Poverty Shortens Ambition
After graduating from university and lingering in Wuhan for more than half a year, Chu Fei finally decided to head to Shenzhen.
The reason for this decision wasn't some messy complication—it boiled down to four simple words: a poor man's will is short!
Just half a year out of school, Chu Fei was scraping by on a monthly salary of less than two thousand yuan, while his girlfriend Li Ran was pulling in over four thousand every month. And her year-end bonus? A whopping one hundred fifty thousand! That brought her effective monthly income to nearly eighteen thousand—ten times his.
That was the gap.
And the cause of this gap... well, life's opportunities can be so uneven. Sometimes, you meet the right person or stumble into the right situation, and boom—you're set. Unfortunately, heaven loves a good joke, leaving plenty of talented folks down on their luck. Chu Fei was one of them.
Chu Fei and Li Ran were classmates. He'd been juggling several part-time jobs since his freshman year, while she didn't start hunting for internships until her senior year.
Both majored in interior design, and Li Ran was shy and introverted to boot, so she'd faced rejection after rejection. But then, during an interview in an office building, nerves led her to the wrong floor. She wandered into a company that never even posted job ads—and they hired her on the spot. Not only did they take her as an intern, but her honest, diligent work ethic earned her a full-time contract after just two months.
That company she lucked into wasn't some small outfit. It was one of the top design institutes in the country, the kind that usually recruited master's graduates in architecture. They'd never taken an undergrad before, let alone one from a non-architecture background. Li Ran was the first—and apparently the last. Even now, her colleagues called her a legend.
Chu Fei and Li Ran didn't start dating until their junior year. She gave him her virginity, and with her gentle personality and birdlike devotion, plenty of classmates envied his luck. But reality is always so cruel. No romance, however sweet, can compete with cold hard cash—let alone the daily grind of rice, oil, salt, soy, and vinegar.
At first, Li Ran had fallen for Chu Fei's drive and ambition, convinced he'd have a bright future. But after graduation, his salary hovered around a measly thousand-plus yuan, while the guys at her company—barely older than her—were banking at least seven or eight thousand monthly, with year-end bonuses starting at three or four hundred thousand. They drove sleek cars to work, chatting about exotic vacations or snapping up apartments in prime developments. Handsome or not, they were undeniably loaded.
And Chu Fei? His under-two-thousand salary kept him afloat in a mid-sized city like Wuhan, but buying a house or getting married? Pure fantasy.
To put it simply, Chu Fei and Li Ran's colleagues weren't even in the same dimension.
So, almost imperceptibly, Li Ran's attitude toward him shifted. She might not have noticed, but it was real.
She'd toss out cutting remarks that stung, lose patience with him bit by bit, and pick fights over the pettiest nonsense. The quarrels piled up until they exhausted her—especially when she learned he had no year-end bonus or extra pay coming. She'd go quiet then, but that look in her eyes? It cut deep.
So Chu Fei decided to leave. Leave this place. Leave Li Ran. Start fresh somewhere new.
Truth be told, it wasn't even about being broke. His mom, He Peiling, ran a beauty salon in Shenzhen.
It was a modest shop, but it employed around twenty girls—handpicked by his mom from the countryside. They were all fresh-faced and lovely, which drew plenty of customers from Hong Kong. Business stayed steady.
Throughout Chu Fei's college years, He Peiling had sent him living expenses that matched or exceeded what other kids got. But he had principles back then. Disdaining that kind of money, he'd gone self-sufficient from freshman year, earning his own keep. Every yuan she sent went straight into savings, untouched. Four years later, it wasn't a fortune, but it was far from peanuts.
That version of Chu Fei was full of energy and ambition. He'd even joined the student union. Tall and handsome with a sunny vibe, he landed a girlfriend by the second semester of freshman year—a stunning model. The two of them, both pushing six-foot-two, turned heads wherever they went. Plenty of envy, but few knew the truth: she'd chased him.
His ex was Zhang Qian, class president of the fashion modeling program at the art academy.
But she wasn't a virgin when they got together, and after a year and a half, they drifted apart and broke up...