Upon seeing the reply, Wen Di’s eyes darkened, his anger surging to the top of his head, almost making him lose his breath.
The people living in Heqing Garden were either professors or their family members, so it was said that the quality of the tenants was very high, but he didn’t expect that there were such unreasonable people.
Could it be that, like him, this person was also an illegal subletter?
Wen Di reignited his fighting spirit and continued to type passionately: [Volume is not the main point! Your pull almost sent me away with your play. How are you going to compensate for my mental damages! Do you have any sense of public morality?]
The neighbor quickly replied: [Do you have it?]
Wen Di: [?]
What nonsense was this person spouting? He was disturbing people in broad daylight, and yet he accused him of lacking public morality?
Neighbor: [(Picture) (Picture) The community has explicitly stated that garbage is not to be piled up in the hallways.]
Wen Di glanced at the picture, which showed several garbage bags. He and his roommate had been so busy these past few days that they forgot to take the trash out, leaving it piled up in front of the door. Fortunately, it was early October; if it had been during the summer heat, it would probably have started to mold by now.
Neighbor: [(Enlarged picture of the garbage bags) You didn’t even sort your trash.]
Ah? Is this the main point?
Wen Di was inexplicably led astray by the neighbor and started arguing about garbage sorting: [I clearly separated the kitchen waste and other trash.]
Neighbor: [Large bones are hard to decompose; they are other trash, not kitchen waste. Glass bottles are recyclable, but mirrors are dry waste. Toilet paper is very water-soluble and is non-recyclable. The mess is all piled up together, do you people have any common sense?]
Wen Di was stunned. This person…why was he so interested in his garbage? He had even carefully examined it and sorted it!
Wen Di: [Is it okay to peep into people’s rubbish bags? You’re not a pervert, are you?]
Neighbor: [I’m telling you common sense, and you’re saying I have a mental illness.]
Neighbor: [Do you resort to personal attacks every time you can’t win an argument?]
Wen Di’s chest was filled with raging anger. This person must have a mental illness!
Wen Di: [These days, sorting trash into two categories already makes you an environmental pioneer! Why don’t you hold up the animal protection sign and go stay in the century-old tree?]
Wen Di: [And if you lack musical talent, stop polluting innocent bystanders’ ears. Just go find a piece of wood and saw it instead.]
Growing up, he had never lost a fight, but the other person sent him a sentence that immediately broke his defense.
In just a dozen words, like an atomic bomb hurtling down, his sanity was blown to pieces.
Neighbor: [Judging by your profile picture, you like Shakespeare ah? No wonder you speak so illogically.]
Wen Di’s mind went blank for a second. He jumped out of bed and shouted: “Damn!!”
Depriving him of sleep, denigrating him as a person, and questioning his quality, all of these could be tolerated.
But this person dared to insult Shakespeare, a crime that deserved death and was unforgivable!
Shakespeare was his research subject, his spiritual mentor, the pillar of his academic journey. Anyone who dared to speak out against Shakespeare was his enemy, his mortal foe, someone he could never forgive!
Wen Di: [Shakespeare is the Zeus on the Olympus of human literature, the soul of Western theater. Who do you think you are to slander him?]
There was a long silence from the neighbor. Wen Di thought they were probably at a loss for words—who could deny Shakespeare’s monumental contributions to human civilization? Then a long message came from the other side.
Neighbor: [Shakespeare’s works are confusingly dated. King Lear is set in the 8th century B.C., but it’s filled with dukes, courtiers, and knights with visors—characters that belong to the Middle Ages. Even a third-rate web novelist today wouldn’t make such a ridiculous mistake when setting a historical background].
Wen Di: [Third-rate? Who the hell are you calling third-rate?!]
Neighbor: [The plot logic is also a mess. Lear lived with his daughters his whole life but easily believed his eldest and second daughters’ words while distrusting his most beloved youngest daughter. The same goes for Gloucester—one son accuses the other, and without asking his son directly, he condemns him. These characters’ tragedies are entirely due to these implausible plot developments. No reader can empathize with such characters; the plot arrangements are utterly stupid.]
Wen Di: [You don’t know shit about Shakespeare! Exaggeration and transcending reality are hallmarks of Shakespearean drama; they have symbolic significance. Do you even know what the mirror of nature is?]
Neighbor: [So you admit that his works have anachronisms and his plot is driven by the logic of irrational character behavior??]
An unknown fire shot out from his throat like a rocket. Furious, Wen Di jumped up, grabbing his phone and circled around the room passionately.
