Dense Fog

Nowadays, gender isn’t even an issue. Would school and major still be an issue?

January 19, 2021

Lin Wu was born and raised in this city for nineteen and a half years, yet he had never before seen such a fog. The climate in Northern China was arid and had low humidity. In a place where rain was rare, the sight of a gentle and hazy fog was even harder to come across.

The most beautiful foggy scenery he had ever seen was in his mother and father’s group photo, taken back when they were young, in a canal town in Jiangnan. The light rain drizzled over the black awning boats1 that gently floated along the waterways of the historic town.

The photo was from his parents’ honeymoon. Lin Wu often thought, their journey must have been so unforgettable that even though he was born three years later, his name still preserved the memory of the fog from that faraway Southern village2.

The comments underneath the post were, at first, all praise for the photography and pretty scenery, but the style of conversation afterwards somehow became more academic, discussing whether this kind of weather could be considered unusual in Shenyang. Moreover, this led to students expressing their anxieties about climate anomalies across the globe.

Eating grilled cold noodles3 and worrying as if they were council members of the United Nations—their university life was simple and modest like this.

At almost noon, Li Junchi finally came back. He was very tall, possessing a build that was long, slender and upright, and his skin was a healthy wheat colour. When he walked around campus, he would always be mistaken by the sports school students to be one of their own.

As soon as he entered, he first looked towards Xia Yang, then discovered that the roommate he hadn’t seen for the entire break was on the top bunk looking at him with an unfocused and puzzled gaze.

Li Junchi laughed, “So did you just wake up now or did you just finish eating so you’re ready to take a nap?”

“Look at my jaundiced face and emaciated body, does it seem like I’ve just eaten.” Xia Yang wiped his face, completely waking up. Afterwards, he thought of something, ambiguously wagged his eyebrows at Li Junchi, and asked, “Did you get their WeChat?”

Li Junchi was lost. “Whose WeChat?”

Lin Wu was having fun watching their show: “The little sister you picked up at the station.”

Li Junchi sure had a lot to say about this, as he placed the plastic bags he was carrying onto the table one after another: “I didn’t ask her for it, she insisted on asking me!”

“Such a nice thing happened?” said Lin Wu.

“Did you give it to her?” asked Xia Yang.

“Well, how could I give it?” said Li Junchi, with a devotion to righteousness that inspired reverence. “This was part of the additional price.”

Lin Wu: “...”

Xia Yang: “...”

Single by his own strength.

“It’s perfect that you haven’t eaten,” said Li Junchi, who wholeheartedly did not think see any problem with his handling of matters, returning seamlessly to the previous topic. “Let’s go have hot pot together at noon.”

“Hot pot?” Lin Wu’s eyes brightened as soon as he heard these two words. “Spicy numb tomato and mushroom soup or curry?”

As they said, there was nothing that couldn't be solved by eating barbecue together, and if there was, then have another meal of hot pot.

“They're all good.” Li Junchi took a few small boxes of ready-made soup bases out of his plastic bags and laid them out one by one. “Pick your flavour.”

Fifteen minutes later.

Three male students were sitting at their respective desks. In front of each person was a steamy, bubbling, self-heating hot pot.

Lin Wu let out a weary sigh. After passing one and a half months in the lull of vacation, he managed to forget about their dorm’s “happy hot pot hour”. At the end of the last term, their dorm room had passed a collective vote to switch from huddling around a shared “family style” pot to eating at individual self-heating stoves.

“My hot pot... It doesn’t have any spirit.” Lin Wu was disappointed.

On the topic of hot pots, Xia Yang was on the same page as Lin Wu. He unwillingly shook his head, once more saying to Li Junchi, “Why did we have to switch, aren’t all the other dorms cooking hot pot together like normal people? Even though they don’t dare tell others about it in case they’re caught by an impromptu room inspection and even hide themselves with guilty consciences, it still doesn’t stop them from eating happily and drinking well.”

“Don’t look at me, back then I actually abstained from voting, alright?” Li Junchi lifted one hand to show his innocence and tapped his phone to send a voice message with the other. “Ren Feiyu, Lin Wu and Xia Yang want to have another chat with you about our dorm’s hot pot situation.”

Ren Feiyu, who still hadn’t boarded the train, clearly had a lot of spare time. In the blink of an eye, he replied with a 59 second long string of voice messages.

