Your New Home

As Jingwei drove them back to his house, Xue Ning noticed how the buildings lining the street got increasingly luxurious. Gone were the ramshackle shophouses and the dirty, faded paint jobs on shoddily cobbled apartments, gone were the traffic jams with incessant honking and the ever-present smell of polluted air. 

Instead, she was greeted with clusters of fancy condominiums with even fancier foreign names, and the hustle and bustle of the streets eventually faded into quiet, peaceful greenery. 

Here, the people spoke in soft tones, and green trees lined a pathway free of litter. Children played in a playground that featured a goddamn dinosaur structure. They screamed like ordinary children, but even that wasn't enough to disrupt the calm of this place. 

"Wow, so do you live around her? It seems peaceful," Xue Ning said as she continued to look out the window.