Chapter 6
Chapter 6
The Sixth Article of the “The Bible of Love”:
"Career is the treasure of all success. In order to achieve victory in the war of love and gain absolute power in a relationship, you must focus only on your career."
Lu Ming's day was very productive, he made songs, came out, consulted emotional problems, and even sought Guo Qianqian to press for the drawing, but was also rushed by others, "Ming Ge, coming out is one thing, but you can not forget my song! Even though it is a heterosexual rap love song, the song is innocent!"
Speaking of songs, Lu Ming suddenly remembered that all his equipment were still left at home. It was almost night time, and he has to go back home to sleep as well as find Liang Yesheng.
Before leaving home today, Liang Yesheng was humane enough to put Lu Ming's ID card on the table. But the note he wrote was very unfriendly, it read, "Take it to open a room with the adulterer, don’t thank me."
Lu Ming was very puzzled, it was only a one sentence note, was there really a need to mark a period?
Besides, he wants not only the ID card, but also the divorce certificate and divorce agreement that he hasn't seen until now. He didn't have much use for them, but they’re still his things. Lu Ming had already searched all over the house, flipped through every corner, but found no traces whatsoever. He now suspects that Liang Yesheng has locked them in a corner of the world in a nuclear bomb-proof safe, because he even found Liang Yesheng's degree certificate.
Wow. Lu Ming looked at all the certificates and awards, and then thought again, wow indeed. Liang Yesheng went to university at the age of sixteen, studied for his master's degree and PhD, and was also the first prize winner of the clinical competition every year. There were more things, but he couldn’t understand the rest.
Why would he resign from the Third Hospital, where even registration was extremely difficult, and run to a private hospital? It even caused him to be so worried he searched the Internet for half a day to check if the hospital was a part of the Putian Medical Group1. So why did he switch hospitals? To earn money?
"I feel like I'm pretty low maitenance," Lu Ming muttered to himself, "Shit! Liang Yesheng didn't get himself addicted to drugs did he!"
Wait no, there was also his house, previously he payed mortgage, but the other day Liang Yesheng seemed to have gone to pay the full amount.
Sigh, if Liang Yesheng is so short of money, then he simply won’t take the 300,000 dollars, he’ll borrow a few thousand from Liang Yesheng instead, just enough for him to live outside.
But when Lu Ming thought of the balance in his debit card, he felt troubled again.
In the past, it was never difficult to this extent. Because hip hop had gotten so popular in the past two years, many of Lu Ming's friends had the intention of making a living from only hip hop. Some people had only just quit their jobs before they were immediately greeted with bad news, and they were beaten into the ground. Rap certainly did become popular, but some of its negative aspects were also magnified, and they were met with criticism. Overnight, many performances were suddenly forced to cancel, and there were people who had been deleted from shows halfway through their participation. There was nothing that could be done despite the frustration, people started to pursue new careers simply as a breakthrough, but financial situations were temporarily rather harsh. Lu Ming went through his transfer records, surprisingly, he also lent a lot of money out to support friends.
Now that he thinks about it, he seems to have very light burden. His friends complained a lot about things like unsupportive family members, disapproval from parents, or inability to earn enough money to maintain basic livelihood. Liang Yesheng seemed to not care about these things, but Lu Ming couldn’t figure out exactly what he cared about.
Shit! There's no way that Liang Yesheng was mad at him for not staying at home as a house-husband, washing dishes and mopping the floor, right?
Lu Ming sent another WeChat to Liang Yesheng, saying, "When will you be back?"
Just as he sent the message, he heard the door ring. Lu Ming saw Liang Yesheng standing at the door, scrolling on his phone. Lu Ming suddenly wanted to recall the message, its content made it seem as if he missed Liang Yesheng very much.
"I’m back." Liang Yesheng looked at Lu Ming, “what do you want to say?”.
The fact is that Liang Yesheng could probably guess what Lu Ming was going to say, it was either “I want to move out” or, “where is the divorce certificate?” He did not really want to answer either of these questions.
"I'm hungry again," Lu Ming said, “I was talking to my friends the whole time during lunch and barely ate anything, I was about to order take-out but realized that I have no money left.”
A man can take temporary setbacks, the first reason for divorce wasn't going to change for the time being. At the very least they got along with each other for almost two years, he still wanted them to end on a good note. Now he's just pretending to be pitiful.
