Back to the Blind Date

Before arriving, Xie Qingcheng had heard that this young woman cared a great deal about a man's income. What he hadn't expected was that even after he told her his salary was nothing exceptional, her enthusiasm showed no sign of cooling.

Bai Jing smiled sweetly. 'Professor Xie truly lives up to being an intellectual — so wonderfully modest. Men this straightforward are a rare find these days.'

Xie Qingcheng: '...'

'Professor Xie seems to have excellent taste too — you strike me as someone with a real feel for the finer things in life?'

Xie Qingcheng frowned. 'No, I —'

'I could tell just from the way you dress.'

Xie Qingcheng: '...'

He remained at a loss for quite a while, until Bai Jing could no longer hold it in and leaned toward him: 'Professor Xie, that T-shirt you're wearing is a genuine piece from our counter — only five or six came into all of Huzhou at the time, incredibly hard to come by, you can't even get it through a one-to-one purchase allocation. You really are so low-key.'

Only then did Xie Qingcheng finally understand why the atmosphere on this blind date had been off from the start: it was the change of clothes He Yu had casually lent him.

He turned the girl's words over in his mind, and recalled He Yu's offhand remark — 'Don't bother returning it. I don't like wearing clothes someone else has worn. Just toss it when you're done; it's old anyway.'

'...'

Wretched capitalism.

Bai Jing smiled sweetly. 'Professor Xie, you're not very serious about this date, are you? That shirt of yours is worth close to what most people make in a year, and it's nearly impossible to buy in China without the right connections — and you only take me out for coffee?'

Xie Qingcheng said, 'There's been a misunderstanding. I borrowed this shirt from a friend.'

'Borrowed?' Bai Jing's eyes went wide in an instant.

What followed was, to put it plainly, dull. The sales girl who had been all lit up and animated deflated the moment she learned the truth, and the blind date settled back into reality.

Bai Jing's interest in him visibly ebbed. After strong-arming him into one photo together, she spent the rest of the time pointing her phone at the desserts — click click click — then flipping the camera around to herself — click click click. When a few clients messaged her in between, she didn't bother to step away; she sent voice replies right there at the table —

'Mrs. Zhang, don't you worry, that limited-edition bag is absolutely being held for you. Oh, please, you really don't need to send an extra thank-you gift — I'd be far too embarrassed.'

'Boss Wang, the dress you ordered last time has come in — when would be a good time for you to stop by the store? Yes, it's been altered ahead of time to your measurements: plus size, but with the front panel taken in two centimetres. Don't worry, I have all of it noted right here.'

The meal was excruciating. When it was over, Xie Qingcheng paid the bill and glanced down at Bai Jing. She was roughly the same age as his students. He had never had any real intention of making this work — he was here purely to fulfil Aunt Li's wish — and so her various words and behaviour hadn't registered as anything worth minding. Besides, he was old-fashioned about these things, so he said: 'Let me call you a car.'

'Sure, sure.' Bai Jing accepted without a hint of hesitation. 'I'll leave that to you then, Professor Xie.'

But this was one of the busiest streets in Huzhou, and it was evening rush hour; the two of them waited a long stretch while every cab that passed was already taken.

Xie Qingcheng sighed. 'If you don't mind, I'll walk with you a little further — the intersection just ahead tends to be easier for hailing a cab.'

Bai Jing said, 'Fine, though I have a livestream at eight. The schedule is fixed, and if I cancel last-minute my followers won't be happy. You don't mind?'

Xie Qingcheng didn't use any livestreaming apps himself, but Xie Xue did, so he had a rough sense of how it worked. Hearing this, he asked without much thought, 'You're a streamer?'

'I am — I work really hard at it. Sooner or later I'll be top-tier. Hehe.'

Xie Qingcheng gave a small nod. 'Having a dream is a good thing. Let's go, then — I don't mind.'

'Thanks, gege — you may not be rolling in money, but you're quite good-looking.' Bai Jing laughed and caught up with him. 'Oh, by the way — if my camera happens to pan over to you later, that's all right, isn't it? Everyone loves a handsome face.'

'...Do as you like.'

Ten minutes later, Xie Qingcheng deeply regretted saying those words ten minutes ago.

He was simply out of step with the times — he had no idea that the kind of livestreaming young people did these days could take this form. Bai Jing fished a pink selfie stick out of her bag and started waving it every which way, delivering lines he found baffling and utterly without substance, rambling from one topic to the next with no discernible point.

