Yangon, India Street.
"Hello, I would like to find Miss Shantanu."
Just like many historic Chinese and overseas Chinese settlements around the world are called Chinatowns.
This Indian neighborhood, which is only adjacent to the Irrawaddy River on the west side of the city, had already been settled here by Indian Sikhs wearing turbans following the British during the colonial era in the 19th century.
The whole street has an Indian feel.
In addition to listening to exotic ethnic songs, seeing Indian-style lotus lanterns floating far away on the Irrawaddy River, and buying authentic Bombay hand-made curry rice and Indian flying pancakes, there are also many restaurants here. A gold store.
When Gu Weijing walked into a gold store with a sign in Hindi देवनागरी (天城).
The guy from Mumbai behind the counter was reading a novel with a white tiger printed on the cover with gusto.
Gu Weijing recognized it as his classmate Shantanu's favorite extracurricular reading - "White Tiger".
It is India’s spooky and dark version of “The Pursuit of Happyness”. It tells the story of a low-caste wage earner who relies on “bloody entrepreneurial spirit” to counterattack. It is considered the most popular popular novel in India today.
Netflix also adapted it into a TV series, which was as popular among Indians as "Shanghai" among the Chinese community in the 1980s and 1990s.
The reason why Gu Weijing understands this book so clearly is because he was in the same study group as Miss Shantanu in the English literature inquiry class at school, and used this book that won the Booker Award as the theme. Made special reports.
Mona Shantanu, she is Gu Weijing's classmate in a private international high school.
From her last name, you can tell that this female classmate's family is quite wealthy.
Having been classmates and good friends with Mona for so long, Gu Weijing is still confused about India's extremely complex caste system.
It is different from the general concepts of Brahman and Kshatriya mentioned in high school textbooks.
When it comes to the breakdown of castes in India today, there are actually thousands of them.
Mona told Gu Weijing that her surname is Shantanu, which comes from the golden king in traditional Indian mythology. It has the same origin as Shantanu, the famous Indian president of Adobe, a company with a market value of 100 billion US dollars.
This is typical of upper castes.
Just like this glittering name, Mona's father runs a gold jewelry store in Yangon and can earn a net income of about US$100,000 a year, which is considered good anywhere in the world.
She is very beautiful and is Gu Weijing's good friend in school.
Yangon is relatively chaotic. Gu Weijing is not yet an adult. If he wants to sell some gold, the first thing he thinks of is this female classmate whose family owns a jewelry store.
The guy from Mumbai who was looking after the shop was obviously so involved in the story of the wage earners' counterattack that he didn't even know there were customers coming to the door.
Gu Weijing rapped his knuckles on the glass plate on the counter several times.
"Oh, welcome...Master Gu."
The Mumbai boy finally came to his senses. He hurriedly hid the novel under the counter. When he raised his head, he found that it was not a customer or the boss who was checking the post. He let out a sigh of relief.
He looked at the young man opposite him for a moment and recognized him as a school friend of a young lady who had been to his home several times.
"You are here to see Miss Mona, right?"
…
"Can you ask your employees to stop calling me Master? It makes me feel uncomfortable."
Mona's room is a large bedroom on the second floor behind the gold shop, facing the Irrawaddy River.
When Gu Weijing walked into the house, Mona was standing in front of the drawing board on the balcony, drawing towards the Irrawaddy River outside the window.
The winter temperature in Yangon is not cold. The girl seems to have just taken a shower, with her hair wet and tied behind her head.
She was only wearing a bathrobe, and her smooth calves were exposed under the white cotton robe. The sleeves of the bathrobe were folded up at the wrists and fixed with a pink clip.
The sunshine coated her jade-like arms with gold powder, and the three gold bracelets on her white wrists made a tinkling sound like bells with the movements of the paintbrush on her wrists.
"He is our coachman and servant, and looking after the store is just a temporary job for him. You are my classmate. If he doesn't call you Master, what should he call you?"
Mona asked in a calm tone without looking back.
The caste system in India is not just as simple as the level of social wealth, but also a strong bond of clan power.
According to some social surveys, there are still more than three million professional servants in India.
Even big cities like Mumbai and Bangalore have special low-cost hotels for servants to stay when they go on business trips with their masters.
The intuitive translation of the caste of the boy who is looking after the store is the coachman.
He was brought by Master Shantanu from the Indian countryside to help in the shop in Myanmar. His father was the driver of Master Shantanu, and his grandfather was the driver of Master Shantanu's father. Even his great-grandfather worked for Shantanu. The Tanu family used to drive horse-drawn carriages for a living.
It can be said that the family history of this Mumbai boy over the past few hundred years is a history of service to the local country lord Shantanu family, which is terrifyingly stable.
