native Russia and she would have absolutely any chance of convincing people about who she really was. She wasn’t even able to pronounce her name anymore!
At this point, when the medical commission following her case realised she had finally accepted her destiny, they decided it was time for her to see her new face.

When she was finally given a small mirror to begin to familiarise with her new appearance her reaction couldn’t have been worse.
She knew exactly what to expect at that point but seeing her new features through her pretty Asian eyes was absolutely overwhelming.
She screamed in her new high-pitched voice and threw away the mirror. How could she, a wealthy Russian young woman, look like every other Asian girl, she screamed out loud.
She had actually been given well-defined features but certain stereotyped were hard to die. Nothing a few months of re-education couldn’t fix, the members of the medical commission thought.

Before anything else, Olga demanded to see the contract she signed. She was told to ask to the surgeon in charge of her surgeries. She found him, quickly told him her demands in fluent Mandarin. He opened her file and showed her the forms she signed what seemed to be a long time before. Now she was actually able to read and understand it, so when she realised what she had really signed, she understood that they didn’t do anything she had not agreed about, even if unknowingly.
The doctor went on to explain Olga her new identity.
“You are Yuja Zheng, 25 years old, Han Chinese. Your facial features have been optimised in order to make you attractive to Chinese young men. Your pheromone level was also altered to drive guys crazy.”

“You don’t have a family obviously, so we prepared a made-up story according to which you grew up in an orphanage. You have a rather low educational level and have a lowly paid job as a secretary in a big company. “
“I can’t believe this” – said Yuja, who couldn’t hide her feelings at the perspective of total identity death and started to weep.
The doctor tried to comfort her but honestly didn’t care too much, she was just a number and anyway she would soon undergo extensive re-education so accepting her new identity would eventually come naturally to her.

Indeed, the chinified girl was subjected to exhausting sessions in specific rehabilitation centres meant to erase most of her previous identity and to force her to surrender to her inevitable fate. Any memory associated to her previous like was associated to painful feelings, while thinking about the implanted notions about her new identity was rewarded with endorphins.
She tried to hold on to her old identity, national pride and knowledge but eventually all she could think of herself is that she used to be a Gweilo from some European country and now was a Chinese girl named Yuja. Any further attempts of accessing her old memories vanished in a flash of pain.
Eventually, she was released from the facility and left free to live her new life.

Yuja began working as a secretary, used her meagre wage to buy herself some new clothes and to dye her hair light brown to pay tribute to her forgotten heritage, and moved on with her life.
When one of her coworker, a mediocre clerk, asked her out, she asked herself “Why not?” – after all, it would have brought some novelty to her life.
The two started dating and she realised she actually liked the guy. They had a lot in common in terms of food, movies and other things, and even though it all came from the conditioning she underwent, it still felt like a genuine connection was developing.
When, a few months later the guy proposed to her despite her lack of family and wealth she struggled to hold her tears back and said yes to him.

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