He had eaten someone else’s entire breakfast without touching his own.
In his whole life, Fang Peizhi had never done anything so shameless. And the “someone else” in question was a man who, just yesterday, had accused him of causing an accident, mistaken him for a rideshare driver, and treated him as a habitual corrupt supervisor who accepted gifts.
He sat there at a complete loss for words. Only now did he notice how painfully full his stomach was. His face burned. Today he was not turning into the dark-faced Judge Bao. Today he was turning into the red-faced General Guan.
After gathering himself, he looked at Zhao Buxi. “Have you eaten?”
Fang Peizhi did not speak with a Beijing accent. His Mandarin was extremely standard.
Zhao Buxi sat down in a chair by the dining table. “Not yet.”
After making breakfast, he had gone back to his room to use Doubao to find a piercing studio and an employment agency. He had not had time to eat.
At his answer, an elegantly prepared breakfast was pushed in front of him.
On a glossy, ivory-white round porcelain plate lay a freshly toasted bagel. It was topped with rich, slightly tangy dry cheese, with vivid green basil leaves still dotted with water beside it.
Beside the plate were five long, slender fingers pushing it forward.
“Eat this instead.”
Having eaten someone else’s breakfast, Fang Peizhi had no choice but to offer his own in compensation.
Zhao Buxi stared at the round thing with a hole in the middle. He had never seen anything like it. At breakfast he had always eaten things like soy milk, fried dough sticks, steamed buns, and tofu pudding.
“What’s this?”
“A bagel.”
“What’s a bagel?”
“Something like bread.”
If it’s bread, why doesn’t he just call it bread?
Since Fang was offering it to him, Zhao Buxi did not refuse. There was nothing else left for breakfast anyway.
He picked it up and took a bite. The bagel was dense and stubbornly chewy, while the dry, cloying cheese stuck in his throat. Zhao Buxi might as well have taken a bite of cement.
The texture was unbelievably strange, both sour and somehow flavorless.
Now he understood why it had a different name. Ordinary bread was nowhere near this terrible.
After one bite, Zhao Buxi felt as though the bagel had attacked his brain. A smear of white cheese clung to his lips as he looked at Fang Peizhi in disbelief. “You’ve always eaten this?”
Fang Peizhi had already stood up to put his coffee cup in the dishwasher. He turned at Zhao Buxi’s question.
Zhao Buxi asked, “For how long?”
“Since I was little.” Fang’s answer was succinct. He did not have much to talk about with this man anyway.
Fang Peizhi had been born in Hong Kong and did not move to Beijing until he was ten. As a child he alternated between Hong Kong-style and Western breakfasts. People developed tastes according to the places they grew up, and his preferences had been mostly set by the time he moved north. Lunch and dinner changed with the region, but his breakfasts hardly changed at all.
The words since I was little reached Zhao Buxi’s ears. He was stunned.
He hasn’t eaten a single decent thing in his whole life?!
Rich people actually torture themselves with food this awful for breakfast?
Fang put away his coffee cup and went back to his room to change.
After he left, Zhao Buxi kept eating for a while. The longer he chewed, the more a faint fragrance emerged. When he finished and passed through the living room, he noticed gift boxes of all sizes covering the entire coffee table.
They came in every color, mostly rectangular or square, each tied with bows or decorated with exquisite greeting cards. Stacked together, they resembled a little mountain.
Zhao Buxi: …
Well, would you look at that. So much for not accepting gifts!
How many students or parents must have sneaked in to bring him all these things? How much money did the whole pile represent?
Even the gift wrapping looked expensive.
Next to all those beautifully packaged presents, his free-range eggs really did look rather unimpressive.
After breakfast, Fang Peizhi returned to his room to dress. He took an aqua-colored shirt, freshly pressed and delivered by the cleaners, out of his wardrobe and put it on while thinking.
No matter how he calculated it, he had never imagined that the person trying to give him a present would turn out to be Zhao Sheng’s relative.
From the way the man described their relationship, they had even come out of the same mother’s womb.
Zhao Sheng’s family was poor. His registered rural household was in a village beneath a remote county of Beicheng City. How could he have an older brother dressed from head to toe in designer brands?
And that designer-clad brother was clearly not very educated.
Zhao Sheng might have grown up poor, but he had won a number of scholarships in college and taken part in industry projects. He should have some money of his own, yet his food, clothes, and daily expenses were still frugal.
