Chapter 21 Part 1

The goal that made a teenage Qin Yue give up schooling to go out and work was clear: earn money to buy the dean’s medicine. To reach that goal she could endure anything within the bounds of principle. She kept herself as low as could be.

But just as the dean said, her health was poor and her personality not lively enough. These shortcomings made it hard for her to win any boss’s favor. So in that first year, she changed jobs once every month or two, for reasons no one could have guessed. Fortunately, she always got her wages properly, and she felt she could keep going on living like this.

Halfway through her eighteenth year, that summer brought the first turning point of her working life. A factory owner from out of town was hiring a batch of assembly line workers, mainly for assembling, testing, and soldering electronic equipment. Qin Yue was meticulous and deft. She finished a three-day soldering training course in half an hour, and the delighted boss hired her on the spot.

It was the first time Qin Yue had been praised in a year of working. She was so grateful that even though she only took home a bare minimum wage from the boss each month, enough to get by and buy the dean’s medicine while the bulk of the piece-rate pay was delayed again and again, she never once thought of leaving. She poured all her free time into the line, hoping to turn in good results and collect a handsome sum at the year-end settlement.

She had long planned out how to spend it: a few new clothes for herself, a gift for the dean, some snacks for the younger children at the institute, and the rest into savings. She really had pinned every hope on the end of the year.

But on payday, the factory’s gates were locked. The boss had absconded with the money. At the tail end of eighteen, she took the hardest fall of her life, without the slightest warning.

Qin Yue pushed against the table and sat up, her expression calm. “That money was only about ten thousand yuan, less than what many people make in a month. But for someone who’d been waiting half a year, for an eighteen-year-old me, it was almost the entirety of my faith. In things, and in people.”

And in one instant it collapsed.

Qin Yue could still recall the feeling to this day. She, who dreaded the cold, felt as if a thousand-pound boulder were pressing her down to the bottom of an icy river, the darkness around her so total not a single ray of light could be seen. Frozen stiff all over, she had no strength left to struggle or escape. Yet her lungs were like a bottomless pit holding an inexhaustible supply of oxygen, keeping her awake every moment. She couldn’t run, and she couldn’t drown. Finally, after half a month of shuttling between the police station and the factory, in such poor mental shape, she was sideswiped by a dump truck and knocked to the roadside.

“A few days after that it was New Year’s Eve. Not only could I not keep my promise to the dean and bring back a pile of gifts for the holiday, I’d made a complete mess of myself.”

Qin Yue’s tone stayed as light as ever, as if she were talking about something that had nothing to do with her. But that helplessness of youth was something Guan Xiangchen could feel in her bones just from hearing it.

“I didn’t dare go back. I sat by the roadside alone from dawn to dark. I went through my head over everyone who had ever cheated me, looked down on me, and thrown me away. And then I realized that hatred is a good thing.”

“A-Yue!” Guan Xiangchen was horrified. “Hatred will destroy a person!”

“But without it, I wouldn’t have known how to stand back up.”

“Qin Yue!!”

“Mm.” Qin Yue turned to look at Guan Xiangchen and soothed her with a smile. “I was just too young then. Couldn’t handle things. It definitely wouldn’t happen now. Don’t worry.”

How could she not worry? This best friend of hers had guts now, and ability. So what? Wasn’t she still pushed around by the old hands at the factory and Wei Xincheng, doing work that wasn’t hers all day long?

While Guan Xiangchen brooded, Qin Yue had already gone on.

“Walking down the street, all I could see were people as gloomy as I was. The happy ones, the ones brimming with emotion, each of them was like a piercing scream, driving me out of my mind. I was slowly losing control of my reason. I wanted to destroy something.”

Guan Xiangchen drew in a sharp breath. If Qin Yue had really done it, she would never have been able to clear her name for the rest of her life!

“A-Yue, you…”

“I didn’t walk over.”

The moment Qin Yue spoke, the cool tones between her brows suddenly turned radiant. She gazed ahead with a smile, as if peering down a tunnel of time at some blazing moment in her past.

“Shen Jianqing must have already stayed on at the university as a teacher by then. Dressed in a fashionable, capable way, she sat in the cat café on the second floor of a mall, toying absently with a cat while talking on the phone. She swept a hand through her curls, then hooked up the corner of her lips, and that effortless command of a thousand pounds with four ounces just hit you in the face.”

A wavering flame kindled in Qin Yue’s eyes, held tightly in check, much like the woman herself. She said, “Xiangchen, the second she smiled, she was covered in light.”

Bright as day. Even with a whole floor between them, it laid bare every dark corner of her world.

Suddenly she stopped hating. Every place this world had wounded her was made whole in an instant. And so, reason regained, she immediately connected this Shen Jianqing, whose looks had changed quite a bit, with the big sister who had held her up to touch the sun outside the dean’s office. Then she realized that the person she had been waiting for all those years truly was the one who had saved her worldview.

In that instant she was so happy she nearly lost her mind.

