Chapter 29
Tong Yufei received the divorce summons on the fourth day after Mo Daoyan moved out. Because of the Spring Festival holiday and the divorce case schedule, more than two months had passed since he filed the lawsuit. The summons was sent by registered mail. When the old man in the message room handed it to her, he muttered, why is it sent by the court?
He Yanjun was on the phone nearby. When he heard the voice, he looked towards her and his eyelids fluttered. His expression seemed to say, "It's true."
She walked towards He Yanjun and whispered in his ear, "Your brother once stopped me on the road. To convince me to be with him, he boasted about our family's wealth, such as how your brother-in-law was omnipotent and how he turned the expensive supplies from the grain and oil station into his own."
He Yanjun's expression suddenly changed: "What do you mean by that?"
"That's what you mean. I've left this letter unopened. No one knows its contents. Only you know I received it. If you hear any gossip about me in the future, I'll treat it as a slip of the tongue. Then... I'll inevitably make a slip of the tongue too."
As soon as I stepped out of the reception room, He Yanjun's shrill voice chased me out: "You think you're Liu Xiaoqing! Who cares to say it!"
The divorce summons in the letter was a light yellow paper document with the name of the court and the case number printed on it. The main body of the document contained her basic information. The reason for the summons was a divorce lawsuit. Below was the specific time and place of the court hearing, as well as a few precautions, such as the identification documents and work certificates that needed to be brought. The wording was concise and clear without a single useless word. The words were filled with a cold legal meaning, as if Mo Daoyan had written it himself with a grim face.
She tore up the subpoena and would not let the relationship end. It was not the right time yet. She didn't know if it was an illusion, but after her family came to the Mo family, Mo Daoyan's relationship with her became more harmonious, which was very different from when he filed the lawsuit. She always felt that there was still a chance.
Recently, Xinli Company's new product entered the pre-production testing phase. To ensure perfect results, Mo Daoyan and his colleagues remained by the machines day and night, closely scrutinizing every set of data, practically without sleep. Xinli has its own cafeteria, managed by Professor Yan Qi's brother, a former chemical factory chef with a knack for running it. For the same price, workers not only get enough to eat, but also enjoy a good meal, even better than at restaurants. Even workers from the nearby eyewear factory often come to try their meals. However, the cafeteria has to control costs and balance profitability, so naturally, the food is not as nutritious as a private kitchen. Mo Daoyan, a picky eater, has noticeably lost weight in two months.
This month, she worked late nights, sleeping until five in the afternoon after work. She would wake up and cook for herself, preparing two meat dishes, two vegetable dishes, and a soup, steaming rice, and putting it in a dark green thermos to take to Mo Daoyan. She usually arrived at their company by seven-thirty, and if Mo Daoyan hadn't eaten yet, he would take her to the cubicle behind the laboratory for dinner. It was a single room that served both as an office and a rest area. It used to be the quality inspection room of a leather shoe factory, with a dilapidated wooden door that couldn't be locked. Mo Daoyan had kept it spotless and covered it with lake blue wallpaper. There was a desktop computer inside, which she used to write program code, design circuits, and record data. Due to its frequent use, the computer often broke down and was far less reliable than handwritten "rough sketches." Therefore, Mo Daoyan had to prepare additional handwritten drafts to ensure the security of the original data.
After delivering the meal, her mission was complete, and she could have taken the bus directly back to the newspaper office. But she didn't rush to leave. Instead, she stayed to eat with him, occasionally telling him some interesting stories from the newspaper office. One of them was about a reporter who had written the Minister of Education's name backwards in an interview. Two proofreaders failed to notice, and after the headline appeared in the newspaper, everyone was punished by running a 10,000-meter race. One person ran so hard that he shouted that he would never work at the newspaper office again. When asked by colleagues what else he could do, he replied that as Minister of Education, he could be called whatever his surname was, and it didn't matter if the two characters were reversed. So everyone was spared the 10,000-meter run.
Although this incident is hilarious, we should not make such low-level common sense mistakes. It is most frustrating to have a small accident.
The second interesting thing was that an editor made the mistake in writing the title of a Japanese commerce minister who was visiting Xicheng, and made the mistake twice in a row. After Sister Xin discovered it, she reminded the editor to make changes in time. Afterwards, everyone broke out in a cold sweat. Given the special nature of the relationship between the two countries, if the facts were wrong and published in the newspaper, it would cause great political risks.
