Cutoff

She helped build the rules. Now she must decide whom they were built to exclude.For eighteen years, admissions official He Yu'an has trusted the numbers. They carried her from a rural village to university, then into a career safeguarding the promise that effort can change a life.A rejected student's questions lead her back to the spreadsheets. A hundredth of a point in a weighting coefficient looks harmless. Across years of admissions, those tiny adjustments tell a different story: the rules can be followed exactly while opportunity quietly moves out of reach.Then He Yu'an finds her own signature on the documents that made it possible.With her daughter approaching the same university threshold, the truth is no longer an abstract question of policy. Challenging the system means exposing her own complicity—and asking how much of her family's future she is willing to put at risk.Moving from examination offices to a courtroom, The Cutoff is a standalone work of contemporary literary fiction about ambition, motherhood, and the distance between a lawful procedure and a fair chance.