“Or maybe I really did go crazy. On my way to find her I bumped into several people and didn’t say a single word of sorry before walking off,” Qin Yue recalled.

Guan Xiangchen didn’t judge a behavior she herself was perfectly capable of. She licked her dry lips and asked, “Did you find her?”

Qin Yue smiled. “If I had, there wouldn’t have been that business of following her at the bar later. But I wasn’t disappointed.” Qin Yue lifted her eyes to the computer, the instruments, and the various schematics on the table, her tone remarkably calm. “From her I saw the very thing I was losing: brightness. I wanted to get it back. I once promised the dean I’d turn my life around within a few years. Back then I didn’t really have a clear answer for how many ‘few years.’ It was more a matter of taking it one step at a time. The moment the word ‘brightness’ popped into my head, I knew right away: my starting point was so far behind Shen Jianqing’s that by her age I’d never match her achievements. But at the very least I could get myself to an intersection, one that opened onto a clear, open road. I started choosing my jobs carefully, from small factories to big ones, from no social insurance to a proper labor contract. The day I finally made it into Lead Science, I knew I could start striding toward that intersection I longed for. I resolved to seize every chance to learn, whether or not it had anything to do with my paycheck.”

Guan Xiangchen jolted awake. “So that’s why you take on work that isn’t yours, whether you should or not?!”

“Yes.”

Guan Xiangchen’s breathing grew heavy. Qin Yue was pushing herself far too hard. She worked eight hours at the factory and six more at home every day, fourteen in all, for a pitiful wage. Most of the money went back to the welfare institute, and what was left barely covered a shoebox single room of twenty-odd square meters and the food that kept her alive. Yet she never complained. When Guan Xiangchen grumbled on her behalf, she’d only smile and say that an egg a day, a glass of milk, and a constant supply of fresh fruit was a very refined way to live.

Bullshit! She only took such care with herself because she knew her health was bad. It had nothing to do with a refined life.

What Niu Bei from her assembly line had said a few days ago, that was real refined living.

Niu Bei said: “Yesterday I saw a courier deliver imported beef for the boss’s dog. One piece costs more than a month of our wages. Sigh, us two-legged folk can’t even outlive their four-legged ones.”

Niu Bei might have been exaggerating, but it at least represented the way one class of people lived. She probably belonged to that class too. She taught at one of the top universities in the country. Her base salary and benefits alone were far out of reach, to say nothing of project dividends. And Qin Yue just had to fall for her. Two people from different worlds entirely. Sigh.

Qin Yue had no idea what Guan Xiangchen was thinking. She propped up one leg onto the chair, gripped her ankle, rested her chin on her knee, and went on to herself: “A life with no time for entertainment is too dull. You need some relief to keep going. Mine was recalling the Shen Jianqing in that cat café who made my heart yearn. She didn’t need to appear; she could seep into my life bit by bit, until I looked up in that bar and suddenly saw her sitting there, alive and real, and my mind went to pieces at once. I followed her without meaning to and wouldn’t turn back no matter how my reason tried to argue.”

Guan Xiangchen half understood. “You fell in love with her in that split second, the moment you saw her when you least expected it?”

Fourteen years of hope, four years of longing. Qin Yue’s feelings for Shen Jianqing had long since accumulated enough inside her, waiting only for a chance to meet and erupt. It must have been like a volcano, unstoppable. She had also already made friends with a lesbian and felt no resistance to it at all, so when Shen Jianqing spoke up, she followed instinctively. She felt it was perfectly reasonable to fall in love that way.

Qin Yue, though, fell silent for a while before saying, “On the way home with her, my heart was actually very empty. My memory of her is long, but not a single day of it had ever held love, let alone a beginning like a one-night stand. I must have fallen in love with her at…”

Qin Yue hesitated a few seconds and still couldn’t bring herself to say “the moment she came.” Her covert possessiveness toward Shen Jianqing wouldn’t allow her to describe her beauty casually to another person. Not even her best friend.

That night had been Shen Jianqing’s first time too, but her passion had been so overwhelming Qin Yue could barely keep up at the start. Fortunately, Qin Yue was patient, a quick learner, and had nimble hands. It took only a few minutes to grasp the essentials, after which she could follow every rise and fall of Shen Jianqing’s with ease. Before long she was drawn in by those aspects of Shen Jianqing’s beauty that were still utterly foreign to her. The longing and yearning in her heart swiftly turned to desire. Kissing her, a voice rose unbidden in her mind: She wanted Shen Jianqing. And then she loved her, carrying eighteen years of longing, and there was no turning back.

Stubborn as she was, she knew the gulf between herself, twenty-two and with nothing to her name, and Shen Jianqing, who had just submitted her materials for associate professor review, was that between the earth and the sky. So she lay low without a sound, waiting for the day she could take her breath away.

To the side, Guan Xiangchen watched Qin Yue drift off, a tangle of feelings in her chest.

No matter which second it was that Qin Yue fell in love with Shen Jianqing, the one who falls first is always at a disadvantage. Guan Xiangchen sighed.