Chapter 50 Scammer Decides to Be a Good Person 25: Big Puppy, Pat on the Head

Shi Lan was going on a long trip, and both of them wanted to go with her.

She took neither of them and left them both behind to watch the stall.

Li Wei was especially worried. “How about I take you there and then come back? You’ve got a lot of luggage, it won’t be convenient. Besides, public security during the Spring Festival travel rush really isn’t that great.”

“I’m flying there, so it won’t be that troublesome. I’m going to Haidu¹, not some backwater countryside. The real help you two can give me is focusing on the shop.”

Li Wei settled for the next best thing. “Then at least let me take you to the airport.”

Actually, Shi Lan was only going for a few days, so she didn’t need that much luggage. But Du Heng hadn’t been back in a long time, so she prepared some food to bring him. And since it was the New Year, she was even planning to make a braised New Year’s Eve dinner herself. So she packed some ingredients and seasonings, and even brought along a pot she was used to using.

She knew which hotel Du Heng’s film crew was staying at. But when she got there and asked, she found that not only that hotel, but even the two hotels nearby had all been booked out by the crew. They were clearly loaded.

Then again, she’d heard their recent filming location was the old Western-style mansions in Haidu, which were incredibly expensive. The daily rental alone must have been astronomical.

So Shi Lan had no choice but to stay at another hotel nearby.

They were probably filming during the day, and she didn’t just sit around waiting. She wandered around the area, got familiar with the roads and markets, had dinner, and even went to see the night view of the Bund² before heading back at nine.

She figured that by this hour, Du Heng and the others had probably wrapped filming and should be in their rooms.

She went to the hotel they were staying in, and only after registering her ID at the front desk was she allowed upstairs.

The layout of the hotel wasn’t complicated, so it was easy to find the room number.

Knock knock.

“Who is it?”

He hadn’t opened the door right away. He’d gotten more cautious, huh?

Shi Lan didn’t answer and kept knocking.

Footsteps gradually approached from behind the door. The door opened, and at last Shi Lan saw the person she’d been longing for.

Du Heng was wearing the flannel robe she’d bought for him, with a half-dry towel draped over his messy hair. After opening the door, he didn’t even look to see who had come. His eyes were fixed on a stack of papers in his hand as he muttered to himself.

This dummy.

Shi Lan said nothing and just stood outside the door watching him.

When he finally lifted his head, he froze in shock for an instant, as if he’d been turned to stone on the spot.

Even more of a dummy now.

Before she could finish teasing him in her head, the very next second he wrapped both arms around her and lifted her right off the ground.

“Lanlan, Lanlan, how did you get here? I’m not so sleepy that I’m hallucinating, am I?”

“Dummy,” Shi Lan scolded softly.

Du Heng rubbed his face against her stomach. “Then a dummy I am, as long as you like me.”

It tickled.

His skin had gotten thicker now.

At Shi Lan’s urging, Du Heng finally set her back down, but he still wouldn’t let go of her hand. His eyes shone as he looked at her.

Shi Lan said, “I came to spend the New Year with you.”

Du Heng’s eyes lit up like stars in the sky.

“Didn’t you say the shop’s first Spring Festival event was keeping you too busy to get away?”

Bracing herself on his shoulders, Shi Lan said, “Then should I leave?”

“No.”

His arms tightened around her again.

“And you say you’re not a dummy. All you do is say the opposite of what you mean.” Shi Lan tapped him. “Let go, you’re hurting me.”

He immediately looked like he’d done something wrong and didn’t know whether to move closer or step back.

Loose pages from the script had scattered all over the floor. Shi Lan carefully avoided stepping on them and helped him pick them up. She saw that he’d marked key points in pencil, and there were notes in the margins too.

“Is this for tomorrow’s shoot?”

“Yeah. We’re rushing the schedule, and everyone on the crew is scrambling to memorize lines whenever they can. If you flub your lines and cause an NG³, the director will chew you out something fierce. I have a lot of lines in these next few scenes, so I wanted to memorize them tonight in advance. There are some parts I’m still not sure how to handle, so tomorrow before filming starts, I can ask the director or some of the senior actors.” Du Heng stacked the script pages neatly and clipped them together with a paperclip.

“I feel like I’m interrupting your work…”

Before Shi Lan could finish, her pinky was hooked.

“You’re not allowed to leave.”

Shi Lan: “…” Since when had he become this clingy?