Gu Weijing didn't reply. The girl's figure painting in the sun was soft and delicate, but the slim curves exposed at the collar and neck of the white bathrobe made him blush a little.
"Um?"
Mona didn't hear anyone's answer for a long time, so she turned her head and saw Gu Weijing's shy face.
"Oh, I never understand what you Chinese have to be ashamed of."
The girl turned around, put down her paintbrush, walked out from the balcony, and hugged Gu Weijing generously, "Welcome to my house, Boy."
"After the Chinese New Year, I made an appointment to go out to watch a movie. You have been busy. I thought we would have to wait until school started to see each other again," she said.
Mona sat cross-legged on her big pink bed, patted the place next to her, and motioned for Gu Weijing to sit down.
Gu Weijing sat next to him.
The fragrance of the girl's shampoo and the faint smell of Bath & Body Works scented candles that had been burned in the room lingered in his nose, making his nose itchy.
He has known Miss Mona beside him for a long time.
Yangon is not Paris. There are actually only a few schools offering international art classes. If parents want their children to learn art, there are not many choices for parents.
When he first met Mona, he was still in elementary school.
At that time, Mona was just a little girl with a red auspicious mole between her eyebrows.
They went to the same elementary school, the same junior high school, and the same high school together.
Mona has also grown from a little girl to a big girl.
She is the most popular girl in the school, beautiful but not withdrawn, cheerful but not arrogant. She is not only a member of the school's cheerleading team, but also the female president of the student union, and is considered a popular figure in the school.
And Gu Weijing...has always been Gu Weijing.
He is definitely not the hateful nerd in school, not the weirdo or nerd who has no friends and only reads books, but he is also not the tall and handsome heartthrob of the school football team who can't let the girls dance at the dance. Cool break dancing for cheers.
He just immersed himself in his own painting world and painted with peace of mind.
Gu Weijing himself might not be able to tell clearly about the exact relationship between himself and Mona.
It stands to reason that a girl can invite you to her room without any scruples. No matter how you say it, this should be a very special relationship.
But Gu Weijing has been doing this all these years. When he was in elementary school, they would discuss homework together, and Mona would sometimes come to his house. Both parties behaved very naturally.
If they are just friends, or the girl’s male best friend,
But both sides have some good feelings and ambiguity in their hearts.
My Boy Friend - This is what Mona often calls Gu Weijing in school, and it is also the positioning of their current relationship.
This word is more ambiguous than Male Friend, but far less clear and straightforward than Partner.
Foreign schools are relatively open to relationships between male and female students.
The most outrageous legend circulated in the school is that nine years ago, a 14-year-old senior went to a Boy Scout summer camp to study in Europe during the summer vacation. During the camping trip, his young love made a senior Hungarian girl unexpectedly pregnant. .
I heard it was the woman who took the initiative.
And it seems that because of family religious reasons, the woman gave birth to the child, so she became a father at the age of fifteen.
But foreign schools are not as open as many people imagine.
Especially in a prestigious private local high school like Gu Weijing and the others, boys who want to sneak into the girls' dormitory, or girls who want to sneak into the boys' dormitory, or wild mandarin ducks who mess around on campus will be expelled.
Although it may not be considered a scandal, this kind of thing will affect the enrollment financial report, and the school board will not care.
In addition, the school has an encouraging attitude towards the emotions of adolescent boys and girls.
Regular sorority dances for boys and girls are also held.
This is also an old tradition in private schools. They need to learn not only knowledge, but also life.
If you can't find a boyfriend or girlfriend throughout your school years, foreign parents who send their children to international schools will see you as a loser, and they will question the school's teaching philosophy.
In Gu Weijing's school, students' definitions of friends of the opposite sex are roughly divided into the following categories.
[male/lady friend] - This word means I have a friend, he/she is male or female, that is, an ordinary friend of the opposite sex.
[Girl/boy friend] - This word has a slightly ambiguous relationship. A person can have many friends of the opposite sex.
But generally speaking, unless you play very fancy, a boy or a girl can only have one boyfriend or girlfriend.
There are two ways to write this word in writing, one is BoyFriend and the other is Boy (space) Friend. In English culture, the former means male lover and the latter means male friend.
The next level up is Partner, which means lover.
In school, if you hear someone introduce their lover as a partner, it means that they may not be just playing around, but are about to reach the point where they want to live together or talk about marriage.
Perhaps due to the influence of culture, Gu Weijing felt that Miss Mona was like an erratic elf.
Sometimes he feels that the other person is very close to him, so close that he can hear the heartbeats of both parties beating together. At other times, he feels that the other person is far away, acting distant and unpredictable.
At least when it comes to dealing with the relationship between men and women, he shows that he is not as comfortable as other girls.
