PLT | Chapter 20

Selling the Body, Not the Art

The gifts onstage had more or less all been collected, and the two of them thanked the fans once again before starting to walk toward center stage.

Just then, a scream rang out from below the stage. “Fengfeng!”

Guan Chenfeng turned his head to look. It was a stylishly dressed pretty jiejie, around twenty-something, holding a bouquet of fiery red roses in her arms.

So Guan Chenfeng smiled into the microphone and said, “Heard you. Mama loves me.”

The audience below immediately burst into laughter. What Guan Chenfeng meant was actually quite obvious, he was hoping this fan would hurry back, because they were about to begin the xiangsheng.

Unexpectedly, this jiejie would not let it go and insisted that Guan Chenfeng take the roses from her hands.

Guan Chenfeng was young after all, and soft-tempered, so he had no choice but to walk to the front of the stage again and bend down to accept the bouquet.

He had just been about to place the flowers together with the others at the side of the stage when he saw that the fan still had not left. She was frantically waving her hands at him while shouting, “The middle! The middle!”

Guan Chenfeng instinctively glanced at the middle of the bouquet and saw a palm-sized envelope. He only assumed it was a letter, and had just been about to signal that he had seen it, but the fan below would not let up and insisted that he open it.

Guan Chenfeng was not on guard either, so he casually opened the envelope. When he pulled out the contents and looked, what he saw was shockingly a large-scale private glamour shot, with a line of contact information written underneath.

He jumped in fright, as though he had seen a snake or scorpion. His hand shook, and that photo slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground.

The moment it hit the ground, the sharp-eyed audience members in the front row immediately caught sight of a glaringly pale figure on it. Connecting that with Guan Chenfeng’s reaction, they could probably guess what it was.

Performers receiving all kinds of weird things onstage was not anything unusual, but a photo this outrageous, directed at a child like Guan Chenfeng, inevitably made the nature of it rather nasty.

The audience below were all regular xiangsheng listeners. Even if they could not clearly see what was on the floor, they could roughly tell what had happened. A wave of booing went up toward the girl, and a few fans were already so furious that they had stood up and were preparing to start cursing.

When that young woman saw the photo fall to the floor without warning, and saw that many people were already craning their necks to look, she could not help panicking too.

Right at that moment, Jiang Chenchi walked to the front of the stage, crouched down, swiftly picked up the photo, slipped it back into the envelope, and said to the fans below with a smile, “The troupe master has educated us many times already, private contact with fans is forbidden. Everybody, do us a favor, don’t make our idol lose his professional integrity, otherwise if he freezes us out tomorrow, what are we supposed to do?”

A wave of laughter rose from the audience below. At the same time, they realized he was helping smooth things over. Although they were unhappy, it was not easy for them to say much more.

Even though Jiang Chenchi was smiling, the movement of his hands was rather fierce. With perfect accuracy, he flung the envelope into the distant bouquet of roses, then without another word pulled Guan Chenfeng back to the microphones.

He adjusted the microphone and continued smiling as he said, “The audience these days really has bigger and bigger imaginations. Last time, there were already several people passing up room cards. So I’ll just put it plainly today. Even though all of us from Xiaqing Yuan are like our troupe master, we sell our bodies, not our art…[1]”

The fans below, who had originally been at swords drawn and bows bent, were instantly amused by that line.

Jiang Chenchi pointed at Guan Chenfeng beside him. “But our jiao’er still has half a year before he turns eighteen. Seducing a minor? That’s illegal, jiejie.”

Even though he was still smiling when he said this, the smile had already very clearly turned into a cold one.

The fans below were obviously delighted by his half-joking, half-scolding manner, and instantly a chorus of cheers broke out.

Guan Chenfeng had already recovered from that brief moment of being at a loss. Smiling, he said, “Don’t talk nonsense. She just wanted to add me on WeChat and hear me sing ‘Only Mama Is Good in This World.’”

Guan Chenfeng was young, and had many mama fans, so the moment he said that, a whole wave of “Mama loves you!” instantly rose from below the stage.

And sitting not far away in the second-floor box, after witnessing all of this, Yan Chao was simply amazed.

Only then did he turn to look at Zhou Chenyu. He saw that although Zhou Chenyu’s expression was no longer as absent-minded as usual, he also did not look at all as shaken as Yan Chao had imagined he should have been.

Yan Chao could not help asking, “As his shige, you’re this calm?”

“This is hardly anything.” Zhou Chenyu smiled helplessly, and a trace of complicated emotion, like the way one looked at a child, showed in his eyes. “Look how badly he got scared. He really ought to get more practice.”

Looking at him like this, Yan Chao figured he must simply be used to it already, so he asked again, “You’ve probably had plenty of room cards slipped to you in the past too, right?”

Zhou Chenyu countered, “What do you think?”

Yan Chao pressed, “Then how did you handle them?”

Zhou Chenyu said, “Threw them out. What else was I supposed to do?”

Yan Chao let out a mocking laugh. “I really didn’t expect that. Looking at the way you are, I thought if a pretty girl asked you out, you’d definitely go running over delightedly.”

“So that’s what kind of image ge has in your heart?” Zhou Chenyu curled his lip. “Leaving the xiangsheng stage aside, when have you ever seen me make dirty jokes to girls in everyday life?”

When Yan Chao thought about it carefully, whether it was with the female guests on the program or with the staff around him, Zhou Chenyu always had a very accurate grasp of boundaries. He still joked around as much as he liked, but he had never crossed the line in any way.

Thinking about it like that, Yan Chao realized he had probably been brainwashed by the way Zhou Chenyu always acted in front of him, and had failed to notice that in front of other people, the man really was a proper gentleman.

Yan Chao said helplessly, “Right. All your dirty jokes are aimed at grown men.”

Zhou Chenyu glanced at him and smiled. “So when is Xiao Yan-gege going to slip me a room card?”

Yan Chao: “……I’ll stuff the room card into your mouth.”

Zhou Chenyu: “If you can’t afford a room, nude photos work too.”

Yan Chao shot him a glance. “Do you believe I’ll hand your fancy nude photos over to the paparazzi tomorrow?”

Zhou Chenyu: “Wow, you pervert. So you really did secretly photograph me while I was asleep! You’ve already got nude photos, did you also do something unspeakable to me?”

Yan Chao had long since gotten used to Zhou Chenyu’s full-on drama-queen act, and just now he had only been answering him back in kind. But when Zhou Chenyu suddenly said this, for some reason, Yan Chao’s mind abruptly filled with the image from that midnight the other night, Zhou Chenyu’s stretch of pale, lean waist, and his own hand hovering again and again at the edge of sexual harassment.

For a moment it was as if something had caught in his throat, and he could not throw back even half a sentence. All he could do was guiltily shift his gaze away.

Zhou Chenyu looked at him, and suddenly revealed an expression full of interest.

Footnotes:

[1] “Selling the body, not the art” is a deliberate reversal of the usual phrase “卖艺不卖身,” which means “sell the art, not the body.” Jiang Chenchi twists it into a dirty joke in keeping with Xiaqing Yuan’s teasing style, while also mocking the room-card and photo incidents.