WeChat functions as the novel’s most immediate channel for private contact and relational negotiation. It is not merely a modern communication utility: messages sent through it repeatedly move information from hidden spaces into visible conflict, allowing Shen Tang to discover other people’s feelings, maintain friendships, coordinate entertainment work, and manage the boundary between her public persona and private life.
A Private Counterpart to Public Performance
WeChat gains its narrative force from its contrast with the public arenas surrounding Shen Tang. Her career is shaped by scandal, company publicity tactics, livestream audiences, and hostile online commentary, yet WeChat gives individual characters a more intimate space in which to approach one another. The distinction is especially important for Shen Tang, whose public image is controlled by rumors and commercial calculation. She may preserve a professional smile during a livestream while using private messages to ask for advice, respond to concern, or investigate relationships that public appearances leave ambiguous.
The platform also supports the contractual performance of intimacy between Shen Tang and Gu Huaian. Their marriage agreement requires them to appear affectionate at selected family occasions while limiting their actual obligations. WeChat helps sustain contact when they are apart and turns an initially formal arrangement into a developing private familiarity. Their communication therefore operates on two levels: it can maintain the outward appearance demanded by the agreement, but it also records an increasingly personal connection that cannot be reduced to public staging.
Gaming, Friendship, and Social Discovery
One of WeChat’s recurring uses is arranging play. Miao Miao sends Shen Tang a message asking her to play games, after which Shen Tang opens King of Glory and waits for Miao Miao to finish a match. The invitation reconnects Shen Tang with a familiar social rhythm and leads her into a room containing another player identified as Cool Tyrannosaurus Rex. Elsewhere, Shen Tang uses game-related messaging to ask a jungler for help when she is repeatedly attacked in the bottom lane. The hostile reply turns a routine request for team cooperation into a gendered insult, showing how quickly private or semi-private digital interaction can reproduce antagonism and status judgment.
WeChat also links gaming to Shen Tang’s relationship with Gu Huaian. When she logs in after not playing for several days, she discovers that Gu Huaian has already reached the King rank and is immediately pulled into his room without creating one herself. His brief invitation to play together makes the platform a bridge between romantic proximity and recreational partnership. Later, Shen Tang again joins games with Gu Huaian and his friends, while new teammates enter the match and one boy begins scolding almost immediately. Across these scenes, WeChat is the connective tissue that turns game matchmaking into a form of social testing: rank, cooperation, insults, and invitations all reveal how people position themselves toward Shen Tang.
Romantic Messages and Exposed Attachments
The platform becomes especially revealing when Shen Tang sees messages intended for Gu Huaian. After a woman leaves with Assistant Cen (Contract Affairs), she unexpectedly sends Gu Huaian a WeChat message. Shen Tang is sitting directly opposite him when the screen lights up, so the supposed private communication becomes an accidental disclosure in a shared physical space. When Shen Tang unlocks Gu Huaian’s phone, she finds a simple home screen dominated by work applications and notices that he also uses Weibo. A second WeChat message then arrives from someone saved as Song Classmate, asking whether Gu Huaian has changed because of Shen Tang and observing that Shen Tang does not seem to match him, though it is acceptable if he likes her.
This exchange complicates Shen Tang’s understanding of Gu Huaian’s past and present. The messages do not provide a complete explanation, but they establish that another person has noticed a change in him and associates that change with Shen Tang. WeChat thus serves as an instrument of indirect characterization: Gu Huaian’s history is not explained through a formal confession, but appears in fragments written by someone who knows him from before. The platform makes private feeling legible through notification sounds, contact names, and unfinished interpretations rather than through a single authoritative account.
Emotional Labor and Boundary Negotiation
Shen Tang’s WeChat conversations also register the labor required to sustain relationships. During several days of filming, she works during the day and video-chats with Gu Huaian at night. The conversations are awkward at first, but gradually become ordinary enough for her to remove makeup and complete her skincare routine while continuing to talk. The change marks a small but meaningful movement from performed companionship toward habitual intimacy. Digital communication extends the relationship across physical distance and allows closeness to develop through repetition rather than through a single dramatic declaration.
At the same time, WeChat exposes the competing claims made by friendship and romance. When Gu Huaian refuses to let Shen Tang send embarrassing photographs to Qi Yue, Shen Tang forwards a screenshot of her conversation with him to Qi Yue and asks what she should do. Qi Yue responds by jokingly accusing Shen Tang of treating her as part of the couple’s performance and complains that Shen Tang will show Gu Huaian the exchange but not her. The incident is comic, but its underlying issue is serious: private messages become evidence that affection and loyalty are being redistributed. Shen Tang must negotiate not only what she feels, but also who is permitted to see which version of her communication.
WeChat likewise carries concern and uncertainty outside the romantic plot. Miao Miao later messages Shen Tang to say that she thinks she has done something wrong. Shen Tang considers whether to reveal her true identity again, but remembers Gu Huaian’s interruption on an earlier night and cannot determine whether it was intentional. The platform gives Miao Miao a direct route to seek help while leaving Shen Tang with an unresolved question about Gu Huaian’s motives. In this way, WeChat does not simply clarify relationships; it can preserve ambiguity by presenting partial evidence that demands interpretation.
Narrative Significance
As a recurring communication medium, WeChat organizes the novel’s movement between visibility and concealment. Public scandals and livestreams turn Shen Tang into an object of collective attention, whereas private messages restore individual voices, though those voices remain selective, strategic, and sometimes hostile. A message can invite a game, reveal an old attachment, request emotional assistance, or provoke jealousy; its apparent smallness belies its ability to redirect a relationship.
The platform’s significance therefore lies in its dual function. It is practical infrastructure for scheduling contact and sustaining long-distance companionship, but it is also a narrative device that converts hidden social knowledge into plot pressure. Notifications interrupt meals and conversations, screenshots circulate between friends, and messages intended for one recipient become readable by another. Through these repeated crossings between private text and shared interpretation, WeChat helps make Shen Tang’s changing identity and relationships visible without dissolving the uncertainty that keeps them in motion.
