2023

Hearing her own voice say the word hate, Chi Xiaoman’s first reaction was surprise; her second was to find it strange. After that came confusion, uncertainty, and unease.

Adults only cared about keeping up appearances. Where in the world were there so many loves and hates?

Thinking of that,

Chi Xiaoman noticed the sudden silence on the other end of the line. After a brief daze, she opened her mouth to say sorry, but then remembered that Chen Yue probably did not like hearing her apologize. The words reached her lips and stopped there, turning once more into cautious silence.

Perhaps Chen Yue was in the same state of mind. She, too, was silent for a long time. Then she suddenly laughed.

It was not an aggressive laugh, nor one that would make the person on the other end feel embarrassed. That only left Chi Xiaoman at a loss. She picked at the edge of her phone and could not help asking, “What are you laughing at?”

“Chi Xiaoman,” Chen Yue said her name.

Maybe because there was still a trace of laughter in her voice, the woman’s low murmur through the phone seemed almost close enough to be beside her.

“So you really haven’t changed at all.”

The line was blunt and abrupt, completely disconnected from anything else. Chi Xiaoman was bewildered. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

Chen Yue did not explain, only gently changed the subject. “Actually, you can think it over a little longer about Neon. There’s no need to give me an answer so soon.”

“Chen Yue.” When the topic came back around to this, Chi Xiaoman took a deep breath. “If you’re saying this because of my call today...”

“No.” Chen Yue’s voice sounded very calm, as if her judgment had not been shaken in the slightest by what Chi Xiaoman had just said. “I know you just dialed the wrong number.”

The strength in Chi Xiaoman’s fingers, which had been gripping her phone, loosened.

“Don’t worry,” Chen Yue said again. Her voice, carried by the wind, sounded unusually forgiving.

“I’m not angry because you’re making Neon without discussing it with me. On the contrary, when I heard about it, my first reaction was to be happy for you.”

“Because I know that choice took courage.”

“Whether from a market perspective, or because of... because of Lang Lang, I’ve never had the courage to do it myself.”

The words were reasonable and thorough from every angle, leaving Chi Xiaoman unable to say anything too harsh.

On this call, listening to Chen Yue’s voice, she suddenly realized once again—

this woman really did have the ability to make everyone feel at ease around her, to the point that no one could find a single fault with her. Even her, an old lover.

And precisely because of that,

Chi Xiaoman felt that she probably could not bear it if anyone said a single bad word about Chen Yue, if anyone picked on her because of Chi Xiaoman and called Chen Yue confused, unwise, or imperfect.

What she could least bear of all was that the one bringing all of this to Chen Yue was herself.

“Chen Yue.”

Chi Xiaoman did not know whether she now really counted as a pessimist, but even with this call still not hung up, the future she could imagine—the future that involved herself—was, to Chen Yue, one that should never have existed in the first place.

“Actually, you don’t need to get dragged into this mess with me at such a sensitive time.”

“I already owe you enough,” she said softly.

This phone call, which should never have been made in the first place, ended on an unpleasant note.

The call was hung up.

Chi Xiaoman could not tell whether this meant she had persuaded Chen Yue, or whether Chen Yue had shaken the certainty of her original resolve.

But that night,

when she lay in bed, staring blankly at the ceiling with tired eyes,

she also hoped Chen Yue had really listened to her.

She also hoped Chen Yue would suddenly come to her senses and stop trying to extend unnecessary kindness to a stubborn person like her.

Yet throughout the entire night, every word she had said to Chen Yue kept replaying in her mind.

So much so that Chi Xiaoman could not stop herself from getting up to check her phone and look through the call log.

Only then did she realize—less than ten minutes of call time was enough for her to remember the tone and ending of every sentence Chen Yue had spoken on the phone.

The length was very different from their calls long ago. But that was all right, because this matched the way things were now.

-

Call duration: 09:45.

After hanging up, perhaps because she had been too distracted, Chen Yue stared at those numbers for a while and suddenly found them unfamiliar.

Because in the past, there had also been a period when they were one in Beijing and one in Hong Kong, yet every call lasted at least two hours. Every time, Chi Xiaoman would be so sleepy she was practically falling over, and still insist on chatting with her endlessly, wanting to tell her everything that had happened that day, one interesting thing or one uninteresting thing after another, until every last detail had been covered.

