The Whole World Is Waiting for Me and My Ex-Girlfriend to Remarry (Entertainment Industry) - Chapter 13

“What are you having for breakfast tomorrow?”

Dong Huaci pushed the door open and stepped out. The sight that greeted her was Zhong Qing sitting naturally on the edge of the bed, one hand gripping Dong Huaci’s phone. The phone screen wasn’t small, but Zhong Qing handled it effortlessly and with great familiarity. Dong Huaci’s focus settled unnaturally on the length and elegance of Zhong Qing’s fingers, rather than the question of why she was looking at her phone in the first place.

Zhong Qing was an expert at striking first: “All these years, and you still haven’t changed your password?”

This was Dong Huaci’s private phone; in public settings, she always used the brand-endorsed phone provided by her sponsors. It had a very simple six-digit password, used only when necessary, so she had never bothered to change it—it was easy to remember. 701701. Shi Xiaonan knew this number and had assumed she was such a fan of 7-Eleven convenience stores that she was embarrassed to use the actual name. Dong Huaci had never explained otherwise.

Though she didn’t know why she was the one who felt the need to explain in this situation, Dong Huaci subconsciously defended herself: “It’s just… I never thought about changing it. There was no need.”

“Alright. I didn’t actually mean to look on purpose,” Zhong Qing said, putting the phone down with a nonchalant, innocent air. “A message popped up, and it was noisy. I just did it out of habit.”

Dong Huaci hurried over. “Please give it back to me then.” Her use of honorifics was perfectly pointed. “I need to leave.”

Zhong Qing went along with it. “Fine. By the way, look at you—you’ve come up in the world. You have so many WeChat friends now.”

It was that tone again—infuriating, pretentious, yet impossible to find fault with or truly harden one’s heart against. Dong Huaci licked her lips. She truly wanted to explode; the feeling of being caught between company mandates and an ex-girlfriend made her loathe herself. Yet, toward Zhong Qing, she always felt an infinite sense of guilt.

She was the one who hit her. She was the one who dumped her. She was the one who hid from her. Therefore, everything that followed was hers to endure.

Seeing Dong Huaci’s expression shift through a kaleidoscope of emotions, Zhong Qing seemed to have caught onto an interesting plot twist in a TV drama. She began to laugh again. Seeing Dong Huaci always brought her ninety-nine percent pain and worry, but that final one percent of extreme joy was enough to offset all the misery that came before. “I’ll ask you one more time: are you really leaving right now?” She checked her own phone with a mock-serious tone. “It’s barely been twenty minutes. If you hit number one on the trending searches now, Dong Huaci, it’s going to make me look quite incompetent.”

Dong Huaci fell silent.

In their dynamic, if Zhong Qing stopped talking, that was the norm—Dong Huaci always had a way of coaxing her back. But if Dong Huaci stopped talking, things were truly broken; it was the start of an ice age.

Zhong Qing’s current mood was likely identical to Dong Huaci’s at the awards ceremony when she fell.

Guilt, testing the waters, and humiliation.

However, Dong Huaci’s silence now wasn’t the intentional cold shoulder from when their romance was in full bloom. She had fallen into a state of emptiness. Very empty. Her mind was wandering, lost, and overwhelmed—more a dissociation in the face of pain. The body was present, but the soul was far away. The words of her high school politics teacher echoed in her ears. Dong Huaci wondered: Had she truly escaped the fate that was meant for her? She hadn’t married off, she hadn’t turned to prostitution… so what was she now? Was she self-reliant? Was she a clear-headed achiever?

“This isn’t funny,” Dong Huaci frowned, forcing herself to maintain some dignity. “Even though I’ve wronged you today, Zhong Qing, I have no choice. I can’t beat the company. And they think this is harmless—I didn’t have to go drink with anyone or do many publicity stunts; it was just a ‘reunion’ for the sake of heat.”

While Dong Huaci refused to look at her, Zhong Qing stared intently at her profile. “You could have told me in advance. You have me on WeChat.” Dong Huaci kept her lips pressed tightly together. Zhong Qing touched her own lips, the lingering sensation still there. “Besides, you’ve already paid the price.”

Is that so? The water bottle was still half full. Dong Huaci twisted the cap with such force it seemed she wanted to unscrew someone’s head—vicious, yet her delicate appearance couldn’t quite carry the malice. She continued to gulp the mineral water as if she were downing hard liquor, finally reclaiming some sense of control. “Then I’ll stay for five more minutes.”

