conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for a book with the title 'China Dolls'
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: China Dolls
  When we arrived at the Forbidden City, Charlie bowed to the reporter and photographer, and they found themselves bowing back. Ah, Charlie... On my first payday after I'd returned from Los Angeles, he asked me to close the door to his office so he could speak to me privately. I remembered how he used to run a routine to let him keep my salary or to try to short me, but these days the club was flush. "I promised the Chinese Dancing Sweethearts three hundred a week," he said. "That was supposed to be divvied up three ways, but that didn't turn out the way we planned, did it? I owe you fifty dollars, but... well... here." He pushed three fifties across the table—the same amount that Helen and Eddie were now each making.
  His gesture, which he continued to do weekly, changed my life. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to afford to patronize shops with Ruby, buy a three-quarter-length seal coat on layaway, use Western Union to start sending money once a month to Miss Miller to slip to my mother, and still have enough left over to save twenty dollars a week. (I still abided by my mother's wish that we have no actual contact. Wiring money through Western Union also protected my privacy. I didn't want my father to come looking for me.) Charlie paid Princess Tai a lot more than either the Chinese Dancing Sweethearts or me. Ruby earned five hundred dollars a week at a time when office workers were lucky to make forty. Eddie would have gone out of his gourd if he'd caught wind of that. But he didn't hear, because I didn't tell Helen. As for the news that Ruby had brought me here and had control over me... I couldn't exactly hold my nose in the air and act all hoity-toity, because my intention had been to use her too. But something unexpected happened along the way. Ruby courted me with her generosity, her humor, and her giddiness. She reminded me how to have fun. She forced me to remember why we'd liked each other in the first place. The makeup job was still pretty unpleasant from my perspective, but what's ten minutes out of twenty-four hours for one hundred and fifty bucks a week? Besides, she'd tell jokes and keep me amused while I dabbed, dabbed, dabbed, and tried not to stare at what was in front of my face. And she continued to help me in other ways, like insisting I be part of this interview.
  Ruby's laugh filled the room like tinkling crystals. "That's for me to know and you to find out! You boys need to go to your table now. The other girls have to get ready and"—she leaned forward and caressed the reporter's knee with a red-lacquered fingernail—"so do I."
  Actually, if Ruby and I had been alone, we probably would have gone somewhere for noodles. Or, if we wanted to spend a little more money, we would have joined up with a group of show kids to go to other clubs.
  Or the kids at the Sky Room might throw a party, and we'd all go to that. (No one brewed bad blood about which club was more popular or classier.) Some nights everyone came over to Ruby's and my apartment. Oh, maybe fifty people in the living room, sometimes more. I played an upright piano while others sang. Pretty soon, the guys were bringing their ukuleles and their guitars. Or we'd put on a record and dance until we couldn't breathe.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: three more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As I repeated what I'd said before, Detective Collins ran a hand through his hair. When I came to the end, he said, "Well, we've just interviewed your neighbors. It seems you have a history of harboring Japs."
  He handed me the letters from Ida's room. They'd been written to Ida by her parents from the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar and sent to a local post office box. Her real name was Ume Otsuka. I had held on to my emotions—frozen from shock—but now tears welled in my eyes. I cried—not because I'd been deceived, but because I knew the terror Ida must have hidden all these years. She must have been petrified that she'd be caught, hated, vilified, sent to a camp, and, yes, beaten or murdered. It chilled me to think she might have lived with me—the person folks believed had ratted out Ruby—as a way to deflect suspicion from herself.
  THE PRESS DUBBED the incident the Triangle of East and West, which didn't make a lick of sense but it sold a ton of newspapers. The public defender painted Ray as a heroic patriot, while I was called in for questioning by agents from the FBI and the War Relocation Authority on six separate occasions.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: As I repeated what I'd said before, Detective Collins ran a hand through his hair. When I came to the end, he said, "Well, we've just interviewed your neighbors. It seems you have a history of harboring Japs."
  He handed me the letters from Ida's room. They'd been written to Ida by her parents from the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar and sent to a local post office box. Her real name was Ume Otsuka. I had held on to my emotions—frozen from shock—but now tears welled in my eyes. I cried—not because I'd been deceived, but because I knew the terror Ida must have hidden all these years. She must have been petrified that she'd be caught, hated, vilified, sent to a camp, and, yes, beaten or murdered. It chilled me to think she might have lived with me—the person folks believed had ratted out Ruby—as a way to deflect suspicion from herself.
  THE PRESS DUBBED the incident the Triangle of East and West, which didn't make a lick of sense but it sold a ton of newspapers.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last four paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: San Francisco, 1938: Three young women meet by chance at the glamorous Forbidden City nightclub and become fast friends, relying on one another through unexpected challenges and shifting fortunes. But when paranoia and suspicion threaten to destroy their lives, a shocking act of betrayal changes everything.
  From the teeming streets of Beijing to Los Angeles and back, detective Liu Hulan and American attorney David Stark are caught in a perilous net of politics, organized crime, family loyalties, and their passion for each other.
  An old friend from deep in China's interior asks detective Liu Hulan to uncover the truth about her daughter's suspicious suicide—a case that will take Hulan into her own buried past and into the heart of a dangerous mystery.
  Hulan and David are swept into a maze of murder and a deadly political power struggle when the corpse of an American archeologist is found at the mouth of the Yangzi River.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Hulan and David are swept into a maze of murder and a deadly political power struggle when the corpse of an American archeologist is found at the mouth of the Yangzi River..
  An old friend from deep in China's interior asks detective Liu Hulan to uncover the truth about her daughter's suspicious suicide—a case that will take Hulan into her own buried past and into the heart of a dangerous mystery.
  From the teeming streets of Beijing to Los Angeles and back, detective Liu Hulan and American attorney David Stark are caught in a perilous net of politics, organized crime, family loyalties, and their passion for each other. But when paranoia and suspicion threaten to destroy their lives, a shocking act of betrayal changes everything.San Francisco, 1938: Three young women meet by chance at the glamorous Forbidden City nightclub and become fast friends, relying on one another through unexpected challenges and shifting fortunes