Wen Di: [Using 21st-century realism to nitpick medieval drama. Have you ever read a classic? Don’t talk nonsense just because you have poor taste.]
He wrote a sprawling thousand-word essay discussing the character development and symbolic significance in Shakespearean plays, only to have the other party persist with the logical issues and point out the inconsistencies between character actions and the historical setting. This word-for-word criticism was just like the reviewer of Foreign Literary Studies, which instantly puts Wen Di into the fear of being dominated by the C Journal.
Neighbor: [It’s the 21st century. We need to be skeptical of authority. Elevating such logically flawed works to a pedestal and forbidding others from analyzing and pointing out the flaws is literary bullying.]
Wen Di: [?? Who’s bullying whom? Don’t spit on people!]
Neighbor: [To like this kind of work that flaunts rhetoric, has a lengthy narrative, a loose plot, a hasty ending, and is mediocre and boring, and to blindly follow that group of self-proclaimed authoritative literary critics who blow it out of proportion, it is called tasteless.]
Wen Di exploded. This person had trampled on his literary idol to such an extent; this was intolerable!
He rushed out of his room, picked up one of the feather dusters in the living room, walked to the front door, and was about to rush out to fight to the death with the next door. The moment he reached the door handle, he paused, took a few steps back in a fit of rage, and started vigorously waving the duster at the door.
His roommate, Yu Jingyi, who was eating breakfast in the living room, looked at him with a confused face: “What’s wrong with you? You look like a ruffled rooster.”
Wen Di pointed the feather duster at the door and said indignantly: “That jerk next door insulted my research subject!”
Yu Jingyi was completely confused, so Wen Di started from the violin and briefly described the other party’s actions that were outraged by both humans and gods.
After listening, Yu Jingyi looked surprised. “Violin?”
Wen Di was stunned: “This sound is like it’s drilling into your head, how can you not hear it?”
Yu Jingyi put down her chopsticks and listened carefully, revealing an expression of dawning realization: “If you open the door to your room, it seems like we’re able hear it, but the sound in the living room is very faint.”
Wen Di frowned and closed his door. The sound indeed became much quieter. He then went to Yu Jingyi’s room and listened intently; there was practically no sound.
The neighbor’s violin playing wasn’t very loud, but it was terribly unpleasant. No wonder the neighbors above and below hadn’t heard it. It seemed that Wen Di’s bedroom was directly adjacent to the room where the neighbor played the violin, so…
“So I’m the only one suffering?” Wen Di was filled with indignation. “How can this be?”
“What are you going to do?” Yu Jingyi watched him holding the duster, “Find him and settle the score?”
Wen Di immediately put the feather duster down. “Don’t be ridiculous. Who can I even beat up?”
Besides, provoking the neighbor was too risky. He was an illegal subletter so it was best not to have direct contact with the residents.
“Sigh, then just bear with it,” Yu Jingyi comforted him. “You’ve put up with Old Liu for over three years, dealing with this guy for a little while shouldn’t be a problem.”
Wen Di was filled with both grief and anger.
He felt like he was truly out of luck lately, suffering misfortunes in his personal life, relationships, and academic pursuits all at once.
He held his breath and went back to his room. Before leaving, he turned to Yu Jingyi and said, “From now on, let’s buy black garbage bags. The light-colored ones have no privacy at all!”
Yu Jingyi was puzzled. “Weren’t the light blue bags your choice? You bought ten rolls in one go because they were on sale on Taobao, and now you haven’t even used half of them.”
Wen Di struggled for a while between fully utilizing what they had and dealing with his obsessive neighbor. He put down the feather duster with humiliation and said: “Forget it, let’s talk about it after using them all. Ten yuan is still money after all.”
Yu Jingyi had known that he was stingy and was not surprised at all. She put the cereal bowl in the sink and washed it. Glancing at her fuming roommate, she hesitated a moment before asking: “Did you change the campus network password?”
Wen Di temporarily recovered from his grief and anger, blinked and reacted: “Oh, right. The system reminded me to update the password earlier. I changed it and forgot to tell you, sorry.”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Yu Jingyi said, “I’m the one who use your account.”
T University used its abundant financial resources to purchase a vast database, which current students could access and download for free with their campus accounts. Although Yu Jingyi had left the school, she still kept up with linguistic journals, so Wen Di had shared his account with her.
“Any interesting research in linguistics lately?” Wen Di asked..
Talking about her former major, Yu Jingyi, who had just looked sleepy, was instantly refreshed, “There was an article in the last issue of Linguistics that was quite interesting, about a language called Whistling in Kuskoy, Turkey.”