Back then, Chi Xiaoman always said with complete confidence that the signal had already worked so hard running all the way from Beijing to Hong Kong; they couldn’t waste its effort!

The Chi Xiaoman of the past did everything with great force; even her words seemed to carry exclamation marks.

Now she did everything as carefully as possible; every word she spoke was so light, as if she were constantly afraid of putting unnecessary pressure or burden on others.

Chen Yue did not know whether she was the only one so fixated on this change, even to the point of getting hung up on it, but every time she heard Chi Xiaoman unconsciously say sorry, she really did feel sorrow and pain, along with a little ill-timed annoyance.

But when she heard Chi Xiaoman take the initiative to mention hate—a word rarely used in real life, a word that, like love, might make people laugh at you for being silly and naive if you said it out loud—

Chen Yue was suddenly at a loss for words.

And she secretly felt relieved for the part of that innocence that might still remain in Chi Xiaoman.

After hanging up,

Chen Yue rubbed at the ache between her brows, put on her glasses, and once again looked at a shot in The Clouds of Zhou Yun through the blue glow of the projection screen—a shot she had already watched more than a hundred times.

It was when she could no longer remember how many times she had watched it that

the phone screen lit up.

It was that unfamiliar number she had not saved.

Late at night, it sent her a text that looked inexplicably strange:

[Chen Yue, have you locked yourself away again?]

Chen Yue stared at it for a while.

When she picked up the phone, she felt a little dazed.

Only when she looked out the window did she realize it was already very, very late at night.

The text from the number ending in 9873 was right. Chen Yue really had locked herself away again.

It was her habit.

Or perhaps compulsion was more accurate. Chen Yue did not deny that she was stubborn by nature, that she often got stuck in her own head, and that whenever she could not figure something out, or when her mood was less than pleasant, she would do things that seemed very strange to other people—

like now, locking herself away, saying nothing, staying in a sealed space, not sleeping, not talking, hardly needing to eat, until she finally thought through whatever it was she needed to think through.

In the past, this usually happened because of her mother, Chen Xiaoping, and because of doubts and regrets over one of her own choices. Now that her relationship with Chen Xiaoping had been repaired, it happened far less often.

This time it was because of The Clouds of Zhou Yun.

Perhaps glory was only a momentary thing.

But that moment was not actually short.

Because the feeling it brought was often delayed; it crashed over you from all directions, leaving no room to breathe and giving Chen Yue almost no space to think.

During this period, magazine interviews came in nonstop. Most of the questions and post-interview remarks were friendly and kind, as if everyone truly was happy for her.

Some said she had top-tier talent, that out of the five films she had starred in, two had won Best Actress; others said she was willing to settle down and refine her craft, that although she had not acted in many films, she had worked her way all the way from stunt double to leading actress;

still others compared her to a previous grand-slam Best Actress and claimed that in the future, she might well become the grand-slam Best Actress of this era...

It was not as if she had been lost in it.

But all kinds of voices had rushed at her; during this time, Chen Yue really had no chance to sort through anything or fully absorb it.

Until, on an ordinary afternoon after winning the award, a few perfectly ordinary-sounding questions were asked by a rookie reporter who seemed so cautious it bordered on hesitant—

Chen Yue, there have been so many voices lately, and many people are saying that how did we only just discover what a good actress Chen Yue is?

What about you?

Are you really satisfied with your performance in The Clouds of Zhou Yun?

Do you think this award was truly well deserved, with no regrets left at all?

It was not that all of these questions were hard to answer, nor that Chen Yue lacked confidence in her acting.

Because that afternoon,

she still gave an appropriate, slightly engaging answer—one suitable for public release and beneficial to her image.

After the interview ended, she had dinner with her agent, Shen Yin, and they chatted amicably about work during this period; she mentioned that she might need to rest for a while.

Shen Yin had no objection. When they parted, she patted Chen Yue’s shoulder a little drunkenly and said she had worked hard lately, and that she would try her best to reduce her workload.

Chen Yue smiled and thanked her as usual, then drove Shen Yin back to her place on the mountain. She herself drove an hour back to her apartment, where in the middle of the night she personally cleaned the entire place, locked the doors and windows twice, checked them three times, replied to every missed call and message, and contacted the cleaning lady to say she would not need to come by for the foreseeable future.

