The smell of spices welcomed her home. She tossed her bags into the corner and kicked off her shoes.

" I'm home."

" You're late. Have you eaten yet?"

It was her mother's main concern. Yingying thought of herself as just being thin, living up to the standards set by the magazines, but her mom  always seemed to be afraid that she wasn't eating enough.

" I'm not really hungry and got an awful lot of homework."

" We still have some chicken."

" Maybe later OK? I have this exercise I must finish before tomorrow."

" All right, I'll make you some tea then. Your aunt made some dumplings. Would you like one?"

She went up to her tiny room and turned on the computer. The monitor filled the room with a gloomy, bluish glow that illuminated the piles of clothes and the scattered books on the ground. Her mother had given up telling her to clean up. After all she was a grown woman herself now and if she wanted to live in such a mess, it was her own problem.

She opened her mailbox and saw there were three new messages. One was from the lecturer to remind them that he had uploaded some new information on his website, the others were from guys.

She clicked on one of them and it was what she had feared.

" Hi Yingying, I wrote this poem for you:

Oh my cherry blossom, where art thou?

Canst thou not see my bleeding heart

Broken and torn it lies before thou

And only thou canst mend the pieces

I miss thee and long for thee

Oh Juliet do not let Romeo stand

Alone in the rain"

Why did he think he was a poet?  No rhyme, no rhythm, just a crappy bunch of clichés, and moreover her name was neither Cherry Blossom, nor Juliet. It was pathetic how some guys thought that girls would fall for any piece of text without punctuation. It was like bringing a serenade with a hard rock band. Besides she was growing sick and tired of him and his self pity.

She expected more of the other one, as the man she only knew by a nickname did not seem so interested in seducing her. If he wanted to, he probably could for he seemed witty and nice, but then, maybe he was ugly or a bit disturbed. Although she was a fan of comics herself, she did have some prejudices about her fellow fans.

She scanned the lines of the lengthy e-mail. He had been busy comforting his little sister, who had been infatuated with a wrong guy...