For some, others merely exist as fleeting, unpleasant encounters, perhaps even serving as a source of amusement or casual gossip.
They become the subject of anecdotes, perhaps shared with a half-joking tone by someone whose mind is muddled after a few too many drinks, yet still insists they are merely ‘tipsy.’ Their significance in these recollections is no more profound than a childhood prank—say, peeing on someone’s dried chicken—simply serving as an amusing topic to enliven a dull conversation.
Yet, for others, certain individuals leave an indelible mark, a single glance etching them into eternity.
They are like a cinnabar mole, not yet faded into a mosquito’s stain—unobtrusive, yet deeply carved into a specific corner of the heart. One might be on the verge of sleep, only to suddenly recall them, and in that instant, all drowsiness vanishes.
Such was the dynamic between Liang Huaiyu and Wang Tianzhuo; though both were transient figures in each other’s lives, Liang Huaiyu remained merely a topic of conversation for Wang Tianzhuo.
Liang Huaiyu, a twenty-four-year-old woman, hailed from Qingzhou County, Weifang City, in Lu Province.
Her family resided in a village nestled beside a small town within Qingzhou County, itself part of Anhuai City.
Broadly categorizing a person’s life, one might divide it into three distinct phases: the initial stage, where one remains unaware of their true desires; the second, characterized by a vague sense of absence, a feeling of lacking something without truly understanding what that ‘something’ is.
The third and final stage is one of acceptance, whether achieved after attaining what was sought, or after realizing it will forever remain out of reach.
Liang Huaiyu, for instance, developed a strong distaste for her given name after experiencing the wider world, a name bestowed upon her by her uneducated father.
Conceived when her father was already in his late forties, she was cherished by him, a daughter born as he approached the age of understanding his destiny. Regrettably, he possessed neither wealth nor education, having toiled at odd jobs for half his life, his worldview perpetually confined to the urban-rural fringes.
Liang Huaiyu attended primary school in the town, and far from perceiving it as rustic or dilapidated, she was simply awestruck by the sheer number of shops it contained.
This ‘town,’ in reality, was little more than a single street, barely wide enough to accommodate two cars abreast.
Stretching long, from one end to the other, it would take her two or three minutes to run its length. This street teemed with diverse establishments: general stores displaying pretty cartoon schoolbags, barber shops showcasing fashionable hairstyles, and noodle stalls where a mere yuan and a half could satiate one’s hunger.
Like her semi-illiterate father, Liang Huaiyu’s childhood perception of the world was that of a single, long street, embedded within an expanse of endless farmland.
Then, her mother passed away one winter, simply falling asleep and never waking again.
Liang Huaiyu, at that tender age, could not comprehend the true meaning of death. Her young mind merely registered a primal fear of this natural phenomenon; she couldn’t reconcile her mother’s demise with the death of an animal. Yet, she understood that once her mother became a black-and-white photograph in a frame, she would never reappear.
Her father, having saved the earnings from half a lifetime of odd jobs, purchased a house in the suburbs of Weifang City, allowing her to transfer to a school there.
From that moment forward, she never once returned to that nameless, long street, not even to cast a fleeting glance.
Liang Huaiyu’s academic performance was commendable; though she didn’t attend a prestigious high school, her grades were nonetheless strong. Her father, upon learning that half of her high school’s graduates proceeded to undergraduate institutions, and that a hundred or two hundred students annually gained admission to top-tier universities, was so overjoyed he practically revered her as a celestial scholar.
Adjacent to her high school, a milk tea shop offered instant coffee, and a budget-friendly fast-food restaurant served steaks. Just two districts away lay a bustling pedestrian street, lined exclusively with clothing boutiques.
At this juncture, the innocence of her childhood memories and the burgeoning experiences of her adolescence converged, creating a peculiar chemical reaction within her.
As a child, she had been confined to a single street, one that took mere minutes to traverse, beyond which stretched vast vegetable fields, verdant with shoulder-high green onions.
Every weekend during her high school years, she would frequent the milk tea shop for a cup of ginger milk pudding, or treat herself to a burger combo at the steak restaurant adjacent to her school.
On one occasion, she gritted her teeth and ordered black coffee with a steak. The coffee proved both sour and bitter, reminiscent of stale noodle soup, while the steak, riddled with gristle, was as tough as rubber, leaving her jaw aching and unable to swallow.
She couldn’t quite articulate the sensation, but it felt, perhaps, like a complete waste of money.
Had she skipped that meal, she would have saved over twenty yuan—enough to purchase two pairs of exquisite canvas shoes from a clearance sale.
This, then, was her inaugural experience with coffee and steak, an impression far from favorable.
In 2008, she sat for the Gaokao, subsequently enrolling in the economics program at South China Normal University.
South China Normal University, a prestigious “Project 211” institution, saw her as the top scorer in her class.
By late August of that year, after an arduous forty-hour journey on a conventional green-car train, she finally arrived in Yangcheng, well past two in the morning.
She arrived travel-worn and weary-faced, while Yangcheng, in stark contrast, glittered with brilliant lights, a dazzling spectacle of urban splendor.
Yangcheng, she discovered, was a city of stark contrasts, where two entirely parallel worlds intertwined and converged on the same stretch of land.
Here, crowded and shadowy urban villages coexisted with subways perpetually devoid of empty seats, yet it also boasted the ceaselessly vibrant Shangxiajiu Pedestrian Street and the towering Yangcheng Tower, seemingly piercing the very heavens.
The dazzling array of lights was utterly captivating; Liang Huaiyu realized for the first time that the city’s neon glow could illuminate even the vast night sky.
