Chapter 2

2

Wen Yan had no time to ponder the strange “dream” from last night. He quickly flipped through his textbooks, jotting down a rough outline when time ran short. After washing up and grabbing a quick breakfast at the cafeteria, he had to head to the classroom to lead the children’s morning reading session.

As soon as he stepped out the door, he ran into Teacher Fan, who taught mathematics. The old man was in his early sixties and should have retired, but with the severe shortage of teaching staff, he had no choice but to stay on and hold the fort.

Teacher Fan was a local and didn’t need to live in the faculty dorms like Wen Yan, but he had stayed late grading homework the night before and spent the night in the room next to Wen Yan’s. The so-called faculty dorms were really just a few single-story rooms.

“Little Wen, you’ve been here a whole semester. Still not used to it?” Teacher Fan greeted him with a genial smile.

Wen Yan was baffled. “Teacher Fan, why do you say that?”

Teacher Fan said, “I heard you yelling outside in the middle of the night.”

Wen Yan blurted, “Huh? Ah!”

The first was confusion; the second was an exclamation of surprise.

He suddenly remembered those scribbled, venting lines on his English textbook, and an ominous premonition crept into his heart.

The old man kept rambling, “Ah, I know this place can’t hold people. It’s not easy for young folks to stick it out for a semester. But it used to be even harder. A few years ago, there weren’t even proper roads, and you had to walk several li^[1] just to get to a convenience store. Now the village even has a mini-mart…”

Wen Yan offered a dry laugh. “Teacher Fan, could you have misheard? I was asleep at my desk until dawn. I never went outside to shout.”

“Think I wouldn’t recognize your voice?” Teacher Fan gave him a look that said, No need to explain.

Thinking back on what happened last night, Wen Yan couldn’t explain his bitter plight and could only change the subject to brush it off.

He had four classes to teach that morning: two Chinese classes and two English classes. With so few teachers at the school, the few of them had to work around the clock.

Arranging a diagnostic test for Chinese was easy enough, but teaching English was truly a first for him, like a maiden boarding a bridal sedan^[2]. Fortunately, he was teaching primary schoolers, so reciting directly from the textbook allowed him to get through most of it.

By the afternoon, Wen Yan thought he would finally catch a break. Instead, the fifth-grade history teacher had an emergency at home and rushed back to the city for a few days of leave. Wen Yan, a Chinese teacher, had to step in as a firefighter once again to teach fifth-grade history.

By the end of the day, he was more exhausted than a dog.

Wen Yan didn’t even have the appetite for dinner. He collapsed onto his dorm bed, not wanting to move a single muscle.

He was a teacher, but not an ordinary one.

Wen Yan was a volunteer teacher who had come to the countryside.

Unlike Shen Po, who was both a wealthy heir and the child of high-ranking officials, Wen Yan came from very ordinary roots. Just like millions of ordinary youths across the country, he had neither family pedigree nor influential background. His intellect was above average, and his smooth academic progress from childhood to college relied entirely on his own hard work.

The only minor quirk was that his parents had divorced when he was very young. Both quickly remarried, formed new families, and had new children. Wen Yan became a relic of the past that neither could discard, yet neither particularly wanted to be close to. His parents were ordinary people; while they didn’t abandon him, their affection for him was certainly nowhere near as deep as it was for the children from their new marriages.

Wen Yan grew up living with his maternal grandmother. By the time she passed away, he was already in university and capable of standing on his own feet. Because he was an adult and sensible, never causing any fuss or drama, his parents occasionally tried to reach out and reconnect, perhaps out of some lingering guilt. But what was in the past was in the past. Whenever Wen Yan faced them, he remained polite yet distant, finding it impossible to summon the longing for closeness he had felt as a child.

These were all trivial details. Wen Yan considered his intelligence and emotional quotient fairly normal; he hadn’t turned into some cynical, antisocial persona just because of his background. His troubles stemmed from entirely different reasons.