“You guys want to cook hot pot in our dorm again? Hear me out, this really won’t do. Remember the huge power outage in our building at the end of the term last time, wasn’t it scary enough? The dorm building has a centralized power supply. If you use a high power appliance and I use a high power appliance, there'll be a dangerous overlap. The power going out is the least of our worries, what if we have an electrical leakage or things catch fire? Our building has so many people that it’ll be difficult to evacuate, and we even live on the third floor, leaving us with a high risk factor if we jump out the window. And there’s still that crumbling wallpaper that you guys definitely haven’t noticed. We always gather around the same spot when we cook, the steam must have smoked the wallpaper above that spot until it started to peel. Haven’t you seen the news online ah, sooner or later that strip of wallpaper is going to fall into our pot. Don’t assume that the probability of this event is small, I’ve lived for this many years, anything and everything unlucky has more than a small probability of happening with me here...”

Lin Wu really couldn't bear listening to any more. He got up, rushed over to Li Junchi, and grabbed his phone to stop the recording. He was too lazy to switch back to his own phone and just used Li Junchi’s phone to send a voice clip to the group: “We’re not having hot pot anymore, we’re having liangpi4, 100% safe. You can relax your 120 hearts5, just sit tight and wait for arrangements at the train station, mkay?”

At the time, room 333 had conducted a vote to decide whether or not to change their hot pot style. The result: two votes for staying with their family style, one vote against, and one vote abstained. Then why did they make the change in the end? It was because the opposing vote came from Ren Feiyu, who channeled his “pessimistic energy emanation plus inexplicable crisis awareness” to out-talk ten Xia Yangs without getting to any point. And this was no average feat; Xia Yang had exerted his full strength. So his one vote overrode ten votes with very little effort.

Speaking of the train, Ren Feiyu finally replied with a short message, full of unconcealable joy: “I’m all done now, it’s the same train but they changed the time to tomorrow, hehehe.”

It was rare to see Ren Feiyu cheerful. One had to know that out of the 365 days of this person’s year, 364 of them were spent in grief. Even if he saw a cloud overhead moving towards him, he would feel that it was an ill omened cloud harbouring evil intentions. Yet still, you couldn’t call him paranoid, because facts proved that life was really out to treacherously do him in on a daily basis. So when he was happy, Lin Wu and the rest of the trio felt happy too.

What a pity that after three merry seconds, grief struck again at Ren Feiyu: “But this means I can’t make tomorrow’s morning classes...”

Sad, pitiful, wronged.

Lin Wu had just returned to his own seat and started eating his little hot pot. When he heard this sentence, he put down his chopsticks and stood up again. He was closest to the window. In one step, he strode over, looked down at the first years who had just received their military uniforms and were walking towards the dormitory building in front of them, took a few photos, and sent them to the group chat.

Ren Feiyu was quiet for a good while. Finally, he replied with a single line of text.

Please bestow a koi upon me: All of that is over [Climb high and look into the distance. How nostalgic.jpg]

Although the message was accompanied by a sticker, it still seemed much more solemn than his voice clip.

Lin Wu also went back to typing: Do you feel better now?

Please bestow a koi upon me: It’s a blessing to be alive [Tearing up in the wind.jpg]

The demonic military training period was a long standing, first-rate tradition at their university. Last year, when they were first years, they each nearly shed a layer of skin on that same, hellish September day.

Happiness, it was all relative.

However, what surprised everyone later was that on the next day, military training did not start on time at all.

The great fog arrived.

“Attention, all students. Attention, all students. Due to the weather conditions, all classes have been stopped. The campus is under provisional lockdown. To all students, if you do not have any special circumstances, please do not leave campus. Stay in your dorms whenever possible and limit your outdoor activities in order to avoid any accidents...”

This announcement echoed across the entire campus on repeat. Starting at 7:45 AM, this message had broadcasted for almost two hours by now.

The reason Lin Wu and his roommates remembered the timing so clearly was that the first time the broadcast had sounded, they had just come out of the dining hall after breakfast and were about to feel their way to their first class through the thick fog.

Forced to fumble about, no matter how strong and tough the guys were, they each still had to tug on one another, like Thomas the Train & friends, shifting forward in baby steps. If one step strayed, either someone would get hit or someone would crash into a tree. In the worst case, the whole line of people could trip and fall together.

The fog was dense indeed.

The azure blue of the morning sky had turned into a chaotic white haze. The clouds billowed in the sky and large masses of fog rolled downwards, melting into the background. The distant mountains, towering buildings, nearby gardens and passersby, all seemed to be tinted with the colour of the fog, becoming light and transparent, floating amongst the dense and dream-like fog.

When Lin Wu peered out the window after getting out of bed, he had been scared out of his skin. Afterwards, only when he realized it was fog did he relax a little, gather his textbooks, and head out with Li Junchi and Xia Yang.

He didn’t expect that after painstakingly feeling their way to the dining hall and eating breakfast, he would be informed that classes had stopped for the whole school.

It was fog. It wasn’t a rainstorm, snowstorm, hailstorm, or thunderstorm. How could there be any danger?

