My One And Only Love/ Exclusive Memory (Somewhere Only We Know) — 独家记忆 Chapter 3 Part 4

  Greetings, hello my dear readers!  

    Hola! Fully healed and ready to roll again \(^.^)/ I'm back again with another part of chapter 3~ 

The four's quirkiness on their "journey to the west"~~

Chapter 3 Part 4: Bright Moon VS Ditch 
Translated&edited by Fei斐

    The next morning, Mu Chenghe fulfilled his promise and personally drove me and Bai Lin back to school.

When I got out of the car, I turned around and closed the car door. Bai Lin nodded and bowed to thank him. He had a smile on his face, and his expression was radiant— making people totally unable to see that the person in front of them had not closed his eyes all night, and yet the light greenish blue dark circles under his eye sockets were the only place that could reveal the secret.

    Bai Lin looked at Mu Chenghe's car shadow driving away and sighed, " So handsome. The usual CR-V makes him drive as if he is on the next level." (T/N: æspa- Next Level playing)

    "What CR-V?" I was puzzled.

    "It's the off-road vehicle he drove, Honda CR-V, low-key, practical, and classic. It's like those cars that my dad fancies, and the only purpose of driving it out is to show that he is a new nouveau riche."

    Bai Lin's father is really cute.

    On the day when the freshmen signed up, Bai Lin's father drove a Hummer to send her off. Before that, I didn't know any Hummer at all. I saw an armored-like off-road car from a distance, stopping right at the main gate of the girls' dorm compound, so that everyone who came in and out had to walk sideways like a crab, attracting many people's attention. So on the first day, Bai Lin made it to the School of Foreign Languages' headline on and became "the precious daughter*" little miss among all students in the department.

(*T/N: 千金 qiānjīn— is a term to call other's daughter in a courteous manner/using honorific.)

    However, this was not the reason that made Bai Lin depressed. She later complained, "If the Hummer really belongs to him, I would have admitted. It's just that it was rented from a car rental shop before he came."

    "No way." The three of us exclaimed in unison.

    "My dad said that people in the city like to discriminate against country folks. If we, country folks, drive a Hummer to study, no one wouldn't dare to bully me. As a result, he flee to rent a car and slap one's face until it's swollen in an effort to look imposing*. You tell me, am I not wronged?

(*T/N: 打肿脸充胖子 dǎzhǒng liǎn chōng pàngzi — is an idiom, meaning to impress other people by feigning more than one's abilities.)

    After hearing this, Song Qiqi, Zhao Xiaotang, and I, the three of us, all looked at each other silently.

    (Bai Lin was) Indeed a bit wronged. However, we were also wronged. We were actually described as an overlord bullying the weak.

    Amitofu——*

    

(*T/N: 额米豆腐 é mǐdòufu — Actually means "a rice curd", but the author deliberately used it as a pun, similar sounding to the Buddhism's amibtabha🙂👍)

    In fact, Bai Lin was neither a rich daughter nor a country girl. Her hometown was a county close to City B, and Father Bai was a well-known local township entrepreneur.

    Apart from her pocket money that was many times more than ours every month, Bai Lin was no different from us.

    Yet the more so, the more mysterious it made other people think of her.

    These rumors aroused many males' curiosity, so when we were in our freshman year, many boys from the opposite dorms took the initiative to come to us for a 'friendship'. Before Christmas at the end of the first semester, at least five or six boys called her to make an appointment.

    One time later, a girl who knew Bai Lin's family suddenly jumped out to reveal the secret, telling that her(Bai Lin) dad rented a Hummer to send his daughter to the university to show off.

    Bai Lin, who was usually very fierce and tough, didn't look for that girl to argue.

    Bai Lin sighed and said, "Ai*, I told that old fellow not to do this, now I'm ruined**. It's really heartbreaking." Nevertheless, there was a bit of sadness in her tone.

(T/N: 

*Ai is an exclamation of surprise or pain— just like "ugh!", sigh, etc.

**身败名裂 shēnbài-míngliè — is an idiom, meaning: 1. To lose one's standing; 2. To have one's reputation swept away; 3. A complete defeat and fall from grace.)