She said with considerable pride: "Our proofreading is more than just finding typos."
Mo Daoyan followed her words and said, "Learn from Comrade Lei Feng's screw-like spirit. Do one thing, love one thing, and delve into one thing. Don't take the reporter exam, just continue to be a proofreader."
She smiled coquettishly and said, "I want to be a good reporter who can proofread."
After Mo Daoyan finished his meal, he returned to the laboratory to continue adjusting the program. She followed him and sat quietly beside him, reading the news writing he brought, or occasionally asking Mo Daoyan some questions, such as why the volume of the refrigerator he was testing was much smaller than the one at home. Mo Daoyan was full of confidence in the newly designed fluorine-free refrigerator, and he explained to her the improvements in refrigeration, defrosting, and noise reduction of the new product. He emphasized that these technologies are completely different from traditional refrigerators and are incomparable to ordinary refrigerators that are prone to frost and use a shared evaporator for refrigeration and freezing.
As long as time permits, he is happy to share his professional knowledge. Whenever a colleague passes by and sees this scene, they would mistakenly think that they are a couple who speak in unison. After all, he rarely talks so much. However, they don’t know that his divorce certificate has already been issued, but it was Chen Huaili who issued the certificate for him. Not only did this save them the tedious mediation steps, but the confidentiality work was also done perfectly.
If she arrived at the company, Mo Daoyan had already had dinner in the cafeteria, and the food she brought would be distributed to his colleagues. Zhou Dinghe and Ji Xilin, as well as Da Ding, a colleague who worked in the same laboratory as Mo Daoyan and was on night shift in another cubicle across from him, all got to know her when they shared the delicacies she brought.
Da Ding is eight years older than Mo Daoyan and has been married for five years. His wife is his childhood sweetheart. Six months after their marriage, she flew to Moscow to study abroad and has not returned since. Due to the high cost of air tickets, he can only fly to Moscow once a year in July to relieve his homesickness. He is like the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. He envies Mo Daoyan for being able to have his wife by his side, and often nags Mo Daoyan to cherish Tong Yufei, saying that she is such a rare girl. Only those who have been alone in an empty room know how it feels.
Don't just smile and say nothing. Da Ding's ability to see things from other people's perspectives and understand other people's emotions is rare, but his kindness may have been misplaced. His wife may be happier when she is left alone in the house. At least she doesn't have to bring him meals or sit with him.
Zhou Dinghe, having already learned from Mo Daoyan that she came from a farming family, took a special liking to her. For a girl to earn Mo Daoyan's affections by relying on her own strength to get into university, rather than relying on her family, was a testament to her charm. Ji Xilin, after enjoying Tong Yufei's three-fresh dumplings, showed a rare eagerness to connect. She asked Tong Yufei if she went to Railway No. 1 Elementary School and if she had an older brother. Tong Yufei resembled a childhood friend of her younger brother's.
Tong Yufei smiled and denied: "I only have one biological brother."
Zhou Dinghe laughed at Ji Xilin's clumsy approach: "Xilin, your way of making friends is so unfashionable."
At 11 o'clock in the evening, she rode her bike away and rushed to the newspaper office. She was always nervous when traveling at night, but that was the inevitable price of giving warmth, and she had to try to overcome it. Mo Daoyan sent her out the door and told her not to come again. There was no essential difference between the meals she cooked and the scarves she knitted. Neither of them was something he desperately needed her to do, especially delivering meals. The cost-effectiveness of this time bill was too low.
The weeping crabapple tree next to her stood quietly in the moonlight. She stared at it in silence for a moment, then asked softly, "Can I come and see the crabapple blossoms?"
The next day, she showed up on time as usual.
On the 25th, she worked three hours of overtime and arrived at Xinli three hours late. The office area and laboratory were empty and dark, with only the running machines humming and indicator lights flashing occasionally. The door of the compartment was ajar, and faint computer light shone out from inside. She pushed the door open and saw Mo Daoyan sitting in front of the desktop computer, thinking hard, his cigarette half-lit and half-smooth, burning to his fingers.
A dim environment is conducive to thinking. When he's not writing code, he often doesn't turn on the lights. Recently, the test data for some components of the new machine have been quite good, but the overall stability has not yet met expectations. He feels like he's hit a dead end. After two days of hard thinking, he still has no progress. He hears the door open, looks up, and says in a hoarse voice, "The switch is behind the door."