Wen Di blinked. “Communicating with whistles?”
“En, the shepherds there have very strong whistles. In the days before cell phones, they could communicate across mountains with whistles, and the sound could travel up to eight kilometers.”
Wen Di exclaimed ‘Wow’ while taking out his phone, intending to send the new password to Yu Jingyi. However, the screen didn’t light up even after pressing it several times.
“It shut down on its own again,” Wen Di muttered. “Aren’t you heading to work? You go ahead, I’ll get it turned back on and send you the password in a bit.”
Yu Jingyi slung her bag over her shoulder and grabbed her keys, glancing worriedly at Wen Di’s phone. “I’ve seen it shut down on its own a few times now. Why not get it fixed? What if it breaks when you’re out?”
“It’s okay, it works once it’s plugged in,” Wen Di replied. “Getting it fixed is expensive. For an old phone like this, it’s more cost-effective to replace it.”
Despite saying that, he hadn’t bought a new one either. As a PhD student, he received a monthly stipend of 2700 yuan from the government and earned an additional 2700 yuan as a teaching assistant, totaling 5400 yuan per month. With cheap food and housing on campus, it was more than enough. However, he still wanted to save some money, especially since his family didn’t have financial resources.
This mobile phone belonged to a high school classmate five years ago. The classmate gave the old one to him after getting a new one. He didn’t know exactly how old it was, but it was normal for it to have some issues by now.
It usually worked fine, so he preferred not to replace it if he didn’t have to.
After Yu Jingyi left for work, Wen Di returned to his room and plugged in his phone, and it turned on as expected. He sent her the new password, checked his notes, and decided to ignore the carping villain next door. He had a mountain of miscellaneous tasks to handle, and his advisor was checking on his progress every few hours.
As a result, just as he sat down at his desk, the sound of the violin from next door started up again. This time, the sound was even more magical than last time, sounding like a combination of sawing wood and drilling a manhole cover, with a hint of a knife scratching the glass.
The anger brewing in his heart was like an active volcano, and every note was like throwing a nuclear bomb into the active volcano.
Wen Di was filling out the application materials in front of the computer while the screeching filled his ears. The more he wrote, the more frustrated he became, and the more he wrote, the more depressed he became, so stifled that he could not breathe well, and his chest stung.
He decided to stay in the library for a day, so he wouldn’t have to stay up late at night.
When he returned home under the ink-black sky, he walked up to his door and, as expected, he didn’t hear the sound of the violin.
Great, he thought, at worst, he could just go out every day.
Who would have thought that when he entered the door, the next door was still quiet, but as soon as he sat down, the sound of the piano started instantly.
The grating sound was like thumbtacks on his chair, causing Wen Di to jump up. This had to be a deliberate attack on him! It was definitely targeted at him!
With late-night emo mood and physical exhaustion, Wen Di’s grief and anger reached a peak.
He slammed his bag to the ground and pulled out a stack of papers. He had to let out this frustration!
Wen Di paced back and forth in his room, and finally came up with the most shameless, filthy, and malicious curse he could muster.
The next morning, when Bian Cheng woke up, he found a message from the neighbor sent at two in the morning, along with a photo.
The photo was taken of a piece of paper with three lines of handwritten words on it, each of them dancing like a dragon and a phoenix1Basically means beautiful penmanship or elegant handwriting , and it penetrated the back of the paper:
May all the wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed with raven’s feature from unwholesome fen drop on you! 2The original translation would be ‘May all the poisonous dew that my old mother scraped off the unclean swamp with her raven hairs be poured on you!’ but considering this curse is taken from Shakespeare’s play, just in the Chinese version, I translated using the line from Shakespeare play (Act 1, Scene 2 of “The Tempest.)
May All the charms Of Sycorax—toads, beetles, bats—light on you!3Same as above. The literal translation would be ‘May all the charms, toads, beetles, and bats of Sycorax be cursed upon you!’ Also from Act 1, Scene 2 of “The Tempest.
May a gust of evil wind from the southwest blow you with blisters all over your body!4Is this from the Shakespeare line? Because I couldn’t find anything on it. Let me know if any Shakespeare fans know anything about this
T/N: I actually had fun translating this because of their interaction! Anyway, do let me know if you guys prefer the original line from Shakespeare or the literal translation from the Chinese version of it! I think there are one or two more line in this book that quoted Shakespeare (the title are all from Shakespeare’s work btw!)
