“Escape Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Go home and be a good-for-nothing.”
Shen Qingxia, a 27-year-old overachiever at a major internet company, finally snapped after staying up all night to finish her 108th PowerPoint presentation.
She quit without notice, blocked her boss, and rushed onto an overnight train back to Yunxi Town in Jiangnan. She swore she’d never touch KPIs or daily active user figures again, and just wanted to inherit her grandma’s rundown tea garden and enjoy a leisurely life, “picking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge.”
But barely had she arrived in the village when her ex-boyfriend of three years, Gu Yunshen, CEO of a tech unicorn, came crashing in with his Maybach and smashed her suitcase.
That collision sparked a tangled romance.
To develop a “digital nomad base,” Gu Yunshen not only rented a place in her home without asking, but also turned her tea garden into a massive “high-tech and wild ideas” testing ground:
She wanted to hand-pick tea; he said robotic arms were 300% more efficient.
She wanted a big yellow dog; he brought in a fleet of patrol drones.
She wanted to create a bit of new-Chinese-style charm; his algorithms analyzed “a broken, melancholy vibe” as the best way to attract traffic.
Just as Shen Qingxia was about to kick him out, a video tagged “Billionaire CEO carries a chicken at the market” went viral by accident.
The whole internet went wild, and the tea garden became a hit.
Facing pressure from the board and a flood of online spectators, Gu Yunshen adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses and brewed her a pot of tea on livestream, in front of tens of millions of viewers.
“My algorithms can predict user behavior hundreds of millions of times over, but they can’t predict the moment my heart races when I see you.”
It turned out every perfectly targeted recommendation had been part of his long-laid plan.
