The phone screen lit up for the seventh time, and the ultimatum from my mother lay quietly in the WeChat dialog box like a time bomb.
"Lin Wan, at three o'clock this afternoon, we will be on the top floor of the Cloud Cafe. If you don't come, we will pretend that we never gave birth to your daughter."
Followed by a location and a string of unfamiliar numbers.
I stared at that line of words for five minutes, until my eyes were sore. The city outside the window glowed with a pale golden halo in the early summer sunlight, but I just felt cold all over. Twenty-nine years old, an ordinary editor of a publishing house, without a house, a car, and a boyfriend—in the eyes of my mother, this was probably ironclad evidence of failure in life. In the past six months, she has arranged blind dates for me at an average frequency of twice a week. From civil servants to programmers, from overseas elites to entrepreneurial bosses, I always messed up for various reasons.
