Chapter 7

Pride and Dignity, Both Burnable

Hearing Xue Jing speak, Ha Yue immediately straightened her posture.

Then, turning slightly toward him, she smiled faintly and replied, “Yes, long time no see. How have you been?”

As if the earlier pretense of not knowing each other in front of others had never happened, Xue Jing naturally continued the conversation, dropping his aloofness.

“I’ve been well. And you? How’s life treating you these days?” he asked, deliberately slowing his speech and enunciating each word carefully.

“How’s life treating you?”

Ha Yue opened her mouth, wanting to answer fluently, but she couldn’t find a fitting adjective. It was just a simple greeting, devoid of any special emotional undertone. Yet she suddenly realized that since returning to Suíchéng, she had been so busy that she hadn’t checked in on her own state of life for a long time.

The last time someone asked her about her recent circumstances was when she had just been “laid off” from her job in Jìchéng.

Back then, she spent her days sleeping in a daze in her rented room. With foreign trade grinding to a halt, even her qualifications hadn’t spared her from the wave of unemployment. She didn’t want to lower herself to take part-time jobs but couldn’t find a better platform either. Starting her own business was still an untested idea she didn’t dare to act on.

During the long, idle nights, with nothing to do, her “emo” moments came frequently. She didn’t need to work, didn’t need to go out. For an entire month, she stayed cooped up in her home, surrounded by social media posts full of panic about the state of life. Her desire to spend money plummeted, and she often felt like she didn’t want to live anymore. Cooking meals was out of the question—when someone is in a bad emotional state, the notion of healthy living holds no appeal.

Her only joy was ordering takeout. Awake for fewer than ten hours a day, she’d eat just one meal daily, ordering from three to five different restaurants at once. She’d sit, mechanically chewing oily, greasy food while blankly watching short videos on her phone.

The world inside and outside the short videos seemed entirely different. Within the app, perhaps due to the background music, everyone appeared brimming with energy.

After mechanically swallowing all the food, her sluggish mind would finally feel a pang of guilt. She’d immediately strip off her pajamas, stand in front of the full-length mirror taped to her wall, scrutinize her arms and thighs, and swear to start dieting the next day—only to break that vow when she woke up again.

During that time, she felt truly lonely. Workers hating their jobs might be a cliché, but she never imagined that losing her job as a corporate drone would mean severing all ties to the world.

Without that not-so-good-but-not-so-bad job, she—a non-local in Jìchéng, living in a rented room—truly had nothing.

The internet is full of hollow motivational advice for young people striving in big cities, telling them that while their apartment may be rented, their life isn’t. But when her landlord swaggered into his property to inspect the premises, or when landlords and property management targeted tenants with unreasonable demands during that special period, Ha Yue deeply felt that not only her life in Jìchéng but even her dignity and sense of belonging were borrowed.

So, when a former colleague suddenly called to ask how she was doing, it felt like clutching at a lifeline to stay connected to Jìchéng.

She wasn’t someone no one cared about. People still remembered her. She was still a person who could be useful to society.

That afternoon, she finally stepped out. She put on her most expensive red-bottomed heels, dressed to the nines, spent a whole hour applying cluster lashes, and two hours doing her nails at a DIY station. She even carried the Chanel Haute Couture evening bag she’d bought on a six-month installment plan.

It wasn’t just for dinner with a not-so-close colleague—she desperately needed to reconnect with this cold city.

In the city, everyone lives wearing a mask. Ha Yue’s mask was the precision of her grooming, from her hair to her nails.

But she didn’t receive the care she had imagined. The real reason her colleague invited her to meet was to ask her to attend a wedding banquet.

At the end of their meal—one that Ha Yue had to pay for—the colleague didn’t forget to use a toothpick to clean her teeth while casually sharing a secret: their boss hadn’t actually gone bankrupt. With several fallback businesses, he’d simply dissolved the company as a ruse.

Apparently, he’d met with every subordinate during the dissolution, but his crocodile tears and sob stories only managed to fool one person—Ha Yue. Everyone else had managed to secure their rightful compensation.

Take her colleague, for instance: she had used her severance pay to travel with her local Jìchéng boyfriend to Lijiang Ancient Town for half a month.

“She bought two first-class plane tickets and stayed in a five-star hotel for a week. It was the best investment of my life,” she said.

