[Shenzhen, 2024. I’m sitting in the director’s office on the 30th floor of Tencent. There’s an encrypted Excel spreadsheet on my computer. It has 168 rows. One name and one date per row. From 2010 to 2024, fourteen years. This is my track record. It’s also my medical record.]
My name is Ethan. I’m from Shenyang. My parents divorced when I was nine, and I went with my mom. Whenever I filled out a family information form as a kid, the space for my father was always blank.
I scored 641 on the college entrance exam and got into the computer science department at Dalian University of Technology. By thirty, I was a technical director. I had a smoother career in the big tech industry than most people.
My love life went even “smoother.”
My first love was in college. In our junior year, I met someone prettier during freshman orientation and broke up with her on the spot. My ex knelt on the ground and begged me not to leave. I turned around and said, “We’re not right for each other.” After that, I developed a precise social algorithm: get into bed within three dates, prioritize long-distance relationships, never make the first move, never refuse, never take responsibility. In fourteen years, there were 168 names. One woman forgave me for cheating on her for ten years, then set me up and ruined my reputation. Another was the richest woman in Xiangtan. I failed to respond to her romantic talk about traveling the world together. One was divorced with a child, and when we broke up, she forced me to play daddy to her daughter for two days.
For a while, I thought this was the standard answer to life: as long as you ran fast enough, emptiness couldn’t catch up with you. But emptiness is a strange thing. The faster you run, the clearer its footsteps become.
This isn’t a book about how to become a womanizer. It’s the story of a boy starved of love who spent fourteen years and went through 168 women before learning how to love one person.