“Fine, then I’ll stay and help you rehearse. Do you want me to read lines with you?”

Du Heng grinned. “Yeah!”

He answered so firmly that Shi Lan really thought she could help. After all, having someone else keep the rhythm should be better than doing it alone. But she soon realized that once she joined in, she was only slowing him down, so she refused to keep making trouble.

Du Heng still kept hold of her hand. He looked at the script, then every so often turned to look at her and smile.

She felt like the orange tabby her family had once kept when she was little. That cat had always climbed onto her desk while she was doing homework and refused to leave. Of course, she couldn’t bear to carry it back out of her room either. So in the end, the orange tabby would sprawl across her desk, the fat on its belly spilling over onto her workbook, and she wouldn’t mind at all.

Her right hand would hold a pen, but her left hand always had to be holding something, whether it was Big Orange’s tail or one of Big Orange’s paws. Every so often she had to give it a squeeze before she felt at ease.

That was probably how Du Heng felt about her now. He kept absentmindedly squeezing her palm from time to time.

Shi Lan: “…”

Well, being the study companion wasn’t a bad role either.

With him holding her hand and limiting her movements, there wasn’t much she could do anyway. She took in the room’s furnishings and layout, then spent a while admiring his stunning profile. Mm, her husband seemed even more handsome now.

But no matter how good-looking he was, he couldn’t fend off the drowsiness that came from having nothing to do for too long. She had no idea when she’d fallen asleep. She was curled up beside him, the top of her head pressed against his waist.

She didn’t know how late he had stayed up working. She only remembered waking halfway through the night to find a blanket draped over her. The room’s main light had already been turned off, and he was leaning against the headboard under the lamp, reading the script.

Her eyelids kept drooping, and she couldn’t stay awake for long before falling asleep again. Her last vague impression was of him picking her up, straightening out her body and covering her properly with the blanket, then slipping into bed with the dampness of recent bathing still clinging to him and wrapping his arms around her.

It felt like he’d only just gone to sleep, and then he had to get up again.

This time Shi Lan had slept enough, so she sat up with him.

“Isn’t it still before dawn? It’s completely dark outside.”

Du Heng turned back, pulled the blanket around her, pressed her back down onto the bed, and kissed her on the forehead. “There’s a scene at daybreak today, and I have to get into makeup early.”

That counted as an explanation.

She knew he was busy, but she still couldn’t help feeling disappointed. She’d flown thousands of kilometers to see him, and they still barely got any time together.

She puckered her lips at him, asking for a kiss. They hadn’t seen each other for so long, how could a kiss on the forehead possibly be enough?

Du Heng clapped a hand over her mouth at once, sounding deeply aggrieved. “Are you trying to make it impossible for me to walk out this door this morning?”

Blinking, Shi Lan yanked the blanket up over her slowly reddening face. Then she nudged him with her foot. “Then hurry up and go already. You’re ruining my chance to go back to sleep.”

She didn’t hear him say anything else, but she did feel him smack her on the butt through the blanket.

“…”

He’d gone bad.

–

By the time Du Heng arrived at the set, it was still pitch-black, so dark you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The only sound was the sparse crowing of some family’s New Year’s rooster, dull and not very bright.

In the dressing room, several male actors from the same production sat in a row getting their makeup done.

One of them smiled at him suggestively.

“Hey, brother, we all saw it last night.”

The others chimed in with teasing agreement.

Du Heng had no idea what they meant, but from their expressions alone he could tell they weren’t thinking anything decent. So he asked directly, “If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

“Quit acting. You’re still pretending. Last night, in the hallway…” As he spoke, he pantomimed an invisible hug.

Du Heng was speechless. “Get that trash out of your heads. That’s my wife. She came to spend the New Year with me.”

“Your wife? I remember you’re only twenty-three.”

Du Heng said, “Mm. My twenty-third birthday is still a few months away.”

In this era, people generally married early, but that didn’t include those in the entertainment industry. For both men and women, being unmarried was a kind of soft advantage.

Everyone in this dressing room, including the makeup artist, was older than Du Heng. He was the only married one.

After the initial shock, they hurried to smooth things over. “Ah, listen to us, we really don’t know when to stop talking. Don’t mind us. We’d actually love to meet your wife. I wonder what kind of remarkable woman made you decide to get married so early.”

