By the time they finished dinner and headed out, it was already past seven in the evening.
The streetlights had come on, and from the direction of People’s Square, the upbeat notes of “Little Apple” rang out loud and clear, a crowd of older folks dancing away in the plaza. [TL: 广场舞 (guǎngchǎng wǔ), or “square dancing,” is a hugely popular group exercise phenomenon in China, typically done by middle-aged and elderly people in public squares to pop music.]
Xu Ye’s family lived in a residential complex not far from No. 1 High — technically a school district property, though the building’s age showed. The place had seen better days.
“Xiao Ye, when do the gaokao results come out?” Zhang Hong asked casually as she fished out her keys at the door.
The moment it swung open, Xu Ye was already kicking off his shoes and stepping inside. The apartment was small, but it wrapped around him like a warm hug.
“Around the 23rd or 24th, I think.”
He made a beeline for the balcony, grabbed a couple of clean clothes off the drying rack, and ducked straight into the bathroom.
He stripped down and hit himself with a cold shower. Before getting dressed, he stopped in front of the mirror and just… stared.
At eighteen.
At himself.
The twenty-eight-year-old version of him had always looked exhausted — like someone who’d been running on empty for years. But this face looking back at him now was bright-eyed and alive, full of a restless energy that years of bad decisions hadn’t ground down yet.
He threw on his clothes and gave his hair a rough once-over with a towel.
The guy in the mirror wasn’t bad, honestly. 5’10”, around 130 pounds, [TL: The original lists his weight as 130 jin, a Chinese unit where 1 jin ≈ 0.5kg, putting him at roughly 65kg or 143 lbs.] and while none of his individual features were anything to write home about, they came together in a way that worked.
Gu Mengyao had been their class beauty back in high school. Plenty of guys had liked her — but she’d shot most of them down without a second thought. That alone told you everything about her standards. She was the type who led with looks.
And that was exactly why she’d never given Xu Ye a hard no. His face had kept him in the running. But she’d never said yes, either.
Every time he’d worked up the nerve to confess, she’d change the subject or find some excuse to leave. He’d spent three years telling himself she was just worried about the rules against dating in high school. But standing here now, he could see it for what it actually was — she’d been stringing him along the entire time. To her, he was a backup option. Nothing more.
He headed to his room. A typical high school senior’s space — NBA posters covering the walls, desk buried under stacks of gaokao study materials.
Xu Ye looked around, then walked to the desk and pulled open the drawer. Inside sat a phone that now felt like a relic from another era.
A Lenovo. He couldn’t remember the exact model anymore.
Back then, iPhones and Samsungs were the cool kid phones, but most people couldn’t afford them. The average person was rocking an HTC, a Lenovo, a Xiaomi, or some off-brand knockoff.
The storage was small, so there weren’t many apps. WeChat hadn’t taken over yet among young people at this point — QQ was still the social platform of choice.
He opened QQ. The contact list had two groups.
Group one: My World. Group two: Only You Exist Here.
My World had his friends and classmates — family generally didn’t get added unless they were cousins around the same age, because everyone’s QQ Zones were filled with the kind of deeply personal, deeply embarrassing posts you did not want your parents seeing.
Case in point — Qin Zhiwei had posted two things just yesterday:
“The memories were too beautiful, the past too warm, reality too cold, the truth too ugly.”
“My shadow has scattered across the floor, and no stars remain to answer.”
Xu Ye could tell immediately he’d copy-pasted those from somewhere online.
Reading them now, ten years later, he felt a full-body cringe coming on.
Group two had exactly one person in it: Gu Mengyao. Her username was Rose Girl. His nickname for her in his contacts: baby.
Xu Ye’s skin crawled. He deleted the nickname immediately, removed her from his “special care” list, and got rid of the whole group while he was at it.
He was hovering over the delete contact button, still debating, when a message came in from her out of nowhere.
Rose Girl: why didn’t you come find me today???
Before replying, Xu Ye changed his own username. Out went Sunshine Boy, in came just: Xu.
