In Ark, there were dozens of presidents, vice presidents, and chief executive officers, maybe thirty or forty people in all, the kind of number that made recognition feel like a private exam no one had warned you about. No one expected a newcomer to know every face at once, but there were still a few names that mattered enough to remember. Li Yue, the chairman of Ark’s Mobile Internet Business Group, was one of those people, active in every corner of the company’s social web and placed high enough in the corporate sky that everyone felt his pull.
Chen Zhi was another. He stood there with his wife beside him, technical director of Ark, carrying himself with the self-possession of a man who knew exactly how much power lived in the engineering floors, even if the product division never stopped circling his department like a natural enemy. At Ark, the technical and product teams were always at odds, and everyone knew it. Ms. Wei, Ark’s chief financial officer and one of the company’s veteran figures, rounded out the trio of people worth watching, because most of the room took its emotional weather from her face.
Someone gestured toward a piece on display and said that, at last year’s auction, he had stumbled across one like it. He had wanted it badly and had been forced to leave it behind because he could not afford it at the time, a confession offered half playfully and half in genuine regret. Another person added that the artist had a reputation for reworking other people’s pieces and signing his own name across them, which was exactly why he remained such a controversial figure.
Controversial or not, collectors still chased his work. Someone pointed at another piece and said that a Maezawa work had been collected back in 2005, and if memory served, the hammer price had been around 4.8 million dollars. The compliment that followed was aimed directly at Sister Wei, saying that she really had both the resources and the taste, and that combination drew the right kind of laughter from the people who knew how to flatter power without appearing obvious.
A toast was proposed to Sister Wei, and glasses rose all around her in a loose circle of polished wrists and careful smiles. Someone told her she could replace tea with wine if she liked, because on nights like this even habits were expected to look festive. Somewhere in the flow of talk, it became obvious that Mr. Wei had not warned his wife about the next part of the evening.
What had been announced as dinner turned out to include exercise before dinner, though the host said he was not going to force anyone. There was a murmur of amusement, a small rearrangement of bodies, the sound of expensive shoes pivoting across the floor. Someone said he was going to change clothes first and urged the others to come along, inviting Sister Wei to join them as though everything about the shift in atmosphere were completely natural.
Lin Shuang had not expected that part. Her husband, Wei Ming, had once introduced her to an English snooker tutor, and when he asked whether she had taken more classes afterward, she admitted she had only managed two or three. She had been so tired by the end of them that her eyes had blurred, and the memory of that exhaustion returned to her now as she looked around and realized that what she had been told was a dinner was turning into a display.
She asked, with more restraint than the moment deserved, where this extra activity had suddenly come from. Then, as if answering herself, she said she would face whatever was coming. She was not afraid of them. She told the others she would see them in half an hour and went to change.
When someone asked why she was not changing into game clothes immediately, she answered that it was her first time there and that she had come unprepared. Another voice explained the rules with the patient superiority of someone used to intimidating beginners, saying that snooker required a high level of skill and that it was hard to grasp the game the first time around. Others chimed in that they, too, had only improved after following Sister Wei and practicing for a long time.
The implication sat in the room like a challenge. Whether Lin Shuang was prepared or not, the evening had already decided what role she was meant to play. For a while, all she could do was stand inside the expectation of it, listening to people talk around her as if they were arranging furniture before a demonstration.
Then the game began, and the tone changed. By the time a difficult table had been cleared, someone exclaimed that she was amazing, that even O’Sullivan would have respected a setup like that, that such a difficult pool game was hard for anyone to survive cleanly. Wei Ming was told there was nothing to be ashamed of in losing to Sister Wei, and the room, which had prepared itself for embarrassment, had to rearrange itself around surprise.
Someone asked who was next. Another turned toward Lin Shuang and asked whether she wanted to try. There was a brief confusion over clothing, and then someone remembered that a set had been left there earlier and handed it over to her. She thanked them, took the clothes, and when they asked whether she wanted to play a game with Sister Wei now that she was properly dressed, she simply said yes.
Afterward, she insisted it had all come down to luck, though no one really believed her. The long shots had not been easy, someone said, and their accuracy had been low all night. Another person remarked that, if it had been him, he definitely would have taken a different shot, while someone else, studying her more carefully now, said that she looked like a professional player.