[Env Eng Class 1 Chat]

Xia Yang the silver tongued: It’s just that the visibility is a little low today, isn’t stopping classes and closing off the school making too big a deal out of it? People know it’s only fog, but those who don’t know might think poison gas leaked from somewhere, am I right? [shrug]

Liu Mu who is looked up to by thousands: I also think this is a bit excessive

Sun Yuehan with elegance born of the heavens: Taking precautions I guess.

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: Too late.

Bai Xinrui the bejeweled: ?

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: A girl from the material science department already tripped right in front of her dorm building and injured herself, a business school student fell in front of the dining hall and got injured, three guys in mechanical engineering got into a fight on the way to their classroom and almost trampled over each other in the chaos, and a guy from the sports school jumped down from a tree and landed on a liberal arts student and fractured both of his arms.

Xia Yang the silver tongued: ...
Pang Dongdong who falls swiftly like a waterfall: ...
Liu Mu who is looked up to by thousands: ...
Bai Xinrui the bejeweled: ...

Lin Wu who makes flowers bloom around him: No wait, those three mechanical engineering guys who got into a fight I can understand, but the sports major and arts major are too confusing, right?

This was the record of the class chat at 8 o’clock in the morning.

Lin Wu had hit the nail on the head. In an instant, he changed the trend of discussion, sending ripples throughout the chat.

Xia Yang the silver tongued: That’s right, why would he climb up the tree?
Sun Yuehan with elegance born of the heavens: After he finished climbing up, he jumped back down?
Shang Haitao who strolls and eats, strolls and eats: The crucial point is that he slammed onto another person.
Xu Zhenlong who shakes the world: Yet he happened to land onto that art student’s two arms??

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: Abnormal weather gives rise to excitement, thus there can be a strong impulse to climb trees @Xia Yang the silver tongued

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: It’s reasonable to say that he climbed to the top of the tree, eventually calmed down, then decided to rely on his athletic abilities and jumped down @Sun Yuehan with elegance born of the heavens

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: Perhaps he didn’t hit the person. Rather, the liberal arts classmate was already standing below with his arms outstretched to catch him @Shang Haitao who strolls and eats, strolls and eats

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: Hence, his two arms were broken @Xu Zhenlong who shakes the world

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: Are there any more questions? @Lin Wu who makes flowers bloom around him

Lin Wu who makes flowers bloom around him: Under this kind of weather, let’s just say that the arts student passed him by from below. He couldn’t have seen that there was someone in the tree, no? Even if the sports student called for help from above and the person underneath heard, he wouldn’t be able to see anything. Would he dare stick his hands out so rashly?

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: Why are you assuming that he passed by? Couldn’t it also be that the two climbed up the tree to play together?

Lin Wu who makes flowers bloom around him: A sports student and a liberal arts student?

Deng Chacha “I’m the class monitor”: Nowadays, gender isn’t even an issue, would school and major still be an issue?

Lin Wu who makes flowers bloom around him: ...

Lin Wu who makes flowers bloom around him: [Your words are so deep, to the extent that I don’t dare question any further out of fear that I won’t be able to bear the responsibility of knowing the full story.jpg]

Lin Wu who makes flowers bloom around him: [Farewell! Fleeing at light speed.gif]

The class monitor would forever be your class monitor, just as your uncle would forever be your uncle.

The author has something to say:
The next chapter, classmate Lin Wu is about to meet our little gong. But actually, the little gong has already appeared in this chapter, have you discovered it hahaha

Additional Notes

杞人忧天 / qǐ rén yōu tiān: An idiom - the man of Qi who fears the sky falling on him; in other words, someone with irrational fears. This was translated as “paranoid”铁齿铜牙 / tiě chǐ tóng yá: Iron and copper toothed, meaning clever and eloquent. This expression was translated as “silver tongued”2333: This was at the end of the author's note instead of hahahaha. 233 is the code for a laughing emoji on the Chinese forum 猫扑网 / māo pū wǎng (MOP). Appending more threes at the end is the same as appending extra “ha”s to a haha乌篷船 / wū péng chuán: A traditional boat with a tent (篷 / péng) made out of bamboo strips painted black (乌 / wū)
↩The wù in 林雾 / Līn Wù means fog↩烤冷面 / kǎo lěng miàn: Heilongjiang specialty food, more of a snack than a dish↩凉皮 / liáng pí: literally “cold skin”, a Shaanxi province specialty dish similar to noodles↩放一百二十个心 / fàng yī bǎi èr shí gè xīn: The title of a song, which has evolved to mean an exaggerated version of 放心 / fàng xīn, aka. don't worry. It basically means don't worry, 120 times over↩