Curry

Curry is the male streamer who collaborates with Shen Tang on a merchandise-promotion livestream ostensibly designed to help farmers sell unsold agricultural products. His role is crucial not because he receives a developed private history, but because his public-facing work becomes the surface through which the novel exposes the unstable relationship among celebrity reputation, commercial mediation, audience participation, and platform-controlled visibility. The collaboration begins as an ordinary publicity job and ends with Curry’s name attached to doubts about rotten produce, an unclean warehouse, and the limits of supposedly benevolent online commerce.

Identity and Professional Context

Curry is identified as a male anchor and livestream personality working in commercial promotion. He appears in Shen Tang’s assignment after her agent, Wang Brother, informs her that she has been booked to promote merchandise with a famous influencer. Although Shen Tang has considerable popularity, her poor reputation prevents her from receiving desirable work; she is largely dependent on hype, while each new wave of hype produces more dislike and reinforces the cycle. Curry therefore operates within the same attention economy, but from the more favorable position of the established livestream host whose platform and sales apparatus attract commercial partnerships.

The campaign’s stated theme is helping farmers dispose of unsold agricultural products. Shen Tang recognizes that the intention sounds admirable, yet the middlemen involved are excessively deceptive. Because she remembers how the scenario functions in the book, she decides to speak and act as little as possible, hoping to remain a background presence rather than become responsible for the promotion’s claims. Curry, by contrast, serves as the visible male anchor who guides the product demonstrations and presents the warehouse’s goods to the audience.

The Promotional Livestream

The decisive scene occurs during the introduction of durians. Curry picks up a cracked-open fruit, revealing large, fleshy pods, and offers a section to Shen Tang while asking whether she enjoys eating durian. Shen Tang refuses to take it, displaying a visibly conflicted expression rather than providing the reassuring endorsement expected from a celebrity guest. Her hesitation interrupts the smooth rhythm of the sales performance: a product that should appear fresh and desirable instead becomes an object of suspicion.

Curry ultimately does not eat the durian himself. An assistant is made to consume it instead, and the assistant, a recent college graduate, can barely maintain a smile. The substitution makes the warehouse’s cleanliness even more questionable. Rather than strengthening consumer confidence, the demonstration encourages viewers to wonder whether the facility is genuinely sanitary. Shen Tang’s maneuver therefore sabotages durian sales, but the damage is not limited to one product: Curry’s livestream becomes evidence of the gap between promotional language and the physical conditions behind the merchandise.

Scandal, Audience Response, and Suppression

After the livestream, an enthusiastic viewer records Shen Tang’s performance and posts it on Weibo, sending her to the hot-search rankings. Shen Tang expects the comments to consist entirely of abuse, since she believes she has no real fans; she regards the managers of her super-topic and the small fan group as little more than her own alternate accounts. Instead, some unexpected defenders appear, even though other users attack them. One post pairs her behavior with a photograph of an oil-covered cockroach squeezing through the cracks of a durian, turning the livestream’s awkwardness into a grotesque visual argument about contamination.

The audience’s reaction becomes more concrete when an anonymous warehouse worker claims that the warehouse is dirty and full of rats and cockroaches, warning people against buying fruit and fresh food associated with Curry. The post identifies Curry by name, transforming him from a commercial host into the public face of a suspected distribution problem. Another reaction characterizes Shen Tang as habitually contrary, suggesting that her refusal to cooperate with the sales performance may have looked perverse at first but was retrospectively interpreted as a form of truth-telling. The episode shows how viewers do not merely consume a livestream: they record it, circulate fragments, supply testimony, and collectively reconstruct what the official promotion leaves out.

Several days later, Curry reaches the top searches again, this time because many customers complain that the fruit they received is rotten. The development confirms that the earlier doubts were not confined to Shen Tang’s suspicious expression or the assistant’s strained smile. Yet the hot search is quickly suppressed, and Shen Tang can only watch the topic vanish. Curry’s public visibility thus follows a sharp reversal: attention first magnifies the commercial controversy, then institutional power removes it from view. The suppression suggests that online popularity does not guarantee public accountability when capital can control the circulation of information.

Narrative Function and Significance

Curry functions primarily as a structural counterpoint to Shen Tang. His livestream requires the appearance of confidence, freshness, and trustworthy mediation, while Shen Tang’s refusal to perform enthusiasm reveals the instability beneath that appearance. The scene’s value shift moves from commercial reassurance to consumer distrust: the same durian that should certify the campaign’s legitimacy instead exposes the compromised conditions of its sale. Curry’s limited characterization intensifies this effect, because the narrative is less interested in his inner life than in the system he represents.

His name also remains attached to the controversy after the livestream ends. Once rotten fruit reaches customers and complaints are suppressed, Curry becomes an example of how a platform personality can serve simultaneously as worker, advertiser, intermediary, and disposable public shield. The campaign claims to connect farmers with consumers, but the scandal reveals how middlemen can distort that connection, while platforms and capital can decide which version of events remains visible. Curry’s role consequently anchors one of the novel’s clearest media critiques: attention can expose exploitation, but attention alone cannot defeat the structures that monetize and control it.