At 34, Gu Wanqing is an elementary school third-grade homeroom teacher. She can keep even the most rambunctious students in line, but she can’t get her own life under control. She’s repaired her desk lamp three times because she can’t bring herself to throw it out, and seven blind dates have come to nothing. When her mother nags her to get married, all she can manage is a dismissive “Soon, soon.” She thinks the rest of her life will be just as uneventful.
At the parents’ meeting, Fu Shen, seated in the back row, disrupted her quiet routine. While everyone else scrolled through their phones, he carefully drew a mind map, breaking down the points system she’d explained. After the meeting, the man in the black jacket stood up. “Ms. Gu, I’m Fu Yao’s guardian. Fu Shen.”
At 28, Fu Shen is a tech mogul worth nearly a billion yuan. Yet he rents an apartment in an old neighborhood and can’t bring himself to buy a parking space. The one person he cares for with all his heart is his selectively mute niece, Fu Yao. He uses his role as a parent to get close to Gu Wanqing. Late at night, he sends her voice messages from the child followed by “Good night.” He finds her an out-of-print teaching guide and a photocopy of it, with a note on the title page: “The original costs too much, but this won’t get in the way of reading.”
Gu Wanqing turns him down three times, not because she’s playing hard to get. When she was twelve, her mother burned all her father’s letters, leaving her convinced she couldn’t hold on to anything too good. Fu Shen doesn’t know how to pursue someone. He clumsily waits for her after work, brings her favorite wontons, and offers her hand cream, making a point of saying, “It wasn’t expensive.”
This isn’t a Cinderella story.
It’s about a woman who refuses to replace a lamp she’s repaired three times teaching a man who buys a 150,000-yuan sofa without blinking what it means to have a home.
A music teacher’s probing questions make her waver. At 34, can she still let herself love without holding back?
He says, “It’s not you trying to catch up with me. I’ll slow down and wait for you.”
