I re-released Temporary Access because the psychological state I documented at pandemic borders turned out to be how everyone lives now.
The collection follows twelve women navigating 2020-2021 when borders closed without warning and every permission was provisional. QR codes, visa applications, quarantine passes. I thought I was capturing an exceptional moment of uncertainty.
Four years later, that uncertainty is structural. Not at borders specifically — at borders, in employment, across platforms, inside consciousness itself.
The book documents what provisional status does to psychology. When nothing is permanent and everything requires renewal, you fragment. Perform different versions of yourself for different evaluation systems. Code-switch between contexts—linguistic, behavioral, emotional. Maintain parallel selves that never quite consolidate into one coherent identity.
That fragmentation has intensified since 2021, but it’s moved beyond immigration systems.
Digital communication now requires constant code-switching between platforms. WhatsApp family, Slack work, LinkedIn professional, Instagram curated. Each platform demands different performance. The book uses this fragmentation as format—chat screenshots, voice transcripts, platform-hopping. Characters maintain multiple selves across digital contexts whilst also code-switching between Russian, English, Mandarin.
I structured it this way to mirror border-crossing experience. Turned out I was mirroring how everyone navigates digital existence.
October 2nd evening at Fulham Library I asked people to identify their last genuinely private moment. Most couldn’t. Someone said: “I don’t know what’s scarier—that I filter myself for others, or that I can’t tell who I’m filtering for anymore.”
That’s the psychology Temporary Access documents. Not as employment analysis or platform critique, but as lived experience of provisional consciousness. When you’re never quite “in”—always being evaluated, always performing, always aware that access can be revoked—you lose track of which self is real.
The stories follow women at literal thresholds. A Moscow hotline operator choosing compassion over protocol. A visa centre translator protecting someone through strategic silence. A Russian student discovering her Chinese name “Li Yu” unlocks confidence her Russian one couldn’t access. A warehouse worker finding a note in a Shenzhen parcel and breaking rules to respond.
These are immigration stories. But they’re also about what happens psychologically when everything feels provisional. When you can’t locate the version of yourself that exists independent of evaluation. When code-switching becomes so constant you forget there was ever a baseline language.
The book isn’t about 2025 conditions. It’s about 2020-2021 borders. But it captured a psychological state—fragmented, provisional, performed—that stopped being border-specific and became how consciousness operates in algorithmic systems generally.
Since publishing in December 2021, I’ve released Omnichannel Hearts (2024) about digital romance and The Influencer’s Canvas (2025) about content creator culture. Both examine performed identity and provisional self-presentation. Temporary Access is where I first documented that psychology, before I understood it would become structural rather than situational.
The original edition reached almost no one. I’ve built readership since through subsequent novels and awards, but this collection—the one that started the inquiry—wasn’t available.
Re-releasing now because the questions it asks became more pressing, not less. What survives when the permission window closes? Which self do you carry forward when you’ve been performing so many versions you can’t locate the original? At what point does code-switching become your only language?
The QR codes are historical. The border closures are over. But the provisional consciousness remains. We all hold temporary access now — to platforms, to curated selves, to versions of identity that require constant renewal and evaluation.
The book documented the moment that psychology crystallized at borders. Four years later, borders aren’t special anymore. The provisionalness spread everywhere.
— Writer Julia Zolotova
