Chapter 19

When a friend told Cheng Yedu that Lin Zhixia had started a social media channel, he went to check it out.

He watched, silently criticizing her.

In her most popular video, she was holding a power drill, drilling holes in wooden planks to build a crooked bed frame. She placed the mattress on top, bounced on it a few times, and muttered to herself, “I hope this doesn’t collapse.”

The comments section was full of praise: [You’re so amazing! Such great DIY skills!]

Cheng Yedu thought, How can they praise that? She’ll learn her lesson when the bed collapses.

In the next video, Lin Zhixia was at a coffee shop buying a croissant. She took a bite, and the crisp crunch echoed from the phone’s speaker.

“Wow-” she said, her eyes closing in pure enjoyment.

Cheng Yedu thought, Is she always this dramatic? The food in America must be truly terrible.

But on his way home from work, he found himself inexplicably buying two croissants from a bakery.

In her most recent video, her department was having an event and giving out free burgers. She was beaming as she stood in line with a paper tray, unable to suppress her grin. “Free food today, hehe.”

A man behind her laughed and said in Chinese, “Take your time, don’t choke!”

Who was this guy? Why was he so friendly with her?

Lin Zhixia even got him ketchup. Didn’t he have his own hands?

Cheng Yedu was annoyed. He started checking her page every day to see if she was working hard.

But then, she suddenly stopped updating.

For more than twenty days, she didn’t post a single new video. An unnamed fire started to burn in Cheng Yedu’s chest.

She was always like this. She started things with a bang, but never saw them through. When she was chasing him, it was all sweet talk and a barrage of gifts.

To reel him in, she would tell him bizarre stories about the kids at her tutoring agency: a boy who got into a fistfight with his parents in her office; a girl who fell in love with her teacher and threatened to kill herself if her parents transferred her to another school…

Cheng Yedu wasn’t a gossip, but for some reason, he found himself desperate to know what happened next in those stories. She had planted a seed in his mind, slowly drawing him in.

But once she got him, Lin Zhixia stopped trying so hard.

She didn’t do housework, her gifts were thoughtless, and when he was upset, she didn’t bother to comfort him properly…

She was just a flighty woman with no follow-through, a short attention span, and poor character.

He wanted to fix her, to prevent others from getting hurt by her.

But then he saw people in her comments section defending her:

“She’s probably just been busy lately. Vlogging isn’t her main job, after all.”

“Oh right, I remember she’s a physics PhD student. Hey, for your next video, could you talk about your research topic? I’d love to hear about it!”

A few days later, she obliged and posted a new video.

The shot was amateurish, just her face close up against the background of her messy bedroom.

“Hi everyone! Today, I’ll talk a little about my project. My field is controlled nuclear fusion, which is a clean energy technology that mimics the energy source of stars like our sun.”

“You’ve all heard of hydrogen bombs, right? That’s a one-time, uncontrolled fusion reaction. But what humanity needs is a continuous, stable release of energy for things like generating electricity and heating. My research goal is to make the fusion process controllable…”

As she spoke about a field she was passionate about, Lin Zhixia’s whole face lit up. She radiated a kind of brilliance.

Cheng Yedu had never seen her like this.

She said she had been interested in this field since she was in college. She was optimistic about the future of controlled fusion because fusion reactions don’t create a chain reaction. If an accident occurs, the reaction simply extinguishes itself, preventing disasters on the scale of Chernobyl or Fukushima.

…

They had been together for over a year, and Lin Zhixia had never talked to him about any of this.

Cheng Yedu realized he had never truly known her.

He was angry at her for being so secretive, but her secrecy only added to her mystique.

From tutoring to save money to pursuing a PhD abroad, every step she took was unexpected.

If he weren’t the victim in this story, he would almost start to admire her.

She was like an onion. She had only ever shown him the outermost layer, and now he wanted to peel her back, layer by layer, to see what was hidden inside.

Cheng Yedu was startled to realize that he might have a bit of a masochistic streak.

He had been thinking about her way too much since they broke up.