THE SADDEST GIRL SINCE THE SONG DYNASTY

WORSE THAN EACH OTHER - PART IV

One month later, however, the social equity values of Lady Zhao and Ander had more or less switched. Ander's stock had started low, but it had risen slowly and steadily. It turned out he had a girlfriend back in the United States, and Ander, demonstrating loyalty and diligence, held multi-hour video chats daily. This was the poorly communicated fact that kept him away from excursions into the city or to the seaside, and struck many as a noble one. Moreover, he had stuck with his dour persona so that his fellow students, his business school comrades, didn't consider shrugs and groans as personal affronts or evidence of contempt. It was Ander being Ander, and if he really didn't like you individually, modest intellectual Lala had reasoned, he wouldn't have accepted electronic friend requests. In a month, Ander had re-styled his hair, and positioned himself as an aloof vogue type.

On the other hand, Lady Zhao, having started off so well – as she so often did – pursued her own well-worn spiral towards the status of pariah. She couldn't help it, she concluded. Based on empirical observations, liking her was a well-calibrated non-linear relationship linking time in her company and bond-strength. Bond-strength started high, an instant brother-in-arms feeling, the startling sensation of meeting the best-friend-sister-you-never-knew-you-had; but it then descended in dramatic drops at intervals so that the graph took the appearance of a staircase going from top left to bottom right. Each step was a realization of betrayal or of true character, or was some obscure misunderstanding. At the bottom of the stairs, there was revulsion. Lady Zhao had long resigned herself to this pattern of relationship destruction that felt almost inevitable, only at King Endowment, it happened much faster than usual.

This time the fuel was Lady Zhao's relationship with one of the academics teaching the course. Professor Beaver was a studious looking middle-aged English woman who, to Lady Zhao's surprise, had an interest in East Asian mysticism. Lady Zhao discovered this during a tutorial when she noticed the necklace Professor Beaver was wearing – a wheel-like gold pendant. They got to talking about astrology and palm reading and chart deciphering, discussing the similarities and disparities of cultures separated for thousands of years by deserts and mountain ranges and seas, musing about the kitschness of it all, and reflecting on how they followed the many different strands with understood superficiality. Lady Zhao and Professor Beaver quickly discovered they were at heart very similar people.