"Chen Yunxian hopes her son will become a privileged child, because she is not one. Wu Xiaole, who earned wide acclaim for her debut Your Children Are Not Your Children, now presents Privileged Children. On the surface, the book still seems to be about education, but beneath that, issues of class, motherhood, and gender intertwine and reflect each other, illuminating the hazy desires of contemporary middle-class women in Taipei." — Liao Meixuan, award-winning Taiwanese author

★ Rights sold in multiple languages including English (World), French, Vietnamese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Arabic. Film and TV rights also sold!
★ A major work by Wu Xiaole, bestselling author of Your Children Are Not Your Children (adapted into a hit Netflix series). A bestseller of the year on major platforms including Books.com.tw, Eslite, and Readmoo, and featured on the front-page headline of Taiwan's Apple Daily!
★ "Your future is my success or failure"—when "nurturing" is misunderstood as a high-return investment, children are forced to become their parents' capital for showing off. Based on firsthand interviews, this contemporary fable cuts directly into the parenting anxiety of middle-class families.
★ Wu Xiaole, with her calm narrative structure and concise yet fluid prose, precisely extracts the subtle emotions and expectations within Chinese parent-child relationships that are most difficult to acknowledge—real, sharp, and thought-provoking.
★ Honestly portrays the dilemmas and confusion of M-shaped education and over-parenting, exploring the common question among contemporary parents: "Is private school the most worthwhile investment?"
★ Reveals the true situation of married women with children under contemporary parenting anxiety—whether full-time mothers or working women, why is the pressure so overwhelming that it makes them weary of life? Being a "socialite mother" is also a high-stress occupation, carrying a deep sorrow beneath the luxurious surface that outsiders find hard to understand.

A life-or-death game of adult vanity, an innocent child's great adventure.
Sending your child to a prestigious private school—is it a fast track to rising up the social ladder?!
When the door of fate opens gloriously, for the dream of "surpassing the previous generation," dare you bring your child along and play the upper-class game?

If they could, which parent wouldn't want to pluck the stars from the sky for their child? Chen Yunxian, striving with all her might to get ahead and give her son Yang Peichen the best of everything, is forced to yield under the grinding pressure of financial constraints.

Until that day, when fate takes a glamorous turn. At a birthday party thrown by her husband's boss Ted for his son, the young birthday boy Chris unexpectedly hits it off with Peichen. This unexpected connection leads Ted and his wife Liang Jiaqi to extend a generous offer: they will fund Peichen's tuition at the elite private school "Songren Elementary" so he can keep Chris company.

Chen Yunxian grows closer to Liang Jiaqi, becoming a friend of the elite mothers—afternoon tea, designer handbags, private cooking classes with Michelin-star chefs. The fireworks of high society life dazzle and bewilder her. Meanwhile, Peichen's outstanding academic performance earns her admiring glances from others, building up her chips as mother and son walk the gilded path together.

But when the behind-the-scenes machinations begin to take effect, it nearly drives Chen Yunxian to sell her soul, and even sweeps her entire family into a storm…

Not having the right to play the game is painful, but the greater pain is joining the game only to find there's no way out…

Wu Xiaole

Born in Taichung in 1989. Graduated from the Law Department of National Taiwan University. She loves parrots and enjoys observing things that others take for granted.

Her life originally went straight. Following the advice of family and friends, she chose not to pursue the path of language and literature, but instead filled in the form for a "bright" department, thinking she would be happy ever after. But she didn't expect that the more she studied, the more uncertain she felt, the more gloomy she became. Not long after graduation, she made a decision: she would not take the civil service exam in the near future, nor did she want to pursue legal work. The moment she made that decision, for the first time she felt her life derailed and directionless.

At eighteen, she met her second student, and the experience was so wonderful that she began a life of teaching in different people's homes. At twenty-two, afraid that staying at home would lead to wild thoughts, she took on a bunch of cases to fill up her schedule. As the years passed, she has gathered many stories. With a mix of surprise and delight, she writes them down, and while writing, she also repairs herself.

Published works include:

Your Children Are Not Your Children (adapted into a TV series of the same title, streamed globally on Netflix; simplified Chinese rights sold)
Privileged Children (film/TV rights and multiple language rights sold)
We Have No Secrets (film/TV rights, simplified Chinese, Korean, and Arabic rights sold)
Fatal Login (Korean and Arabic rights sold)
But I Just Don't Like It, and others