The Crimes of Lord Pei

Gong: “Your Majesty.”Shou: “Me.”Actually, Shen Shanshan wasn’t really named Shen Shanshan.We met when we were very young. When I finally thought to ask his name, he looked terribly pleased with himself. He dipped his finger in tea, wrote the characters on the desk for me to see, and even told me they came from some poem or another.It wasn’t as if I could compare with him. He could recognize a thousand characters by the age of five and write poetry at six. I was just a mischievous little brat.I stared at the two characters on the desk, but I didn’t know how to read either of them. And when I heard him pronounce them, they sounded terribly awkward to me. So I simply picked the part I recognized and used that to call him.I must have been six or seven at the time.The moment I called him “Shan Shan,” the name sounded like a girl’s name.Every youngster at the Ding’an Marquis Manor’s birthday banquet burst out laughing.Shen Shanshan was so furious that he snapped off a branch from the plum tree and came after me with it. The two of us, little dumplings that we were, ended up wrestling in the snow until we were both covered in mud.And that was the name I called him for the next twenty years.First-person POV; nonlinear narrative.