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One day, out of the blue, Jin-furen calls up Yu Ziyuan. After they finish with the usual pleasantries between old friends, she says, as if it’s an afterthought, “Oh! Did you hear that Zixuan is going to be the Bachelor? I was wondering what your A-Li was up to these days!”
Two days later, Yu Ziyuan bundles Jiang Yanli onto the train to Shanghai for the Bachelor auditions.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Yanli asks, not for the first time.
“Of course, A-Li! I’m sure Zixuan will be extremely pleased to see you.”
Yanli is not so certain, but she keeps her concerns to herself. She knows, from long experience, that her mother will dismiss them even if she does voice them. It’s not that she’s upset by the idea, for herself; it’s that she’s not so sure Jin Zixuan will be happy to see her again.
She’s known Jin Zixuan forever, or at least for as long as she can remember; in the way that extravagantly wealthy families often do, the Jins (who run a television production company) and the Jiangs (who own a chain of swanky resorts) have always gravitated together. Since the Jiangs live on the property of their flagship resort, Lotus Pier, it was only natural to invite the Jin family to come and stay for a few weeks every summer, so that they could spend time with people who understood the difficulty of having more money than they could ever spend.
As children, Yanli and Zixuan doted on each other. They spent all their time together during those summer visits, leading Jin-furen and Yu-furen to coo about how sweet they are, isn’t it cute, wouldn’t it be nice if … Well. It would be a good match, after all.
By the time he was 13, though, Jin Zixuan had grown a teenage boy’s distaste for his childhood playmates, and began to spend the annual holiday sulking in his room, ignoring Yanli and her brothers. When Jiang Cheng popped his head in to ask whether Zixuan wanted to come hunting for frogs on the lakeshore, Jin Zixuan (who would have liked to come, but frog-hunting doesn’t sound cool), sniffed and said, “I wouldn’t want to get my clothes dirty.”
After that Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian called him peacock, and Yanli kept her distance. The one time she’d tried to come in and ask if he wanted to come and hang out, he’d muttered something about her being “timid and soft” and how he’d have more fun by himself.
(For the next five years, until he stopped attending the annual family vacation to Lotus Pier, Jin Zixuan still got a lecture from his mother on the flight from Beijing to the resort: “You should talk to A-Li! You two would be the perfect match,” over and over till he grew to hate the sound of her name: A-Li, A-Li, A-Li, ughhhhhhh.)
Anyway, in the years since, Jin Zixuan left the family business — he has no head for the manipulations of reality television — took some seed money from his father, and went into the hospitality business. A few years ago he opened Koi Tower, a boutique five-star hotel in Beijing, which has been very successful due to his sixth sense for what amenities appeal to the ultra-rich. Yanli is now the guest experience manager at Lotus Pier. They’ve seen each other in passing at hospitality business events, but never spoken more than two or three polite words.
So Jiang Yanli is convinced that Jin Zixuan won’t be pleased if she ends up on The Bachelor, but Meng Yao has different thoughts on that. He only has to hear Yanli’s shy little story — “Oh, Zixuan and I were childhood sweethearts, I think our mothers wanted us to get married? But you know how these things turn out, he outgrew it and we haven’t really talked in years” before he has her signed up as a suitor.
Yanli was right, though: Jin Zixuan is none too pleased to see Jiang Yanli come up the driveway on the first night, but when he complains, Meng Yao tells him that he can’t send her home until the end of Episode 4, at the earliest. Zixuan is annoyed, but begrudgingly agrees to keep her, deciding that he can ignore her easily enough. (This is the moment in which he realizes, like Lan Wangji will after him, that the Bachelor isn’t actually in charge of the Bachelor’s love journey. Meng Yao is in charge of the Bachelor’s love journey.)
Jiang Yanli (who, secretly — a secret she kept even from herself — never stopped liking Zixuan) thinks that he looked a bit anxious during the first rose ceremony. She decides to make him some of her lotus root and pork rib soup, which he loved as a child, to help him calm down. She remembers Zixuan telling her once, when he was 10 and she was 11, that the happiest times in his life were sitting with her and eating her soup. Maybe, she thinks, he can feel that again.
She makes the soup, which requires that she request various ingredients from the Bachelor crew, which they provide because everyone on the crew is immediately half in love with her — she’s the nicest suitor they’ve ever had, they all agree. Once it’s done, though, she’s scared to try to sneak it from the mansion to the beach house (which is about 2 li away; they’re on the same property, which a number of paths through the woods connected them).
Just when she’s decided that she’ll have to ask the crew again, one of the other women, Shi Yan, offers to take it.
