That night she told Jiang Hai that, starting tomorrow, she would be going to work at Pan Shi. She expected the first stage to be busy because every new job came with an adjustment period. She had already spoken to Aunt Deng from their neighborhood, and if she ever got off work late, Aunt Deng would help pick up Pingguo.
Jiang Hai thanked her for everything that had happened during that time and congratulated her, calling her Ms. Lin Shuang with mock ceremony that could not quite hide his warmth. Then he admitted, awkwardly, that if things changed like this, he might not be able to see her every day anymore. He said that if she had to leave work late and the roads were unsafe, he could still pick her up.
His next confession came out in fragments. He was already embarrassed, but sometimes, he said, he just wanted to hear her voice every day, to see her even from a distance, and that would have been enough. He insisted he did not mean anything else and did not want to bother her.
Lin Shuang stopped him as gently as she could. She told him that she really only saw him as an ordinary friend and hoped he would respect the boundaries between them. He said he understood, and before the moment could grow more painful, Pingguo burst in asking whether she had bought the rainbow lollipop she had promised.
Lin Shuang laughed and handed it over. Of course she had, because could a mother really fail to complete a task assigned by the state. Pingguo was told to go share the candy with friends, and the child ran off bright with satisfaction while the adults stood in the softer, sadder silence children never notice.
At work, another set of problems waited. Someone still treated Huang Jiayi like a child, too young to understand what a company was and too eager to play family games in a place that did not forgive innocence. Yet Huang Jiayi insisted she was not joking and that she genuinely wanted to learn something from Lin Shuang.
Another conflict rose over a business trip. Huang Jiayi pointed out that she had applied a long time ago, yet in the end Wei Ming had still chosen Ming Bo. Wei Ming said there were two reasons. First, Ming Bo had more work experience. Second, on business trips there would be social drinking, late nights, and all the ordinary inconveniences of male-defined corporate life, so it would be more convenient to have a man with him.
The accusation of workplace gender discrimination arrived immediately. Wei Ming denied that was what he was doing, but the logic was already exposed. It was not that she did the work poorly, she said. It was that he feared she would not do it well, and there was a difference between those two things he did not seem eager to admit.
She told him she would prove through action that his worries were completely unnecessary. Since there was no backup plan anyway, she would go back, review the information on the established businesses in Jiangnan, do all the homework required, and prepare for the site visits. They also had to visit several companies and places, so all routes and vehicles needed to be arranged in advance. He answered simply that it was fine.
When Lin Shuang officially arrived at Pan Shi, someone greeted her by name and told her she was welcome, that this was the beginning of her career as a programmer. She was placed under the development center, meaning the company’s research and development center, which currently held more than one hundred eighty developers. Pan Shi had always focused on technology, she was told, so the R&D center answered directly to the CEO.
She was shown the workspace next. There was an app she needed to download called Engine, the company’s internal collaboration system through which daily communication, leave applications, shift changes, and nearly everything else related to work could be handled. A map of seats was opened in front of her, and she was told that any green spot meant vacant.
She chose one. The guide nodded approvingly and showed her the way to the desk, then mentioned, almost cheerfully, that it sat directly opposite the general director’s office. Whether she worked hard, got lazy, or sneaked out, everything would be visible. It was, apparently, a famous Feng Shui treasure in all of Pan Shi, a spot too eye-catching to ignore.
The next week’s product requirements meeting had already been synchronized to her computer. She was told to read through everything herself and to comply with the rules and regulations exactly as written. When the meeting actually began, the speed of the discussion nearly outran her understanding, and when she admitted that the requirements were coming too fast, someone told her she would get used to it after hearing a few more sessions.
Pan Shi had its own strange culture of endurance. Late-night snacks were mentioned with the same tone people used for compensation. So were massages and overtime allowances, as if all three belonged to one ecosystem of managed exhaustion. Someone pushed a task toward her and told her to give it a try. Then another person reviewed her output, said the design was not quite right, and told her to take it to the backend for another pass.
