Society in this era was still fairly conservative. Strictly speaking, even college students dating wasn’t exactly encouraged.
Of course, when young people spent so much time together, hormones inevitably took over, and mutual attraction happened. Still, no one dared to be too blatant about it, which was why Chi Ying’s threats carried real weight.
Seeing how confident she was, Zhang Yang couldn’t figure out how much she actually knew. Until today, everything had been under his control. How had just one day completely turned things upside down? He was convinced someone had told Chi Ying something.
He immediately rounded on Tan Yi and shouted viciously, “Was it you? Did you fill Chi Ying’s head with nonsense?”
“Leave innocent people out of this!” Chi Ying snapped, her temper flaring just as quickly. “How often do you two meet? And what did you tell her? ‘If it weren’t for the little bit of talent she has, who’d waste their time with a girl who has such a terrible personality?’ Weren’t those your exact words?”
“And every receipt from all those hotel rooms you booked together? Zhao Xuemei has kept every single one. Do you really think you can deny any of it?”
Zhang Yang froze in shock, his face turning deathly pale.
Those were things he had only ever said when he and Zhao Xuemei were alone together. There had never been a third person present.
So it really had been that stupid woman who told Chi Ying!
He couldn’t understand why Zhao Xuemei had chosen this moment to expose everything. Had she decided that now that the job assignments were finalized, it was time to replace Chi Ying?
Objectively speaking, Zhang Yang’s plan had always been to have the best of both worlds.
He wanted to keep the “red flag” standing at home while letting the “colorful flags” wave outside.
He and Chi Ying had grown up together. Their families had known each other for years. Chi Ying’s parents were intellectuals, and she herself was pretty, refined, and outstanding in every way. Ever since childhood, she had always been the brightest person in any crowd. Being with someone like Chi Ying gave him tremendous emotional satisfaction and countless other benefits.
More importantly, he knew perfectly well that, in this profession, he was nowhere near as talented as Chi Ying. From the arts entrance exams onward, she had practically carried him every step of the way.
His plan had been simple.
After they returned to the provincial television station, Chi Ying would handle the professional work while he took care of administrative affairs. That way, he’d climb the ranks much faster. Whenever they worked on projects together, his name would appear first in the credits. Chi Ying was too proud to argue over such things.
To put it bluntly, Chi Ying would do the work while he became the official.
He thought it was the perfect arrangement.
As for Zhao Xuemei, he had never intended to have any future with her.
Then why had he gotten so entangled with her and even helped arrange her post-graduation work placement?
Because Zhao Xuemei gave him something Chi Ying never could.
Chi Ying had many wonderful qualities, but she had a terrible temper. Since she’d always excelled at everything, she approached everything with the same sharp, uncompromising attitude. Even while dating Zhang Yang, she often seemed to be accommodating him instead. At least, that was how everyone around them saw it. Even Chi Ying’s parents clearly looked down on him a little.
When he was with Zhao Xuemei, he got to enjoy the admiration and dependence of a delicate little woman, something Chi Ying had never made him feel.
And then there was the fact that Chi Ying was so stubbornly principled. There were lines she absolutely refused to cross, which left Zhang Yang frustrated more often than not.
But now, all those carefully laid plans had gone up in smoke.
“Get lost!” Chi Ying said with undisguised disgust. “I don’t want to see you again. If you pull any more tricks, don’t blame me for showing you no mercy.”
With that, she turned around and walked straight into the women’s dormitory without looking back.
Zhang Yang wandered away in a daze.
At first, he wanted to confront Zhao Xuemei and teach that stupid woman a lesson.
But after thinking it over, he stopped himself.
He couldn’t afford to fall out with her now.
Not only that, he had to keep her happy. Since that scheming woman had clearly been planning this for a long time, she probably still had plenty of evidence against him. He couldn’t risk driving her into a corner.
She always acted like such a meek little woman.
Who would’ve guessed she was capable of something like this?
The more Zhang Yang thought about it, the colder he felt, as though he had fallen into an ice cellar.
He had never imagined these women were all so calculating.
He had actually believed he was the clever one, that everything was firmly under his control.
Everything Chi Ying had said really had come from Zhao Xuemei.
But that had happened in her previous life.
And it hadn’t come out during some three-way confrontation, either. It was after Chi Ying had returned to work at the municipal television station. Zhao Xuemei had deliberately sought her out just to provoke her and reveal everything as revenge.
Now that she’d exposed it ahead of time and gotten rid of this problem, she finally felt she’d vented some of the resentment she’d carried.
Yet Chi Ying was still furious.
Not because of Zhang Yang.
She was furious at herself.
Furious that, despite being a highly educated woman of the new era, she had once thrown away her career for the sake of a man.
What on earth had I been thinking in my previous life?
Sitting alone in the empty dormitory, tears suddenly burst from her eyes without warning.
But dwelling on it now was meaningless.
She had already chosen a different path.
From here on, she would devote herself to her work and strive to realize her dreams as soon as possible.
With that thought, she stood up, picked up her washbasin, and headed for the communal washroom to splash some water on her face.
The moment she stepped outside, she saw her roommate, Song Lin, standing at the door.
Objectively speaking, the Chi Ying of her previous life hadn’t been particularly likable. She wasn’t someone people found easy to approach.
Their dormitory housed six students.
Besides Chi Ying, the other five girls all majored in acting. She had ended up there simply because there were too few female directing students, so they had mixed them in with students from other departments.
All six beds in the three bunk beds were occupied.
Except for Song Lin, however, the other four girls barely spoke to Chi Ying.
Song Lin was the roommate she got along with best, though that was mostly because Song Lin had always been genuinely friendly toward her.
