September 6, 2043, Shencheng, cloudy.
The pre-interview for the reality show Wives Traveling Together was scheduled in two small studios on the seventeenth floor of Mango TV, separated by a hallway. The director team spent a long time deliberating on the division of labor based on the information cards of four couples, and finally wrote two lines on the whiteboard with absolute equality: Studio A, Zhang Qinglan; Studio B, Yi Junling.
Zhang Qinglan entered the studio first.
She wore a crisp white shirt with the cuffs rolled up to her forearms, revealing a distinctly bony section of her wrists. A low ponytail was tied at the back of her head, making her look as neat and sharp as if she had just stepped down from an academic seminar. The makeup artist circled her twice and in the end only dared to press a thin layer of translucent powder over her face. There was simply nothing on this face that needed altering: large, round almond eyes with full, plump lying silkworms, carrying a natural, focused soft-focus glow when looking at people. Yet her brows were wild and thick with sharp peaks, which reined in the sweetness of her round eyes and added a three-tenths aura of heroism. Her bridge of nose was straight, and her lips had a natural pinkish tint. Even when she wasn’t smiling, she looked as though she carried a slight smile. A small mole on the right side of her nose and another on her chin were the only two rebellious details on this excessively proper face.
The director flipped through the information card in his hand: Zhang Qinglan, thirty-six years old, Grade-A alpha, outstanding scientist at Luosheng Pharmaceuticals. In the corner of the card, there was a small line of text later added in pencil: “Head of the Twilight Project, quasi-senior academician.”
“Teacher Zhang, relax, we’re just chatting casually,” the director said. “First question: Why did you come to our show?”
The writers behind the monitor pricked up their ears. They had studied this couple’s profile back and forth for a week. One was the youngest project lead at Luosheng Pharmaceuticals, and the other was a professor and doctoral advisor at Jiangwan University. They had been married for five years, with a four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and a resume so pristine it looked completely fabricated.
Zhang Qinglan sat very straight, and upon hearing the question, she thought about it earnestly.
“Company arrangement,” she said. “And also to spend time with family.”
The studio went quiet for two seconds.
“Just like that?” In twelve years of his career, this was the first time the director had heard such a brief initial answer.
“Mm,” Zhang Qinglan nodded, thought about it again, and added, “The show is going to many places. We are both usually busy with work, so it’s a good opportunity to travel together.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
The director would not give up: “Then what is your wife’s attitude toward joining this show?”
As soon as the word “wife” left his lips, the camera clearly captured how Zhang Qinglan’s previously calm and waveless gaze suddenly softened, like someone dropping a candy into deep water, with ripples spreading from the deepest depths of her eyes.
“She signed the papers first,” Zhang Qinglan said. “She said her past has nothing that cannot bear the light of day.”
“And you?”
“I follow her lead.”
Another three words. The director slapped his forehead inwardly. Teacher Zhang’s footage probably wouldn’t even reach thirty seconds even if everything was edited together.
He didn’t know that three months later, these exact three words would be turned over and over by the entire internet until they were polished smooth, paired with eight hundred kinds of background music, and edited into the most expensive three words in the history of domestic entertainment variety shows.
The director changed direction: “Then let’s talk about how you two met.”
“A blind date,” Zhang Qinglan said.
The director was stunned: “A blind date?”
“Mm.” Her expression was so serious it bordered on solemnity, as if she were talking about some momentous event. “The fifth day of the Lunar New Year, a blind date.”
The interview in Studio A progressed with difficulty amidst an atmosphere where the Q and A was more concise than an abstract of a thesis.
“Well, next question.” The director flipped through the cue cards, deciding to switch to something softer. “What is your wife’s greatest advantage?”
This time, Zhang Qinglan hardly hesitated.
“Everything.”
“Ah?”
“I’m not joking.” She looked at the director with a gaze so earnest that the person asking the question suddenly felt a bit embarrassed. “She was the city’s top scorer in the college entrance examination, the first one our entire county produced in decades. In her undergraduate years, she gave up on Qinghua and Peking University to study biology, which she loved. At twenty-eight, she got her PhD from Blue Ridge, the fastest graduate in their laboratory in a decade. She returned to China at thirty-four, an overseas high-level talent youth program recipient, directly appointed as a researcher and doctoral advisor, and promoted to professor in her early forties. The first doctoral student she supervised graduated this year, and on the day of the defense, she sat in the audience, even more nervous than the student.”
She finished it all in one breath, paused, and added one more sentence:
“All of this can be looked up online. The parts that can’t be looked up are even better, but I can’t say them.”
The director was dumbfounded: “Why can’t you say them?”
“Because it would sound like bragging,” Zhang Qinglan said as a matter of course. “Even though it already is.”
Behind the monitor, there was utter silence. When Qiao Zhi recalled this later, she remembered that at that exact moment, everyone in Studio B had replayed this statement in their minds and collectively reached a conclusion.