The person saying it was only being polite, but after hearing that, Du Heng nodded with complete seriousness. “She really is a remarkable woman. She’s amazing.”

“…”

Some people let out awkward laughs and went along with it, while others couldn’t help genuinely laughing at his reaction.

Then someone else said, “The filming schedule’s too tight, otherwise we could’ve invited your wife to dinner tonight and met her.” That, at least, was said sincerely. Before long, the conversation shifted back to the packed rehearsal schedule, followed by all kinds of complaints.

Du Heng’s coworkers didn’t get to see Shi Lan first. What they saw first was her cooking.

After Du Heng left that morning, she couldn’t fall back asleep, so she simply got up and went to buy groceries. She had already scouted out where to shop beforehand. Not just where to buy groceries, but also where she could cook.

In a little alleyway, there was a place where you could use water and a stove as long as you paid rent.

Shi Lan bought two large antimony pots⁴, the big twelve-liter kind.

She filled both of them to the brim with stew.

The spicy pot held braised chicken, while the clear one held tomato beef brisket. Both were perfect with rice, and low in fat.

Shi Lan’s tomato beef brisket was different from what other people made. The broth was thick, with potatoes cooked down into it. It had simmered solidly on the stove for four full hours that morning, and by mealtime, it was just right.

She couldn’t help him memorize his lines, but since she was here, there was no way she was going to let Du Heng keep chewing on dry boxed meals. Extra food, absolutely necessary!

And while she was at it, she could bribe his coworkers a little too.

She had already asked around the night before. During filming, the set was closed off, so visiting in person was out of the question. But sending things in was still allowed.

Once the pots were done, she guessed it was about time for the meal break and hired a few people to help carry them to the entrance of the film set, then had someone from inside come out to receive them. Besides the pots, she had also prepared a huge stack of disposable bowls and chopsticks. She couldn’t guarantee everyone would get a satisfying portion, but at the very least, everyone could have some.

The pots arrived at exactly the right time. At first, some people complained that something soupy like that would be easy to spill and make a mess. But once someone took a bite… well, who cared about that anymore? Winter was meant for eating from hot, steaming pots like this. Work up a good sweat, and you’d have energy all afternoon.

Some of the people who couldn’t handle spicy food didn’t manage to get any tomato beef brisket. Even so, after getting two scoops of the braised chicken, they still ate while hissing from the heat, yet refused to put their bowls down.

The two pots were instantly surrounded. Even the stagehand automatically took on the side job of serving food, making everyone line up and come one at a time.

Du Heng didn’t get even one more spoonful than his coworkers. The stagehand openly shortchanged him. “You eat this at home all the time. You should carry on the fine tradition of good conduct and show some courtesy to us coworkers who’ve never had it before.”

Du Heng: “…”

When he came back that night, Du Heng brought the two washed-clean pots back to Shi Lan.

“Well? Did everyone like it?”

Du Heng said, “They even used the broth to soak their rice… If anyone still says they weren’t used to it, they ought to be struck by lightning.”

Shi Lan chuckled. She had always been confident in her cooking, so this was exactly what she expected. She wasn’t all that excited about it.

Then she heard Du Heng say aggrievedly, “I only got two pieces of beef brisket and one piece of chicken. And those were picked out of someone else’s bowl.”

“Huh?”

“They told me to be courteous.” He looked utterly pitiful.

Shi Lan couldn’t help laughing. She truly hadn’t expected things to turn out like this.

Then she looked at Du Heng again. Didn’t that expression look exactly like a little kid in kindergarten, sitting in a neat row and being told to share his snacks?

Big puppy. Pat pat.

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Translator’s Notes

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1. Haidu: A fictionalized name for Shanghai (often referred to as ‘Sea City’). The mention of ‘Old Western-style mansions’ and ‘the Bund’ confirms the setting as this historic international metropolis. ↩
2. the Bund: A famous waterfront area in central Shanghai. It is lined with colonial-era buildings and faces the modern skyscrapers of the Pudong district, making it one of China’s most iconic tourist landmarks. ↩
3. NG: Commonly used in East Asian film industries, ‘NG’ stands for ‘No Good.’ It refers to a botched take or a blooper that requires the scene to be re-filmed. ↩
4. antimony pots: Commonly used in 20th-century China, these ‘antimony’ (di) pots are actually made of aluminum alloys. They are lightweight, durable, and ubiquitous in traditional household kitchens for large-scale cooking. ↩