No one sounded cruel. That almost made it harder. When she asked whether there was a problem, the answer came back that there was no problem, only that today might be difficult and the overnight plan might have to be revised.
At another meeting, she told Mr. Wei that a certain client had absolutely no sincere intention of cooperating with them and asked whether they could not just move on to someone better. He answered that no client was easy to calculate or easy to handle. Huang Jiayi, he said of someone else in the orbit of the deal, was a pampered rich girl who had lived quietly and never endured very much. Perhaps, for a while, she could hardly understand the life of an ordinary worker.
Someone responded with a line about fairy tales, saying that in those stories people always lived happily ever after after marriage. The answer came back that fairy tales and the real world were different. In the real world, people showed others the good side and hid the bad. Somewhere in that conversation, someone admitted that she did not particularly care for promotions and raises, and another fragment of the exchange brushed against the shadow of a father’s influence before the topic moved on.
The lesson about fairness returned later in an entirely different setting, when Pingguo was at practice. Lin Shuang stood by the side and asked why no one had passed the ball to the child. If the others did not even consider Pingguo a teammate, then what kind of teamwork were they talking about when they used words like solidarity and cooperation.
One of the children answered with brutal honesty. It was not that they did not want to treat Pingguo like a teammate, he said. He had wanted to pass the ball, but Pingguo ran too slowly. He was healthy and afraid he might knock her down, and then she would cry and say he was bullying her. In a game, everyone wanted to win. They could not just make Pingguo happy because she was a girl and let her do whatever she wanted.
Soon several of the other children were saying the same thing, that they did not want to practice with Pingguo anymore. The coach cut them off before it could become a mob and ordered them all to do the figure-eight drill twenty times. The gym filled with the sound of reluctant feet, discipline imposed too late to erase what had already been said.
Back at Pan Shi, someone asked Lin Shuang whether she was getting used to everything. She answered that she was actually pretty happy and that she did not mind working hard. Then came the warning she had not expected. The issue she had raised with Lao Sai the day before, a problem involving a quantitative algorithm, had been forwarded directly to Mr. He, the head of R&D, with a copy sent around in a way that made her look reckless.
Lin Shuang said she had not even known him well enough to predict that. The other person told her she did not need to explain, only to think carefully about what she would say when Mr. He came back from his business trip to Beijing the next day. That was when Lin Shuang understood just how cunning Lao Sai had been. She had sent him a private message to report the issue, and without any warning he had turned it into a weapon by forwarding it upward.
If Shuman had not told her early, she would not even have known she was being used. Around her, people spoke with the detached clarity of office veterans. As a beginner, they said, she had made herself easy prey. The most important thing for a newcomer was to bow one’s head and work while still lifting one’s eyes often enough to see the road. She had thrown herself into the task with complete goodwill and ended up making herself into a shield.
Lin Shuang admitted the whole thing felt unjust. When she had worked at Ark, she said, she did not remember the internal fighting feeling quite so vicious. The answer she received was that Ark had been in an earlier stage back then, with only a few dozen employees. Pan Shi, by contrast, had tens of thousands. In a place that size, naturally there were near relationships and distant relationships, factions, interests, and alliances. This was not a fairy world. Skill and hard work were not enough by themselves. A person also needed the ability to adapt.
Then Mr. He returned, and the feared conversation finally took place. He began by saying that, based on the recent trip to Beijing to negotiate the project, he had gained a better understanding of the client’s needs and would hold a private meeting with the colleagues in charge. Then he brought up the email he had received from a colleague reporting poor performance in the open-source quantitative algorithm.
Just before the meeting, he said, he had asked the Quality Assurance department to run the algorithm and test its performance. The result showed that the specific problem described in the email did not exist at all. Lin Shuang then explained that her original intention had only been to discuss the issue with Lao Chai and think through a solution together, but Lao Chai had not responded to her emails for a long time, so she had stayed up the night before continuing to work on the matter herself.