Liang Yesheng never said it, but he knew that Liang Yesheng couldn’t stand seeing him like this.
Liang Yesheng froze for a second or two. As expected, his face was no longer as cold as before, and his tone became a little softer: "Do you not know how to cook the frozen food in the refrigerator? If I do not come back, will you have to starve to death?"
Is this even what a normal human being would say? Lu Ming was about to get angry again, and almost opened his mouth to ask Liang Yesheng what’s wrong with him. But Liang Yesheng spoke again, seamlessly, "Change your pants, we're going out to eat."
Lu Ming didn’t think there was anything wrong with wearing shorts in the summer, "It's thirty-nine degrees celsius outside! I'm afraid of the heat!"
Liang Yesheng looked at him again, but Lu Ming was not quite sure of Liang Yesheng's mood. After a while, Liang Yesheng said, "Whatever, but I get to decide what to eat."
Lu Ming felt that Liang Yesheng was conspiring something, but he could not figure out what it was. Would Liang Yesheng give him anesthetic and dissect him? They couldn’t be going to eat canned herring2 . So he followed Liang Yesheng, wearing an oversized t-shirt.
Turns out, he was taken to a western restaurant by Liang Yesheng.
"There are two more window seats," the waiter said, "couple seats."
He looked at Lu Ming and Liang Yesheng as he spoke, a little worried that he had guessed wrong.
But Lu Ming was not very concerned, "Not really, we’re just here to eat a goodbye meal."
He pulled out a chair and sat down, looked at how Liang Yesheng was just standing still next to him, and asked suspiciously, "Why aren’t you sitting?"
He couldn't see Liang Yesheng's expression in the dim light, but an unexplained intuition told Lu Ming that Liang Yesheng was angry again.
But it didn't seem polite to argue here, Lu Ming sighed in his heart, he lifted the hand that was on his chair and took Liang Yesheng's hand, "Let's eat, I'm hungry."
Only then did Liang Yesheng move and sit opposite him.
But Liang Yesheng looked very moody. He chose the restaurant, but pushed the menu to Lu Ming, "You order."
This store is a Spanish restaurant,the menu looks quite good, but Lu Ming is not good at ordering. After looking at the menu for a long time, he said, "Let’s just get the two-person’s meal, looks like there will be more food."
"That's a couple's meal." Liang Yesheng said coldly, "Why would you order that for a good-bye dinner."
Liang Yesheng wouldn’t even let him order a couple's meal! Lu Ming felt that Liang Yesheng was really holding a grudge against him, and when he got angry, he simply began to go through the menu to find the most expensive dish.
"This," Lu Ming pointed to a picture, "a hundred grams is so expensive. Then give me 250 grams of it."
"This is top quality Iberian ham." The waiter said, and he kindly suggested, "Why don't you start with one, and you can order more if you still need it."
The waiter felt the pain for the person across the table.
But Liang Yesheng said, "It's okay, let him order it, he can eat like a pig."
The waiter thought to himself, "This guy is really here for the meal. He should stay away from this table so that he doesn’t get involved in a fight. Unfortunately, he couldn't let the guests pay the bill before serving the food, hopefully they could wait until after they paid to start a fight.
When the dishes were brought up, Lu Ming watched with great interest as the foreign chef performed ham cutting, and Liang Yesheng said, "For you, this is cannibalism."
"Liang Yesheng you are too weak," Lu Ming really wasn't too concerned, "If you were in one of our rap battles, you would lose very easily, you know? I also battled before, there was freestyle practice every day, you’d be criticized all the way back to your ancestral line. Once there was a person who pointed at me and said, ‘you’re fake, your shoes are also fake.’ Fuck!"
"So how come you stopped?" Liang Yesheng asked him, "When I met you, you seemed to be doing nothing but songs."
"Isn’t it obvious, you actually have to ask?!" Lu Ming said, "Of course it's because I can’t think of anything good to scold back!"
And, dammit, his shoes were really fake, which stopped him from refuting, and could only resentfully lose. After the game, Xu Ou went to help him scold back. Xu Ou said to the rapper: "Your watch is also fake! Your gold chain is discolored!"
