Shang Zhitao remembered the coffee incident, so the next morning she got off the bus early and went straight to the coffee shop. She had never had a coffee habit before. During exam season in school she'd only ever torn open a few packets of instant coffee to stay awake. Her plan was simple: get her boss to drink the coffee she'd bought, and start off on the right foot in front of everyone.
She had just paid and stood there waiting, back straight and posture stiff, rigid enough that she made the relaxed atmosphere around her feel a touch more formal.
The clerk called out, "Your coffee's ready."
"Thank you." She turned to collect it and saw Luan Nian standing at the register. Flustered, she blurted out, "Morning, Luke."
She couldn't believe she hadn't even thought to buy her boss a coffee.
"Morning." Luan Nian echoed the word, then said nothing more. Embarrassed and a little intimidated, Shang Zhitao added, "Bye, Luke," and hurried off.
She didn't even have the sense to bring Luan Nian a coffee.
That was pathetic.
Today was orientation training for the new campus hires.
Shang Zhitao sat in the training room watching the new employee video. She'd expected a rundown of the company's history, forgetting for a moment that she worked at Lingmei. Lingmei never bothered with niceties. It preferred to lay out the harsh truth.
The final segment of the video listed the washout rate among Lingmei's campus hires over the past decade, numbers stark enough to unsettle anyone watching. It closed with one line: "If you feel you can't do this, there's no shame in it. Stand up, walk out of this room, and you'll still receive two months' severance."
Shang Zhitao thought of Luan Nian's suggestion that she resign, and for a moment she almost felt he'd meant it kindly.
After the video ended, the training room fell silent.
Tracy smiled at the room. "It's not as dire as all that. Today I have the honor of inviting Luke, our creative consultant and head of the planning department, to share the second part of orientation. Luke is only twenty eight, but he won the International Advertising Film Award at twenty two and has been called a creative genius in the industry ever since. Let's give Luke a round of applause."
What kind of introduction was that? Luan Nian's frown made clear exactly what he thought of Tracy's overblown build-up.
He wasn't a particularly good-tempered person.
Shang Zhitao sat in the back row watching him, thinking that Lumi had been right. She really did need to keep her distance from him going forward. But what he said was genuinely good. He talked through Lingmei's creative principles: simplicity, refinement, warmth, aesthetics. His slides put those same principles into practice. Every page was beautiful.
Listening to him was a pleasure.
He spoke just as crisply, not a single wasted word through the full forty minutes. When he finished, Tracy kept him at the front to take questions. Kitty's hand shot up first. "Is Luke single?"
Everyone burst out laughing. Luan Nian, expression flat, answered as if he hadn't heard the question at all. "Next."
He hated pointless jokes like this. They wasted everyone's time, and to him that was nearly a crime.
"So does the company allow coworkers to date?" another colleague asked.
"The company doesn't prohibit romantic relationships between employees, but there are two rules: not between a supervisor and a direct report, and not within the same interested department." Tracy answered, then tried to spur the room along. "Doesn't anyone have a professional question for Luke? This is a rare chance."
The room went quiet.
Shang Zhitao had plenty of questions, but she didn't dare ask Luan Nian. It would be mortifying if he used the moment to publicly urge her to resign again. So she lowered her head and jotted the questions in her notebook instead, telling herself she'd ask Lumi later.
Luan Nian looked over the room and felt a flicker of disappointment with this year's campus hires. Not one of them showed any real edge. The most timid of the bunch looked ready to bury her head between her knees. He shrugged at Tracy, turned, and walked out of the training room.
Shang Zhitao didn't yet realize this was simply how work went. Miss your window to ask a question, and it rarely opened again. By the time training ended and she made it back to her desk, Lumi had already left for a job site. She sat down and went back to the industry basics she hadn't finished that morning, the papers in front of her dense with notes.
Shang Zhitao had one advantage.
Her handwriting was excellent.
Back in elementary school, a wave of penmanship classes had swept through Harbin. Kids whose parents could spare the money lined up after school, backpacks still on, to learn proper handwriting. It was the only extracurricular class Shang Zhitao ever took in her life, and she'd had to push through it with more perseverance than most. By junior high the trend had faded and no one bothered with it anymore, but she kept going to her teacher's house after school to practice her copybooks.
So her handwriting really was outstanding.
Every stroke had its own character. Even scrawled in a hurry, it still looked good. She used that handwriting to take notes on the industry fundamentals, working so intently she forgot to eat, and didn't look up again until she'd worked through the material and the moon had risen over the western sky. She checked her watch. Ten thirty at night. If she hurried, she could still catch the last bus.
She stood, grabbed her backpack, and dashed out, vanishing from the office like a gust of wind. Even after she got on the bus, the unfamiliar terms kept circling in her head: ATL, BTL, AE, brief, PR. She'd seen the words in books and heard professors use them in class, but applying them at work was an entirely different matter. She thought of Kitty, who seemed to already know everything, shining like the sun.
During her first week at the job, Shang Zhitao's head filled up with knowledge, and the pace of that kind of intensive learning far outstripped anything she'd known in school. Everything felt manageable, except for Luan Nian. Lumi had handed her the job of liaising with him, and Shang Zhitao couldn't just refuse. She tried to protest, but Lumi cut her off. "Whatever you do, don't tell him you're not up to it, especially not in front of Luke. If he hears that, he'll have HR process your resignation the same day."
"And if you can handle a boss like Luke, what other troublemakers could possibly rattle you after that? Right?" Lumi went on, talking her into it. As the wealthy daughter of a family that had made its fortune in demolition payouts, Lumi had grown up running wild across old Beijing. To her, work was never more than something to muddle through. As far as she was concerned, it would be a relief not having to look at Luan Nian's sour face.
"So how did you manage him?" Shang Zhitao asked, genuinely looking for advice.
Lumi laughed. "I never did manage him, so it's your turn now! Hang on, let me have the boss give him a heads up first, then you can go make contact."
...
Trembling, Shang Zhitao sent Luan Nian a message on the internal chat: "Hello Luke, my mentor Lumi is currently working on a project coordinating with the Guangzhou and Shenzhen offices, so she's asked me to take over the wrap up work on a few projects in the planning department that are nearly finished. I hope you'll bear with me."
She lifted her head to steal a glance at his office. He was sitting in front of his computer. Her palms had gone damp. After a long while his icon lit up, and he replied with only two words: "Get someone else."
That was no surprise.
On Friday night of her first week, Shang Zhitao ran into a problem. He wanted someone else assigned. How was she supposed to move forward? She called Lumi, but Lumi was already at a nightclub and shouted into the phone, "Hey, girl! I'm having my weekend! Even if the sky falls, it can wait till Monday!"
"But the signature-" Shang Zhitao hadn't even finished before Lumi hung up. The papers still needed a signature, and Finance was pressing her for it. She finished the sentence alone, then groaned and slumped over her desk. It took a long while to gather the nerve to stand up and carry the folder to Luan Nian's office. His secretary had already gone home, so there was no one to pass along a message. She would have to face him herself.
If he refused to sign, she'd just leave the folder on his desk and tell him it wasn't her problem anymore.
If he told her to resign again, she'd tell him he wasn't even her boss.
Naively, Shang Zhitao had already scripted out every possible confrontation in her head. With the resolve of someone walking to her own execution, she knocked on his office door.
She heard his low voice answer, "Come in."