This Teacher Zhang was not bad at answering questions.
She just hadn’t encountered the questions she actually wanted to answer before.
“Then any flaws?” The director recovered his wits and asked cautiously. “Does your wife have any flaws?”
Zhang Qinglan thought about it very carefully for a long time, so long that the director thought she was going to say none.
“Yes,” she said. “She’s picky about food and doesn’t eat cilantro. She forgets to take her medicine when she gets busy. Packing her luggage looks like a crime scene. And also…”
She suddenly stopped.
“And also what?”
“Nothing.” Zhang Qinglan lowered her eyes, the corners of her lips ticking upward. “The rest is inconvenient to share.”
When this segment was broadcast later, the comment screen was flooded with the exact same question: Zhang Qinglan, what did that final smile of yours mean?
Meanwhile, in Studio B, separated by just a wall, it was a completely different scene.
Yi Junling wore a bright yellow long dress, her hair past her shoulders loosely coiled up, revealing a cleanly lined neck. She had an aloof bone structure. Her brows and eyes were sparse and light, with the outer corners of her eyes slightly upturned. When she wasn’t smiling, she looked like a piece of porcelain covered with a thin layer of frost. Yet as soon as she walked in, she smiled and greeted everyone present, not even missing the camera operator carrying the rig. Standing there at a height of 165 centimeters, the lights in the studio seemed to lean slightly toward her direction.
“Teacher Yi,” Studio B’s director addressed her habitually.
“Just call me Junling,” she smiled, her eyes curving first, then her lips, the warmth melting away layer by layer.
“Alright, Junling.” The director was slightly dazzled by that smile and looked down at the cue card. “First question: Why did you come to our show?”
Yi Junling did not answer immediately. She tilted her head to think, her earrings swaying gently with the movement.
“To be honest?”
“Of course.”
“My wife was initially rather reluctant to come,” she said very candidly. “She worried about me, always feeling that putting me in front of the public eye would invite people to dig up old history and say unkind things.”
The studio fell quiet. No one anticipated that she would answer this question so directly.
“But I don’t think that way.” Yi Junling looked at the camera, speaking at a steady pace, every single word firmly placed. “My past has nothing that cannot bear the light of day. The path I’ve walked and the things I’ve done are all a part of me, and I don’t intend to hide them. Besides…”
She paused and suddenly smiled.
“I want everyone to see how wonderful my wife is.”
Behind the monitor, intern writer Qiao Zhi couldn’t help letting out a soft expression of awe and quickly covered her mouth.
“Out there, she is everyone else’s Scientist Zhang or Project Lead Zhang. But when she comes home, she will crouch at the entryway to arrange my slippers, sort my medication into little boxes by the week, and because I casually mention wanting to get pastries from a certain bakery, she will cross half of Shanghai to buy them back, keeping them warm when she arrives home,” Yi Junling said unhurriedly. “She does so much and says so little. If we didn’t do this show, these things would forever be known only to me.”
“What a pity that would be.”
She finally said those four words, her eyes brimming with something very bright.
It took the director two seconds to remember the next question on the cue card: “May I ask how you two met?”
“A blind date,” Yi Junling said. “My aunt introduced us.”
The director burst out laughing: “Such a coincidence? Your wife just answered the exact same thing next door, not a single word different.”
“Is that so?” Yi Junling raised an eyebrow, the smile deepening. “It seems we didn’t need to align our stories for this question.”
“You can get this kind of relationship out of a blind date? If the blind date market had this quality nowadays, I wouldn’t still be single.”
“As for that,” Yi Junling looked at the camera, the corners of her eyes curving upward, “you can watch the show yourselves later.”
Studio B’s director flipped to the final page of the cue card and decided to ask the matching question: “In your view, what is your wife’s greatest advantage?”
“Diligence,” Yi Junling answered just as quickly. “She’s earnest about everything. Earnest in experiments, earnest in romance, and earnest as a mother. Earnest to the point of being a bit silly.”
“Silly?”
“Mm,” she smiled. “You’ll know later. This person, once she sets her mind on something, will walk down that single path to the very end. You can’t even persuade her back.”
The tone in which she said this sounded like she was complaining, yet also like she was bragging.
“And the flaws?”
“Flaws…” Yi Junling drew out the syllable, her eye corners curving. “Too easily embarrassed. She’s clearly an alpha, and a Grade-A one at that, yet whenever I tease her, her ears turn red. Red all the way to the root, red to the back of her neck, and she can’t suppress it no matter what.”
She paused and added: “However, regarding this point, I reserve my opinion. I don’t really want her to change it.”
The writers in Studio B all lowered their heads simultaneously, pretending to stare intently at the monitor as their shoulders shook harder than one another’s.
Later, the director wrote in his work log: This footage from Studio B doesn’t need a single cut. The footage from Studio A doesn’t need a single cut either, not because it was so good it didn’t need editing, but because if you cut any further, there would be nothing left.