The legal partner printed on my marriage certificate is so picky it makes people retch.
As a programmer in a pharmaceutical company, this dog Yu Haiqiao never looked the least like a programmer. Programmers were usually dressed in checkered shirts, carrying their laptop bags with them all the time, but the clothes he wore when working from Monday to Thursday, didn’t look appropriate, instead, they looked flashy. By the time Friday came, the company allowed everyone to wear whatever they want so he would dress up all the more flashier.
One day, I was eating in the company canteen in the afternoon when this guy sent a string of emoji to me, saying, “The new receptionists of our company asked whether I was a fresh graduate who was interning.”
“Do you feel proud?” I said without holding back.
“This just proves that your fashion taste is just like an aunt’s. Whenever I walk with you amongst a crowd, people would always think you’re my older sister. If you were a few years older, they would’ve thought you were my mom.”
I didn’t know what he was feeling so smug about. He was already nearing thirty but was still being mistaken as a fresh graduate who was interning. Wasn’t this a very shameful matter? It proved that he didn’t look mature enough, no different to a baby who was still wet behind the ears.
I hung up on his call in extreme disgust and soon received a series of messages from him. He sent me a string of taobao[1] links on weChat and I didn’t open a single one, patiently clearing all the chat history I had with this dog, including the 300 emojis we sent back and forth while slacking on the job. After clearing them up, he then sent a late voicemail, “Shi Ran, you’re too old-fashioned. Please raise your standards.”
I sent him a middle finger emoji as well as a sentence, “Get lost, Dog Yu.”
Of course, this can’t prove that he was a picky person, at most, he could only be labelled as a show-off.
His picky nature manifested itself the night he came home from working overtime. He had just opened the door and changed his shoes but even before he raised his head, he was already making a fuss, “Have you already boiled the radish and spare rib soup? The weather’s been so dry as of late, eating radish is equivalent to eating ginseng these days.”
“It’s boiled, I even put poison in it.” I told him.
“What poison? Insecticide doesn’t taste very good. Rat poison also doesn’t seem too nice either. It would probably make your tummy hurt very much, and dying would be painful. Sleeping drugs seem quite nice but if you didn’t put in enough of it and I failed to die, I’d have to go to the hospital to get my stomach pumped.” He put down his bag and took off his coat to hang up. He then rolled up his sleeves and earnestly analysed with me.
I sincerely recommended to him, “Then just jump off a building and die.”
Yu Haiqiao responded with a despicable chuckle, “Okay~” Then he smoothed his sleeves and entered the kitchen. After a short period, he began to shout, “Shi Ran, how much f*cking rice and water did you cook? What’s the proportion of spare rib and radish in the soup I told you, is this even edible?!”
Yu Haiqiao is a dog and I swear that one day, I’ll definitely kill him.
*
He nagged on incessantly in the kitchen for a long time, making me unable to help but turn the volume of the TV louder. After a while, his voice began to grow softer, the sound of him chopping vegetables was transmitted from the kitchen and then the fire being ignited and oil being poured. It was only then I stopped blocking my ears and Yu Haiqiao’s loud voice rang out from the kitchen once again, “Can you turn the TV down a bit, your ears may have gone deaf but mine f*cking hasn’t!!”
Because this dog Yu Haiqiao was so picky, he never ate the dishes I cooked. It was often him who cooked after getting home from work. Our workplaces were as far as south and north, the distance quite far, but he always drove a car to work whereas I took the metro so I would often reach home 10 minutes later than he would and by that time, he would’ve finished up his job in the kitchen, leaving me with nothing to do. Today was an exception as he had to work overtime until 8pm so he arrived home at 8:30 but he was a picky dog, choosing to die rather than submit, determined not to eat anything I cooked.
When we had just gotten married, he used the kitchen for two days and the reality was that the things he had cooked tasted horrible. However, being the picky person he was, he blocked out any words he didn’t wish to hear. When I saw the two to three dishes he presented, I was unable to differentiate what ‘things’ were on it that made him appear so proud, even bragging about how he was a naturally genius cook, always whipping up a fine delicacy. Because this dog thought too highly of himself, he didn’t want a mortal like me to stain his noble kitchen with my grubby fingers, thinking that all the disgusted looks I showed whenever he made something, were signs of envy towards his cooking skills. Even when I ordered takeout, he would still point out that my trash taste wouldn’t be able to live up to his fine cooking.
In any case, this was the current situation. Sometimes, he would act so narcissistic it made one’s fingers curl, but in my mind, even if it were a pig, after cooking for so many years, the things he would cook would eventually become edible. Of course, logically, pigs couldn’t cook, they could only serve as dishes on the table so this was just an analogy.
Moreover, although I didn’t want to admit it, this dog Yu Haiqiao was extremely smart, at the very least, smarter than a pig.
That was why in the three years we’d gotten married, I‘d never been in the kitchen much.
The reason why I said I’d never been in the kitchen much instead of never been in the kitchen before, was naturally because one time, after I stepped into the kitchen, I suddenly realized that that the dog Yu Haiqiao didn’t deserve to eat food, he only deserved to eat shit!
One night, when he had to work overtime until 8pm, in order to prevent myself from starving to death, I cooked some rice and ordered two takeout meals. By the time he got home, there were vegetables being fried in the pot and when I took it out and saw him, his expression looked really unsightly.
After taking two bites during dinner, he put down his chopsticks and put on a fussy face, “What the heck did you make?”
I coldly watched him act like a fool and told him, “It’s takeout.”
Yu Haiqiao’s face then grew a bit better and he pompously lifted up his chopsticks that were holding onto a piece of vegetable, his mouth clicking as he said, “I knew it. No wonder it didn’t taste bad.”
I naturally mocked him without the slightest hesitation, “Were you thinking that I had cooked such great dishes so your self-esteem took a huge hit, even thinking that the dishes you cooked before were shit?”
Yu Haiqiao looked at me with an expression of disdain, complaining how my words were very unladylike. Then his chopsticks pointed to the plate of vegetables I had personally cooked. He picked up a piece and stuffed it into his mouth before elegantly taking out a tissue to spit it out on, telling me haughtily, “How could that be?” He looked at me smugly and slowly pointed out the plate of green vegetables I cooked, “This is shit.”
Soon after, I was forbidden from going into the kitchen and was also forbidden from calling for takeout. He said that he wouldn’t allow me to bring those terrible things into his kitchen.
That was why Yu Haiqiao was a dog, fussy and only deserved to eat shit.
*
Cough, this may have sounded a bit ambiguous. After all, right now, he was the one cooking for me. I can’t classify myself as the same kind as him and after so many years of being covered in kitchen soot, Little Comrade Yu had now advanced leaps and bounds in cooking, that sometimes, when I was in a good mood and he had laid out a table of good dishes from the kitchen, I would occasionally feel very happy to the point of shedding tears and give him a big thumbs up, saying, “Hubby, your cooking is amazing!”
Yu Haiqiao only barely managed to act like a husband at moments like these whereas the rest of the time, he was a dog, especially when he uttered the next few words.
He would use his dead fish-like eyes to look at me and then reply with another question, “Don’t you think you’re being disgusting?”
In order to amplify his disgust, I would use three ways to show him hearts, and they would be carried out using two fingers, two hands as well as the arms, paired with an extremely exaggerated idol drama-like sound effect——”Love you, hubby.”
The author has something to say:
Heh, writing this is quite fun~~
[1] Taobao is the biggest e-commerce mall in China, kind of like e-bay. It is also my favorite app to buy from cuz everything’s so cheap kek