During Wen Yan’s senior year of college, his classmates were either job hunting or preparing for postgraduate entrance exams, each finding their own path. Wen Yan had originally planned to take the postgraduate exams, but after revising for a while, he found he couldn’t settle his mind. He switched to job hunting, yet after searching high and low, nothing suitable turned up.

He was not exceptionally gifted, nor had he achieved anything outstanding in school. Having scraped by uneventfully until graduation, just like ninety-nine percent of fresh graduates, why would employers look at him with special favor?

Sure enough, after hitting a wall several times, Wen Yan could not help feeling discouraged. It was around that time that he saw the rural volunteer teaching program.

Going to teach in the countryside for two years offered modest pay and subsidies, but at least it provided two years of experience. Afterward, various government policies offered preferential treatment, giving bonus points for postgraduate exams and adding a polished highlight to a resume when applying for other jobs. Wen Yan felt he was not yet ready to step into society, deal with all kinds of people, and brave the stormy winds and torrential rains. This choice seemed the most fitting for him.

There were no lofty ideals, only practical considerations.

Yet not long after arriving in the countryside, Wen Yan began to regret it.

Without question, this place was backward.

Although a paved road had been built a few years ago and life in all respects had improved substantially thanks to national poverty alleviation policies; according to Old Fan, volunteer teachers in the past didn’t even have separate faculty dorms and had to take turns boarding at villagers’ homes.

Now there were new classrooms and school buildings, and the students received free lunches. Teachers hardly ever needed to go door to door persuading parents to let their children attend school anymore, as many villagers had come to understand the importance of education.

On top of that, there was fresh air and a bountiful mountain landscape. Living off the mountains as they did, there was never a shortage of mountain delicacies and wild mushrooms. Many plants Wen Yan had never even heard of before could be turned into delicious dishes in the hands of the villagers.

But it was still hard.

Bareness met the eye everywhere, and the monotony was plain to see at a glance. Although there was internet, the speed was slow; when Wen Yan wanted to play a match of Honor of Kings, he had to use mobile data. Day in and day out, life consisted only of teaching classes, with practically no entertainment. Shopping was confined to the village’s only mini-mart; if he wanted anything else, he had to head to the township, and parcel deliveries had to be collected from the township as well.

At first, Wen Yan had been full of enthusiasm, but once the novelty faded, the struggles typical of an ordinary person began to surface.

He felt he had been far too mentally unprepared for this place.

He had thought of himself as something of a homebody, yet he still found this day-after-day monotony hard to endure.

In the dead of night, lying in bed, Wen Yan would wonder: no matter how hard finding a job in the city had been, wouldn’t life still have been far more comfortable than it was now? Had he lost his mind, acting on a sudden impulse to run all the way out here? If he were still in the city, he should be staying up late to play games, ordering a delicious barbecue spread, or hanging out with classmates and friends for skewers, instead of lying on cold, hard wooden planks listening to mosquitoes sing, often waking up to see some unknown giant bug crawling across his mosquito net.

Wen Yan had originally planned everything out quite nicely: the small countryside village was quiet, allowing him to teach as a volunteer while studying on the side. Two years later, he could take the graduate school entrance exam or the civil service exam, boosted by preferential policy points. It had sounded like a sweet deal.

After arriving, however, he realized how naive he had been. He woke earlier than roosters and went to bed later than dogs. Though he had ostensibly come as a Chinese literature teacher, he had to be ready at any moment to fill in as a temp for every subject imaginable. Forget finding time to study; in his rare free moments, he did not even feel like looking at his phone, preferring to just zone out and stare at the sky.

The young woman who had arrived in his cohort could not bear it and fled, choosing to shoulder the penalties of breaking her contract rather than stay another day. As a result, Wen Yan was the unlucky soul saddled with the role of substitute English teacher after she left.

Every time he had a spare moment, an inexplicable anxiety crept over him.

