"I am so sorry about doing press, it's awful."

"Alas, it's the best way to get people to know things all at once."

The next morning Jing Yi is taken to an agent who has worked with the Cascadian government before, representing celebrity forecasters and so on, who has a really remarkable straight face about the fact that Jing Yi is a time traveler from the past.

Well, that's good, because he literally is.

"Is there any action you'd recommend doing first?"

"A lot of it depends on your interest-- do you want to write books, do you want to have your own show, do you want to consult with filmmakers to make sure that their Chinese films are historically accurate, do you want to star in a reality show, do you want to become an actor or an artist or a musician, do you want to do pornography--"

...of course pornography would be an option in Cascadia, it's Cascadia. "--I'd be interested in helping historians? Though I have no idea if that is a thing that could be a job."

"We can arrange a grant."

"Really, a lot depends on whether you would like to be comfortably middle-class or phenomenally wealthy. --Oh, sperm donation also, you could make an enormous amount of money selling your sperm."

"...because of not being exposed to bitoxiphosphene? I would like to be more than middle class, but I don't want a--" palace "--mansion." 

"Bitoxiphosphene isn't believed to affect sperm, but we can predict that a lot of people will want their child to be descended from the time traveler, because time travelers are cool."

"That seems-- like a strange selection process."

"Well, how else would you choose the other parent of your child?"

"--I think I'll hold off on that, for now. Seems like a decision where it will be easier to decide I want to do that later than deciding I don't want to later." Also, he does not want any children that he can't be personally responsible for! Especially if they're going to be raised by random strangers who think time travellers are 'cool'. (Not that he isn't cool ice cold.)

"All right. Would you prefer to be famous enough that people recognize you on the street or not that famous? If you prefer not to be famous that'll rule out a lot of options, like most of the ones that involve showing your face."

"I'm more than happy to be recognised."

"All right. I think it's hard to guess what kinds of opportunities you're going to have, so I'll select the highest-paying and most interesting offers and send them your way."

"Well, this is rather uncharted territory, and I very much appreciate your help with it."

Now she wants to walk him through the contract.

The upshot of it is that she gets ten percent of the money he earns, and she is supposed to find him work and negotiate his contracts to make sure he isn't getting taken advantage of and manage his image, and he is supposed to show up on time and not be a nightmare for producers to deal with and give her notification if he wants to pull out of something and also he is not supposed to behave badly. Normally she will pay him a severence fee if she fires him as a client, but if he is a nightmare to work with or engages in misconduct then he might be fired with no severence fee at all.

(The severence fee is eye-poppingly huge.)

...which definitely gives her an interest in not firing him! Also the fact that if he makes a lot of money, she makes 10% of a lot.

He signs, and makes a solemn promise to behave well for reasonable definitions of 'behave well.' (He is not going to work while drunk, and he is going to avoid breaking any laws if at all possible, but he is not going to promise to never drink at all.)

"...okay yeah actually probably there are some assumptions here we shouldn't assume that we're on the same page on."

He should not drive while drunk or high. He should not use racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, ageist, or anti-Semitic slurs; he should also refrain from making glaringly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, ageist, or anti-Semitic comments. (Actually, she is going to write a training for him about that, the fact that it is glaringly racist to compare black people to monkeys is probably not obvious from his perspective.) He should not imply that it is okay to use nukes or that it is wrong to secede from the government or that the Gileadite religion is correct (he may say that other evangelical Christian sects are correct). He should not be cruel to animals. He should not have sex with people who don't want him to have sex with them. He should not date people younger than the age of consent. He should not make any sort of sexual or flirtatious comment to people while he is at work; if he is making them to coworkers after work, he should be careful to ensure that the comments are welcome and that people aren't afraid that he's going to ruin their careers if they don't tolerate him flirting with them, and also he shouldn't date or have sex with anyone above or below him in the hierarchy. He should not physically attack anyone or throw objects at them or anything like that. He should especially not physically attack people he's dating, his children, service workers, or coworkers. There is some drama about who owns the island of Taiwan, and it is probably best to just refrain from having any sort of opinion on the topic of whether it is part of China; if he decides that Taiwan being its own country is the hill he wants to die on she is fine with that but he should tell her so she can cancel any speaking engagements he has on the mainland.. There is a list of atrocities that he should not deny the existence or badness of but that can wait for the training.

He solemnly swears to avoid the above listed Bad Ideas and will have no opinions about who owns islands he's never heard about. And he will look up and follow the training to avoid making any egregiously offensive statements.

Well, she's going to have to write it, they had not previously had to train anyone on all of the things that are considered super racist because even the Gileadites think racism is bad.  

Does he have any other questions?

He doesn't have any other questions, and hopefully this is because they both understand each other and not because there is any knowledge that he doesn't have and doesn't know he doesn't have.

The agent and her employees spent two frantic days pulling together a training, and Jing Yi can go through it before he does the press conference. He is NOT supposed to imply that Jewish people drink the blood of aborted children. He is NOT supposed to say that black people like watermelon. He is NOT supposed to compare fat women to whales. He is NOT supposed to say that if you just didn't have sex then you wouldn't have HIV. He is NOT supposed to put makeup on his face so he looks like a person of a different ethnicity. If he hears any of this very long list of words, they are slurs, and he is not allowed to use them. (He is allowed to use these slurs because they refer to Chinese people.)  

Also, here are all of the horrible things that happened in the past thousand years, he should try to remember that they actually happened even if he reads on a website that they didn't happen. 

...That list is such a combination of "well, I can see exactly how that would be very offensive" to "--what the hell happened that to make that offensive." (He spends a minute staring at the "list of foods you should not imply that [insert group here] people like" in slightly horrified bafflement.)

(He spends more than a minute staring at the list of Horrible Things in actual horror.)