“Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai, zaosheng guizi,” he advises. Even though we’ve both grown up here in LA, his pronunciation is perfect, but I don’t have time to be annoyed about it.

“Got it.” I repeat the phrase rapidly under my breath as my cousin and her husband approach. Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai, zaosheng guizi. It’s only a few words. Even though I might not understand them, I can rely on my short-term memory to know the sounds. I just have to focus and recite them until it’s my turn. Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai—

“I thought your Mandarin was decent,” Cyrus says.

Dammit.

“Please don’t talk to me right now,” I say, wiping my hands against my dress. “I’m concentrating.”

Zhu nimen xinhun yukuai.

“I can tell. Your concentrating face looks the same.” He points to the space between his brows, then to mine. “You get this little crease here.”

Xinhun. Xin. Hun.

Zhu nimen xinhun—

“But really. Have you been slacking off on your Chinese studies these past two years or what?” Cyrus asks.

I glare at him. “Could you not—”

“Hi!” Xiyue appears at our table, her husband following close after her. She smiles over at me expectantly, her glass of wine refilled. And then she waits. Her husband waits too. This is my first time seeing him up close, and he has the sort of face that just belongs to a banker: a soft jaw, gelled hair, round glasses. He would look great with square frames though. I’m debating whether to offer this fashion tip when I remember what I’m meant to do.

I rise hastily to my feet and hold up my untouched glass of orange juice. “Zhu nimen …” As I talk, I notice that the ballroom has fallen quiet. A few people are even pushing back their chairs or craning their heads to look at me.

It’s a strange feeling, but not a new one.

Most of the guests here must still think of me as the model, thanks to my mom’s constant promotional-slash-humblebrag posts on WeChat. That’s what everyone from my current high school knows me as too—and it’s by design. After the Incident, after the first and second school I transferred into and left again because nobody wanted me there, I knew that unless I wanted to graduate a social pariah, I needed to change something. Not in an Eat Pray Love way, but quick, shallow changes, Band-Aid fixes to hold myself together while everything was falling apart.

So I cut my hair at a salon recommended by all the prettiest influencers. Learned how to do my makeup. Blasted songs about loving yourself as you are while working out to remold my body into something else. Poured my savings into completely revamping my wardrobe—out went the comfortable sweatpants and basic, faded shirts, and in came the suffocatingly tight dresses and crop tops that always left my stomach cold.