The payoff was immense. That trip not only earned her boyfriend’s admiration but also led to his proposal. Soon, her name would appear on the title deed of a courtyard home about to undergo redevelopment.

“This is the most successful investment I’ve ever made.”

A mere ¥10,000 netted her over ¥2 million in return, plus the promise of lifetime security.

As she spoke, the colleague pulled out her phone, opened a photo of a graduation picture, and pointed to someone in it. “Ha Yue, you graduated from Jì Dà too, right? We were talking about you once, and he said you were in the same class. He even said you were the campus beauty of the foreign languages department back then. Is this you in the group photo? I don’t think it looks like you, haha. Did you gain a lot of weight after graduation?”

“Your apple cheeks are sagging a bit, your nasal base looks sunken, and your nasolabial folds seem more pronounced.”

“As women, we really have to maintain our looks. Gaining even a couple of pounds can ruin the fit of a wedding dress. You shouldn’t just buy bags—invest in your face too.”

Seemingly predicting that Ha Yue might retort by pointing out her boyfriend’s stocky frame, the colleague quickly justified herself: “Men are different. They rely on their capabilities; they don’t have to perform ‘beauty duty.’”

“Oh, right! I almost forgot! Have you thought about trying blind dates? My fiancé’s family has a cousin who’s a Jì Dà Ph.D. graduate, just like you—also in literature. He’s set to stay on as a lecturer after graduating this year. He’s divorced but doesn’t have kids. Their family owns a few properties too. Of course, not as many as my future mother-in-law’s…”

The care was there, but not much of it. What passed as peer support was actually a form of condescending display. Ha Yue’s single and unemployed predicament served more as an antidote to the colleague’s own life anxieties.

Knowing there were others doing worse always made one feel luckier.

Staring at the screen displaying her past, collagen-filled face, Ha Yue seemed to block out the noise around her and heard the real mockery in her colleague’s heart.

Look, so what if you were the campus beauty back then? Now you’re left behind by everyone’s standards for choosing a partner. So what if you were excellent at work? You still got exploited by your boss. Women can only find happiness by taking the traditional path. There’s no other way for an outsider to survive here.

That day, as always, Ha Yue forced herself to finish the meal, maintaining the “face” she had clung to for so long.

She suppressed her disgust, wore a forced smile, and told her former colleague she was doing just fine—that there was no need for her to worry.

After resigning, Ha Yue’s romantic prospects weren’t bad at all. She had many suitors. Now, not only was she no longer single, but she had also landed a new job with an annual salary of one million yuan. Her new job was in New York, and she had already completed her visa process. She was about to leave Jìchéng soon, so attending the wedding was out of the question.

“What about your boyfriend? Does he agree with you going abroad? Aren’t you scared? It’s so chaotic overseas. I really don’t understand people like you. What’s so good about going abroad? Is the moon overseas rounder?”

“My boyfriend’s family owns businesses in the U.S., and he’ll be going with me this time. If everything goes well, we’ll settle down over there.”

Lying wasn’t new to her, so she delivered it with ease. At least, seeing the constipated expression on her former colleague’s face before they parted gave her five minutes of satisfaction.

But the satisfaction was quickly replaced by an endless surge of anger—though she couldn’t quite pinpoint whether it was directed at herself, her colleague, or society at large. Regardless, her anger reignited her determination and pushed her to finally put her entrepreneurial dreams into action.

It didn’t matter that her former boss hadn’t compensated her; she had her own savings. Back then, Ha Yue genuinely believed she would soon earn her first million yuan. But now, in hindsight, she realized that her decisions had been motivated by the desire to outshine her former colleague, leading her to misstep at every turn.

For Ha Yue, pretending to be an elite socialite in Jìchéng made maintaining her “face” seem crucial. But to the owner of a modest corner store like Chūnnī’s Shop, face wasn’t all that valuable.

If she could, she would gladly toss both her dignity and pride into a stove and burn them for warmth.

So, when the same question came up again years later, echoing in her ears, Ha Yue didn’t want to lie anymore and claim that she was doing well. There was no need. If Xue Jing sought to reclaim the pride he lost when they broke up, she felt she could graciously hand over that sense of superiority as a gesture of goodwill toward their shared past.

It was the reconciliation a blameless victim deserved.

Thus, she gave the question some serious thought before replying in a lighthearted and cheerful tone, “Not bad—just okay. As you can see, it’s definitely not great, but I take it one day at a time. At this stage, I can’t ask for too much.”