It was from that day on that she no longer went out.

She also stopped contacting anyone, locking herself in that not-very-large apartment, watching The Clouds of Zhou Yun day and night, endlessly picking apart her own performance in every shot.

She was not doing this to reassure herself, so it was more than simply running through the footage once. It was not because she genuinely thought something was wrong. She wanted confirmation.

And she also believed that only a thousand, ten thousand repetitions counted as true verification, and could truly let this matter leave her own hands.

Based on this idea, Chen Yue sometimes felt that she was not a particularly suitable person for intimacy.

Because she was strange in her thinking, not used to expressing emotions sincerely, and always prone to getting trapped in dead ends over some moment or some question.

And if someone truly wanted to get close to her and earn her recognition, it would take a great deal of effort.

She could no longer remember how many days she had shut herself inside the apartment since the last meal she had with Shen Yin.

What she remembered was that Shen Yin’s daughter, Shen Baozhi, sent her a message asking whether she could share Chen Yue’s private contact information with Chi Xiaoman, because the other party had something she wanted to discuss about the film Neon.

Chen Yue agreed.

Actually, she had not kept much contact with Shen Baozhi, who had only returned to the country in recent years.

But Chen Yue felt she understood Chi Xiaoman well enough to know that the other woman’s temperament had changed a great deal by now, to the point that saying she was avoiding her like the plague would not be an exaggeration. There was no chance Chi Xiaoman would take the initiative to ask Shen Baozhi to help contact her, nor that she would actually make the call herself.

But that night,

Chen Yue still turned off silent mode and, amid the film clips playing on repeat, waited until a call came in from an unfamiliar number ending in 9873.

And the owner of 9873 seemed to still know her very well; she clearly understood that after winning the award, Chen Yue would need a lot of time to think.

She also understood that Chen Yue absolutely would not do this during her busiest period after the award; the most likely scenario was that she would wait until everything had quieted down and then hide away by herself.

Even after the call ended, she had finally sensed that something was off; after some time spent thinking and struggling, she had weighed it over and over before choosing to send this text that did not contain much concern.

Even though their call just now had lasted less than ten minutes and there had already been plenty of unpleasantness.

The owner of 9873 still seemed to keep the same good habit as before: never holding grudges, never remembering resentment, only remembering kindness.

No matter how badly she fought with someone, when she saw them again next time, she would still be smiling.

She might still be angry and arguing one second; the next, upon seeing Chen Yue standing in the sun,

she would hurry over in a sweat, pull her into the shade to escape the heat, and rather stand there stiffly in the sun herself while having a cold war with her.

Because of that good habit, they almost never fought when they were together. Even when they had the occasional spat, they never lasted more than ten minutes.

Because Chi Xiaoman’s basic rule when dating was that a fight could not last longer than ten minutes. Back then, Chi Xiaoman always said that once an argument went past ten minutes, it became very hard to make up properly.

Ding—

The phone vibrated.

Chen Yue pulled herself out of her thoughts and saw another new text light up in the center of the screen:

[Chen Yue, don’t lock yourself away.]

There was almost no tone to it, as if the sender was afraid that if she hid away, she would end up sick, but could not find a way to say it that wouldn’t make Chen Yue feel she was being unnecessary.

So she chose the clumsiest, most direct way.

Chen Yue lowered her eyes.

She wanted to type. Her fingers curled; she wanted to say okay, but stopped partway through.

Less than five minutes.

Just as she had expected.

A third text, one that might have been repeatedly considered, deleted, and hesitated over before being sent at all, finally came through:

[Because I watched The Clouds of Zhou Yun.]

It seemed Chen Yue had misunderstood her. Because thirty-year-old Chi Xiaoman was always uneasy and uncertain, her voice had grown much softer, and every sentence she sent no longer ended with an exclamation mark.

Yet when it came to being Chen Yue’s number-one supporter, she still seemed to have overwhelming determination:

[You are the most deserving Best Actress of all.]

[Author’s Note]

On time for the fifteenth day of Little Neon [sunglasses]

Today’s word count is already a lot (praise me)