When Lin Yingtao was doing internship, she heard a teacher from the other kindergarten say: "We don't have to accept gifts from parents. But you know, little girl, people out there are working hard to make money, but we will always stay in the childhood stage, babysitting such a group of children. You said this job has no money, no status, no dignity. A university teacher, doesn't it sound impressive? A kindergarten teacher, you are just a kindergarten teacher! You work so hard all day long, and if you want to develop, how can you develop? If you don't develop through the children's parents, where else can you develop?"
"Since you are young and come from such a good university, I advise you to change your career as soon as possible after graduation. Can't you take the postgraduate entrance examination in a different major? Accounting is very suitable for a little girl."
It was close to the New Year, but HKU had not yet closed for the holiday. After finishing his classes, Jiang Qiaoxi took Lin Yingtao along the school's hiking trail to climb Victoria Peak.
They went there in the afternoon, just in time to see the night view. Jiang Qiaoxi said it was windy on the top of the mountain, so he asked Lin Yingtao to wear his coat.
Lin Yingtao was held by his hand, walking and stopping along the way. Lin Yingtao stood by the road, leaning against the tangled and exposed roots of an ancient tree, smiling at Jiang Qiaoxi's mobile phone camera. Lin Yingtao had little experience and did not bring water with her. She held Jiang Qiaoxi's black, slightly peeling water cup and drank the green tea soaked in the tea bag.
Lin Yingtao ran to the back and asked a passing Sichuan tourist to take a photo of her and Jiang Qiaoxi.
In exchange, she also helped the other party take pictures. However, the camera called "Invincible Rabbit" was very complicated. Lin Yingtao fiddled with it for a while, and finally apologized with a smile. Jiang Qiaoxi came over, took the camera from her, took several pictures and gave them back.
They continued to walk to the top of the mountain. Lin Yingtao said, "Jiang Qiaoxi, can HKU go to UC Berkeley for an exchange?"
Jiang Qiaoxi suddenly turned around and looked at her.
Probably understood what she saw at home.
"Okay." He nodded.
"Then why didn't you go?"
Jiang Qiaoxi held Lin Yingtao's hand and suddenly squeezed it.
"That's a wish of mine," he said, "but it's not a dream. It has to make way for the dream."
It was getting dark in Hong Kong. Lin Yingtao was holding an ice cream, queuing up at the top of the mountain with Jiang Qiaoxi. There were so many tourists, it was crowded and noisy. In the crowd, Jiang Qiaoxi hugged her, and Lin Yingtao could only hear Jiang Qiaoxi talking to her. Standing on the observation deck, Lin Yingtao looked down at the surface of Victoria Harbor, the skyscrapers along the coast, and the bright lights that never stopped all night. She felt as if she had glimpsed the true face of a part of the world, which she had never seen in the mountains, in the provincial capital, or in Beijing.
She was attracted by this strange feeling, and like a newborn baby, she stared at everything in front of her.
Jiang Qiaoxi held her from behind the whole time, so Lin Yingtao was not afraid even though she was standing too high.
She asked Jiang Qiaoxi, what is your dream
Jiang Qiaoxi held her hand, and the two of them came out of the night discount supermarket together. Jiang Qiaoxi was holding some coix seeds, rice, and dried red date tea.
Jiang Qiaoxi looked at the wet road ahead and said, "My biggest dream now is to have a home."
There were still many shops open on the street. Lin Yingtao turned her head and heard a Cantonese song playing in an old record store.
I have fallen in the ups and downs and twists and turns.
Suddenly I realized that being happy and simple is great.
Lin Yingtao said: "What family are you talking about?"
Jiang Qiaoxi lowered his eyes: "My family and yours."
Lin Yingtao said: "How old are we?"
Jiang Qiaoxi raised his eyes and said, "I'm not kidding you, Cherry. I'm serious."