He was terrified of letting two years slip away in vain. If he had no time to study, he would not be able to pass any exam two years down the line.

Just think about it: after two years in the workforce, peers his age would have accumulated a solid base of experience and seniority, whereas he would essentially just be starting out. No matter what he pursued, he would lag two full years behind everyone else.

Such were the worries of an ordinary person who had no one to rely on but himself. Take a step forward, and you fear making the wrong choice; want to step back, and you are paralyzed by second thoughts. For Wen Yan, life happened only once, with no room for trial and error.

Whatever choice he made could be the wrong one; whatever path he took could leave him full of regret.

This was a kind of distress that the Shen Po from his “dreams” would never understand. A favored son of heaven born with a silver spoon in his mouth could squander his life however he pleased. Even if he took ten thousand wrong turns, countless people stood ready to catch his fall.

Then again, if Wen Yan truly became Shen Po, he certainly would not be so utterly unaccomplished. Handed Shen Po’s script in life, even a casual effort would easily yield a far better existence.

That was the last thought drifting through Wen Yan’s wandering mind.

And then he fell asleep.

Wen Yan discovered that his “dreams” were indeed continuous. When he opened his eyes, he was back in the 1930s “Paris of the East^[3]” depicted by scholars and literati of the era.

This time, he was not in a ballroom with his arm around a dancing girl. Instead, he was sitting at a table with a bottle of whiskey before him.

And three glasses.

“Young Master Shen, why are you spacing out? Did you set your eyes on another beauty? What happened, did Mary fall out of favor?”

“Mary who? He’s got his sights set on someone named Zhang Ming now, a university girl!”

“Not bad, Young Master Shen! Looking for a real challenge this time, are we?”

The two fair-weather friends beside him chuckled and poked fun at him. All around, crystal chandeliers cast rotating, dazzling colors. On stage, a songstress swayed her slender figure and sang at the top of her lungs, performing a familiar melody that would still be replayed as a timeless classic a century later.

It was this kind of life again, either drinking or on the way to indulge in booze and beauties.

Wen Yan let out a long breath. He had no way of enjoying all this like Shen Po did. No matter how backward that small village was, it still belonged to an era over a century in the future. Wen Yan felt that lying in bed scrolling on his phone was far more interesting than listening to old songs here. Besides, if this time-travel dream occurred only when he fell asleep at night, it meant he still had to work every day in the waking world.

Which brought him to the real problem:

He still had a stack of student essays back there waiting to be graded!

At that thought, the working stiff in him could no longer sit still. He rose abruptly, tossed out, “I’m not feeling well, I’m heading back,” and strode out the door to find the driver, Xiao Wu, leaving his two friends staring at each other in bewilderment.

“Which word set him off?”

“Mary? Zhang Ming?”

“He couldn’t have actually fallen for that Zhang girl, could he?”

*

Wen Yan was deeply worried about what Shen Po was up to in his own body.

That fellow had doodled all over the English textbook yesterday; would he ruin the students’ essays today?

Hopefully he would not go running outside screaming again, or Old Fan would definitely think he had gone mad.

He had to find a solution.

On the ride back, an idea began to take shape.

The moment he arrived home, the sound of shouting and things crashing filled his ears.

In the living room, two women and two men were either sitting or standing, locked in a fierce argument.

One of the women was Shen Po’s mother, whom he had met the previous night.

Wen Yan recognized the other three as well, having seen the family portrait hanging on the wall. Judging from their positions and apparent ages in the photograph, they were likely Shen Po’s father, Shen Po’s uncle, and Shen Po’s youngest aunt.

Indeed: the merchant father, the vice-mayor uncle, and the talented youngest aunt.

Before this household of elites, Shen Po looked even more like a useless playboy.

The old butler shot him a subtle glance, warning him not to invite trouble. Wen Yan softened his steps and quietly moved to the edge of the room to listen in.