'We're on one of Huzhou's busiest streets — lots of beautiful people out tonight. Oh, does everyone see that bag the passerby is carrying? That's a fake; I can spot it at a glance. If you want to know how to tell real from counterfeit, make sure you follow me.'

'Oh right, the guy next to me is a handsome professor I just met today — incredible aura, highly educated, annual salary in the millions. See that limited-edition T-shirt he's wearing? Yes, that's right — he's the one who took me to dinner, and now he's walking me home. Thank you all for the well-wishes, thank you!'

Xie Qingcheng genuinely wondered whether he had gone deaf. He had just turned to refute her when Bai Jing smoothly swivelled the camera away and muted herself.

'Sorry about that, gege — making a living isn't easy. Please don't blow my cover, all right?'

Xie Qingcheng: '...'

He simply could not understand why anyone would want to put a fabricated happiness on display for strangers, luring viewers in with inflated desires.

But that was her business, and he had no interest in picking a fight with her over it.

The blind date should have ended there, smothered in silence — except that on the way, they ran into someone.

The unexpected figure appeared at a three-way intersection.

By then Xie Qingcheng and Bai Jing had been walking for over ten minutes and had reached a quieter stretch of road, where they stood waiting for a cab. Bai Jing was regaling her livestream followers with an animated rundown of the season's high-end luxury items.

Midway through her presentation, Bai Jing caught something in her front-facing camera: a blurred shape some distance behind her, swaying back and forth as if wavering over something.

She didn't pay it much mind at first — but then the shape began moving rapidly toward her, and by the time she registered it, the frame had already filled with the face of a filthy old vagrant bearing straight down on her from behind.

Bai Jing froze. She turned — and let out a scream.

He was a decrepit old man who reeked from several paces away. His clothes were in tatters — so thoroughly riddled with holes of every size that no one would have doubted they'd fall apart entirely if he took them off. A three-legged stray dog limped along at his side, and it came bounding over now, barking furiously at Bai Jing.

'My girl! My girl! I've finally found you, my girl!'

'What is wrong with you?! Who's your girl?! Get away from me!'

'No — no, no, no — you're my girl. Don't you recognise your own baba? Come, let baba get a look at you — it's been so long, so long since baba's seen you...' The old man seemed to have some kind of mental illness; even as he spoke, tears were streaming down his face, and in his agitation he lurched forward trying to embrace Bai Jing.

Bai Jing went white with fright, retreating step after step without thinking to cut the stream, shrieking hysterically: 'What's wrong with you?! Who are you?! Get away from me!'

'My girl, how can you not know me?' The old man wept openly, stumbling forward two steps, his blackened and ashen fingers reaching out — thin as spent charcoal, the kind that refuses to die in the embers — trembling as they grasped at the air. 'I... I miss you... baba misses you...'

His speech was thick with a Central Plains accent; he was plainly no one from Huzhou, and certainly no father of Bai Jing's. Xie Qingcheng read the situation at once, stepped in front of her, and said quietly, 'It's all right. Stay behind me.'

Bai Jing, still shaken: 'He's terrifying! How can people like that just wander around the streets — doesn't anyone do anything about it?! Ahhh!!!'

Before she had even finished, she was shrieking again and hopping from foot to foot — the stray dog had circled around and was sniffing at her heels.

'Help! It — it's going to bite me! What is wrong with this dog?! Does it not have a leash?!'

She screamed and bolted, fumbling for her phone in a panic to call the police.

In her mind, the old vagrant had already been bad enough — this mangy stray dog sent her completely over the edge. Both of them ought to be hauled away. On top of that, they had frightened her and interrupted her stream — wait, wait, her stream!!

Bai Jing suddenly remembered she'd never cut the feed. She grabbed her phone and looked.

Seconds later, her pupils contracted sharply. She could barely believe what she was seeing —

Her unremarkable little channel, which normally drew twenty or thirty viewers on a good day, had shot up to over three hundred in just a few minutes, all because of this bizarre incident unfolding in real time.

The viewer count was still climbing. The comment feed scrolled with messages:

'What the hell is happening — Huzhou night of terror?'

'Looks like she ran into a deranged vagrant, streamer are you okay?! Turn the camera over, we want to see what's going on!'

'Wild, this is literally near my place!'

'Is that old vagrant trying something? He was trying to hug her — streamer go check it out! Call the police if anything happens!'

Amid the comments rising like a balloon, a rocket suddenly launched and exploded across the screen.

Bai Jing felt it like a jolt through her whole body. That explosion woke her right up.

She suddenly knew exactly what she needed to do. She smoothed her hair, adjusted the camera — and before Xie Qingcheng could even react, she pushed past him from behind.

