"We had not actually prepared ourselves mentally for the reality of calling Uncle Mu our brother-in-law, for the social complications that will arise when people in China realize that generational boundaries have been completely disregarded, for the inevitable gossip and speculation about whether this relationship is appropriate given the age gap and the family connections."
"I do not particularly care about gossip or speculation or what people in China think about the appropriateness of my marriage," Zhou Yuxi replied with the kind of cold certainty that characterized her approach to social conventions that she found irrelevant or constraining.
"Mu Yunchen and I are not blood-related, the age gap between us is not extreme enough to be genuinely problematic, and the only reason anyone considers this marriage inappropriate is because of arbitrary social hierarchies that have no real bearing on our actual relationship."