After listening for a moment, he pieced together the situation. Shen Po’s father and uncle were teaming up to bombard the youngest aunt because she had reached marriageable age, and the family had arranged a well-matched marriage for her. However, having benefited from the recent opening of female education in modern China, her head was brimming with progressive ideas of freedom. Naturally, she refused to submit to the family’s arrangement, leading to this shouting match.

“I see all that studying has ruined your brain! Do you think the family sent you to school so you could play at making revolution? It’s just that these days, a woman needs a bit of schooling and a diploma to make a more respectable match!” Shen Po’s uncle snapped, so enraged that his words grew unvarnished, a hint of his local accent slipping through.

“Little Sister, we are doing this for your own good. You may have gained some learning at school and learned to write a few poems, but can you really live like this forever? How can a girl not marry? As your brothers, we are willing to provide for you, but we don’t want you full of regret in a few years. When that time comes, even with our family background, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a match as good as the Zhang family right now!”

The two men played bad cop and good cop, one scolding and the other persuading.

Shen Po’s mother chimed in from the side from time to time to add a word or two.

Shen Po’s youngest aunt was only a few years older than him and still unmarried. While perfectly normal in later generations, in this era it meant she was overdue for marriage. It did not help that she held high standards, and in her earlier years she had even taken to the streets with female students to demonstrate for the revolution. The family kept a close, wary eye on her, terrified she would become a rebellious troublemaker within the clan.

By comparison, an idle playboy like Shen Po who only cared about eating, drinking, and having fun seemed almost entirely normal among his peers.

Just then, Wen Yan heard Shen Po’s aunt reach the end of her patience and shoot back loudly.

“Do you expect me to be like Second Sister-in-law, turning a blind eye even though she knows Second Brother keeps a concubine and an illegitimate child on the outside?! It’s not like you don’t know what a playboy Zhang Youqing is! Are you only going to be happy if you push me into the fire pit?!”

The moment those words left her mouth, the scoldings grew even fiercer.

“Shut your mouth! What nonsense are you spouting?!”

“Disrespecting your brother and sister-in-law, is this something an unmarried girl should meddle in?!”

Hearing this, Wen Yan felt it was time to make his exit.

If he didn’t pull back now, he would be the one dragged out for a lecture; the spectator watching the drama would turn into the drama itself.

Wen Yan turned and tiptoed back to his room, leaving the battlefield to the Shen family elders.

It turned out those Republic of China mansion-drama shows^[4] weren’t entirely made up. The Shen family wasn’t as harmonious and glamorous on the inside as it looked from the outside. Mother Shen, that beautiful, wealthy lady from yesterday who seemed without a care in the world, couldn’t keep her husband devoted either. And Shen Po, that profligate wastrel, wasn’t an only child after all; his father had an illegitimate son out there. Did Shen Po even know?

Wen Yan still couldn’t bring himself to step into Shen Po’s shoes. Viewing everything as an amused bystander, he felt a petty twinge of schadenfreude, perfectly happy to watch the chaos unfold.

But there was a more important matter waiting for him right now.

Wen Yan prepared to leave a letter for the real Shen Po.

A person like Shen Po, reckless and arrogant because of his family background, knew no limits. If he ran wild using Wen Yan’s body, Wen Yan might wake up every day facing a fresh disaster.

Teaching in a rural village was busy and dull, but at least it was peaceful. If Shen Po ran out in the dead of night shouting that he was the young master of the Shen family…

The scene was too horrifying to imagine.

Even if Wen Yan didn’t wake up in a mental hospital one day, it would still mean total social death.

So the top priority was to communicate with Shen Po and stabilize him first!

He found Shen Po’s diary, which only had two pages written in it, turned to the third page, and wrote down:

January 7, 1932. Evening.

For some reason, seeing this date made Wen Yan’s heart beat a little faster, stirring an inexplicable flicker of excitement.

It felt as though he were about to enter a dialogue with history.