Mountain ranges stretched endlessly.
Teacher Zhou drank a can of coffee.
The Zhou Meiling driving a car and the Zhou at the office of the Cultural Palace were completely different.
She was still wearing that extremely professional-looking thick knitted sweater and medium-long green flannel skirt, but she had on little white shoes. Her body swayed to the music in the car - Japanese, English, Chinese songs, very popular Chinese folk-style songs.
When listening to this song, little Su Xiaoqi held onto the door handle even more tightly.
Because the teacher’s body swayed to the music like she had Parkinson's disease.
"The vast horizon is my love, the soft green hills are flowering below. What kind of rhythm is the most, the most swaying..."
Her skirt also flipped up and her clothes pulled out from her tight belt. If Teacher Zhou wasn't a woman, little Su Xiaoqi would have thought Teacher Zhou was about to do something...
Finally, tall buildings slowly emerged among the mountain ranges as they approached Fulong City.
The teacher finally stopped swaying.
While waiting to exit the freeway, the teacher neatly tucked her clothes back into her belt and pulled her skirt back down over her legs, once again the epitome of a graceful, lady civil servant femme fatale.
Su Xiaoqi: ...
After entering Fulong City, there was more traffic and they couldn't drive fast anymore. Teacher Zhou finally stopped swaying randomly, though she seemed quite excited in spirit.
"Let's go straight to Guojin Building. There are lots of signs there, all the newest and prettiest clothes." Zhou Meiling set the navigation on her phone.
It showed it would take an hour to get there.
There really was traffic congestion. It only took two hours to drive from Lvshan City to Fulong City, but once inside Fulong City, it took a whole hour to get to the department store in the city center.
"Although you are a natural beauty, don't be casual about how you dress up. Looking good is always good. Who doesn't want to make themselves look nice and stand out, catching everyone's eyes at first glance? Let me tell you, if you encounter extreme situations, like being wrongly accused of being a thief or something, people's treatment towards those dressed nicely and shabbily is different. People tend to think it's the shabbily dressed one who did something bad. Really, teacher is doing this for your own good. If you can, never let yourself end up in such an awkward situation."
Though spoke casually, little Su Xiaoqi somehow felt that Teacher Zhou seemed to have gone through something. At first she thought Teacher Zhou must come from a very good family, otherwise how could she have studied abroad in Japan and Korea. But after getting along for a while, she felt it wasn't like that. The elegance and refinement she embodied didn't seem to come from her bones.
It might come from the girl who got excited drinking canned coffee and swayed along to the popular folk song, letting her skirt ride up to bare her thighs comfortably.
Especially when she said this, she was quite emotional, as if she had experienced it herself.
"It's hard to explain clearly to you since you are too young, only seventeen years old. You haven't experienced the ugliness of the world. But maybe you won't have to. You are so excellent. Maintain your excellence - you are much more excellent than ordinary people. You won't suffer unfair treatment either. But maintaining excellence is exhausting. I see you walk over 30,000 steps every day, you still swim and practice Japanese. You preview English classes and memorize the entire New Concept English Book Four. Jing Zhi said you basically have no rest time. I quite admire you. But teacher is speaking from experience - sometimes people can be lazy and you don't actually need to try so hard all the time. If there are simple ways to prove yourself, why not make it simple - for example, later we buy clothes, you put on nice clothes to attend the concert. This is a very simple thing to do."
With heavy traffic, Zhou Meiling had slight road rage but was too embarrassed to swear in front of the child.
So she just chatted endlessly with little Su Xiaoqi.
To be honest, few elders talked to little Su Xiaoqi like this around her.
Her parents cared about her life but wouldn't say things like this.
Her aunt Su Simei had a happy-go-lucky personality and didn’t even know how to get along with children.
The teachers at school had so many students that they wouldn’t pay special attention to the mundane student life of little Su Xiaoqi.
Teacher Zhou was the first.
Little Su Xiaoqi wondered, hadn't she experienced the ugliness of the world herself?
Thinking about it, maybe she was right. What she had experienced - failing the college entrance exam, failed romance, mocked by relatives and classmates - though they seemed huge deals to her at the time, looking back now, they weren't that serious and definitely didn't count as the ugliness of the world.
What the teacher said made some sense but also felt somewhat wrong.
By the time they finally arrived at Guojin and drove into its underground parking garage, seeing the delighted look on the teacher’s face, not even changing into lower heels, bouncing out of the car excitedly, emptying her bag - little Su Xiaoqi suddenly felt that perhaps Teacher Zhou had said all that to convince herself so that she could buy new clothes.
A Teacher Zhou who could cite so many principles just to buy clothes...she didn’t have it easy either.
Little Su Xiaoqi chased after the teacher running wildly, taking the elevator up. Curiously she asked, “Teacher, how will you find your car later? We’re on the second basement level.”
Zhou Meiling: ...
“Oh crap I forgot my parking space. But don’t worry, we’ll take this elevator back down and go find it, then my key fob has sensor detection.”
“Teacher, that number, EZoneC97 written on the front of your car before is a parking space identifier, right?”
Zhou Meiling’s eyes lit up: “Yes, that’s it! Let me remember that.”
Su Xiaoqi: ...That’s dialect...Teacher Zhou exposed herself again...
From the second basement floor to the first floor above ground, they were suddenly blinded by bright lights.
Little Su Xiaoqi had never seen such a brightly lit department store in Lvshan City. It felt like her entire body was under lights from head to toe, flashing like stars.
The mall was not crowded, there were many cosmetic counters and many large stores.
Little Su Xiaoqi recognized the sign of one store, Gucci. She had been specifically educated about this brand by Zhang Juan, who said her handbag was from Gucci and cost over $10,000.
Glancing in through the big glass windows, inside were shelves full of bags...How much did this shop cost? Little Su Xiaoqi looked at several other stores that were like Gucci, very big, entrances glittering, men in suits standing outside like guardians - they didn’t look like shopping stores but more like high-end office spaces, making people not even dare to casually walk in.
Were they going to buy things here? Hadn’t they come to the wrong place? Little Su Xiaoqi felt that even all her prize money from winning the swimming championship was not enough to shop here.
Zhou Meiling was focused, not dragging little Su Xiaoqi to luxury shopping, as she was quite obsessed with new clothes, not so much bags. Mainly she believed different clothes had to be matched with different bags, and those bags were really too expensive. She felt pain to spend that much as a civil servant and it was also inappropriate to change luxury bags every day.
Wearing white shoes, she walked extremely fast, dragging little Su Xiaoqi to a certain cosmetics counter. Little Su Xiaoqi looked up at the English letters: Armani. She sounded it out - Ah-ma-ni.
"Do you have tomato-colored lipstick?" Zhou Meiling's eyes shone as she asked the clerk excitedly.
