Baldy Li said this for Lin Hongs benefit, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth he immediately regretted them, feeling that his comparison was perhaps too crass. After he returned home, he asked Song Gang for advice and subsequently changed his line to "Reading is good. You can go a month without eating, but you can't go a day without reading."
The people of Liu disagreed, pointing out that if you don't read for a day, you can still survive, whereas if you go a month without eating, you will surely die. Baldy Li dismissed the naysayers as a bunch of cowards and said valiantly, "If you go a month without eating, you would in fact starve to death, but if you go a day without reading, it would result in a life worse than death."
Lin Hong continued walking expressionlessly She heard this back-and-forth between Baldy Li and the onlookers and noticed the onlookers’ laughter and Baldy Li's excitement, but she herself maintained a studious indifference to it all.
After Baldy Li adopted the identity of a Confucian scholar, he became very bookish and would frequently spout pearls of wisdom, only occasionally straying into obscenity. When Lin Hong heard Baldy Li's obscenities, she thought to herself, You can't teach a dog not to eat shit.
Lin Hong knew what kind of scum Baldy Li was and didn't feel at all as though the sun were now rising in the west. Instead, she was convinced that he was up to his old tricks, and at the end of the day he was merely the same ugly toad and pile of cow dung, just as, at the end of the day, the Monkey King in Journey to the West was still, despite his seventy-two incarnations, merely a monkey.
On the night of the rendezvous in the grove, Lin Hong had been furious when Baldy Li, rather than Song Gang, appeared. She then attempted to excise Song Gang from her heart. When she glimpsed him on the street a few days later, she laughed coldly and thought to herself that this guy was a perfect idiot who wouldn't get another chance. She lifted her head high and walked toward him, telling herself that she wouldn't give him a second glance. The last thing she expected, however, was for Song Gang to run away as soon as he saw her coming. The next several days, every time Song Gang caught sight of her, he would run away as though she were a leper — exactly as Baldy Li had instructed. This ritual gradually ate away at her pride and left her feeling completely bereft.
In this way, Song Gang unintentionally made his way back into Lin Hong's heart. She noticed her heart's peculiar transformation: The more Song Gang avoided her, the more she liked him. Every night, rain or clear, Lin Hong would find herself remembering his handsome figure as she was trying to fall asleep — his smile, his bowed head and pensive appearance, his soulful look every time he saw her. She found everything about Song Gang as sweet as could be. After a while, her memories of him became an intense yearning, as if he were her lover from whom she was separated by a vast distance.
Lin Hong was convinced that Song Gang was secretly in love with her and that he was avoiding her on Baldy Li's account. The mere thought of Baldy Li turned her pale with fury. His fearsome appearance made all the other young men of Liu too terrified to court her— though, truth be told, in her eyes they were all worthless wretches. Song Gang was different, and Lin Hong would often fantasize that he was courting her. Each time after her daydream she would shake her head and sigh, knowing that he would never come visit her on his own accord. Deciding that it was time for her to take the initiative again, she resolved to write him a note — seven lines and eighty-three characters long, together with thirteen punctuation marks, to be exact. Of those eighty-three characters, she devoted fifty-one to cursing Baldy Li and the remaining thirty-two to urging Song Gang to come meet her at eight o'clock that evening under the bridge. Lin Hong folded the note into the shape of a butterfly and hid it inside a brand-new handkerchief, then waited in the street for Song Gang to get off work. The last sentence in the note asked that Song Gang return the handkerchief to her when he came to meet her. She felt that, by adding this line, she was guaranteeing that he would not stand her up.
It was a drizzly autumn evening. As Lin Hong stood under a wutong tree drops of water fell from the leaves onto her umbrella, making a pattering sound as they landed. She looked out on to the misty street and saw several umbrellas go back and forth, as well as several youngsters without umbrellas. She then saw Song Gang rushing straight toward her from across the street. He wasn't wearing his coat but, rather, was holding it over his head to deflect the rain, and as he rushed forward the coat looked like a flag flapping in the wind. Lin Hong hurried down to the street and used her umbrella to gesture for him to stop. He hydroplaned past her like a car, almost slamming into her umbrella. When she moved the umbrella out of the way, she saw his startled expression, whereupon she stuffed her handkerchief into his hand and immediately turned and walked away. After she had walked ten yards, she turned to look back at Song Gang and saw him staring at her dumbfounded, holding the handkerchief in both hands. His coat fell to the ground, and several pairs of feet trampled over it. Lin Hong turned back around and, grasping her umbrella, walked away smiling, having no idea what would happen next.
Song Gang spent that drizzly evening in a daze. Eventually he managed to get home, and then, with a pounding heart, he opened up the handkerchief and found the note folded into the shape of a butterfly. With trembling hands he began to unfold the note, but Lin Hong had folded it in a very complicated way, and he was afraid he would open it incorrectly. Therefore, it took him forever to unfold it. When he finally succeeded, he read, with bated breath, Lin Hongs eighty-three-character message over and over again. Several times the sound of his neighbors’ footsteps startled him so badly that he hurriedly stuffed the note into his pocket, thinking that it was Baldy Li returning home. Only when he heard the neighbors unlocking their front doors did he breathe a sigh of relief and take the note back out and begin reading it again. Afterward, he lifted his head and distractedly watched the raindrops roll down the windowpane as the fire of love, which had virtually been extinguished from his heart, was ignited once again.
Song Gang was desperate to go see Lin Hong and several times even walked to the door, but each time the thought of Baldy Li stopped him in his tracks. He stared, bewildered, at the drizzle outside, then closed the door again. In the end, it was the final line of Lin Hongs note, where she asked that he return the handkerchief, that gave Song Gang the courage to go meet her.
Baldy Li would normally have returned home from work by that point, but on that particular day he happened to have been delayed at the factory, thus giving Song Gang his opportunity. After leaving the house he rushed to the bridge, knowing that if he were to run into Baldy Li, all it would take would be for Baldy Li to call out to him, and Song Gang would lose his courage. He walked down the stairs at the rivers edge, and when he arrived under the bridge, it was six in the evening, two hours before his scheduled meeting with Lin Hong.