BWXS CH6
School let out at 8:10 PM. It was already dark, and the campus streetlights were glowing like scattered stars.
As the group walked together, Che Ziming tapped away at his phone. “I’m pulling you in now—the group without teachers.”
Xie Lan’s phone vibrated immediately.
“Cherry” has invited you to join the group chat “Class 4: Piercing Gazes”
Just as he was considering how to say hello, Che Ziming sent another message.
Che-rry: Let’s kick off the new student welcome ceremony!
The phone instantly began to vibrate wildly. The screen scrolled down rapidly as the entire class, with military precision, spammed the exact same sticker—
Owl Stare.jpg
Xie Lan nearly threw his phone.
Once the round of sticker bombing finished:
Crystal: Welcome, Mr. 150 Big Shot.
Vincent: Class 4 welcomes the strong!
Croissant: His nickname shouldn’t be Renaissance; it should be Gauss Reborn.
Below that, people started spamming various stickers of owls acting cute, rolling around, or laughing.
Che Ziming held his phone, giggling. “Don’t you think our classmates are kinda like owls?”
Xie Lan looked at him in silence, then nodded.
“Exactly. The owl is Class 4’s trademark. We want that specific vibe. Our class motto is just two words—High! Spirits!”
“……Oh.”
Dou Sheng was walking beside Xie Lan with his bag slung over his left shoulder. A breeze brushed past their faces; he reached out and grabbed at the air, catching a plane tree leaf that had been swirling in the wind between his fingers.
Dai You laughed. “New buds are about to sprout, yet there are still withered leaves. That’s pretty rare.”
A faint smile appeared in Dou Sheng’s eyes as he gently pinched the dry, curled leaf.
After spamming the group chat, Che Ziming asked, “So, what’s the math level actually like in British high schools?”
Xie Lan rubbed his fingertips, which were cold from the wind. “Actually, it’s not as good as in China. I studied for the AMC, that’s why I can adapt.”
“What’s that?”
Yu Fei rolled his eyes at him. “You don’t even know that? It’s an American high school math competition. It’s graded. Someone like Xie Lan would have at least reached AMC 12, right? The difficulty is similar to here, but while domestic exams focus on advanced math knowledge, AMC leans more toward abstract math principles.”
Xie Lan caught the gist of it and gave a casual “Mmh” of agreement.
Dou Sheng turned his head to look at him. “Dare I ask your ranking?”
“Top 1%.”
Yu Fei took a deep breath. “Impressive.”
Che Ziming hissed. “Hey, so did you think the comprehensive science test this time was hard?”
Xie Lan hesitated. “Physics… was okay.”
Che Ziming nodded. “That means it wasn’t hard. Awesome, awesome. What about Chemistry?”
“……” Xie Lan was silent for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“Huh?”
Xie Lan sighed. “I couldn’t read the questions.”
Beside him, Dou Sheng turned his head away. Xie Lan glanced at him and noticed his lips were pressed tight, seemingly suppressing a laugh.
Xie Lan coldly withdrew his gaze.
“Ah…” Che Ziming immediately comforted him. “Maybe the chemistry curriculum is just faster here. It’s fine, with a brain like yours, you’ll catch up.”
Xie Lan didn’t want to recall that science paper filled with blank spaces. He tugged at his backpack straps and didn’t make another sound.
“Hey, hey, Fishy, look at the school gate.” Che Ziming nudged Yu Fei. “Chen Ge has already packed up all his stuff.”
People were coming and going outside the gate. Che Ziming was talking about the boy who sat by the back door during the day—thin and sharp. Xie Lan had made eye contact with him once that morning; his eyes were clearly beautiful, yet incredibly gloomy.
“With the class reshuffling this time, he definitely has to leave,” Dai You said with some regret. “He was second in the city during the high school entrance exams back then. He and Douzi were once known as the Twin Heroes of Class 4.”
Che Ziming lowered his voice. “I still remember how high-spirited he was on the first day of high school. Who could have imagined… I hope he can hit rock bottom and bounce back, just like our…”
Dou Sheng suddenly interrupted. “Why are you gossiping about people? You guys must be bored to death.”
He lifted his hand and stuffed something into Xie Lan’s palm. “A gift for you. Don’t tell my mom about the fight today, okay?”
Xie Lan opened his hand and looked at the withered leaf with a cold expression.
I absolutely won’t say a word. I’ll just write your mother a letter. A bilingual one, in Chinese and English.
However, the reality was that Zhao Wenying didn’t come home at all; she reportedly had three consecutive business engagements that night.
Little Ma bought Cantonese dim sum for their late-night snack. Dou Sheng didn’t eat in the dining room; he just grabbed a box of cream puffs and went back to his room.
After eating, Xie Lan went upstairs. Passing Dou Sheng’s door, which was ajar, he inadvertently glanced inside.
