Chapter 51: Is This Supposed to Highlight Class Inequality in Dining?

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Inside the dim wooden booth, behind the bamboo curtain, the young woman held up her phone, encased in a white plush cover, and scanned the QR code on the brown wooden table. With a soft ding, the restaurant’s menu appeared on Xia Qianyi’s screen.

“Hey.” She raised her bright eyes and glanced at Gu Yin. As she began ordering, she said with a hint of irritation, “You did that on purpose just now, didn’t you?”

“Did what on purpose?” Gu Yin casually picked up the old-fashioned teapot. Accompanied by a trickling sound, he poured two cups of tea. He lifted one to his own lips with his left hand and handed the other to Xia Qianyi with his right.

That small gesture of courtesy dispelled some of the frost between the girl’s brows.

“You deliberately waited for me to come over and call out to you, didn’t you?” Xia Qianyi said.

“Pfft—cough, cough!” After taking a sip of barley tea, Gu Yin wiped his mouth with a tissue, his eyes darting away as he said casually, “You’re overthinking it. Do I really look like the kind of person who’s that vain?”

“You don’t look like one. You are one.” Xia Qianyi regarded him with undisguised contempt.

“…”

At a loss for words, Gu Yin changed the subject. “If you had even half the brains you have right now when you were practicing driving, I wouldn’t have suffered so much.”

“You!”

A flush of anger appeared on her delicate, rosy face. It was barely noticeable under the restaurant’s dim lighting, and Gu Yin seemed not to have noticed it—but that did not mean Xia Qianyi was any less furious.

“Haha, all right, all right. Hurry up and order. I’m starving.” Not wanting to waste any more time on the subject, Gu Yin simply urged her on.

Xia Qianyi rolled her eyes at him and began ordering.

This Japanese restaurant was actually rather upscale, specializing mostly in sashimi. Not only was the salmon freshly slaughtered each day, but even the tuna was transported by sea and cut up on the spot by the chefs. When they had first entered, they had even seen an enormous tuna head. It had been downright frightening.

Xia Qianyi ordered a sashimi platter with salmon, tuna, scallops, sweet shrimp, and more. Gu Yin, unlike her, did not go in for such refined and extravagant fare. He ordered a sushi platter and added a serving of sukiyaki. As he studied the menu, he suddenly grew curious and asked Xia Qianyi:

“What’s tempura?”

Gu Yin did not feel embarrassed in the slightest about not knowing. Nor did the big star laugh at him. She simply explained, “Vegetables and prawns coated in batter and deep-fried. They taste pretty good dipped in the sauce.”

“So it’s just fried vegetables and fried shrimp?” Gu Yin clearly knew all about this sort of thing. “This stuff is ridiculously expensive. Come eat at my house next time. Wouldn’t my mother’s fried eggplant and lotus-root sandwiches crush this?”

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“Your mother is a good cook?” At the mention of this, a trace of interest appeared in Xia Qianyi’s eyes.

“Oh, she’s only so-so.” Gu Yin pulled out his phone, opened the photo album, and showed it to Xia Qianyi. The pictures showed a whole table of food his mother had prepared when his uncle’s family had come over for a gathering during the National Day holiday. There were several fried dishes alone: lotus-root sandwiches, eggplant sandwiches, mung-bean fritters, crispy fried pork, and fried hairtail. As for the chicken, duck, fish, and meat, there was no need to say more. The warmth of a family gathering filled every corner of the feast.

“I’m jealous,” Xia Qianyi said softly. “I’ve never eaten food like that.”

At those words, a hint of carefully concealed loneliness passed through the girl’s eyes. Gu Yin noticed, but he had no habit of exposing other people’s wounds. Instead, he laughed and enlarged one of the dishes in the photo, pointing at it.

“Look at this. Do you know what it is?”

The picture showed a cold dish of intermingled yellow and green. The green vegetables looked like cucumbers, but Xia Qianyi had no idea what the yellow pieces were.

“What is it?”

“Youtiao mixed with cucumber!” Gu Yin clapped his hands. “This stuff has a really strong flavor. You’ve probably never had it, right?”

“No.” Bewilderment filled the girl’s eyes. “Those two things can actually be combined?”

“Why not?” Once food came up, Gu Yin became positively unstoppable. He went on at length about how it was made, where it tasted best, and how he could never gather with his friends without ordering it. In this high-end Japanese restaurant, he was probably the only person who would bring up such a heavy-flavored dish.

Strangely enough, Xia Qianyi was not put off at all. On the contrary, she listened with great interest. When Gu Yin finally finished, she asked, “After talking about it so much, can you actually make it?”

“Of course.” Gu Yin puffed himself up. “I’m the complete package—a fine gentleman in the drawing room and a master in the kitchen.”

The corners of Xia Qianyi’s pale lips lifted in an almost imperceptible smile. Then, without even realizing it, she said something she had never expected herself to say:

“Then, if we ever get the chance, make it for me.”

The moment the words left her mouth, Xia Qianyi realized that something was off. Given her relationship with Gu Yin, saying something like that seemed rather ambiguous.

Gu Yin, however, remained completely oblivious. With an impish grin, he said, “I suppose I could, but that would cost extra.”

He was only Xia Qianyi’s driving instructor. If she wanted to eat something good, she would have to pay an additional fee.

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Xia Qianyi: “…”

Her rose-colored filter over Gu Yin shattered once again. She thought to herself, What on earth was I ever so taken with him for? Gu Yin was plainly just like the sweet shrimp in the dish that had recently arrived—he had a shrimp head for a brain!

Gu Yin was miserly beyond belief, but the female star was generous. Seeing that he was too embarrassed to order more, she simply added some eel and several plates of wagyu beef for him to cook in the hot pot. Since she was paying, she could hardly let him go hungry.

The two of them ate and chatted like that.

At a table not far away sat Tong Liang and Jiang Yun.

Although they could not hear what Gu Yin and Xia Qianyi were discussing, the gaps in the bamboo curtain occasionally lifted just enough for them to see the two chatting animatedly. While this made them envious, it also suddenly gave them the strange feeling that some sort of class divide had emerged between their old classmate Gu Yin and themselves.

Wasn’t the class divide between people determined by the company they kept?

While they were still struggling against the hardships of ordinary life, Gu Yin was already chatting happily with a hugely popular female star. Wasn’t that, in itself, a kind of class divide?

Click.

Jiang Yun secretly took out her phone and, while the waiter was serving the dishes, stealthily snapped a distant, blurry photograph of Gu Yin and Xia Qianyi.

“She’s so beautiful…” Jiang Yun could not help sighing as she looked at the picture. People said Xia Qianyi was a beauty without a bad angle, and seeing her in person today proved it true. Even in such a blurry, distant shot, she looked exquisitely beautiful. There was simply no comparison.

“Hey.” Beside her, Tong Liang studied Xia Qianyi sourly for a long while before muttering quietly to Jiang Yun, “Who do you think is prettier, Xia Qianyi or Yu Jie?”

“Is that even a fair comparison?” Jiang Yun could not help rolling her eyes. She did not deny that her good friend Yu Jie had been the unrequited dream of every boy in their year, but Xia Qianyi was a bona fide celebrity, surrounded by the radiance of stardom. How could the two possibly be mentioned in the same breath?

…

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