Zhong Qing continued to watch her. Dong Huaci’s face was like a flame, always the thing most capable of luring Zhong Qing—the moth—to rush toward it recklessly through the dark. Even if there were a thousand layers of glass in the way, in those moments of peak passion, Zhong Qing probably wouldn’t mind crashing herself to death just to get a little closer. “Is your life… happy? Have you gotten what you wanted? You said you didn’t want to sell your life to Xingtu, but is Yusheng Media really any different from Xingtu? Back then, you just didn’t want to stay at Xingtu and suffer, right? I understand not wanting to suffer; I never blamed you for that. But if you’re going to sell your soul to a company, why didn’t you just sell it to…”

Dong Huaci let out a sharp “Ha!”

“Sell it to you? Zhong Qing, you’re acting like a man.”

Those words were an insult. In today’s society, Dong Huaci was an expert at using the word “man” as a scathing, negative term. Zhong Qing loved this trait of hers, and she hated it. She was always independent at the most inconvenient times, and because of that inconvenience, Dong Huaci’s colors were unique in Zhong Qing’s world.

Zhong Qing sat on the bed. After Dong Huaci’s words landed, she blinked for a long time, not saying a single word. Under the warm yellow lights of the hotel, her brownish-black wavy hair looked like the bark of a tree left behind after a wildfire. While Dong Huaci frowned and looked up, expecting a retort, a single tear abruptly fell from Zhong Qing’s eye. It was quiet, silent—proof that this tree once had a lush summer and had accepted endless, extravagant rainy seasons, only to now be reduced to parched earth and dust.

Of those who understood Zhong Qing’s emotions intimately, Dong Huaci would be at the top of the list if such a ranking existed. She knew Zhong Qing was truly heartbroken. She turned her face away, panicked and lost, her subconscious instinct almost driving her to her knees. What kind of habit is this… Fine, Dong Huaci thought, this was a deep-rooted bad habit left over from when she and Zhong Qing had been genuinely, passionately in love.

Zhong Qing wept, but she did not sob. She said calmly: “Dong Huaci, I am a woman.”

Yes, she was a woman. It wasn’t Zhong Qing who had forgotten that; it was the Dong Huaci of the past. Back then, Dong Huaci had been immersed in her own myriad difficulties, never considering how Zhong Qing carried the emotions of a “cliff-drop” breakup. She had never considered that Zhong Qing’s career could also face failure, threats, and the possibility of her soul being trivialized by a vulgar, hyper-sexualized entertainment industry.

I have it hard, too. I have difficulties. Dong Huaci thought. She relied on her soft, flower-like face to gain more sympathy, more favoritism, more paths. She didn’t have to refine her dance moves with the same rigid, injured perfectionism as Zhong Qing; a single word of “congratulations” or a smile from her face could easily garner more male fans and more “mothers.” A face like Zhong Qing’s, with its stronger sense of aggression, had a much harder path back then. Feminism wasn’t trendy yet, and the company forced a “Big Sister” persona on her. Did Zhong Qing not feel insulted or discouraged for even a single moment?

What happened back then? What really happened?

The memory was a vacuum.

Facing Zhong Qing’s tears, Dong Huaci practically fled. Grabbing her bag and phone, she didn’t look back at Zhong Qing once. She left in the posture of a betrayer, without even saying goodbye.

That night, Dong Huaci dreamed. She dreamed of high school, her mother, and her friends—but she did not dream of Zhong Qing. Her mother’s familiar, warm voice echoed in her head. “Yes, you must succeed, Cici. You don’t understand; treating a child as property and an investment might not be as happy as you imagine. Cici, Mama’s body isn’t going to make it…” Dong Huaci’s mother reached out to touch her face, but Dong Huaci stepped back, wanting to reach for a cigarette.

But she didn’t know how to smoke back then.

So she knew she was in a dream. Her mother always had that sickly, soft, pitiful face. After watching it for so many years, Dong Huaci had learned it through a kind of fatalism—she would always present that same look, the one she hated most yet the one that brought the most benefits, whenever she needed to.

Dong Huaci grew up in an environment lacking money.

A vanished gambler father, a mother too ill to work—she was only one “lazy, gluttonous younger brother” away from the ultimate “hostess-origin” cliché. Some famous jokes are built on the real traumatic experiences of individuals.

Dong Huaci’s mother died three months after she joined the company.

