"Hey, the dishes are here! It's been a long time since I last cooked, so I'm a little rusty. If the taste is off by even a bit, brothers and sisters, please bear with me."
Li Ye and his senior sisters were all quick with their hands. One wok turned out two dishes at a time; for twenty-odd people, it was only twenty-odd dishes. They had everything laid out before noon.
After serving the dishes, Li Ye was about to join Cai Minying, Yu Xiufen, and the others at their table. He was the youngest here, so he belonged at the table for "children and women."
But Zhang Qiyan called out to him, "Li Ye, you've finished cooking, so why aren't you coming over here to keep your fellow apprentices company? Why are you hanging around with your senior sisters? Are you Jia Baoyu?"
Li Ye smiled awkwardly. "Teacher, I... I thought I should sit over there according to age!"
At mainland dinner tables, arranging seats by age was a relatively "harmonious" method. Unless everyone's social standards had reached the point where nobody cared, there always had to be some rule that everyone recognized.
That later claim mocking northerners—"Pass the civil-service exam and land ashore; if you don't get a seat at the table, you don't get to move your chopsticks"—was pure nonsense. If seats were really assigned by rank and wealth, that would be the idiotic way to inflame conflicts.
But sorting people into First Brother and second brother by age was much gentler. You called me brother, I called you younger brother; at the very least, people were weighing kinship rather than profit, so it was much easier to accept.
And since Li Ye was the youngest, there was nothing wrong with him not sitting at Zhang Qiyan's