There were only two possible explanations for a brother covered in designer labels.
First, the family had won the lottery. Or perhaps, now that Zhao Sheng was grown up, his brother had decided to reveal the secret he had been keeping all along: they were actually local emperors who ruled their county.
Second, this older brother was a parasite clinging to Zhao Sheng, draining every yuan he earned through study and academic competitions to buy luxury brands for himself.
Judging by Zhao Sheng’s circumstances, the second explanation was obviously the more likely one.
Fang finished dressing and prepared to leave, casually picking up his men’s cologne and spraying it twice against his neck.
At the same time, Zhao Buxi returned to his room after breakfast and pulled a bottle of Six God floral water from his Gucci tote bag.
There were plenty of mosquitoes in the summer, especially mornings and evenings. He needed to take precautions.
As he applied the floral water, he remembered the scent he had smelled on Fang Peizhi the day before. So men really could wear cologne. The idea was starting to tempt him.
He smelled pretty good. Once Zhao Buxi found work, he thought, he would buy a bottle for himself.
The two men emerged from their rooms almost simultaneously and met head-on at the door.
They were polite to each other’s faces but secretly at odds, and every meeting became another awkward test of who would yield.
Fang Peizhi asked, “Going out too?”
“Yep. Looking for work today. You going out too, Professor Fang?”
“Mm. To work.”
Like two robots, they walked out together and entered the elevator. The confined space was suffocatingly awkward, and neither had any intention of starting a conversation.
With nowhere for the air to circulate, the elevator amplified every scent. Catching the fragrance on Zhao Buxi, Fang Peizhi grew even more convinced of his theory.
Jo Malone’s Frangipani.
As they got out, each glanced at the other’s outfit. Both appeared to be wearing fine fabrics and excellent tailoring. A single top looked as though it could not possibly cost less than a thousand yuan.
Zhao Buxi: Wonder how much he squeezes out of his students.
Fang Peizhi: Wonder how much money he sucks out of his little brother.
The moment they emerged from the apartment building, they hurried off in opposite directions without so much as looking back. Neither knew when the other disappeared from view.
It was a brilliant, sunny day. A strong wind had blown the previous night, leaving the sky cloudless and a crisp watery blue. Everywhere on campus, lively university students walked in twos and threes on their way to class.
A doctoral-student dormitory stood not far from the faculty apartments.
For the first time in his life, Zhao Buxi walked through a university campus like this, surrounded by so many people his own age and moving along the same paths as them.
It felt a little magical.
As magical as Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
He had learned about the cartoon when he was a teenager working at an auto repair shop. One of his coworkers’ sons was always watching it on his phone. The mouse inside kept shouting, “Hey! Potato!”
Elio’s Notes: In Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Mickey calls for “Toodles,” his helper. Zhao Buxi hears it as tǔdòu (土豆), “potato,” which explains why the word keeps running through his head.
The boy would shout along.
For a while back then, even in the middle of the night, Zhao Buxi’s head had been full of potatoes.
After leaving Capital University, Zhao Buxi followed the voice navigation to the piercing shop.
Bright flowers lined the route. The roadside landscaping was refreshing to look at, and the early-morning smell of greenery and blossoms filled his nose with a crisp, slightly astringent freshness.
Shops offering services like ear piercing, which fell into the beauty and cosmetics industry, generally did not open early. Ten o’clock was about the earliest he could expect.
But the shop Doubao had found opened at seven.
It stood on the street among coffee shops and small stores selling niche designer eyewear and clothing.
As Zhao Buxi approached, he heard a thunderous wail coming from inside. A man with something like a bull ring through his nose ran out, clutching his ears. He wore a black tank top and green cargo pants.
“Good lord, it’s Lei Zhenzi, the thunder god!”
He turned and spotted Zhao Buxi outside. After taking a closer look and realizing the newcomer was not merely there to watch the spectacle, he asked, “Here for a piercing?”
A piercing? Zhao Buxi did not know what the word meant. “I want my ears pierced.”
“Sure.” The man covered his ears again. “Come on in.”
Zhao Buxi followed him inside. The crying practically blasted him back out the door. He covered his own ears and went in again.
The man entered with Zhao Buxi, like a copy made with Ctrl+C. Inside, the crying grew even louder.
A little girl in a black puffy dress sat on the sofa, wailing like a thunderclap. Beside her, a young woman played a Nintendo Switch as though she could not hear a thing.
