"might you avert your eyes away from that horrendous device for a moment?" jang qian's mother, chen rongshui, scolded her daughter as she resumed irritating her mother with her refined on her phone's keypad, "and keep your back straight—your posture is atrocious."

"well, I never had a mother to teach me proper etiquette if I was to be in the presence of the old money elite," the daughter remarked in Japanese, much to her mother's distaste, "especially since this is what I theorize to be a business arrangement than it should be a matchmaking attempt of some sort on your behalf."

The mother-daughter pair stopped in front of a dim-sum restaurant in the pudong region of shanghai, something to akanen's ire ("wealthy people feel obligated to essentially boast about how much money they own by constantly one-upping each other and making plebians like us feel worthless," she told her brother and father once). entering the building, a waitress escorted them to a private room, where a lady, much older than akanen's own mother, and who she assumed to be her son waited for the other pair. "jang qian, this is wang biyu, and her son—your fiancé—wang taojun; he will be taking over wang technology by the end of the year," rongshui introduced, greeting the other lady with a warm embrace, sitting as they inspected the various carts entering the private dining room.

in the girl's conjecture, wang taojun was a handsome young man, clad in a white dress shirt and navy blazer, evidently ed due to his sitting position, and he had his bangs pushed upwards and to the side, subconsciously making jang qian feel underdressed, yet she shrugged off those feelings. she considered her socioeconomic background, more humble in comparison to the people she was dining with, so, she