Lin Yingtao followed him on the night street as a double-decker bus drove by. For a moment, Lin Yingtao really felt that she would live with Jiang Qiaoxi in the small rental house for the rest of her life and she would never go back.
She originally wanted to tell Jiang Qiaoxi that her cousin recovered so quickly that it didn't matter if he didn't go as an exchange student. After graduating from HKU, he could go to Berkeley, California to continue studying mathematics and get the doctorate he wanted.
Jiang Qiaoxi's cell phone suddenly rang. It was Cai Fangyuan calling from Shanghai.
Lin Yingtao raised her head and listened to Jiang Qiaoxi and Cai Fangyuan talking on the phone about some words she didn't quite understand.
"They asked you to do fa when you were a junior?" Cai Fangyuan asked exaggeratedly.
Jiang Qiaoxi said softly, "It's just a connection."
Cai Fangyuan said: "If you really want to do it, wait until you come back from Morgan Stanley and start a company here!"
Jiang Qiaoxi smiled, and he put his arm around Lin Yingtao's shoulders: "Don't think that far ahead, just take whatever you get."
Lin Yingtao asked in the apartment elevator: "What is FA?"
Jiang Qiaoxi said: "Venture capital consultant."
Lin Yingtao looked at him and said, "Can you make money?"
Jiang Qiaoxi thought for a moment: "If my landlord really invested... at least, 200,000? 300,000?"
Lin Yingtao asked, "Is this money for Cai Fangyuan?"
Jiang Qiaoxi said: "It's for me."
The elevator door opened, and Lin Yingtao was dumbfounded: "So many?!"
Jiang Qiaoxi smiled. Lin Yingtao came from a traditional state-owned enterprise worker family and didn't know much about the capital world. He pushed Lin Yingtao's back and walked out with the things in his hands.
"The chances of success are actually quite slim," he said, "but if there is a chance, why not try."
As soon as he entered the house, he started to get busy and changed his shoes. Jiang Qiaoxi took off his coat, sat on the mat and turned on his computer. He began to receive a series of information sent to his mailbox by Cai Fangyuan.
Lin Yingtao also changed into slippers. She picked up the supermarket bag, picked up Jiang Qiaoxi's empty water cup and walked out.
Jiang Qiaoxi quickly flipped through the PPT sent by Cai Fangyuan. He called him and said, "I'm afraid I won't know how to revise it for you until I have my internship."
Cai Fangyuan said: "How long should we wait? Should we develop for another half a year?"
Jiang Qiaoxi thought for a moment and said, "Wait for me."
Lin Yingtao came in from outside, took a can of cold beer from the refrigerator in the public kitchen, and put it on his desk. Jiang Qiaoxi was calling his cousin's wife, and when he looked up at her, he saw Yingtao was about to go out again, and he couldn't help but grab her hand.
The cousin's wife answered the phone. Lin Yingtao said, "I'm going to soak the rice." She pulled her hand away and left, humming a song, happily going outside to the kitchen.
Jiang Qiaoxi asked his cousin's wife for the contact information of a colleague who went to the hospital to visit his cousin yesterday.
"Cherry will be leaving after the Spring Festival," he said. "I hope he can arrange an internship for me in the spring."
Lin Yingtao was in the kitchen, washing the coix seeds and rice, filtering the water, soaking them, and picking out the broken dates from the red date tea.
Jiang Qiaoxi said that he wanted to have a family. Lin Yingtao didn't know why, but she started to be pretentious again while washing the broken dates - she really hated her pretentiousness, just like before, she felt that she couldn't keep up with Jiang Qiaoxi, so she hesitated and refused to go to the United States with him rashly. Now Lin Yingtao started to worry again. Jiang Qiaoxi seemed to be able to make a lot of money easily, but Lin Yingtao's monthly salary in the future was only two or three thousand yuan, and she might not even be able to support herself.
Jiang Qiaoxi made a few phone calls and set a time for his spring internship. He finished the rest of his beer and saw Cai Fangyuan asking in the chat box: "How are you and Lin Yingtao doing now?"
