Baby
My name is Xie Yanli. I’m a sophomore in college, and I’ve never dated anyone. I think coding is better than romance.
But my roommate, Jiang Yuan, has been acting crazy lately: going to bed and getting up early, not cursing, avoiding spicy food, and even folding my blanket into a perfect square. Something’s definitely up. He asks me to go back to his hometown with him, saying his uncle won’t be home and we can stay there as long as we like.
Then, as soon as we walk in, his uncle comes down from the third floor.
Jiang Huaiyuan is two years older than me. He doesn’t look like an uncle; he looks like he stepped off a magazine cover. He remembers that I like sweet porridge, replaces my pillow the moment it bothers me, and quietly cooks a whole table of dishes after I casually say, “Tomato and egg stir-fry is pretty good.”
He drives to my dorm in the middle of the night just to make sure I’m safe. At the airport parking lot, he gets everyone in place, then says, “I told you I wouldn’t follow you, but I never said I wouldn’t come myself.”
There’s a shiny silver ring worn smooth on his finger. When I ask why he always wears it, he says, “I’m waiting for someone to put it on.”
I think he’s joking, until he blocks me at the door and asks in a low voice, “Would you be willing to wear it?”
My mother’s situation, the Jiang family’s debts, the grudges of the previous generation: he says they’re all in the past. He says he’s waited all these years for one reason only: to meet someone named Xie Yanli.
I want to run, but I can’t. The way he looks at me is harder to escape than an infinite loop in my code.
There are a lot of things that are not smooth. For example, when he talks to himself, sometimes it is clearly said by another person, but he does not change it. He does not even say why the man is Jiang's mother, as if it is a matter of course. Later, he even says that the man's mother is pregnant with Jiang.
It's so confusing that I can't understand it. Age is also a big issue. Lin is in his fifties and has three children. The eldest grandson is 20 years old. The younger son is two years older than the eldest grandson, but the difference between the eldest son and the younger son is only a dozen years? The writing is too messy. I feel like I wrote which sentence in a dream and I can't understand it. The characters' outlook on life is all very distorted.