Xiao Feng and Kang Min

Xiao Feng and Kang Min are linked by a grievance that Xiao Feng does not understand until she explains it: at a gathering in Luoyang, he failed to notice her, and she took that inattention as a personal rejection. Years later, when Kang Min is incapacitated and Xiao Feng questions her, the old slight emerges as the grievance she insists lies behind her hatred of him. Their encounter exposes a sharp disparity between the importance she gives the moment and the little attention he remembers paying to it.

The grievance and its setting

Kang Min’s accusation reaches Xiao Feng during a later confrontation. She curses him for what she regards as his arrogance and says he caused her present condition. Xiao Feng does not respond in kind; he lets her speak, then challenges the connection she draws between them. He recalls that when they first met outside Wuxi, her husband Ma Dayuan had already been killed by her. Since he and Kang Min had been strangers before then, he asks how she can hold him responsible for bringing her to her current state.

The disagreement is not simply about who caused what. Xiao Feng treats their first meeting and her husband’s death as the relevant facts; Kang Min redirects the question to an earlier encounter he does not remember as a meeting at all. Her accusations thus make visible a past that, for him, had passed without notice, but for her had acquired lasting emotional force.

The Hundred Flower Gathering

Kang Min identifies the occasion as the Hundred Flower Gathering in Luoyang, held two years before the confrontation. Xiao Feng remembers attending with many Beggar Clan brothers, drinking wine and playing rock-paper-scissors. He does not remember meeting her there, and initially supposes that Ma Dayuan had gone without bringing her to meet him.

Kang Min says she stood beside a yellow peony and that the heroes present looked at her. In her account, Xiao Feng alone among the men at the gathering failed to give her a proper look. She describes him as having seen her face but letting his gaze pass without pausing, treating her as though she were an ordinary woman. The point, as she presents it, is not that he failed to recognize her by name: his apparent indifference singled her out precisely because so many others paid attention to her.

Xiao Feng then recalls the scene, but not in the way Kang Min does. He says there were several women beside the peony and that he had been wholly occupied with drinking, paying no particular attention to the flowers or to the men and women around them. He adds that had she been a senior female hero, he would have approached to pay his respects; because she was his sister-in-law, he considered that not looking at her a matter of proper manners. His explanation reframes the omission as deliberate restraint grounded in their relationship, rather than contempt or a judgment of her appearance.

Recognition and misrecognition

Kang Min interprets Xiao Feng’s lack of attention against the crowd’s response. She says more than a thousand men attended, that the heroes regarded him as foremost among them, and that the women regarded her as foremost. In that setting, she reasons, being overlooked by the famous leader of the Beggar Clan deprived her of the recognition she expected. Her account makes the public gathering a contest of attention: the crowd confirms her beauty, but Xiao Feng’s failure to join its admiration becomes the slight she cannot accept.

Xiao Feng answers that he had never been especially interested in looking at women, first as a child and later as an adult, and that his inattention was not unique to her. He also refers to a woman far more beautiful than Kang Min, a remark that immediately draws her attention and prompts her to demand the woman’s identity. The exchange shows how little the two share in their understanding of the old scene: what he presents as habitual distraction and restraint, she remembers as a uniquely meaningful refusal to see her.

Resentment and responsibility

Kang Min’s recollection does not displace Xiao Feng’s objection about the chronology. He continues to distinguish the old gathering from their first meeting outside Wuxi, after Ma Dayuan had already been killed, while she insists that the earlier encounter explains her hatred. The evidence presents no mutual intimacy or shared history between them; rather, their connection is made consequential by the disproportionate significance Kang Min assigns to his inattention.

Her anger also persists as she speaks. After cursing Xiao Feng at length, she says she will resume when she has rested, and he calmly asks whether she has finished. The contrast between her continuing grievance and his composed questioning gives the relationship its defining tension: Kang Min treats the unreturned glance as an enduring injury, while Xiao Feng can only reconstruct it as an incidental moment during an evening spent with his companions. The confrontation exposes not a romance or established bond, but a one-sided fixation that becomes part of her explanation for their later hostility.