Xu: busy.
Rose Girl: if you’re going to be like this, i’m just not going to talk to you anymore.
He typed out several lines, then deleted all of it. Kept it to two words.
Xu: okay.
On the other end, Gu Mengyao had just gotten home and was reading his reply with her jaw tight. She hadn’t expected this. He always came to her — that was how it worked. She reached out once, and this was what she got? Two words and zero effort.
She chucked her phone onto the bed.
Back in his room, Xu Ye saw that she’d gone quiet and couldn’t help smiling to himself.
He scrolled back through their chat history. Almost every conversation had been him reaching out first, and her replies had been a rotation of “yeah,” “oh,” “sure,” “I’m about to eat,” “I’m gonna shower,” “going to sleep” — rinse and repeat. Giving her a taste of her own medicine felt satisfying in a way he hadn’t expected. Fight fire with fire.
The gaokao was over.
In the grand timeline of a person’s life, this moment was a crossroads. Every choice from here would ripple forward, shaping everything that came after.
He definitely wasn’t going back down the same road as before. And as he sat there, he realized the options in front of him were actually wide open.
If he’d remembered the English answers correctly, he was probably looking at a score bump of sixty or seventy points, easily clearing the cutoff for a top-tier university. That opened up a lot of doors.
But that wasn’t really the point.
Back in the seventies, his grandfather’s generation would have set the whole county buzzing just by getting into a vocational school. In the nineties, his dad’s generation — getting into a junior college meant the principal personally delivered your acceptance letter. But this was 2014. Even graduating from a top university didn’t guarantee you’d turn your life around.
“Should’ve just memorized a few lottery numbers while I was at it,” he thought.
Xu Ye sighed and racked his brain, running through all the waves he’d watched rise and fall over the past decade — e-commerce, social selling, livestreaming, the sharing economy, short-form video, livestream shopping…
None of those had an entry point for him right now.
2014…
“Wait — stocks!”
“That’s it. From early 2014 through mid-2015, the A-share market was in a full-blown bull run — the last real bull market it ever had. The index went from something like 2,000 points all the way up to 5,000. Anyone with a pulse was making money during that stretch. And on top of that, I actually know which industries are going to take off.” [TL: The 2014–2015 Chinese stock market bull run is a well-known historical event. The Shanghai Composite Index surged dramatically before crashing in mid-2015.]
Xu Ye shot to his feet, suddenly electric with excitement.
Short-term goal: locked in.
Make money first. Open a brokerage account. Get my first real windfall as fast as possible.
He swung open his bedroom door and found Zhang Hong still parked on the couch watching TV. He shuffled over with his best puppy-dog energy and grabbed her arm.
“Hey Mom, can we talk about something?”
“Spit it out.”
“So now that the gaokao’s done… any chance I could get a little spending money?”
“How much?”
“The more the better.”
“Five hundred. Go get it from my purse.”
“Just five hundred?”
Zhang Hong looked at her son’s exaggeratedly wounded expression and snorted. “Five hundred not enough for you? Fine — you get into a top-tier school, I’ll give you five thousand.”
“Five thousand would barely cover a new phone and a laptop.”
“Then what exactly do you want?”
“I…”
Something clicked.
“Summer break is three months long,” Xu Ye said quickly. “I want to use the time to get my driver’s license. And if I actually do get into a top-tier school, grandma and grandpa on both sides are going to give me money anyway — plus there’ll be a celebration dinner and—”
He didn’t get to finish. His ear was seized.
“Oh, so that’s how it is,” Zhang Hong said. “Gaokao’s barely over and you’re already eyeing your grandparents’ wallets.”
“Mom, just tell me yes or no.”
“You get into a top-tier school, and I’ll give you all of it. But that means you actually have to get in.“
Xu Ye’s brain short-circuited for a second and he planted a kiss right on his mom’s cheek.
“Deal!”
Zhang Hong wiped her face with exaggerated disgust, but she was already laughing.
“You little menace.”
(End of Chapter)