On Military Training Day, He Lost to a Girl

Seventeen-year-old twins Chen Zhishui and Chen Zhinian ranked first and second across the city in their high school entrance exams. Their father, Chen Lin, was one of the founders of Chengfeng Tech, and their mother was the well-known author Xu Nuo. Online commenters called theirs a family with “divine genes.”

During freshman military training, Chen Zhishui, the city's top student, made his first misjudgment: when a classmate collapsed from heatstroke, he thought she was having an epileptic seizure.

A girl pushed through the crowd and crouched down. “It's not epilepsy. It's heatstroke. We need to cool her down first.”

Her name was Shen Nian. Both her parents were doctors at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, and she had wanted to study medicine since childhood. That day, when she stood up, she barely even looked at him.

From then on came their names side by side on the honor roll, the silence across a table in the library, and the bench they shared on winter nights in the training camp. She taught him how to do experiments, and he helped her with reading comprehension. She remembered how steady his hands were; he remembered the spot where the mole on the back of her hand sat.