Dou Sheng’s room was much larger than his. The furniture was simple—just a bed and a desk—but the open space was filled with several photography lights of varying heights. The largest one looked to be over 1.2 meters in diameter. Next to it, a small cart was piled high with an array of lenses, gimbals, tripods, tangled power strips, and a large box of batteries.
Dou Sheng was standing with his back to the door, adjusting a light stand. The cream puffs were by his hand. He casually picked one up, tossed it into his mouth, and three seconds later, tilted his head back—Cream Puff Vanishing Act.
A sudden spark of realization hit Xie Lan. He tapped on the pink TV icon he had just downloaded.
Dou Sheng turned around to grab something and jumped in fright. “Damn, how do you walk without making a sound?”
Xie Lan asked, “Are you making an eating video?”
Dou Sheng paused. “What?”
“Like this kind—” Xie Lan picked out characters he recognized on the screen and read, “Deep… Deep-something Giant Mouth, Human Meat… Deboning? Is it pronounced ‘Ti’? Human Meat Deboning Machine? Iron Pot Hoarding… no, Stewing… Iron Pot Stewing Himself?”
“……” Dou Sheng looked a bit bewildered.
“Today Che Ziming said you have a million…”
“Ah!” Dou Sheng suddenly understood, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Right! Right… I guess so. In China, it’s called Chibo (Mukbang).”
A Mukbang streamer with a million fans.
Xie Lan tightened his grip on his phone. What he actually cared about was the matter concerning his cousin.
“So yesterday at the airport convenience store, you were… uh, livestreaming?”
Dou Sheng: “Livestreaming?”
“Yeah.”
Dou Sheng shook his head decisively, speaking slowly to accommodate Xie Lan’s listening skills. “I never livestream. Yesterday I was just replying to some voice messages. I’m very shy. In front of the camera, I only eat, I don’t talk. I don’t say anything to the fans.”
Xie Lan fell silent. He was deeply skeptical of the word “shy,” and even suspected he had misunderstood the definition of the word.
“It’s Bilibili, right? I installed it. What’s your ID?”
Dou Sheng’s expression stiffened. It took a long time before he squeezed out a few words. “Food-Loving MRX.”
Xie Lan typed it in and searched. “There’s no name like that.”
Dou Sheng frowned, thought for a moment, and said, “Slip of the tongue, slip of the tongue. It’s MR.X Who Loves to Eat (Ai Chifan de MR.X). I missed the word ‘Eat’.”
This time, he found it.
Xie Lan glanced at the follower count and was surprised. “You actually have 1.48 million followers. That doesn’t just count as a million.”
“Mmh…” Dou Sheng paused for a few seconds. “It’s been growing fast lately.”
Xie Lan tapped on a random video.
It really was a Mukbang, specifically the professional ASMR kind that recorded chewing sounds. Just audio, no face. The camera was pointed down at the food on the table. You could see the camera shyness; even the act of reaching for food was edited out. Let alone a face, no physical features were filmed at all.
Xie Lan scrolled to the latest update teaser. “This weekend you’re recording drinking a whole basin of meat sauce?”
Dou Sheng lost all expression. “……Really? I forgot.”
“Go to sleep.” He walked over and placed his hand on the door. “Get over your jet lag. Goodnight.”
The door was shut before he finished speaking; the second half of the sentence came through the wood. The sign was flipped; business hours were over for the day.
Xie Lan didn’t care about the details. His cousin’s situation had nothing to do with a million fans. He suddenly felt much more relieved, casually clicked ‘Follow,’ and returned to his own room.
On his bed were several clean, folded clothes and a small note.
— Bought these based on your style. Download Taobao yourself later. (Smiley face)
It was signed “Auntie Zhao.”
Xie Lan looked at the small note, and after a while, pulled open the drawer to keep it safe.
When he took off his clothes, the withered plane tree leaf fell out of his pocket. He had intended to throw it away, but as he picked it up, his fingertips brushed against the raised veins of the leaf, and he stopped.
His mother’s illness had been discovered four years ago. After two years of ineffective treatment, she passed away.
During those two years in the hospital, she would occasionally speak to him in Chinese about her hometown. Outside Wangjiang Lane in the 90s, the plane trees grew so thick they blotted out the sun. The campus was the same; every autumn, falling leaves would flutter everywhere.
Now, Xie Lan was living outside the Wangjiang Lane of the past, attending the same school Xiao Langjing had attended back then. Time rushed by, and in a trance, he felt as if he had traveled through time to walk the path his mother had once walked.
He stared at the withered leaf for a while and, in the end, placed it in the drawer for safekeeping as well.
The first period the next day was Chinese.
Xie Lan took it very seriously. He went to the academic affairs office early in the morning to pick up his textbook, and before class, he looked up all the characters he didn’t know in the first three paragraphs of the first lesson, meticulously annotating them in English.