“Oh, I’ll drop it off for you! I’m great at sneaking around!”
“Would you? That’s so nice of you!” Yanli says, and Shi Yan laughs and thinks wow, this one’s really naive.
So Shi Yan sneaks up to the beach house and allows Jin Zixuan to “catch” her dropping off a container full of soup.
“You made this?” Zixuan asks, inhaling the fragrant scent of lotus.
“Well … I … I wanted you to have it,” Shi Yan replies, smiling.
For the next three weeks, Jin Zixuan favours Shi Yan over all the other women and completely ignores Jiang Yanli, and Shi Yan continues to drop off batches of soup every night at the beach house. Zixuan loves the soup. He doesn’t know why, but it reminds him of his childhood, of times when he felt carefree, joyous, loved. He hasn’t felt like that in a long time, and to find it here, on The Bachelor … well, he waits for Shi Yan’s arrival with the soup each night with anticipation. (Meng Yao obviously knows about the soup deliveries, after the first time, but it did catch him off guard on the first night, which he hates. Meng Yao hates surprises. He increases security at the beach house, after that, and installs more security cameras around the perimeter.)
When the rose ceremony for Episode 4 arrives, Jin Zixuan breathes a sight of relief: he can finally send Jiang Yanli home. His mother had actually called him at the beach house to ask whether he’d taken A-Li on any dates yet! Now, she’ll have to leave him alone about it. Yanli takes it with grace, although there are a few crew members who cry to see her go. She heads home to Lotus Pier and tells her brother, Jiang Cheng (who is now the General Manager of Lotus Pier) that everything is fine.
“I didn’t expect him to fall in love with me, anyway, A-Cheng.”
“That peacock is a fool if he didn’t fall in love with you,” Jiang Cheng says, darkly, but leaves his sister alone with her thoughts.
In the next episode, Jin Zixuan gets a cozy little one-on-one date with Shi Yan where they’re given a bunch of ingredients and told to cook dinner together. Oddly, the ingredients include pork rib and lotus. (Meddling is Meng Yao’s favourite part of his job.)
“Oh, look, Yanyan! You can make your soup!”
“Uh … about that,” Shi Yan says, a little embarrassed, then decides to play it off as a joke: “It was actually Jiang Yanli that made it, isn’t that funny? But she didn’t have guts to bring it over to you, so her loss, right?”
Jin Zixuan’s heart drops into his stomach. Two hours later, Shi Yan is gone — she doesn’t get a rose after the one-on-one date — and Zixuan is cursing his half-brother out for not telling him the truth.
“You have to bring her back,” he finishes, tears in his eyes. “I want A-Li back.”
(This whole speech is caught on camera. Meng Yao is beside himself with glee.)
“Well, I don’t know,” he says. “I’m not sure she’ll want to come back. You weren’t very nice to her, were you?”
“I’ll make it up to her,” JZX says, desperate. He’s realized, now, why the soup tasted so good, what it reminded him of. What a fool he’d been, he thinks, to throw away their connection for the sake of teenaged coolness. “I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll turn Koi Tower into a lotus pond, if that’s what she wants.”
“Yeah, not that,” Meng Yao says, shuddering, “that wouldn’t play very well on television.”
So, instead, they fly into Lotus Pier in a floatplane so that Jin Zixuan can apologize to Jiang Yanli. when they arrive, though, Jiang Cheng comes out onto the dock and yells at Jin Zixuan for thirty minutes about how terribly he’s treated A-Jie, and how he doesn’t believe Jin Zixuan is good enough for his sister, until finally Jiang Yanli joins them on the dock and says, gently, “That’s enough, A-Cheng.”
Yanli accepts Zixuan’s apology and agrees to return to the show. She can't say no to his tear-stained face, down on one knee on the dock, apologizing profusely for twenty years of ignoring how wonderful she is. After that, Jin Zixuan doesn’t even glance at any of the other women on the show, which maybe makes the ending of that season of The Bachelor a bit anticlimactic. Everyone knows who Zixuan is going to pick, so when he offers Jiang Yanli the Final Rose, it’s no surprise.
Meng Yao, who doesn’t mind surprises when he’s the one orchestrating them, is still alright with a predictable ending after all the drama of the soup and the apology. Anyway, the ratings are good, so Meng Yao’s happy. Sometimes, when he’s upset about something, he thinks about the face Zixuan made when he found out who really made the soup, and it turns his day right around.
“That’s going to be hard to top, for next season,” he says to Lan Xichen, one night after dinner. “We’d really have to luck out to get a moment that good again …”