As for why he had chosen to report it upward in that way, she said she genuinely did not know. Instead of merely reporting problems, what they needed most was awareness and the ability to solve problems effectively. Mr. He listened and concluded that Pan Shi needed Lin Shuang’s pragmatic spirit.
She answered with her head slightly lowered, saying that she was only doing her job and that she was still just a newcomer. Her working principle, she said, was simple: bow your head and work, lift your head and be a good person. The meeting ended there, but the damage Lao Sai had intended for her had already turned itself inside out.
By the time she stepped out, someone was already congratulating her, telling her that she had become famous in one battle. In the future, the speaker said, it would probably be a little more difficult for anyone at Pan Shi to bully her. Lin Shuang answered honestly that she ought to be the one giving thanks.
The friend who had warned her brushed the gratitude aside with a laugh that had iron in it. When it came to the bastards in the workplace, she said, she had a hundred ways of dealing with them. She was watching, and she wanted to know who still dared to bully Lin Shuang now. Lin Shuang admitted that interpersonal relationships as a subject were actually much harder for her than her own technical field.
In the workplace, there were too many stories built out of favors, deception, and betrayal. Her friend answered that she knew, but that she also knew Lin Shuang was special. Then she asked whether Lin Shuang remembered the time she had gone to Jiang University to take classes. Of course she remembered.
The friend went on to say that she had heard from Zhou Xiaoqing in human resources that one woman had been separately arranged by General Manager Gu to attend those classes, while she herself had been arranged by Gu Xu. The implication was left hanging, and then the conversation was interrupted. Someone was told to keep going. Someone else warned Mr. He to be careful.
A question surfaced out of nowhere about motivation. Another voice snapped, asking whether someone had gone crazy and what exactly he wanted from her. Then someone advised the person in question to go back and rest. The scene passed quickly, one more unfinished fragment in a workplace full of unfinished things.
Later, when Lin Shuang was still in the office writing, someone told her he had already saved the file for her and that if she was tired, she should go home and sleep instead of wasting electricity in the office. The line should have been annoying, but it carried just enough playfulness to sound familiar rather than cruel. She found herself thinking about all the ways he seemed to appear around the edges of her effort, even arranging for her to attend classes and stepping in before she knew she needed help.
When she finally asked why, the answer came in two parts. First, he said, she was Professor Lin’s daughter. He could never fully repay the kindness Professor Lin had shown him, so the best he could do was show gratitude through her, which he compared to borrowing flowers to offer to Buddha.
Then the second reason emerged, and it was stranger, more personal, and much less gentle. For seven years, he said, he had lived in her shadow. To surpass her, he had gone to study in the United States, spending every day in libraries and laboratories. After starting his own company, he treated the office like home and spent two years turning his startup into an industry unicorn.
Even his decision to accept Pan Shi’s offer and return to China had been driven in large part by the desire to compete with her again. He had imagined countless versions of how they might meet after all that time, but he had never imagined this one. Then he asked whether she had read martial arts novels.
When she asked what he meant, he explained it in a way that was half joke and half confession. He had done everything he could, trained as if he were trying to become a martial arts master, all so that one day he could stand across from her again and compete. Now, after everything, he finally understood the feeling of invincibility, which was less triumph than loneliness.
The reason he wanted to help her, he said, was that he admired his old opponent. More than that, he hoped that one day she would regain the strength to compete with him again. Lin Shuang thanked him, but she also told the truth. She had only just managed to get close enough to Pan Shi to enter it. She was still miles away from being his opponent.
He said, with a shrug that tried to hide how much he meant it, that perhaps his wish would indeed be difficult to fulfill. But it did not matter. Everything gained required something to be lost. Fortunately for him, there was still a unique kind of pleasure in watching an old rival now work hard for him every day.
Lin Shuang looked at him and answered in kind. Unfortunately, she said, he would never experience the feeling she had just described from her side. If he could not bear it, he should go back and rest. But if the task was not finished, she added with perfect dryness, his salary would still be deducted.
