After Being Scummed – Chapter 44
by Little PandaAs long as you’re happy!
A few rounds of awards had passed on stage, and it was finally time for the Best Actress award. Zuo Jingyou, who had already won two major awards, became a presenter for this award alongside An Ruoru1, a highly experienced actress.
When the two walked onto the stage together, An Ruoru looked at Zuo Jingyou’s cane and teased her a bit, asking why she was injured.
With a faint smile on her face, Zuo Jingyou nonchalantly replied that she had accidentally twisted her ankle.
While An Ruoru verbally advised Jingyou to be more careful in the future, her gaze drifted towards Yin Bai’s direction. She then asked Zuo Jingyou, “Jingyou, this cane of yours is quite unique. I saw you take it from your friend just now. Can you tell me where you bought it? I’m planning to go hiking soon and would like to buy one too. How about you introduce it to me?”
Zuo Jingyou was, after all, not some naive newcomer. The moment An Ruoru spoke, she knew the other party wanted to use her to cue Yin Bai, thereby teasing her about the incident at the airport that morning.
Zuo Jingyou smiled faintly, leaning on her cane. “Alright, I’ll gift you one later.”
Realizing there was no gossip2 to be had, An Ruoru sighed and shifted the topic to the award itself. After they jointly presented the award to this year’s Best Actress winner, An Ruoru reached out to help Zuo Jingyou off the stage.
As they were coming down from the stage, An Ruoru supported Zuo Jingyou’s arm and whispered to her, “What’s going on with you and that Director Yin? It’s caused such a big stir. Are you dating?” Strange, she hadn’t noticed Zuo Jingyou liking women when they worked together before.
Zuo Jingyou lowered her eyes and chuckled softly, shaking her head. “Nothing of the sort. We’re just friends.”
“As long as it’s nothing…” An Ruoru breathed a sigh of relief and lowered her voice to tell Zuo Jingyou, “It’s fine to tell you now. That Director Yin… she used to date Xiao Nian. I saw her once when I was filming with Xiao Nian… This person… she feels very gloomy, and her temper isn’t very good…”
Although An Ruoru was usually gossipy, she was generally someone with a good sense of proportion. For her to say such words truly surprised Zuo Jingyou. Zuo Jingyou turned her head, glanced at her, and asked doubtfully, “Her temper isn’t good? I don’t think so. Her temper is excellent.”
Yin Bai wasn’t just good; she was so cute it was explosive!
An Ruoru hadn’t expected Zuo Jingyou to refute her like this. She paused for a moment, then explained to Zuo Jingyou, “It’s like this, although it might sound a bit presumptuous, but this person… back when we were filming, she dragged Xiao Nian away very forcefully. Xiao Nian’s wrist had very heavy bruising the next day…”
“She might be a bit…”
“It’s hard not to suspect she has violent tendencies.”
When Zuo Jingyou released An Ruoru’s hand and returned to her seat, An Ruoru’s words replayed in her mind.
Yin Bai has violent tendencies? Had she once treated Xiao Nian so roughly?
Zuo Jingyou looked up, gazing at Yin Bai’s stunningly beautiful face beside her, thinking about her past adorable actions. It was hard to imagine her being so rough with Xiao Nian. What exactly had happened to cause Yin Bai and Xiao Nian to break up?
After all, with someone as adorable as Yin Bai, how could anyone not fall for her? And how could anyone bear to leave her?
Countless questions arose in Zuo Jingyou’s mind, so much so that after returning to her seat, she stared at Yin Bai in a daze for quite a while.
Yin Bai, sitting beside her, turned her head and saw Zuo Jingyou staring intently at her. After a moment, she lifted her cane, tapped Zuo Jingyou’s shoe, and called out, “Teacher Zuo…”
Zuo Jingyou snapped back to reality, her gaze refocusing on Yin Bai’s face. She asked, somewhat puzzled, “En, what’s wrong?”
Yin Bai blinked, looking innocent. “That’s what I should be asking you. What’s wrong with you? What have you been thinking about so dazedly since you came down from the stage?” And she kept staring at her so intently, it was making her quite embarrassed.
