Chapter 5

Chapter 5

After signing my first contract, Xu Zhiqiu and I booked a restaurant to celebrate.

“Your boss flew into a rage when he found out you and I had partnered up,” Xu Zhiqiu told me.

As grad students, we called our supervisors our bosses.

“That happened? He actually called me today and asked me to come back and keep attending classes.”

After my supervisor heard I had started a business and even landed a major contract with the Lin Family, his attitude toward me did a complete one-eighty. He was warm and accommodating in a way he had never been before, and kept hinting, both openly and otherwise, at why I hadn’t come to him.

I told him directly, “When it comes to starting a business, I’ll only consider partnering with women. Women are meticulous, cautious, emotionally intelligent, and empathetic.”

My supervisor had once said right in front of me that he wouldn’t recruit any female students in the next cohort, because women would all end up latching onto rich men anyway, so from then on he would only take male students.

Xu Zhiqiu asked, “Then are you planning to go back?”

I shook my head. “At the end of the day, people go to school so they can get a job. I already have a job. I have a company to run. I told him he could cancel my enrollment outright. I don’t care.”

Xu Zhiqiu looked a little surprised, then smiled. “Even if he agrees, the department won’t. They still want you to give the outstanding graduate speech.”

“And here’s to you becoming a professor soon.”

We clinked glasses.

In truth, what I was doing was no different from the original story: taking care of Lin Yue with all my heart and soul, keeping him comfortable in body and mind, and making sure he had nothing to worry about.

The difference was that in the original story, I personally rolled up my sleeves and cooked for him.

Now, I had hired a professional team to do it. Along the way, I even squeezed a nice sum out of him and became the star of the college, never again the pitiful dodder flower who dropped out halfway through.

Maternal-style devotion and sacrifice are worthless. Men won’t love you just because of that.

Because feelings are involved, men even think it’s their own charm at work, that they deserve it, while you are just foolish and naive.

I have never understood why the heroines of tragic romance novels are always taking care of men. There seems to be a kind of East Asian conditioning in it-if you love someone, become his mother. This is even regarded as a common feminine virtue.

But if this really is a virtue, why don’t men practice it themselves?

Why don’t men become women’s supportive partners at home? Why do they get to fight for their careers, rise to wealth and power, and then surround themselves with pretty young things outside?

I admire supportive partners, but I can’t be one. I don’t like taking care of people, especially not men. What do men have to do with me? Am I supposed to spin silk until the silkworm dies, burn like a candle until I’m nothing but ash and tears?

My time is precious too, so I choose to be like them: loving money and wealth, obsessed with power, and greedy for young beauty.

Just like the line on the cover of the Neapolitan Novels:

“My entire life has been nothing but a vulgar struggle to improve my social status.”