Song Lin came from Su Province, but she was unusually tall for a girl. She was the kind of striking beauty with bold features and a naturally heroic air.
When the school admitted her, they had envisioned her becoming a qingyi-type actress, someone suited to dignified, mature female roles, rather than the youthful ingenue actresses who were popular at the time. Accordingly, most of the roles she was expected to play later in her career were elegant, slightly mature women.
There were advantages to that positioning.
Such roles generally had much greater longevity.
But the disadvantages were equally obvious.
There simply weren’t many of those parts available at the time, so actresses in their twenties often had to portray women in their thirties or forties. By the time they actually reached the appropriate age, casting directors often considered them too old and started pushing them into mother roles instead.
While she was still in college, Song Lin had also made one unfortunate mistake.
She accepted an outside acting job and played an especially memorable vicious supporting villainess.
After that, every script that came her way cast her as seductive, manipulative women.
The entertainment industry they worked in suffered badly from typecasting.
Once an actor became known for a particular role, the offers that followed were almost always similar. It was incredibly difficult for actors themselves to change either the audience’s perception or the industry’s fixed impression of them.
In Song Lin’s previous role, she’d already been cast as a warlord’s concubine.
To make matters worse, she even had an eldest son who was older than she actually was.
She was sick of it.
Utterly hopeless.
Now that she’d graduated, Song Lin hadn’t managed to secure a work assignment in Beijing either. Her grades weren’t good enough to stay on at the university, and she didn’t want to return to the local theater troupe in her hometown.
So, just like Tan Yi, she had become another drifter trying to make it in Beijing.
Earlier that day, she had been out drinking with classmates when Tan Yi paged her, asking her to do him a favor and hurry back to check on Chi Ying.
Since she considered Chi Ying one of her closest friends, she immediately put down her glass and rushed back without hesitation.
When she arrived at the dormitory, she found Chi Ying sobbing uncontrollably.
Not wanting to interrupt, she had quietly stopped in her tracks and leaned against the doorway, waiting for her friend to finish crying.
Seeing Song Lin standing there awkwardly, looking bored and embarrassed, Chi Ying quickly guessed what had happened.
Feeling mortified, she muttered, “I’m going to wash my face.”
Song Lin held it in for as long as she could before finally blurting out, “What’s there to cry about? Finding out what kind of scumbag he is now is practically your ancestors blessing you. When you go home for New Year, you should burn extra incense to thank them.”
“It’s ten thousand times better to dump him now than to follow him back home and only break up after everything’s beyond saving.”
“I’m not crying over the scumbag,” Chi Ying said helplessly. “I’m crying because I was stupid.”
Hearing that, Song Lin didn’t know what to say.
All she could do was offer a weak consolation.
“Who hasn’t fallen for a few jerks when they were young?”
The two girls stood silently in the hallway, awkwardly facing each other.
After a long moment of silence, they both burst into laughter.
Yeah.
Who hadn’t fallen for a few jerks when they were young?
As for what became of Song Lin in her previous life, Chi Ying honestly didn’t know.
By the end, all the girls from their dormitory had simply disappeared from one another’s lives.
They scattered into the vast sea of humanity, each tucked away in some forgotten corner, living ordinary lives of their own. Some were carefree, others burdened with worries.
Every year, countless performing arts schools across the country graduated enormous numbers of students.
But how many of them ever truly made a name for themselves?
Most remained complete unknowns.
Even more left the industry altogether after graduation.
Especially the women.
An actress’s prime was short.
In the end, none of the six girls who had once been as beautiful as flowers ever appeared in the public eye again.
On top of that, all kinds of short-term acting training programs kept popping up, while countless aspiring performers with no formal training at all continued flooding into the industry.
There were simply too many people.
In her previous life, talent competition shows became hugely popular later on, with wave after wave of hopefuls pouring in.
Even those so-called star classes at prestigious acting schools might not produce a single true star in ten years.
And even within those classes, some graduates disappeared without a trace.
The only ones who ever appeared on celebrity interview programs were those who had at least built some reputation and accumulated notable works.
Actors who had spent their entire careers playing minor supporting roles weren’t worth inviting in the producers’ eyes.
And many of those actors wouldn’t have had the face to go anyway.
That was the entertainment industry’s reality.
After washing her face and calming down, Chi Ying sat on her bed chatting with Song Lin, who was removing her makeup.
“What are your plans now? Is there any chance you can at least find a work unit to affiliate with?”
It wasn’t that Chi Ying looked down on classmates who were still drifting just because she had secured her own position.
The reality was that, in this era, household registration, personnel files, and official staffing quotas were all critically important.
When people were young, they rarely thought much about them.
But once real-life pressures set in, all those disadvantages would eventually hit them squarely in the face.
“I’ve got no choice. I’ve been running around for over half a year and still haven’t found an opening.” Song Lin shrugged, looking resigned. “But our department advisor told us today that there’s a new policy this year. Graduates can temporarily store their personnel files at the Labor Bureau’s Talent Service Center. I’ll just do that for now.”
She smiled helplessly.
“Someone with conditions as good as Tan Yi is still drifting around. What else can I do?”
“Don’t worry too much,” Chi Ying encouraged her. “I heard a lot of organizations are being restructured this year. Maybe after a while, things will finally start looking up.”
“Hahaha. I’ll take that as a good omen.” Song Lin laughed. “I’m not too worried. I won’t starve. I’ve saved up a little money, and if things really don’t work out, I can always go home and live off my parents.”
“It’s okay.” Chi Ying smiled encouragingly. “We’re still young. There’s still time for everything.”
…
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