Dou Sheng slept beside him on his left all morning, not moving an inch, even when the bell rang.
The Chinese teacher, surnamed Qin, was a male teacher. He stepped onto the podium clutching a stack of test papers, instantly turning the faces of the students below green.
Dai You said gloomily, “Is he that hardcore? Graded the Chinese papers overnight?”
Old Qin smiled. “No, this period you will preview Preface to the Prince of Teng’s Pavilion. I’ll continue grading.”
The class let out a sigh of relief.
“But before that, there is one thing.” Old Qin changed the subject. “I heard Class 4 has a new student who made Teacher Ma ten years younger overnight. After hearing about it last night, I was very intrigued, so I hurriedly pulled out his paper, wanting to experience that rejuvenation in advance.”
Good-natured laughter erupted from the class.
Che Ziming used his book to cover his mouth and leaned back. “Here it comes, here it comes. The second teacher to be shaken by your power.”
Xie Lan: “……”
Hopefully not shaken to pieces.
Old Qin pulled a paper from the stack. “Student Xie Lan—”
The whole class held its breath.
Old Qin looked down at the paper. After a moment, he flipped a page, looking like he wanted to say something but stopped. After another moment, he flipped another page.
He flipped faster and faster, and the class grew quieter and quieter. When he reached the last page, he finally stopped. “The essay topic this time was actually ‘Universal Love’. Mozi’s words are difficult to understand, but the poet’s words were quite accessible. Most of you based your essays on the argument that ‘No man is an island, entire of itself.’ Let us hear how Student Xie Lan interpreted this.”
Xie Lan froze.
He didn’t understand what Universal Love was. He only knew that he recognized neither “entire” nor “island.” He had only focused his essay on the first half of the sentence.
He had died an even more thorough death than expected.
Old Qin walked over personally to hand him the paper. “Read it.”
“……”
After a full thirty seconds, Xie Lan slowly stood up.
The essay looked like it was half a page long, but actually, only the first paragraph was in Chinese. His handwriting was terrible, and while he could recognize many characters, he couldn’t write them. He had flipped to the reading comprehension section, found characters there, and copied them down. With limited time, he gave up after the first paragraph and switched to English.
“‘No man is an island,’ this is a viewpoint everyone agrees with,” Xie Lan read with his head down. “We look independent, but actually we are composed of two halves—”
Che Ziming was poking Yu Fei frantically under the table. “Holy crap, write this down, write this down! I feel a brilliant metaphor coming.”
Xie Lan: “……One half is Mom, and one half is Dad.”
Che Ziming furiously scribbled a few words, then his pen tip suddenly froze.
He slowly turned his head: “?”
The owls slowly turned their heads: “?”
Dou Sheng woke up, sat up straight, and looked up at Xie Lan.
Like a dead man walking, Xie Lan continued reading: “‘No man is an island.’ We must be grateful to our parents, just like the ancient Chinese man Confucius, who gave away a pear, demonstrating traditional culture: Xiao (Filial Piety).”
Actually, he didn’t know how to write the character for Xiao. He hadn’t found it in the reading section either, so during the exam, he temporarily switched to English: filial duty.
The classroom fell into a deathly silence for ten long seconds.
Until Dou Sheng suddenly let out a pfft—
“Filial to death.” (Xiào sǐ dé le)
Then the owls blew the roof off. Che Ziming slapped his table, his butt slipping so hard he nearly flipped over, chair and all.
“Amazing hahahaha!!”
“Boss Xie Lan, Filial Proud Wanderer!” (Xiào Ào Jiāng Hú)
“What’s so hard about essays? Xie Lan laughs it off with one Filial!”
“Confucius giving the pear, oh my god! Kong Rong is being Filial in the grave!”
“……”
Xie Lan moved the paper away and glared hatefully at Dou Sheng.
Dou Sheng was laughing incredibly happily. He produced another plane tree leaf from somewhere, quickly wrote a line of small text on it, and slammed it onto Xie Lan’s desk.
— Xie Lan, Filial Your Way to Power.
Translation Notes :
In Chinese, “Laugh” is 笑 (Xiào) and “Filial Piety” is 孝 (Xiào). They are pronounced exactly the same. Xie Lan used the word “Filial Piety” in his essay, leading the class to replace “Laugh” with “Filial” in common idioms.
- “Filial to death”: A pun on “Laughed to death” (Xiào sǐ).
- “Filial Proud Wanderer”: A pun on the famous novel Xiao Ao Jiang Hu (The Smiling, Proud Wanderer).
- “Filial in the grave”: A pun on “Han Xiao Jiu Quan” (To die peacefully/with a smile).
- “Confucius gave away a pear”: The actual story is “Kong Rong gave away a pear.” Xie Lan mixed up the names.
- “Filial Your Way to Power”: A play on a slogan like “Smile out loud.”