Jiang Qiaoxi replied: "Prepare to propose."
Lin Yingtao was wearing a nightgown, with messy hair. She sat in bed, calculating her accounts in a small notebook. She had never lived alone before, and after calculating over and over again, she still didn't know if two or three thousand yuan was enough to support herself.
She looked up and saw Jiang Qiaoxi shut up his computer, picked up his phone, and sat next to her.
The soundproofing in the rented house is very poor, and I can always hear Lady Gaga's songs coming from upstairs. Her songs are popular all over the streets of Hong Kong.
"How much money do I usually spend?" Jiang Qiaoxi leaned against the cushions and leaned against the headboard. "I have a scholarship, which basically covers my tuition, and there are subsidies from the school—"
"Ask about the money you spent." Lin Yingtao took a pen and wrote it down in the notebook.
Jiang Qiaoxi recalled: "Rent, electricity, water, internet, mobile phone, transportation, printing, meals. I don't eat, drink, or have fun much, so I don't have much to spend..." He looked at Lin Yingtao, whose face became uglier and uglier as he recalled, "What's wrong with you?"
Lin Yingtao did not answer his question. She lay on the bed with her face in Jiang Qiaoxi's arms. It was time to go to bed, but she was still tapping on her cell phone, as if she was still calculating some bills.
"Stop playing." Jiang Qiaoxi said.
"Dushan had a fight with his girlfriend and he was crying on Nanjing Road," Lin Yingtao looked up and said, "Cai Fangyuan was taking a taxi to pick him up and asked me to chat with him for a while."
Jiang Qiaoxi hugged her, very surprised.
Cai Fangyuan called and told Lin Yingtao in a bad mood that he had picked up Du Shang and would send him back to school: "Wow, his phone is full of snot and tears. I'm going to hang up first."
"Duchamp and his girlfriend have a very good relationship," Lin Yingtao said. "Whenever Duchamp has time, he goes to spend time with her to prevent the tragedy that happened to his parents."
When Jiang Qiaoxi heard such a serious word as "the tragedy of that year", he said, "Then why are you still arguing?"
Lin Yingtao said, "Because they both studied in medical school, Du Shang said that their teacher told them not to marry someone in the same profession. In the future, both husband and wife will be doctors, with endless shifts, endless outpatient visits, endless prescriptions, and endless surgeries. It is very likely that they will not see each other very often throughout the year, and the children born will be with their grandparents every day, like left-behind children, and the family will not be happy. It is recommended that they should not marry someone in the same profession."
Jiang Qiaoxi blinked.
"So his girlfriend discussed it with Dushan," Lin Yingtao said, "She felt that there was no future for the two of them. Dushan's girlfriend was also from a single-parent family, and she thought that one of them should change careers. But Dushan disagreed, and they started arguing, and Dushan broke down in tears."
Although there was a lot of noise upstairs and downstairs, Jiang Qiaoxi felt particularly calm. Lin Yingtao didn't say anything either. She leaned in his arms and glanced at her phone from time to time.
"Then why did you talk to him for so long? What did you say?" Jiang Qiaoxi asked.
Lin Yingtao said: "I didn't say anything useful. I just said that we are equally miserable. Who won't be busy at work in the future?"
"My work will be very busy in the future," Lin Yingtao said to Jiang Qiaoxi, looking embarrassed. She raised her head in his arms and said, "And there is not much money. It's good for someone like Duchamp to go to medical school and become a doctor in the future. My work is very busy and tiring. I can only make two or three thousand yuan a month. I have no money, no status, and no dignity... And now, all jobs are tiring. Huang Zhanjie always posts in the middle of the night. He stays up all night every day to write his novel. Cai Fangyuan is the same. He is still busy with his studio's affairs on the way to dinner. Yu Qiao is even worse. Aunt Yu said that Yu Qiao will fly around every day in the future. Even if he has a girlfriend, she will be in another place all year round..."
