I still remember the first time Shi Xiaomeng followed Lao Liang to a high-end club for tasting red wine, trying hard to suppress his panic and ignorance, with a face full of embarrassment. I feel very sorry for him, really, from beginning to end. No matter what immoral things he did later on. Even when other friends have eventually settled down, like having hotpot in a quadrangle courtyard or celebrating the Spring Festival at an old place, I always think about Shi Xiaomeng from that small mountain village. Thinking about how lonely he was, surrounded by a bunch of people, unable to tell the difference between different years and qualities of red wine, looking at their price tags and crying with clenched teeth, ugly and rustic. The gap between a poor boy and a rich second generation is not fundamentally materialistic. A rich second generation can say confidently, if I lose all my wealth, I can still get it back. And they really can, even if they just glance at the company reports during the breaks while chasing girls in the office, with a little more patience and help from Baidu, they have enough knowledge to make a plan that will impress others. 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 that such a school could bring. But he still made it to Beijing. I can imagine how rustic he looked the first time he took the subway, how out of place he was when he wore a suit for the first time, and how his hands trembled when he went shopping at Xintiandi and saw the price tags. With no relatives or friends around, he struggled desperately, and after graduating for several years, he only managed to save up 30,000 yuan, which wasn't even enough to buy a bathroom in a house. Just because he was poor, he was scolded by landlords, taxi drivers, and probably many other people: "Die, outsider, go back to your hometown." To gather the 80,000 yuan down payment, this tough man was almost at his wit's end. The bottle of red wine that a rich second-generation公子opened was once his lifelong hope. Can such "wealth" allow him to say confidently that even if he loses this dirty opportunity, he can still get it back? And what is love? Love is Shen Bing, that beautiful girl who seems to live in the last century. She can handle both formal occasions and domestic chores, despises material desires, is simple and kind, and her face writes, "I won't change, I will stick to love." She plays innocently with the children in a noble kindergarten where she earns 12,000 yuan per month. At home, Shi Xiaomeng loves her, and she rejected another international superstar who wanted to be with the rich second generation. If she had nowhere to go, she still has Lin Xia, a good friend who would not let Shi Xiaomeng enter the door for her sake. She resigned multiple times, and each time, the kindergarten principal would personally come to ask her to return to work. She is so beautiful that even sitting on the train, there is Xiao Liu running errands for her to buy instant noodles. When Fengzi faces the same choice as Xiaomeng, he tells Xiaomeng that the happiest days of his life were living with Shen Bing in the quadrangle courtyard, and concludes that love and wealth are unrelated. But he forgets that he still has two billion yuan. It is not these two billion yuan that keep Shen Bing by his side, but he does not fear (and may not even consider) that one day Shen Bing will skip breakfast and go to work hungry, run one station to save one yuan, dare not go to the hospital when sick and just endure it, or even have a dirty male superior forcing her to sell her charm 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 beautiful that one doesn't want her to bear anything. But Shi Xiaomeng cannot do it. Even if there is a ten-thousandth possibility that she becomes the next Yang Zixi, who gets messy for shoes she cannot obtain, or becomes Wu Mei, who is realistic and smooth in business like a man, just thinking about it would make Shi Xiaomeng feel terrified. Everyone says Shi Xiaomeng has a choice, and he chose wrong. But I think he never had a choice. There are no longer any 38-square-meter houses outside the fifth ring road with an 80,000 yuan down payment. A one-bedroom, two-living room rental unit for 2000 yuan per month will not appear on the top floor of buildings in Dongsi-Wuhuan where you can see the 'big pants' building. A single room in a standard large quadrangle courtyard near the top-tier kindergarten costs no less than three to five thousand yuan. The story of a handsome rich boy 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.