I always remember the first time Shi Xiaomeng followed Lao Liang to taste red wine at a high-end club, trying hard to suppress his panic and ignorance, with a look of a bumpkin. I feel sorry for him, really, from beginning to end. No matter what immoral things he did later. Even when other friends eventually settled down, whether it's eating hotpot in the quadrangle courtyard or celebrating the Spring Festival at the old place, I would always think of Shi Xiaomeng from that small mountain village. Thinking about how he was lonely among those red wines whose years and qualities he couldn't even distinguish, looking at their price tags and crying with clenched teeth, making an ugly and rustic face.
The gap between a poor boy and a rich second-generation is not fundamentally materialistic. A rich second-generation can say casually, "Even if I lose all my wealth, I can still take it back." And he really can do it. Even if he just looks at the company report boredly while chasing girls in the office, with a little more patience and help from Baidu, he has enough knowledge to make a plan that makes people look at him differently.
As for the poor boy, he came out from a mountain village where even the primary school was almost demolished. He worked hard but missed entering Tsinghua University by 7 points. What he missed was not just a prestigious school but the life-changing destiny brought by the prestigious school. But he still went to Beijing. I can imagine his rustic appearance when he took the subway for the first time, his awkwardness when he wore a suit for the first time, his trembling hands when he went to Xintiandi and looked at the price tags. He had no relatives or friends around, struggled desperately, and after graduating for several years, he only saved up 30,000 yuan, which wasn't enough to buy even one bathroom in a house. Just because he was poor, he was scolded by the landlord, scolded by the taxi driver, and might have been scolded by many others: "Die outsider, go back to your hometown."
In order to get the 80,000 yuan down payment, this big man was almost at a dead end. The bottle of red wine opened by the rich second-generation young master was once his lifelong hope.
This kind of "wealth", dare he say confidently that losing this dirty opportunity, he could still take it back?
What is love then?
Love is Shen Bing, such a wonderful girl, as if she lived in the last century. She can handle both social gatherings and household chores, despises material desires, is simple and kind-hearted, and her face is written with "I won't change, I will stick to love."
She innocently plays house with the kids at a noble kindergarten where she earns 12,000 yuan a month. She stays home and is loved by Shi Xiaomeng, rejecting the advances of another international superstar by the side of a rich second-generation. If she has nowhere to go, she still has Lin Xia, a good friend who wouldn't let Shi Xiaomeng into the door for her sake. She resigns repeatedly but has a kindergarten principal who personally comes to ask her to return to work. She is so perfect that even on the train, Xiao Liu runs errands for her to buy instant noodles.
When Fengzi faces the same choice as Xiaomeng, he tells Xiaomeng that the happiest days were these few days living in the quadrangle courtyard with Shen Bing, concluding that love and wealth are unrelated. But he forgot that he still had two billion yuan. It's not these two billion yuan that kept Shen Bing by his side, but he doesn't need to worry (or may not even think) that one day Shen Bing would go to work hungry without breakfast, walk a station to save one yuan, be too afraid to go to the hospital when sick and endure it, or even have a dirty male superior forcing her to sell her dignity to please customers.
For Fengzi, living a hard and poor life with Shen Bing is a romantic fantasy. For Shi Xiaomeng, that is the real life he has lived for more than twenty years.
Shen Bing is so perfect that you don't want her to bear anything. But Shi Xiaomeng can't afford it. Even if there's a one in ten thousand chance that she turns into the next Yang Zixi, who messes herself up for unattainable shoes, or becomes pragmatic and smooth like Wu Mei in the business world, just thinking about it makes Shi Xiaomeng tremble with fear.
Everyone says Shi Xiaomeng has a choice, and he chose wrong. But I think he never had a choice.
Outside the fifth ring road, you can't find a 38 square meter house with an 80,000 yuan down payment anymore. A one-bedroom, two-living room rental apartment for 2000 yuan a month won't appear on the rooftops of the east fourth and fifth rings where you can see the "big underpants". A single room in a regular large quadrangle courtyard close to a top kindergarten costs no less than three to five thousand yuan.
The handsome rich son turning over a new leaf to pursue true love is a fairy tale. That expressionless, mechanical-actioned, desperate passerby squeezed next to us on the subway is Shi Xiaomeng.