Jiang Qiaoxi couldn't help but reach out and rub Lin Yingtao's hair.
"I searched on Baidu for your internship at Morgan Stanley," Lin Yingtao suddenly looked up and looked at him again, "and it seems to be very busy? You can only sleep four or five hours a day, and there will be no vacation at all."
Jiang Qiaoxi suddenly pulled Lin Yingtao's hand and squeezed it.
"So you knew?" he sighed.
Lin Yingtao lowered her head and leaned her forehead against him.
"I asked Dushane, what kind of career do you want to switch to? Unless you just muddle through, I think there are few careers that won't make you tired."
After the college entrance examination, the life ahead was not as easy as imagined. Lin Yingtao sometimes felt that the four years of college were like a buffer slope, giving everyone the opportunity to get closer to society and prepare themselves mentally in advance.
They are starting to try to carry the burden of their own lives, which their parents have carried for them for more than 20 years.
Everyone has to work hard for his or her own future.
"Dushamp is just too happy," Lin Yingtao said suddenly with disdain, "He has been sweetly together with his girlfriend since his senior year of high school. Now they are in their junior year of college, and they are so inseparable that they have never been apart. If we let them try to live apart, I guess he would break down and cry at home every day..."
Jiang Qiaoxi burst out laughing.
Lin Yingtao continued, "I really can't understand why we quarreled just because of a word from the teacher..."
"No money, no status, no dignity?" Jiang Qiaoxi suddenly repeated, "Then what... ideals do I have?"
Lin Yingtao felt a little embarrassed after hearing this.
"I don't really know what my ideal is," she said. "I just really like being with children. I felt that I was happiest when I was young, and children's minds are very pure."
Suddenly, Lin Yingtao's cell phone screen lit up. It was a QQ message from Cai Fangyuan.
"I was speechless. When we arrived at his school, his girlfriend was waiting at the door. They hugged each other and started crying again!"
Lin Yingtao suddenly threw her phone aside. She had been typing for a long time and her hands felt really tired.
"But I remember when I was in kindergarten," Jiang Qiaoxi ruffled her hair, "our teacher looked very nice, very happy every day, and younger than her peers, and didn't seem to have a very low salary."
Lin Yingtao said: "Then I don't know..."
Jiang Qiaoxi opened his mobile phone and sent a text message to his cousin's wife at around ten o'clock in the evening.
My cousin's wife replied after a while. She was still talking to her husband in the hospital.
"I'll ask for you, but Mr. Zhong may be taking a break."
Jiang Qiaoxi pulled Lin Yingtao up from him. Lin Yingtao knelt on the bed sheet and was suddenly hugged by his waist. She was stunned.
I didn’t expect the text message to be replied so quickly.
My cousin's wife said: "Mr. Zhong called me and asked if Yingtao had an AMI certificate. If she had this certificate, her monthly salary in their farm would be about 20,000 Hong Kong dollars."
Lin Yingtao hurriedly pulled down her nightgown. Jiang Qiaoxi had even taken off his T-shirt. He lowered his head to look at his mobile phone screen for a while, then called his cousin's wife back.
"Twenty thousand?" he asked.
My cousin's wife said, "Look up where you can take the exam. Teacher Zhong said that it's not available in Hong Kong or the mainland. She went to the United States to take the exam. She can write a letter of recommendation for Cherry to study. Does Cherry have a TOEFL score?"
Lin Yingtao was hugged by Jiang Qiaoxi. She held his shoulders and knelt on the bed sheet. The nightgown was lifted from her legs. Jiang Qiaoxi looked up, his eyes bright, and said, "Since we have to come back during the summer vacation, why not take the TOEFL again?"
Lin Yingtao hadn't reacted yet. She wasn't as quick-thinking as Jiang Qiaoxi. It seemed that in Jiang Qiaoxi's eyes, getting whatever he wanted was a matter of course.