Zuo Jingyou’s lips curved into a helpless smile. “I wasn’t thinking about anything…”
She was just wondering… why had Yin Bai become like this now, and what was the Yin Bai of the past like?
She was just wondering… if her growing curiosity about Yin Bai’s past meant that Yin Bai’s future had also piqued her interest.
At ten o’clock in the evening, the 53rd Thorny Flower Awards concluded successfully. After the closing ceremony, Yin Bai linked arms with Zuo Jingyou, and they walked out of the venue side by side. Neither of them planned to attend the banquet, so they took a car directly back to the hotel where they were staying.
As it turned out, after the awards ended, Zuo Jingyou and Yin Bai once again trended on the hot search together. The reason was that they had left in the same car, and a paparazzi following them had snapped a photo of their backs as they got out of the car at the hotel.
Two blurry photos of Yin Bai leading Zuo Jingyou into the car and then out of it were uploaded to the internet, adding more fuel to the fiery “Overbearing President and Pampered Wife” rumors.
After returning to the hotel, Yin Bai sat on the sofa, looking at the trending topics on the phone Zhang Yu handed her, and remarked with emotion, “Teacher Zuo, you usually don’t get involved in any scandals, but look at this, spending time with me and you’re trending every other day.”
Zuo Jingyou changed into a pair of house slippers and, wearing her qipao, walked towards her room. “That’s because I was married before, and now I’m single, I suppose.”
Zuo Jingyou rested her hand on the doorframe, turned her head to glance at Yin Bai, and winked playfully. “Isn’t this great? Besides, my movie is coming out in the second half of the year. I’ll have to borrow Director Yin’s fame to stir up some publicity for me during this period.”
After Zuo Jingyou finished speaking, she leaned against the doorframe and, like a fish swimming into the night, disappeared from Yin Bai’s sight.
Yin Bai stared blankly at her retreating figure. After a long moment, she turned back to look at Zhang Yu and asked, completely bewildered, “What does Teacher Zuo mean by that? Does she not plan to clarify the rumors?”
Zhang Yu stood aside and said hesitantly, “Well… I wouldn’t know about that.”
She thought to herself, with the two of you looking so ambiguously intimate right now, is there even a need to clarify? Clarifying would just be confirming the rumors. It’s better to do nothing and let the netizens guess wildly!
Of course, Zuo Jingyou, who understood Yin Bai relatively well, didn’t just let the netizens’ imaginations run wild. After showering and drying her hair, she emerged from her room in a purple silk nightgown, called Yin Bai over to the living room sofa, and discussed clarifying the rumors with her.
They finally decided to post a group photo on Weibo where Yin Bai’s face wasn’t visible, to clarify her relationship with Yin Bai.
Yin Bai had also just showered and was curled up on the sofa in her bathrobe, snuggled next to Zuo Jingyou as they looked at the phone together. After much deliberation, they finally chose a suitable photo.
It was a photo taken before they left, with Yin Bai sitting on the sofa leaning on the cane, and Zuo Jingyou sitting on the armrest of the sofa, one hand on Yin Bai’s shoulder.
It had to be said, Zhang Yu had an excellent sense of camera. In this photo, Yin Bai looked exactly like a wealthy young lady from a foreign land, and next to Zuo Jingyou, who was also a lady from a prominent family, they complemented each other beautifully.
Yin Bai looked at it from left to right, feeling very satisfied, and asked Zuo Jingyou to pixelate her face and post the photo. However, after her face was pixelated, Yin Bai felt that something was off.
How to put it? Seeing her own beautiful face covered by something strange, the more she looked, the more comical it seemed, and it just didn’t feel right anywhere.
Zuo Jingyou watched her looking thoroughly displeased, blinked, and tentatively asked, “Then how about we don’t pixelate it? What if you just show your face directly? It’s such a beautiful face anyway, tonight can be considered a super welfare package3 for my movie fans.”
Yin Bai thought for a moment, pursing her lips without speaking.
Zuo Jingyou tilted her head, pondered for a moment, then sighed and said softly to Yin Bai, “Look, the reason you didn’t want to show your face before, was it because you didn’t want Xiao Nian to be affected by you and get caught up in scandals? But now, we’re friends, so you won’t have that worry. How about you consider showing your face?”