Xie Qingcheng: 'Watch yourself!'

But what he could never have anticipated was that the girl who had been cowering in fright a moment ago now stepped up beside the old vagrant without hesitation, chin lifted — though she had the presence of mind to swing her expensive bag around to her back first, so the old man couldn't brush against it.

'Look at yourself — you don't even sound like you're from here. How could you possibly be my father? You filthy old man, I know exactly what you're doing — taking advantage by pretending to be confused. Act your age, would you?'

The old man flinched and stumbled back a few steps.

With that, everything shifted. Xie Qingcheng saw now that the old man seemed to have no malicious intent whatsoever. Looking more carefully, he could see the grief on the man's face was too raw, too deep to be performed.

Xie Qingcheng frowned. 'Miss Bai, could you cut the stream? This gentleman doesn't look well — he's probably mistaken you for someone else. Let's call the local authorities together and get this sorted properly.'

Bai Jing wasn't listening to any of it. She could see the viewer count climbing by the second, and she had stopped caring about the old man's smell entirely; she pushed her face in even closer.

'Hey, take a look — come on, everyone look at this.' Bai Jing held the phone screen up for the vagrant to see, the selfie stick and front camera capturing both of them full-length. 'You dirty old man — look at me, then look at yourself. Compare. Could I possibly be your daughter? Take a good hard look — look at those rags you're wearing, that filthy face. And you still say you weren't trying something? Well?'

The old vagrant looked startled at first, then followed her prompting and squinted down the length of the selfie stick at the screen.

He seemed to make out the two figures on it clearly enough, because first he went still — and then, as though suddenly confronted with the full extent of his own wretchedness, he panicked and turned to flee.

He ran. That only made Bai Jing more alive to it.

It turned out that all it took to make a fastidious streamer overcome her revulsion and press herself up against a filthy old man on camera was a follower count going up and up.

'Everyone look at this — this is harassment in all but name! He was obviously faking the mental episode — watch me expose him!' Bai Jing chased after him, trying to keep him in frame, shouting at his back: 'Hey! Get back here! Didn't you just say I was your daughter? In a city this big, with law and order this good, you really thought you could pull this stunt?! Take a look at yourself — you reek! Get back here!'

The old man seemed to have come back to himself somewhat, yet not entirely — his eyes held in equal measure a haze and a dawning recognition.

Standing to one side, watching, Xie Qingcheng had by now confirmed that the man had no malicious intent whatsoever. His mental state was severely compromised. If pressed to describe him, Xie Qingcheng would have said he was like a gaunt old dog that had drifted across half of China, blown by misfortune into the misty south — the word 'searching' had become the very shape of his bones; you could see at a glance that he had lost something and had never stopped looking.

None of that mattered to Bai Jing. She had been at it for more than half a year, and her channel was ordinary enough that it attracted almost no one; meanwhile she burned with envy at the peers who had built something real and worked hard to keep it.

At some point she had started flooding the comment sections of well-known streamers with abuse, because she had wrung herself dry trying to be noticed and had nothing to show for it.

Today it was this one: 'Drop the act! Putting on that picture-perfect serene life — you know it's all capital at work. What you're showing isn't real country living at all!'

Tomorrow it would be another: 'A man living off the blood and sweat of women, buying himself mansions and villas — other people have pointed it out already: every lipstick those women buy is another brick on his foundation. And the women buying from him still can't wake up?!'

The day after, she'd move on to the next: 'All that talk about the independent modern woman — all you ever do is wallow in self-pity. Isn't streaming your job? You're tired, sure, but you got paid. You get hate, sure, but you got paid. With that much money coming in, what exactly is there to complain about?'

No one knew what her face looked like when she lay in bed scrolling through her phone in the dark. On the packed subway, among the glittering towers, in rooms full of perfume and dressed-up crowds, in the dazzle of money and glamour — she was always Cindy: heels clicking, working her career, bowing and scraping for her wealthy clients.

Back bent, keeping up appearances through sheer effort; crouching down, her slender hands fastening the buckles on shoes for Mrs. Chen and Mrs. Li, bowing respectfully as she walked them out through the wide gold-lit entrance — nobody knew how many times she had watched those elegant retreating figures and thought: one day, I'll be the one the proudest sales girls rush to welcome.

She wanted money, wanted fame, wanted it so badly it had scorched something behind her eyes — and so the fear was gone, the fastidiousness was gone, and she could no longer see the trembling of the old vagrant's lips, nor the clouded, burning tears in his aged eyes.

