By the time they arrived, their colleagues were already there.
"Everyone, this is our new hire, Shang Zhitao. Her English name is Flora." Zhang Ling stood up to introduce her. "She'll be learning the ropes from Lumi. Take good care of her."
Shang Zhitao bowed to the table. "Please look after me, seniors."
The men and women of the marketing department really were good looking, Shang Zhitao thought. This must be Lingmei's hiring standard. I'm lucky to be here.
She sat down next to Lumi and listened carefully as everyone introduced themselves, memorizing each name. Her new colleagues spent most of the year flying between cities for work, so it wasn't often they were all in one place, and the marketing crowd tended to be outgoing besides, which made the dinner especially lively.
When it was Shang Zhitao's turn, she thought for a moment and said, "I'll work hard." No flourish, no clever line, even though half the table seemed to be waiting for one. That was simply how she was. Everyone at the table was used to people who knew how to say the right things, so a colleague like this felt unexpectedly refreshing.
Zhang Ling wasn't standoffish either. He joined in the joking with the rest of them and said to Shang Zhitao, "Once you're in advertising, it's like being tossed into the deep sea. Might want to think that over."
"I took a cab the other night and the driver asked me if I worked in advertising," said a girl named Qin Xiaoxiao. "I asked how he knew. He said there are only three kinds of people who take taxis that late: sex workers, their clients, and people in advertising."
The table burst out laughing, and Zhang Ling said to Shang Zhitao, "If you've got a boyfriend, hold onto him. If you don't, good luck finding one. Look around this table. Nobody here has their life together."
"I think everyone here seems plenty put together," Shang Zhitao said quickly, radiating the kind of earnest naivety that comes with being new to the working world.
After dinner, Shang Zhitao went over her colleagues' names silently in her head. She felt like a sparrow that had fallen out of its nest and couldn't fly yet, unsure of everything and everyone around her.
New city, new faces, and she was on her own in it, with a quiet sense of loneliness that bordered on something sadder.
Lumi, who came across as easygoing, had noticed how tentative Shang Zhitao was, and once they were back at the office she told her, "Listen, don't be too modest around here. This company's full of people who go after anyone who looks like a pushover. The more you defer to them, the more they'll walk all over you. Turn your back for one second and they'll dump every dirty, exhausting job on you. You'll be swamped before you know it."
"Okay. So..."
Lumi cut her off. "If anyone tries to hand you work, tell them to talk to me first. I'm your mentor. I'll be the one telling you what you're doing."
"Okay. Thank you, Lumi."
"Thank me for what."
Still worked up, Lumi went and pulled a compressed file together to send to Shang Zhitao. "Here, look. These are the projects we'll be handling in the second half of the year. You need to get a clear picture of each one first, or we won't be able to manage the budgets properly." She paused, then took out a form and handed it over. "Also, when I was going around learning about these projects, I had to sit down and interview the department heads too."
Interviewing the department heads was standard practice for new hires. It meant sitting down with the heads or senior staff of the relevant teams to learn about the company culture and how each department was structured, all in service of settling in properly.
"Are these all Planning Department projects?" Shang Zhitao asked, flipping through the documents and noticing that Planning was listed as the approving department on every one of them.
"Yeah. Planning was a pain to deal with, so it got passed to me. I've got thick skin."
"So I should go find Luke?"
"Go find him. You'll be dealing with him plenty from now on anyway."
At the mention of Luan Nian's face, Shang Zhitao felt a flicker of unease. Lumi rapped her on the head. "What are you scared of? He's not going to eat you. Go find him now. He's serious when it comes to work, he won't give you a hard time over something like this."
"Okay."
Shang Zhitao carried the documents to Luan Nian's office. She stood outside the door for a moment to steady her breathing, then knocked slowly.
"Come in."
Shang Zhitao pushed the door open and stood just inside it, caught in the afternoon light, like a bud waiting to open. Luan Nian looked up at her. "What is it?"
"Hello, we met earlier today. I'm Shang Zhitao, the new hire in marketing. Lumi just sent me some project materials from our department and I have a few questions for you." She had rehearsed the line before knocking and got it all out in one breath, then stood there waiting for him to respond.
Luan Nian studied her for a moment and noticed something about the girl: she was unusually deferential. Almost nobody at Lingmei was like that.
"Is it urgent?"
"Not urgent."
It was the wrong answer. In this line of work, everyone treated whatever was on their own desk as the most pressing thing in the world, and the people under Luan Nian were no exception, always pushing their own matters to the front of the line.
Was she in a hurry? Truly urgent meant something that, left unresolved, would set back everything down the line, something with real consequences for the company that had to be dealt with immediately.
Luan Nian nodded and pointed at the sofa in his office. "Since it's not urgent, you don't mind waiting, do you?"
"I don't mind."
Shang Zhitao sat down on the sofa to wait for him. She figured three to five minutes would be enough, so that was what she braced herself for. Three minutes passed. Five minutes passed. Fifteen minutes passed, and Luan Nian showed no sign of looking up from his computer. Several times Shang Zhitao opened her mouth to say something, only to swallow the words back down.
She didn't think it would be polite to interrupt.
Since Shang Zhitao wasn't in a hurry, Luan Nian saw no reason to be either. He kept working through whatever was in front of him at his own pace, waiting for her to speak first. He wasn't trying to make things difficult for her. He simply wanted to see how patient she really was, and to gauge, by that patience, how important her matter actually was.
Eventually Shang Zhitao stopped feeling rushed at all. Her task for the afternoon was to make sense of these projects anyway, so she simply took out her own laptop and started reading through the materials properly. She read for a while, then checked her watch. Forty minutes had passed. That was well past what she'd expected. She glanced at him again, but he showed no sign of finishing up.
She tried once more to break in, but the words wouldn't come.
When he finally glanced up again, he caught the look on her face, the one that clearly wanted to say something. He pretended not to notice and lowered his head again.
Shang Zhitao decided, from the way he carried himself, that whatever he was working on had to be genuinely important. So she kept waiting, quietly.
Eventually Luan Nian finished. He picked up his phone to reply to a message, then looked over at her again. She was watching him, her expression completely sincere, and the moment his eyes met hers she spoke. "Are you finished?"
The question landed at exactly the wrong moment, and this time Shang Zhitao didn't miss her chance to speak.
Luan Nian stood up, walked over, and sat down across from her. "What is it?"
This was the first time Shang Zhitao had been this close to him. He moved with a seriousness and efficiency that showed even in the short walk from his desk to the sofa, every step clean and deliberate. Looking at his eyes, Shang Zhitao thought they didn't belong to a man in his twenties. They were sharp and utterly self-assured, as though he held the whole world in his hands.
He asked the question as if he'd already forgotten what she'd said when she first came in. Caught off guard, she repeated herself.
Luan Nian suddenly smiled, his eyes narrowing slightly like a fox's. "Are you in a hurry now?"
"What?"
"Isn't what you came here for urgent?" he prompted.
Shang Zhitao's face flushed slightly. She had no idea how to answer. If she said yes, it was urgent, he would surely ask why she hadn't said so from the start. If she'd never claimed it was urgent in the first place, he probably would have simply stood up and gone back to his desk to keep working.
It occurred to her, though she suspected she might be reading too much into it, that Luan Nian might actually be teaching her something.
She cleared her throat and said seriously, "Luke, I understand. Next time I'll just say so directly, whether it's urgent or not. Thank you for the lesson."
Luan Nian raised an eyebrow, his expression seeming to ask: teach you? You seem to be doing fine on your own.
Shang Zhitao nodded. "Yes, thank you. I've learned my lesson."