She flipped the switch, the tungsten filament trembling twice, and light filtered through the frosted lampshade, casting a hazy glow. She stepped out of the halo, pulled an aluminum lunch box from her bag, and placed it on the tea table next to the cot. "I made pizza. It's definitely not as authentic as the ones you eat in Germany, but it's okay for what you eat."
When she got tired of reading professional books, she would read some extracurricular books to refresh her brain. Among them were some articles about German cuisine, which mentioned pizza. When Sister Xin went on a business trip to the United States, she went to Pizza Hut and ate banana cheese pizza. After she came back, she thought about it day and night and said that if Pizza Hut opened in Xicheng one day, she would definitely be the first in line. On a whim, she looked up the recipe and made fruit-flavored pizza in the oven using apples, dragon fruit, potatoes and sausages as ingredients.
Mo Daoyan washed his face, pulled a chair and sat down, not rushing to eat: "Tong Yufei, let's dance."
She fetched a basin of water for Mo Daoyan and placed it on the washstand. She then took out a tin teapot, unscrewed the wooden stopper of the kettle, and poured water to make honeysuckle tea for him. "Why are you interested in dancing?"
"Your old injury... can you still jump?"
“There may be some problems with the higher difficulty ones.”
"It doesn't have to be difficult. I'm not an examiner."
She paused slightly, then quickly regained her composure, trying to suppress the disturbing thoughts in her mind: "Dance here?"
"If you feel like the space is too small to move around and you want to go to the lab or outside, I'll go with you."
"What dance do you want to see?"
"You are an expert, you decide."
After a brief hesitation, she chose a reverberating pipa piece from the folk dance drama "Silk Road Flower Rain." Set during the heyday of the Tang Dynasty, "Silk Road Flower Rain" draws inspiration from the world-famous Silk Road and the murals of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang. The magnificent stage sets and costumes were also a highlight of the performance, but they were now absent. Furthermore, considering the cramped cubicle's limited movement, she streamlined the set. Since there were no stage lights, she turned them off and had Mo Daoyan use a flashlight, gently waving it for fill light. Without a gauze-lined dress, she stretched her arms and gracefully leaped into the "center of the stage," a little over a meter from Mo Daoyan, at the center of the room, tapping her toes and gently swirling her waist.
If it were a real stage, the dancers would pick up the pipa with their backhands while their sleeves fluttered, and lightly pluck the strings with their fingertips, and clear music would flow out. She was no longer a dancer, and had no chance to go on stage again. There was no pipa here, so she took Mo Daoyan's tennis racket, sometimes looking up and back at the road ahead, and sometimes lowering her brows and casually plucking the racket head. The tennis racket made a messy and strange noise, and amid the continuous strange noise, she lifted her cardigan and pretended that her skirt was flying.
At the end of the dance, the beat of the "pipa sound" became faster, and her dance steps also quickened accordingly. While spinning rapidly, she thought of her graduation drama, the last performance in the school auditorium that could accommodate 150 people. She danced to "Silk Road Flower Rain". At that time, her turns seemed to carry the charm of the thousand-year-old Silk Road, and the seasonal petals fluttered to create a beautiful atmosphere. She spun and jumped freely on the circular stage, as if she had traveled back to the prosperous Tang Dynasty thousands of years ago, and saw the lonely smoke in the desert and the setting sun on the long river on the Silk Road, and heard the sound of camel bells and the laughter of merchants coming and going.
As the last note of "Pipa" fell, she, who was once frozen in the state of flying, with the pipa leaning against her shoulder, bathed in colorful soft light, forming a flowing Dunhuang mural. Now she was frozen in the state of flying as she imagined, but was hit on the head by the handle of a tennis racket.
The flashlight disappeared, and she sank into the darkness again: "I haven't danced for a long time, it's a bit strange..."
She was still speaking when she suddenly felt her shoulders sink and Mo Daoyan hugged her from behind.
His voice brushed past my ears: "I don't understand dancing, but I must give an evaluation. I don't think I'm unfamiliar with it. Instead, it's like a hidden master showing his brilliance for the first time. It's just..."
"Just what?"
He plucked the tennis racket from her hand and threw it onto the coffee table. He gently lifted her chin and slowly turned her face towards him: "Do you want to try love? Starting tonight."
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