Yin Bai wasn’t actually too resistant to the idea. After all, the photo didn’t capture her walking, so she generally wouldn’t dislike it much. But once her face was revealed, then afterwards, everyone would connect the image of the lame person hobbling away at the airport this morning with her beautiful face, which might cause a lot of discussion…
But… if she just didn’t listen to those discussions, it wouldn’t really matter, right?
Just as Zuo Jingyou said, some people might genuinely care about her disability, but many more also admired her beauty. Besides, she was so good-looking, people ought to know.
If someday gossip brought up her past with Xiao Nian, it would also let people know that she wasn’t actually worse than Lu Qing, right?
She was rich, wealthy, and beautiful. It would be too pitiful if she was dumped just because of a disability.
At this moment, ten thousand dramas were playing out in Yin Bai’s mind. She pondered for a moment, then finally mustered her courage, tentatively stepping over the boundary in her heart called “self-abasement,” and looked seriously at Zuo Jingyou, saying, “What if people say bad things about me?”
Zuo Jingyou looked at her with a smile and retorted, “Who would say bad things about someone so beautiful? Unless that person is blind in both eyes and heart.”
Alright, then let’s try it…
Speaking of which, Yin Bai was actually a little expectant of others’ reactions to her appearance. After all, for someone with such a heavy idol burden4, she did somewhat crave praise from others.
Yin Bai nodded, enduring her nervousness, feeling a mix of anticipation and excitement, and looked at Zuo Jingyou. “Then post it.”
Zuo Jingyou chuckled and immediately edited a Weibo post: “Thank you to my dear friend for the cane support today~ 【Image】”
Less than a minute after the Weibo post went out, Zuo Jingyou’s comment section was overrun by a horde of appearance stans5. Soon, major marketing accounts frantically reposted Zuo Jingyou’s photo, and other forums also posted the picture of Yin Bai and Zuo Jingyou.
This photo, with its highly story-rich composition, circulated on major forums, thoroughly establishing the “Overbearing President and Pampered Wife” CP as number one among all of Zuo Jingyou’s pairings.
There was no other reason; it was simply because Yin Bai was too beautiful, and the two of them looked too compatible.
Soon, a comment asking, “Teacher Zuo, are you getting remarried?” was pushed to the top of the hot comments. Zuo Jingyou looked at her highly agitated fans and somewhat awkwardly handed the phone to Yin Bai. “It seems… it’s stirred up even more intensely…”
What to do, the CP fans were really increasing. But it felt like… this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Yin Bai took her phone, scrolled down the comment section, and saw a unanimous chorus of “so compatible” and comments praising her beauty. Her eyes curved into crescents with happiness.
“It’s pretty good,” Yin Bai said, handing the phone back to Zuo Jingyou and smiling at her. “Actually, this is also very good. Shipping CPs is the netizens’ freedom. As long as we ourselves know there’s nothing to it, it’s fine.”
Yin Bai paused, then said to Zuo Jingyou, “Teacher Zuo, thank you very much.” Seeing so many people today not caring that she was a lame person felt really great.
Perhaps many people didn’t mind that she was lame? Maybe the only one who had always minded was herself.
Zuo Jingyou’s eyes crinkled as she smiled gently. “You’re welcome.” Being able to make Yin Bai happy, she also felt, was truly wonderful.
LP: Re-translated on June 13, 2025
Footnotes
- 安若茹 | Ān Ruòrú
- 八卦 | bāguà | Lit. “eight trigrams.” Slang for gossip or to be gossipy.
- 福利包 | fúlìbāo | Lit. “welfare package” or “benefits package.” In this context, it means a special treat or bonus for fans.
- 偶像包袱 | ǒuxiàng bāofú | Lit. “idol burden/baggage.” The pressure on celebrities or public figures to maintain a perfect image and persona.
- 顏狗 | yán gǒu | Lit. “face dog.” Slang for people who are primarily attracted to or fans of someone’s physical appearance.
The 10000 episode drama bit was such a mood, honestly. 😆
The 10000 episode drama bit was such a mood, honestly. 😆