American journalist Roseann Lake chronicles the lives of the women she first met working as a television reporter in Beijing. Known as "leftovers" if they fail to marry by age twenty-five, these women represent a China in which gender roles have not evolved as vigorously as society itself, and where new professional opportunities have made women less willing to compromise their careers or concede to marriage for the sake of it. "Channeling their full economic engagement...is not only a social imperative; it's an economic necessity." Lake's coverage has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Salon and Vice.