'Is your daughter even from Huzhou? Your daughter. A man like you — who knows if you've ever even been married — making excuses to play crazy and harass women in the street. What are you running from? Weren't you the one pushing toward me a moment ago? Let everyone get a good look at you! Come here!'

'No... no...'

The old man was terrified. He hunched his neck down into his shoulders, his body folding in on itself, emitting a low, muddled, infantile whimper.

'I'm sorry... I... I made a mistake...'

'Sorry? Sorry's worth nothing. Come here! Look at the camera! Look at the state of yourself! If you were going to come out here and run a con, you could at least have made yourself look presentable!'

On the screen, in the comment feed, viewers with no idea what was really happening were cheering on the 'fearless streamer who turns the tables on a harassing vagrant.' Gifts were coming in, balloons going up, and something in her chest seemed to swell along with it all.

The old man stumbled and dodged in panic — from the feverish delusion of having found his daughter, to the crashing return to reality and his helpless scramble to escape. Chased by the camera, he looked like an old dog with nowhere left to run, no different from the stray he kept at his side, hounded by 'justice' until he was shaking and beside himself, shielding his head as he fled.

'Please stop filming... I'm begging you... I was wrong... please don't film me anymore... miss, please don't film me...'

The old man was trembling all over, his legs shaking inside his torn trousers like something rattling loose.

He covered his face in front of the camera — then, hands still over his face, tried to cover the threadbare rags on his body — and in the end he didn't know what to hide anymore. Every inch of his flesh, every scrap of clothing on him seemed too shameful to expose, too wretched to be seen. Tears ran down the deep furrows of his old face in a steady stream; he shrank lower and lower, almost sinking to his knees before Bai Jing in supplication.

'Please, miss, have mercy...'

'I —' Bai Jing was pressing on, relentless, on the verge of saying something — when the selfie stick was suddenly yanked from her hand.

Then her phone was taken from her without ceremony, and Xie Qingcheng tossed the selfie stick aside.

'Hey! You — what do you think you're doing?!'

'What am I doing? I told you — this old man appears to have a mental illness. I told you not to provoke him. Are you deaf, or do you just not understand plain speech?'

Xie Qingcheng force-closed the stream.

Bai Jing's face cycled from pink to red to purple to green in rapid succession, a whole blooming carousel of colour, before she planted her heels and turned on him in a fury: 'Why are you sticking your nose in this?! Give me back my phone! I have every right to stream! I need to make money, do you understand?! I'm going to be an influencer!'

'What you want to become is none of my business.' Xie Qingcheng's face had gone cold; his instinct to lecture had kicked in, and he delivered it without blinking: 'But Miss Bai — have you no shame? Can't you see the state he's in? You know perfectly well it's wrong, and you choose to do it anyway. You can see the consequences, and you pursue them by any means necessary. You even know exactly what kind of pain your behaviour is causing another person — and you choose to trade that pain for a few more followers, because it costs you nothing. Where is your decency?'

'What garbage are you talking about?! Don't you dare lecture me — who do you think you are, my father? You're nothing but today's blind date. This is none of your business!' Bai Jing's temper flared and she lunged forward to snatch her phone back.

But Xie Qingcheng had a worse temper than she did. He caught her by the arm, looked down at her from his full height, his gaze sharp as a blade.

'Human dignity means nothing to you. A person's life means nothing to you. It all weighs less than the viewer count on one livestream. You're spectacularly, irredeemably warped.'

'How dare you insult me — you piece of trash —'

Bai Jing was so furious she launched herself at him, hand raised to slap him across the face.

But Xie Qingcheng caught her wrist, wrenched it hard, and twisted her arm behind her. She yelped in pain.

Xie Qingcheng said, ice in his voice: 'Keep this up, and I won't just insult you — I'll hit you back.'

'You — let go of me! Let go or I'm calling the police! I'll scream for help!'

The street wasn't crowded, but the commotion was loud enough to draw onlookers who had stopped at a distance to watch. Xie Qingcheng paid them no mind — he was the sort of man who treated other people's stares as background noise. But then, unexpectedly, a sharp-eyed woman in the small crowd called out.

'Oh heavens — what's wrong with that old man?'

Xie Qingcheng looked down immediately. Perhaps because the old man already had a mental illness, and perhaps because the wild swing from elation — finding his daughter — to terror under Bai Jing's camera had been more than his heart could bear: his lips were going blue, his face draining of colour, his whole body slowly folding in on itself, and then, with a heavy thud, he collapsed to the ground.