It was at this precise moment that Liang Huaiyu entered her second stage of life, feeling a profound sense of incompleteness yet utterly bewildered as to what she truly desired.
A bewildered young woman from Lu Province, she had traversed half of China to arrive in this sleepless metropolis.
Utterly alone and without support, she possessed a statuesque, graceful figure and a dignified countenance. With heavy makeup, her beauty could easily earn a seven out of ten, and coupled with the prestige of her university student status, her virginity was ultimately sold for a six-figure sum.
This was her conscious decision; the price fetched for her dispensable virginity was equivalent to two or three years of her father’s arduous labor.
She adopted the name ‘Danlene,’ which directly translated to ‘Dalenna.’
It was a French name she had stumbled upon in some magazine, and she cherished its meaning: ‘gentle love.’ The imagery resonated with her.
‘Huaiyu,’ by contrast, sounded provincial, lacking refinement, falling short of the ‘white-collar’ image or the allure of a ‘city lady.’
It was as commonplace as a crumpled red cloth, as vulgar as her hometown itself.
While at school, she remained Liang Huaiyu, but in the venues of “Huawida,” “857,” and “Night on the Seine,” she became ‘Dalenna.’
The span from 2008 to 2013 was sufficiently long to fundamentally transform a person’s perceptions.
Liang Huaiyu—or rather, Dalenna—underwent cosmetic surgery, sometimes entertaining multiple clients in a single day. She endured three D&C procedures, leaving her uterine lining so thin that further implantation became nearly impossible.
Having all but destroyed herself, she found herself adrift, unsure how to confront the remnants of her life.
Her father, now well over seventy, had long since ceased working odd jobs. More than half of the earnings from her illicit profession were regularly sent to him.
He, in turn, believed his daughter worked in a financial institution, leading a prosperous life.
Though not born into a wealthy family, she was blessed with striking beauty and a father devoted enough to fund her education—a fortune in itself.
No matter how desperately she tried to convince herself, even if she mentally recited neoliberal platitudes like “new-age women have the right to control their own bodies” ten thousand times, a lie remained a lie. Self-deception might offer temporary solace, but rationality would inevitably assert itself.
This truth mirrored the themes of a book she had recently been reading, *Sexual Masks: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson*. Despite its dense academic discourse on binary oppositions—nature versus civilization, female versus male, earth worship versus sky worship, paganism versus Judeo-Christianity, Dionysian versus Apollonian spirit—the underlying message consistently boiled down to a single, stark directive: “sell yourself for a good price.”
It seemed that all such literature delighted in this very act: obscuring simple rights and wrongs with intricate modifiers and arcane terminology, transforming straightforward concepts into impenetrable doctrines, only to invariably arrive at the same conclusion: “sell yourself for a good price.”
This pervasive confusion, like a breaching tide, corroded Liang Huaiyu’s inner world, leaving her soul riddled with countless holes. From this, a peculiar tendency towards self-loathing began to bloom within her.
Rather than allowing these overly trendy, nonsensical ideas to pollute her mind, rather than observing these ‘opinion leaders’ raise their arms in fervent pronouncements, distorting facts, defiling truth, and rendering beauty meaningless, she thought it better to simply wander through the luxury boutiques on Shangxiajiu Pedestrian Street.
A single handbag there could cost five figures, and a simple cotton T-shirt, six thousand yuan.
Even if the craftsmanship was mediocre, even if the true value of such an item lay solely in its foreign-branded label, at least in the act of spending, she could find a fleeting moment of peace.
Liang Huaiyu, deep down, understood implicitly the attitudes of those who espoused feminism yet regarded her as a mere object.
In their eyes, she was Dalenna—a worthless plaything, a dog that would wag its tail at the mere offer of a bone.
She also knew the profound difference in her father’s perception, a man utterly oblivious to feminist theories. In his eyes, she was Liang Huaiyu, an exceptional intellectual, a formidable celestial scholar.
As for her name, ‘Huaiyu,’ she had once asked her father its origin. He had simply smiled, explaining that he had heard the tale of the female general Liang Hongyu in an opera, and hoped his daughter would grow to possess similar heroic spirit. After all, as a great man once proclaimed, “Women hold up half the sky.”
She was a worm, parasitic on the sordid desires of others, who had sold herself for a good price early in life, yet she had deceived her father, telling him she had transformed into a butterfly.
If her life were to continue down this path, perhaps one day, after a drug overdose or another D&C procedure, she would, like her mother whose memory had long since blurred, fall into an eternal sleep from which she would never awaken.
She was no longer the naive country girl who believed the world was merely a long street embedded within vast farmlands. She now understood the true nature of death: that when one dies, everything vanishes, leaving behind nothing but a pure, blank emptiness.
But Liang Huaiyu felt no fear; indeed, she harbored a strange anticipation, as if death could somehow wash away all her misguided choices. Once consigned to the crematorium, her withered self would burn into ashes as white and pure as those of any virtuous young woman who had died too soon.
White as paper, pure as snow.
What was right and what was wrong, she had long since understood in her heart. Yet she kept it hidden, unspoken, refusing to reveal her truth to her father, as if by doing so, she had committed no transgression at all.
Her life would likely have continued in this manner, perpetually playing Dalenna at “Huawida,” at “857,” and at “Night on the Seine,” endlessly deceiving her father over the phone, until she could no longer command a price. However, life, being inherently dramatic, took an unexpected turn a month and a half ago when she encountered a man named Wang Tianzhuo, a wealthy second-generation heir from a real estate family.
He proposed a monthly arrangement, and she agreed.