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“I’ve known since I was little that my grandmother didn’t love me.
“When you realize you are not being loved, anxiety is inevitable. You can’t help but wonder: where exactly am I falling short? I don’t know if this self-questioning is something only I experienced, or if everyone does — it’s not the kind of thing you can easily ask someone else about. All the more so because, as far as I could see, every other child around me was being loved very well by their family.
“Then I started primary school. I was very happy — everyone liked me very much. The teachers would praise me for being smart and hardworking, and the other students were very happy to play with me. So I became even more baffled: why, exactly, didn’t my grandmother like me?
“In the end I arrived at an answer: if everyone else likes me and only you don’t, then the problem must be with you.
“Once I worked that out, I became cheerful again. The weight that had been pressing on my heart was gone.
“As I grew a little older, I came across a phrase: ‘son preference.’ Oh — so my grandmother didn’t like me simply because I was a girl. This realization struck me like a powerful blow. Almost impatiently, I ran to the teachers’ office to ask the teacher I trusted most at the time: ‘Is favoring boys over girls the right thing to do?’
“The teacher was taken aback. She said: ‘Of course it isn’t.’
“I was relieved. See — I still wasn’t wrong. The fault still lay with my grandmother.
“I am not wrong — you are. Those eight words became the entire foundation of my growing up. Whenever I faced unfair treatment from family members because of my gender, I no longer turned inward to examine or exhaust myself. I looked on at everything from a cold distance, pretending I was an outsider. I even looked down at them from a position of superiority: What a pity — do you even know that the belief you’ve held onto all this time is wrong?
“Looking back now, there was something of ‘Ah Q’ in the girl I was then.
“But there was no other way. This self-righteous ‘spiritual victory method’ had already been carved into my bones and woven into my flesh. To this day, I find that my judgment of whether something is ‘correct’ remains stubborn to the point of near-obsession. This may be a kind of self-defense mechanism: I need to be certain I am right, because only then can my spiritual domain stand firm as a fortress.
“So, Teacher Liu, I am deeply grateful for those words you said to me: ‘I also don’t think you did anything wrong.’ If not for those words, that morning in Teacher Chen’s office, my heart would certainly have suffered an attack. I would very likely have been unable to hold back and would have argued back against Teacher Chen, debating with him until either he was convinced by me or I was convinced by him.
“One person fighting alone is one person. But two people — and there is a chance of becoming a thousand-strong army.
“Thank you for giving me the strength of that thousand-strong army. But I am still somewhat troubled, because in this particular ‘battle,’ I surrendered very quickly. I try very hard to tell myself: this is reality, and you always have to accept reality. Yet I am afraid. If I always accept, will I forever remain that Ah Q?”
Li Kuiyi set down her pen and leaned back in her chair, letting out a soft breath.
Then she read back through the entire entry — once, then again, then once more.
Compared to the half-truths of her last journal entry, this time she had laid herself out almost entirely honestly.
And yet — baring her innermost thoughts like this left her with a vague unease. She liked Liu Xinzhao, and she was grateful to her, but that didn’t mean she was capable of opening herself up to her without reservation, because she had no way to predict how Liu Xinzhao would react to this entry.
Would she find her melodramatic? Would she think she was making a fuss out of nothing? Would she share the story with others?
After all, true empathy between people is, more often than not, a luxury.
After much deliberation, she tore the page out from the journal.
She picked up her pen again and chose a harmless, neutral topic. She thought: the ultimate reason she was having all this hesitation and worry was — humans can think.
So she wrote: “Very often, we cannot help but admit that thinking makes people suffer.”
Writing was never a torment for her, never a real challenge. Effortlessly, she wrote over a thousand flowing words — just as before, giving expression to her genuine feelings in fragments. She closed the journal and looked at the page she had torn out. Something inside her scolded harshly: Li Kuiyi, you call yourself an idealist, but you are not honest.
True honesty in exposing oneself was incredibly difficult. Over all these years, she had only ever been fully, wholeheartedly honest with Fang Zhixiao alone. Everything about her — including her not-so-beautiful past, the occasional flicker of unkindness that rose in her, her small, petty flares of temper — Fang Zhixiao knew all of it.
Precisely because Fang Zhixiao knew all of it, and accepted all of it, she was free to be willful and capricious in front of her without restraint. For instance, when Fang Zhixiao’s birthday came around, Fang Zhixiao would deliberately remind her: “I really want that Doraemon collaboration mug.” And she would give a dismissive hmph: “Just because you want it, you think I’ll buy it for you?”
But she would absolutely buy it. And Fang Zhixiao knew she absolutely would.
This had long since become an unspoken understanding between them.
It came as quite a surprise, then, when Fang Zhixiao pounded the table in outrage and declared that she had not been honest with her at all. “Li Kui! You’ve been hiding the whole He Youyuan thing from me!”
