Watching Flames

HE

Xia Baolai is twenty-five this year and a sociology graduate student at Yuan University.

Living under the halo of being "Professor Xia's niece," she is determined to produce the most authentic and insightful research possible.

Her classmates all think she's crazy. She could get the best resources without lifting a finger, yet she insists on taking a semester off and walking the streets with a heavy tool bag to work as a cleaner.

Li Yan is twenty-two this year and a veteran cleaner at a housekeeping company.

The company assigns her apprentices every so often. They come and go, never making much of a ripple in her life.

She goes from one client's home to the next, checking the app every morning to see whether her daily wages have come through.

Later...

Xia Baolai's sociology research was published as a collection, attracting widespread attention from academia and society at large.

At academic conferences of every size, she always begins her speech by showing a photo on the big screen and telling the audience, "First of all, I want to thank my mentor, Ms. Li."

Li Yan became the youngest cleaning instructor at her company.

With her broad range of expertise, lively humor, and endless patience, she tells amusing stories about her encounters with all kinds of difficult or eccentric clients, making her students laugh until they cry.

One student turned her stories into short videos and posted them online. At last, someone noticed how much she resembled the woman in the photo shown during sociology scholar Xia Baolai's speeches.

"That Xia Baolai who wrote the book, was she really your apprentice? Are you still in touch?"

Students asked Li Yan this all the time.

"We're not in touch anymore."

What she didn't say was that before they lost contact, they had squeezed into a tiny rented room and spent three months living together, sharing meals and even falling asleep in each other's arms.

Theme: The things a person fears are often the very things she ought to do.