At Shanghai’s People’s Park marriage market, Zoe Zhu is appraised like a stock, betrothed like an asset, and sold the oldest fantasy in Chinese romance: become a butterfly, and be free. When she flees to New York and meets Lance Liang, a disgraced scientist driving Uber and living in his car, their story becomes currency for parents, algorithms, capital, governments, and the internet. A razor-sharp contemporary riff on The Butterfly Lovers, The Butterfly Agreement asks: in a world where every identity has a price, what does it cost to love without becoming someone else’s narrative?