"I know this certificate..." Lin Yingtao said, her knees gradually trembling at Jiang Qiaoxi's fingers, "but this certificate is very expensive to pass, and it takes a long time to study, and it is of no use in China—"
Jiang Qiaoxi said: "Do you know how fast China is developing now? How can you know that it will be useless in the future?"
Lin Yingtao frowned and said, "The exam will cost tens of thousands—"
Jiang Qiaoxi said: "It's okay, we will get rich slowly."
Lin Yingtao lay on his shoulder, her body trembling, and her knees could no longer hold her ground.
"I haven't listened to TOEFL listening for a long time since I graduated from high school..." she said softly.
Jiang Qiaoxi suddenly noticed what she said.
"You originally wanted to take the exam in high school?" he asked.
Lin Yingtao shook her head at him.
Jiang Qiaoxi first hugged Lin Yingtao's waist and slowly taught her to sit down. Yingtao's pajamas straps slipped down, and she lowered her head to brush the hair that fell by her ears. Jiang Qiaoxi taught her patiently, just like he taught her math problems before. Yingtao studied for a long time, and slowly learned it. She held his arm and moved on her own.
"Yes, right in front of us, we saw Jiang Qiaoxi!"
On the last day before the Spring Festival holiday, Jiang Qiaoxi stood in the corridor of HKU and chatted with his teaching assistant.
"Are you not going to go on exchange this semester?"
Jiang Qiaoxi shook his head, and he and the teaching assistant from Tsinghua University wished each other a Happy New Year.
"I wish your cousin a speedy recovery," the assistant said.
Jiang Qiaoxi walked in the crowd, wearing a shirt, carrying a schoolbag, with his hands in his trouser pockets. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and had an unusually handsome face, and he attracted attention wherever he went.
He was like this in secondary school and remained like this when he came to HKU.
He is the kind of person who is blessed by heaven and will not worry or feel distressed about anything. Jiang Qiaoxi always has a kind of pride that is not worldly, which is the look of people who have never experienced any setbacks. When he was in middle school, he always looked down at mathematics, appearing indifferent, ascetic, and unkind.
"Jiang Qiaoxi!" One of them couldn't help but shout from behind the pillar.
Jiang Qiaoxi walked forward and didn't turn back until someone called him a second time.
This candid photo was sent to the QQ group immediately.
Then came the second and third photos... Jiang Qiaoxi went downstairs.
Downstairs, a girl was making a phone call in the corner. I didn't know who she was talking to, but as she was talking, she happily stood on tiptoe, looking very restless.
Jiang Qiaoxi got off the elevator and walked up to her. He was a head taller than her.
Several girls came down the elevator, and they were stunned to see Jiang Qiaoxi being hugged by the girl. Jiang Qiaoxi stood in the corner, put his arm around the girl's waist, hugged her, lowered his head and kissed her upturned face.
Someone took a photo hastily, from a hidden angle, and sent it to the group. The group was bustling just now, but now no one responded.
Someone knocked on Cen Xiaoman's window.
"Xiao Man, have you seen the photos in the group? Jiang Qiaoxi is really in HKU, and he has a girlfriend, who is pretty."
Cen Xiaoman replied: "It's Lin Qile."
"She went before me."
The author has something to say: －－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－－
Notes to this chapter:
＊"I have fallen down in this ups and downs, twists and turns. Suddenly I realized that being happy and simple is great.": "With Love", composed by Lowell Lo, lyrics by Yuan-Liang Pan, and sung by Taiwanese singer Su Rui, is a classic song. It was released in February 1989. Later, there was a Mandarin version "Looking Back".
＊Lady Gaga: Lady Gaga is an American singer, songwriter and actress. In 2011, she won the 53rd Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her song "Bad Romance". In the same year, her studio album "Born This Way" sold over a million copies in the first week, reaching the first peak of her career. Lady Gaga is the Hong Kong and Taiwan translation of her name.