When she asked for a glass of water, it was brought almost immediately. Two women, flushed with the residue of competition and attention, were told they had both played very well. Lin Shuang smiled and told them just to call her by her name, and the conversation softened into something unexpectedly warm.
Someone asked where she had learned to play billiards. She answered that, when she had been a student, she joined the billiards club at Jiang University. That answer sharpened the interest around her at once. Another person asked whether she had studied at Jiang University too, then said that when he had time, someone there had guided him, though his billiards skills had really been taught by Lin Li.
Lin Shuang looked genuinely startled. She said there was no way that could be true, because she had also been taught by Lin Li. Just like that, the two of them discovered they had come from the same school, and the delight in that coincidence was so immediate that people watching from the side could not help noticing it.
Someone nearby asked what exactly they were talking about. Another answered that the two of them seemed very happy, and a third explained that they had only been saying Mr. Wei’s wife played very well. Lin Shuang told them not to talk about her like that, and somebody else laughed and told the pair of them to stop flirting.
When it was time to leave, the mood shifted again. On the way home, Lin Shuang asked Wei Ming how he thought the evening had gone and told him, with her voice steady, that he had already set a trap for her. She said the whole thing had been a bit too much, and he answered that it had only been dinner together, that it was not too much at all.
She asked why he had arranged it that way and whether there had been some important client involved. The question hung between them longer than he wanted it to. Neither of them said everything they meant.
The next day, someone asked Sister Wei whether she had been happy yesterday. The answer was immediate: yesterday had been wonderful. Whoever spoke next said he had not expected Mr. Wei to have such a precious wife and added that his own wife did not have many friends, so she would be happy if Lin Shuang would spend time with her.
Then came the admission that Lin Shuang had actually been the better player at pool. Another person joked that next time they had to arrange a time to learn from her properly. The praise sounded harmless, but Lin Shuang had already begun to understand how praise moved inside circles like these, how quickly admiration could become calculation.
If she counted carefully, she sometimes felt that society had already abandoned people like her. These people, whether overbearing or moderate, all weighed the company’s hierarchy and their own interests first. Nothing in a room like that was simple, not even an invitation to dinner, not even a game that looked like leisure.
Someone close to her laid the politics out plainly. With the Peng Shi card in his hand, Wei Ming’s promotion to vice president was probably only a matter of one or two months. The new assistant, Huang Jiayi, was Director Huang’s daughter, and lately Wei Ming had shown a suspicious level of interest in her.
Lin Shuang asked whether that meant he intended to use Huang Jiayi to win Director Huang’s favor. The answer she received was cool and unsentimental: not necessarily as a matter of self-defense, but people always wanted more than they could safely hold. Wei Ming was still under forty, and his ambitions probably did not end with vice president. Above the vice president’s office sat the CEO’s chair, and some men could not resist staring upward.
The same voice admitted that Wei Ming really was talented and intelligent. Becoming a vice president would be a good fit for him. But if he wanted to control the larger situation and lead an entire company, then he still lacked something essential, something that looked like vision from a distance and like character up close.
He wanted Director Huang to become his support. In terms of ability, he had talent to spare, but when it came to handling women, he was said to be the best in the world, and no one meant that as a compliment. Huang Jiayi, well protected by her family and raised without needing to distinguish one kind of man from another, had likely already fallen into his trap.
If all he gained from helping raise Director Huang’s daughter was a favor, that favor would not be remembered for very long. But if he became Director Huang’s family, that was an entirely different matter. Lin Shuang asked whether the implication was that Wei Ming wanted to marry Huang Jiayi, and the answer came back that, given what they knew about him, it was not impossible.
That possibility violated every principle Lin Shuang still held. Anyway, she said, she still had to find a job quickly. Then, almost as if shifting from grief to strategy, she added that Wei Ming’s salary and bonuses were public enough to estimate.
Along with what she already knew about his dividends and his performance bonuses, she had made a rough calculation of his annual income. On top of that, he liked small games, informal side deals, and had taken a great many bribes. Everything she knew was in the file she handed over, and she thanked the other person sincerely, saying that this time the help had mattered.
