Chapter 5: Eating together
Zhang Xiaoqiao did not particularly care whether the people in the other dorm rooms liked him. He had never been popular in high school, for one simple reason: he always looked so sour.
So Zhang Xiaoqiao had no intention of finding a bunch of so-called close buddies or sworn friends at university. To him, all that was unrealistic. Once you left the ivory tower of university, you still had to get on with whatever you needed to do. His father had once had a buddy from university. The year they graduated, the two of them had stayed on at the school like young men brimming with ambition, working on research projects in the same laboratory. Ten years at the school had passed in a flash, and the other man had long since become an associate professor, while Zhang Xiaoqiao's father was still only an assistant researcher.
After painful reflection, Zhang Xiaoqiao's father had decided to turn his technical expertise into wealth. He married the daughter of a company boss with substantial financial backing. From her undergraduate years through graduate school, the girl had secretly loved him for nearly eight years without giving up. She was just rather plain-looking, but her devotion had finally borne fruit.
After that, Zhang Xiaoqiao's father had used the pharmaceutical group's heavy spending on advertising and its reputation to raise his own academic standing to a considerable height. Naturally, his path to his current position had been smooth, while his old buddy was now the head of the chemistry department. Both had become powerful figures in their own spheres, and under the banner of Nanjing University, they frequently clashed over academic matters, battling away with great relish.
So Zhang Xiaoqiao simply did not believe there was any such thing as a true