She didn’t live to see Dong Huaci become a superstar, nor did she see her marry into a wealthy family—even though Dong Huaci, in high school, had boastfully told her mother to make her happy that if she couldn’t find a good job later, she’d just work on her appearance and marry into money. In the dream, her mother laughed at her from a strange corner, a laugh filled with mercy. She said: You, marrying into a wealthy family? It’s a miracle if you aren’t sold off and still helping them count the money.

The scene shifted. From the bustling center of Shanghai to the hospital—a strange sickbed. A dim environment, a small stool, a folding cot, medicine, so much medicine. Her mother was closing her eyes. She said she was tired, she wanted to sleep, and she wanted to go home.

At 4:00 AM, Dong Huaci woke up with a start.

She needed social interaction at this bizarre hour, so her first instinct was to grab her phone and message Shi Xiaonan on WeChat. She knew Shi Xiaonan kept her phone on silent, so she did this with a clear conscience.

Dong Huaci: “Can you talk to ‘Yusheng’? I don’t want to have any more interactions with Zhong Qing.”

To her surprise, Shi Xiaonan wasn’t asleep either. She replied almost instantly: “Tree, I understand.”

Dong Huaci: “So that means it’s a ‘no’?”

Shi Xiaonan: “I’m not afraid to tell you, the problem is that it’s not just a request from Yusheng’s side. The production crew wants it too.”

Shi Xiaonan: (Adding a moment later) “And on Zhong Qing’s side, Xingtu wants it as well.”

Dong Huaci: (Sends a crumbling emoji) “Then why hasn’t anyone told Zhong Qing?”

Shi Xiaonan: “Does she not know?”

Dong Huaci: “I don’t know if she knows. It feels like she doesn’t.”

She closed her phone. After such an exhausting day, she couldn’t fall back to sleep. The standards of the hotel provided by the crew were worlds apart from the tiny Xingtu dorms of the past, yet for some reason, her quality of sleep could no longer return to those days in that cramped, damp space filled with a mess of camisoles, dresses, and makeup—the kind of days where she’d pass out the moment her head hit the pillow.

She had to admit it: she had insomnia. Insomnia and startling awake when at the point of extreme exhaustion was a lingering curse. Dong Huaci reached for a real cigarette, then realized she hadn’t smoked in a long time. She had no tools—no cigarettes, no lighter.

“Ever since I met her in this crew, I haven’t been right… it’s like I have a fever, or I’m drunk,” Dong Huaci murmured to herself in a tone of resignation.

She remembered she had only picked up smoking during the period after her breakup with Zhong Qing. She needed something to replace the cigarette because her new company strictly forbade her from smoking and had made her go through withdrawal—which was one of the few good things among a thousand bad ones.

The hotel arranged by the crew was remote due to the filming locations. Looking down from the floor-to-ceiling window, there were endless green trees. Thinking of the upcoming scenes they had together, Dong Huaci felt a hollow void in her heart.

She looked down, pushing the approaching dawn out of her mind for a moment, and scrolled through her Moments. Zhong Qing’s Moments were as sparse as a straight line; her professional account seemed too stingy to even be perfunctory. Or perhaps that was just proof of how popular she was in the girl group world. Dong Huaci’s Moments, on the other hand, were constantly updated with required selfies.

It was uncomfortable; everything was uncomfortable. Guan Fei had posted a photo of them at the hotpot restaurant. Dong Huaci gave it a like, put down her phone, and went to look in the mirror. The red marks on her arm had faded. Thanks to Zhong Qing’s kissing skills, her lips weren’t swollen either. Zhong Qing always managed to take care of Dong Huaci in the most unexpected ways—just as she always had, as if it were an innate ability. But the “itch” was still there. Itches are troublesome—invisible and untouchable. Dong Huaci’s gaze returned to the window sill. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well see the sunrise in an hour.

The deep forest, the gray sky, and her reflection.

Dong Huaci gave up the fight, letting the tangled threads of her thoughts consume her sleepiness.

Her white bathrobe was soft. She hadn’t even realized she was subconsciously imitating Zhong Qing’s way of wearing it from earlier that night. She reclined in the chair behind the desk, swaying slightly. Her phone vibrated again. She naturally assumed it was a message from Shi Xiaonan, but when she tapped it, an unexpected avatar appeared. The avatar was a blur of blue and orange—a beautiful, melancholic empty scene. It was a familiar name in the contacts—the full name, a real name that sounded like a stage name, a name that felt like the final note of a confession.

Zhong Qing: “What are you having for breakfast?”

Dong Huaci thought: This is a very ‘Zhong Qing’ way of apologizing.