The “Fang’s Sour & Spicy Noodles” shop was cramped and packed with students from the First Affiliated High School. At the sound of “He Youyuan,” quite a few people turned to glance toward the corner where the two girls were sitting — his disciplinary notice had been hanging on the bulletin board for nearly a week, and most people had seen or heard of it by now. Gossip travels fast under any circumstances, and when the subject of it happens to be very handsome to boot, that only accelerates the spread further.
“Keep your voice down,” Li Kuiyi reminded her quietly. She pulled two pairs of chopsticks from the chopstick holder on the table and passed one pair to Fang Zhixiao. “I remember telling you everything about me and him the day I added him as a contact.”
Fang Zhixiao looked briefly around the room and lowered her voice. “I know that backstory — what I want is everything that happened after!”
After? Li Kuiyi thought for a moment, then recounted the cola incident in full as well, adding: “I’m not actually certain whether him coming to bump into me that night was because I’d given the cola to Zhou Ce, because he had also bumped into me once before that — when the cola was still in my hands.”
Fang Zhixiao’s eyes began to glow. She slapped the table in excitement. “I swear on my years of reading novels — he is absolutely into you!”
Li Kuiyi twirled a chopstick-full of sour and spicy noodles, unperturbed. “So we’re doing the ‘if you like someone, you have to make her life difficult’ storyline? Fang Zhixiao, that is so dated.”
Fang Zhixiao was frantic. “Don’t dismiss it! What other reason would a boy have for going out of his way to mess with a girl for no reason?”
Li Kuiyi said, “Um — because he’s random like that?”
Fang Zhixiao: “…”
She glared. “Don’t play word games with me!”
But Li Kuiyi had decided to keep deflecting. This wasn’t a math problem — she couldn’t produce concrete conditions to prove that He Youyuan definitely didn’t like her. And Fang Zhixiao was particularly skilled at piecing together the tiniest hints. Even a 0.1% ember of romantic possibility would, in her eyes, be treated as proof of a love so fierce it defied death.
Li Kuiyi said, “Don’t forget — He Youyuan was just reported a few days ago for early dating. He has a girlfriend.”
Fang Zhixiao hurriedly clarified: “No he doesn’t! Zhou Ce told me — that girl isn’t his girlfriend!”
Li Kuiyi shifted the topic away from herself. “Oh? So what’s actually going on between them?”
Fang Zhixiao scratched her head. “I don’t know the details either — He Youyuan apparently hasn’t said anything to Zhou Ce about it. He seems like he doesn’t want to talk about it.”
Li Kuiyi seized the opening triumphantly. “See! He isn’t even honest with his own brother! Even if someone like that does like me, is that supposed to be a good thing?”
Fang Zhixiao was, as expected, led astray by this. She considered it briefly. “Hey! Now that you put it that way — wait, so he’s actually a terrible person?”
Li Kuiyi smiled with the satisfaction of someone who had gotten exactly what she wanted, bowed her head, and went back to eating her noodles in quiet, anonymous victory.
As for whether He Youyuan liked her — she wasn’t especially concerned, because she was quite certain about one thing: she did not like He Youyuan.
Back in middle school, she and Fang Zhixiao used to curl up under the covers together and read romance novels. Those novels had directly shaped Fang Zhixiao’s vision of a future partner: she wanted her future boyfriend to be like those male leads — domineering, icily cool, strikingly handsome, intensely possessive, the kind who wouldn’t speak to another girl besides her.
But Li Kuiyi was strangely vague about all that. She couldn’t conjure any image in her mind of a person she could fall in love with. Sincere? Kind? Optimistic? Interesting? All of it felt too abstract. She couldn’t love something she couldn’t grasp concretely.
She thought of the moment she had first fallen for Fang Zhixiao as a friend.
At the time, Fang Zhixiao was always following her around, always being kind to her — but Li Kuiyi felt distinctly uncomfortable with such sudden, uncalled-for warmth, so she kept a certain distance. The turning point came on a rainy night. The downpour must have been heavy enough to trip the circuit breaker in the dormitory building, because without warning the lights went out, plunging the dorm room into darkness and setting off a wave of shrieks. Li Kuiyi had been sitting at her desk doing homework. When the lamp above her blinked out, she looked up — and for some inexplicable reason, she suddenly thought of the spell “Lumos” from Harry Potter. Almost unconsciously, she picked up the pen in her hand, wielded it like a wand, and gave it a small, light flourish in the air. And at that exact same moment, Fang Zhixiao’s thrilled voice rang out: “Lumos!“
So: I chose to be your friend because, in that one instant, you reached me.
If friendship could work that way, then perhaps love could too.
She needed that kind of resonance between souls far too deeply — because it was the kind of thing you could encounter but never seek out, which, in a certain sense, made it feel like fate.
That was Li Kuiyi’s greatest and most magnificent vision of love.
And He Youyuan — quite evidently — did not fit that vision. He and she couldn’t even exchange a single sentence in peace.