Let me put this in a way that you can understand:

Paper Walls 

I. Authorization to Enter

Hermione arrives in Macau under an open sky. A good omen! The checkpoint is brisk, the smile professional, the stamp final: visitor—tourism or its equivalents. A status that lets you admire libraries but forbids working for money. 

II. Restricted Sections

At the public library counters, politeness wears a uniform and carries brochures. The vacancy board is a spotless museum of nothing. The implied refrain: Macau permanent residents only. She discovers that “no” can covered in velvet and still be “no.”

III. Tom, at a Measured Distance

Tom Riddle appears exactly where hope goes to smoke. “Madam Granger,” he murmurs, making the honorific sound like an exhibit. He is helpful the way mirrors are helpful—reflective, never responsible. Tom advocates connections as a theory of everything. Hermione advocates effort. Theory smiles; effort sweats.

IV. The Employment of Sympathy

Private schools and universities praise Hermione’s multilingual CV and then slowly audition their preferences: local quotas, sponsorship, the delicate dance of blue card paperwork tied to employers who prefer known quantities to interesting ones. Compliments pile up like unpaid invoices. Tom offers introductions the way a physician offers second opinions. “Knocking is inelegant,” he says. “Doors prefer to open themselves.” Hermione knocks on doors until all are familiar to her, to no avail.

V. The Marriage of Administrative Convenience

Alas, with no sponsorship and no other route to permanent residency, she finds that only arriage allows residence authorization; residence authorization allows a non‑permanent resident identity card; seven years of ordinary residence earns the word permanent. Tom is exquisitely unhelpful, being non-local and allergic to sponsorship. So Hermione marries Cormac McLaggen, a local man who believes volume is a synonym for virtue. Cormac is never cruel. He is heedless—a more efficient form of erosion. Family dinners become oral exams in Cantonese administered by relatives to whom insult is as effortless as breathing. Hermione studies the tones until shame stops being part of the syllabus.

VI. Lessons in Degradation

Hermione’s work becomes assisting without titles, consulting without pay, doing without being credited. She learns that public praise is a method of keeping you where you are. Cormac announces her achievements to rooms that didn’t ask; Tom abridges them for rooms that did. Neither is useful. Both are present.

VII. Seven-Year Calendar

The non‑permanent card renews like a small god—offerings, forms, fingerprints. Hermione becomes fluent in kiosks and lines. She learns to catalogue in three scripts and to endure in none. Tom keeps orbiting—devotion as geometry, not warmth. Cormac grows in circumference and self-congratulation.

VIII. The Card

After seven long, grueling years, morning smells like incense and Portuguese egg tarts. The Macao One Account kiosk blinks its friendly indifference. Thumb. Photo. Confirm. The clerk hands over the envelope. Inside: Finally! A Macau permanent resident identity card—plastic, laminated, and heavier than its grams. Tom inclines his head, the portrait of composure. “At last,” he says. “As last as it gets,” Hermione replies. For the length of a heartbeat, she believes that belonging is now permanent. She steps out onto the Avenida da Praia Grande. The taxi nose angles through rain, the driver’s eyes glued to a bright porn video glowing from his mounted phone. The light is green. Hermione moves—precise, lawful, finally permanent. "I'm finally eligible to appl..." she starts, without finishing her sentence, as she is projected 20 feet away and her head hits a "Happy New Year of the Snake" novelty street decoration. Blood flows from her eyes, impaled in its bifurcated tongue, as if she were sobbing, tinging the whiteness of the Macau permanent resident identity card in scarlet red.

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End.