The man shuffled over to the girl, still covering his ears. “Sweetheart, stop crying. We’ve got a customer. People are going to laugh at you.”
The little girl glanced at him and unleashed another sonic attack.
At last the young woman could not bear it anymore. Worried the girl would cry herself hoarse, she sighed and picked up a palette of dark-toned eye shadow from the shop’s makeup counter.
“Wonder who she takes after,” she muttered helplessly to her daughter, then fixed the man with a vicious glare.
The man: …
The woman returned to the sofa with the palette, wiped the girl’s face dry, and layered black and red shadow around her eyes.
The little girl stopped crying instantly. Sporting two dark red-and-black rings around her eyes, she headed off to kindergarten in high spirits.
Zhao Buxi stared in amazement.
The man gave an apologetic smile. “Goths as kids.”
He invited Zhao Buxi to sit and rolled over a trolley of tools, then confirmed where he wanted the piercings.
As he worked, the man chatted with him.
“What line of work are you in? Are you an influencer?”
“Not working right now. Looking for a job today.”
The man gave him a look. “With a face like yours, you won’t have trouble. Beijing’s full of opportunities.”
Big cities offered lots of opportunities. Every day, young people came north to Beijing to make something of their futures.
He took out a whole selection of studs and asked Zhao Buxi which ones he wanted to wear in the fresh holes.
It was Zhao Buxi’s first time choosing such things, and the novelty intrigued him. “How about this one? How much does it cost?”
“Two hundred and thirty yuan, including the studs and the piercing.” He picked out Zhao Buxi’s choice as he spoke.
Zhao Buxi was stunned by the price. He had expected fifty yuan at most. Good thing Old Jiang had promised to reimburse him, or he would have stood up and walked straight out.
The stud was a simple, plain silver one, a basic design with nothing special about it.
But the man thought Zhao Buxi had good taste. “I think this would suit you really well too.”
He asked, “Needle or gun?”
“What’s the difference?”
The man laid the tools in front of him. “With a needle, putting in earrings later is a little easier. The hole made by a gun is smaller.”
Seeing the long, sharp needle, Zhao Buxi swallowed. Either way he would be getting stabbed, so he might as well choose the prettier result.
“Needle.”
“All right.”
Once the numbing cream had taken effect, the man disinfected his ears again, put on a pair of sterile disposable medical gloves, and began.
Zhao Buxi was nervous inside, but the whole procedure lasted only seconds and did not hurt at all.
When he finished, the man handed him a mirror. “Man, that looks great. Seriously sexy.”
Not sexy in a vulgar way, but in a bold, stylish way that had real impact.
Zhao Buxi inspected himself from left and right, delighted by the novelty. His eyes kept returning to the silver stud in his earlobe.
“Thanks.” He paid readily.
“Don’t mention it.”
Zhao Buxi had just finished paying and stepped outside when the woman returned from dropping off the child. They passed each other at the door, and she kept looking back at him as she walked in.
Inside, the man asked, “What, thinking of marrying someone else?”
The woman: …
* * *
There was an eight o’clock research group meeting that morning. Nobody got a free ride in Fang Peizhi’s group; from the very beginning, the work was intense.
Life was short. Fang Peizhi did not want to waste time on things he considered useless or meaningless, and he expected the same of his students.
China’s examination-oriented education system had its limitations. Students had to devote enormous amounts of time to tests to prove themselves, leaving less energy for talent and passion. Fang did not want his students’ abilities to go undiscovered. So although he was approachable and relaxed with them personally, his academic standards were extremely demanding.
He had eaten too much breakfast, and by the time he reached the meeting room, his stomach still felt uncomfortably full.
Soon after he arrived, the students began to file into the classroom on schedule.
Zhao Sheng took a seat in the last row. It was not that he was an unwilling student. This was his first group meeting, and he wanted to observe how everyone else did things and learn from them.
Besides, he was bound to be nervous giving his first report. He needed time to prepare himself mentally.
At the sight of Zhao Sheng, Fang Peizhi remembered the present the student’s older brother had tried to give him yesterday.
He had refused the gift but wound up eating the man’s breakfast.
Once you accepted something from someone, it was hard to be hard on them. And he had eaten their food.
The group meeting began. Fang Peizhi said, “Zhao Sheng, you’re up first.”