Tu Nghi had said that, when assets were divided, the other side would definitely try to reduce the percentage she received. But if she understood the full picture of his income and made the divisible pie as large as possible, then she would, indirectly, walk away with more. They could not afford to ignore a single penny.
Not long after that, she heard that Pan Shi’s research room was hiring again. Someone asked whether she was going to apply, and she answered without hesitation that of course she was. It was the first answer she had given in a long time that sounded more like hunger than defense.
Elsewhere in the machinery of company life, someone checked with Brother Wei to confirm that they were heading to T2, and he said yes. A greeting followed, then a question about where Ming Bo was, since the company had supposedly sent him on the business trip. The answer was that Ming Bo had suddenly had an emergency and could not go, so the company had sent someone else instead, and the driver was told to start moving.
Over the past few months, Lin Shuang had indeed learned a great many lessons in a very short time. Besides becoming proficient again in computer programming languages, she had filled in old gaps in deep learning and recommendation systems. She had gone back to tools she once only knew in outline, studied them properly, and carried out more than a few pilot projects on her own.
At Pan Shi, those old projects and the ability to build on them still mattered. During one conversation, Brother Gu asked her the question nearly every woman with professional ambition is asked sooner or later: how exactly did she intend to balance her career and her family. Lin Shuang answered that the so-called equilibrium did not really exist, not in the sentimental way people liked to describe it. Most of the time, it was nothing more than trade-off and sacrifice.
But before accepting that as the whole truth, she clarified one thing. The trade-offs and sacrifices inside a family should not be carried by the woman alone. Every family member, including the children, had to shoulder responsibility, and only after each person began performing his or her role could unnecessary waste be reduced and the burden be minimized enough to approach something that resembled balance.
Brother Gu admitted that what she said made a great deal of sense, but he also called it an idealized state. In reality, he said, it was very difficult to achieve. Programming was a stressful profession, and even employees who had just graduated from college often felt overwhelmed, so what, exactly, did she intend to use as proof that she was competent?
Lin Shuang said she wanted to show everyone a schedule. Her day began at six in the morning with cleaning and getting dressed. By six-twenty she was already preparing breakfast and waking the family. At seven-fifteen she took her child to kindergarten, and by eight o’clock she was at the market buying groceries.
At eight-forty she was back home, cleaning the dining table, organizing clothes, handling payments, and taking care of whatever errands had piled up. In the middle of all that, she also took online classes on her phone. By twelve-thirty lunch was over and preparations for dinner had already begun, and by three in the afternoon she was back at kindergarten to pick up her child and take him to extracurricular classes devoted to language, math, art, Go, and any other skill the future was rumored to reward.
At five she returned home to cook. At six the family ate dinner. At seven-thirty she helped with personal hygiene and put the child to bed, and at nine she cleaned the room and got everything ready for the next morning’s breakfast before starting another two hours of study. At midnight, she cleaned herself up and finally went to sleep.
Then she added, quietly, that this was only her most ordinary day over the last few years. If an elderly family member or a child got sick, or if relatives suddenly arrived at the house, the schedule became much more complicated. Time management was only part of the story. Years of being a housewife had also sharpened her financial management, her ability to counsel family members psychologically, and her capacity to coordinate multiple moving parts at once.
Compared with the work assigned to a novice programmer, she believed the intensity and complexity of what she had already been doing were more than enough. Someone on the panel reminded the room that, in the earlier interview and written test, she had scored the highest. Her computational ability and engineering ability in machine learning were solid. Brother Gu then asked whether anyone had any further questions.
One final question came anyway: what if she still did not pass the interview. Lin Shuang answered that, when she had first started looking for a job again, her motivation had been very simple. She needed a salary. She chose programming because it was a skill she had once been good at and believed she could become good at again.
But over the previous months, during all the staggering and rebuilding, she had begun to remember something else. Once, as a housewife, she had lost herself in sameness, in a life so homogeneous that it had slowly erased her shape from the inside. So whether or not she could work at Pan Shi, she was still determined to continue on the path of finding herself and fulfilling herself.
The congratulations that followed were immediate. She was welcomed into Pan Shi Research Lab. She accepted the offer with a composure that had cost her years to earn and said she hoped that every day in the future, she could shine instead of merely being illuminated by someone else’s light.