    Regardless of those rumors-chasing boys, who were coming and going, again and again, there was one person who was (still) as diligent as ever to Bai Lin. This person was Brother Li from the Department of Physics, who had wanted to help us with our dorm's door bolts. So,  even though Bai Lin wasn't interested in him, we still had a good impression of him.

    We were rushing back to the classroom after Bai Lin and I ran back to our bedroom to get a book. When I walked downstairs to the bedroom and saw the remains of the warm thermos and mineral water bottles there, I realized that what I did yesterday was quite intense. Fortunately, the girls' dorm compound had an entrance guard. No one dared to hang around outside (last night), so no one was hurt.

    Later, I learned from other people that our girls' dorm was pretty good. In the boys’ dormitories by the small river yonder, some of them even took down the dorm windows and threw them away, resulting the school to urgently deal with some group of people.

    In the past, when I just entered freshman year, there were various kinds of school education. It's nothing more than saying that someone violates something and (finally) couldn't graduate, couldn't issue a degree certificate or something, bla bla bla. Those cumbersome rules were printed as a booklet by the school and distributed to all freshmen. It appeared to be much thicker than prime minister Wen’s* yearly government work report. I couldn't help but wonder wether I could really graduate successfully or not.

    (*T/N: Prime minister Wen Jiabao (born 15 September 1942) is a retired Chinese politician who served as the sixth Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China and serving as China's head of government for a decade between 2003 and 2013. --source: wikipedia)

    Thus, I imagined my college life as a journey to the Western Heaven, and when I passed the nine nine-days and eighty-one calamities*, it would be all done.

(*T/N: 九九八十一个劫难 jiǔ jiǔ bāshíyī gè jiénàn — 

1. Nine nine-days here, I think, is the nine nine-day periods beginning the day after the Winter Solstice, which is the coldest time all year around. 

2. Meanwhile, eight one calamities/sufferings can be refered to "The Eighty One Difficulties of the Yellow Emperor ", which is said to be written by the people of Qin Yue ( Bian Que ) during the Warring States Period . This book was compiled in the form of question and answer explanations. A total of 81 questions were discussed, so it was also called as the "eighty one difficulties". 

3. The nine nine-days and eighty one difficulties generally refer to the hardships suffered by the monks and apprentices of the Tang monk in the classic " Journey to the West ". 

    With Mu Chenghe's help, we survived another catastrophe.

    Precisely today, is the day, where our learning load was the heaviest.

    The lessons in the morning and afternoon were fully packed. After finishing the first few intensive reading sessions, we kept on being busy.

    Because of last night's hard work, Bai Lin and I could no longer insist on wearing earphones (to keep them stay awake), sitting one after another in the gap between other students, avoiding the teacher and dozing off.

    Teacher Wu, who taught us reading and listening, was a beautiful woman who came back from overseas a few years ago. She taught us speaking and listening by using audiovisual, and her favorite thing to do was to pick an unpopular British and American movies to play it out on the projector. She would often press pause abruptly, and then randomly pick a person to ask what the movie character had said in the last sentence. Once the person chosen stammered and couldn't answer, Ms. Wu would make a cold stroke on the grade book and said, "Five points will be deducted as usual."

    At first, we felt fresh and thrilled. But as time went on, we felt bored and panicked.

    Bai Lin was even more all out.

    Generally, a certain movie plus the time to answer the questions would spend Teacher Wu a full four or five classes. Bai Lin simply surf the Internet to download the movie and watched it with relish, then conveniently took the following movie script to class to read them aloud.

    Although Song Qiqi always ranked first in grade, her listening comprehension was weak.

    She also reads those scripts, but what differ her from us was that after she's done reading them, she spent her free time memorizing them. Similar motive, but the level of hard work was truly jaw-dropping.

    

    This was the difference between good and bad students.

    I had always aspired to be a good student, it's just that my willpower was not quite up to the mark.

♡    💜    ♡    💜    ♡    💜    ♡

I don't really have anything to say, but I'm OMW on editing Chapter 3 Part 5 and translating half chapter of Why Secretary Kim Chapter 2. No promises for Why Secretary Kim tho! My top priority for now is finishing MOAOL <3 See u next week..

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