Then they got into a fight, and the two groups staged a gangsta fight on the street, and were reported to the police by passerbys. Once the sirens went off, everyone else scattered and pretended that nothing had happened, except Xu Ou who was still fighting with the other side, and the two were arrested together and locked up for three days.
From then on they and the other company, Flying Eagle, started a feud known far and wide, Flying Eagle posted on weibo that they would not attend any music festival that invited Lu Ming and Xu Ou’s company, and posted their half of the argument at the top of their weibo page.
Indeed they only had half, Flying Eagle said that they only stated the fact that Lu Ming wore FAKE, it was Lu Ming's company, Deer Mountain, who started the fight, and it was Lu Ming’s fault that he didn’t have the ability to buy himself real shoes. It made Lu Ming suffer a lot of harassment those days; friends rushed to laugh at him by sending him 80 cents red packets to let him crowdfund to buy shoes.
So wearing fake shoes is really wrong. Lu Ming hasn’t worn shoes since then. He only wears a pair of flip-flops to go around the world, such as now. The employees were polite enough to not kick him out for being poorly dressed. But it still feels weird, sitting in front of Liang Yesheng, who was well-dressed, they don’t seem to match one bit.
"Speaking of which, why did you stop working at the Third Hospital?" Lu Ming remembered the question he had at home today.
"You finally remembered to ask," But Liang Yesheng did not answer, "too late, it's none of your business now."
It seems that indeed he is in no place to ask about Liang Yesheng's position, but he is not particularly happy to be reminded so by Liang Yesheng.
Strangely enough, this is the second day, but Lu Ming is only gradually having a sense of reality. He seems to have realized only now that, in a legal sense, he and Liang Yesheng have no relationship at all, and are no different from strangers. Even if he choked to death on his ham, Liang Yesheng could have left him alone and not send his body to be cremated.
So Lu Ming said, "Stop stop stop stop cutting, why is the ham so big?!"
The ham was sliced extremely thin by the master, so the weight of 250 grams looked like a lot, and Lu Ming regretted it. But unfortunately it was too late to either return the dish, or to stick the thin slices back on the large ham.
The original idea was to let Liang Yesheng spend a lot of money. Liang Yesheng had little reaction, but Lu Ming began to feel the pain. He felt that it was difficult to make money, Liang Yesheng spent years studying thick professional books to get where he is today, which was not easy.
Lu Ming asked while he picked up the ham to eat, "Are you very short of money? Is there anything wrong with your parents?"
"No." Liang Yesheng replied. His parents were fine, they didn't know anything. When they called yesterday they asked how come Lu Ming wasn't around, Liang Yesheng made up a bunch of lies, saying that Lu Ming had gone to buy them a gift.
"It's good that they’re okay. Liang Yesheng, in fact, I thought about it all day, I was too impulsive yesterday."
Liang Yesheng's eyelids jumped, Lu Ming looked as if he was hesitating and didn't know how to speak his thoughts. Thinking about it, for Lu Ming, it was indeed very difficult for him to think of how to phrase things properly.
Both of them got into this situation because of their harsh words. But there is no need for Lu Ming to say anything to apologize, a word of regret, asking if Yesheng could forget about yesterday’s disastrous events, would be enough.
"Three hundred thousand is too much, I shouldn’t have asked for it." Lu Ming said, "I think that you are short of money recently, why don’t you pay me in installments instead."
Liang Yesheng's hand that was reaching for the ham stopped.
"It's delicious, don't you want to eat it?" Lu Ming asked.
"I'm full." Liang Yesheng said.
Lu Ming thought he heard the sound of grinding teeth.
The author’s notes:
There are some references to the reality of the hiphop circle here. Lu Ming is really just a bit slow......
1 “Putian Medical Group is an organized group of entrepreneurs ...that dominates most of China’s private hospitals. These hospitals, though mostly licensed, have poor regulations and often incite controversy regarding their unsafe practices….Putian hospitals have also been reported to charge exorbitantly large sums of money from their patients. Some of these patients, however, are later diagnosed by public hospitals as completely healthy with no complications” More info can be found in this article: https://www.connectinhealth.org/post/putian-china-s-healthcare-butcher
2 “The herring used for surströmming are caught just prior to spawning in April and May. ... A newly opened can of surströmming has one of the most putrid food smells in the world,” according to wikipedia.