157 Without the baggage

Jia Li bid a silent, tearful goodbye to her childhood town and headed back towards the Pudong airport in Shanghai. She had booked a flight to Tunisia, a place in North Africa which she had visited last with her previous job. Not only did the country not require a visa, it was a familiar enough place for her to get a temporary reprieve from the current turmoil in her life. There was a near zero chance of her meeting anyone from her current life in that place. She wanted to breathe freely without any baggage before deciding upon the future direction of her life.

Pudong Airport

"Looks like you pissed off the big corporates this time around," Eric declared on the phone.

Ying Hui took off the glasses, and polished them before donning them back. He was trying to stay focussed as his brain assimilated and rejected various permutations and combinations to arrive at the best and worst possible scenario under the given circumstances.

Ying Hui stood at 5'8 feet and had a slim, lean built like his Asian counterparts. Fair, with narrow features, his eyebrows were perpetually drawn in a frown. It wasn't that he was displeased with things and people around him, he was simply thinking! His only form of exercise was walking since that helped him clear his mind and didn't waste his time.

"You sound more excited than troubled on my behalf, Eric," he replied back to his COO after a minute of silence.

Eric was used to his boss's delayed responses in a normal conversation. Of course, had he asked him a complicated question in the arena of Quantum Physics, the answer would have been delivered at a lightning speed. What else was to be expected out of a man who had been a consistent 192 on his IQ scores in the past many years.

"Not excited, just hyperventilating! You really do need to work on your communication andinterpersonal skills. The people whom you just refused to share your invention with, are not used to being rebuffed. And I am assuming that you wouldn't have been kind in your words when you told them about it," he grimaced.

"I do not have time to waste on niceties. Aren't they smart enough to distinguish between fake and genuine talk, anyways? And I hadn't gone there to make friends. As to answer the second part of your query, my reason for refusing them was communicated in a concise and precise manner. Whatever that I asked for, is not for personal gain but to ensure that the invention is not misused ever. I do not understand why were they so offended that they threatened me with a travel ban to China," he sounded genuinely perplexed.

"Of course you wouldn't understand," Eric muttered under his breath.

"Things wouldn't have been so bad had you let me travel along with you," he told Ying Hui.

"You are my COO, not my assistant who should waste his time trying to mollycoddle grown men," he growled back.

"Then hire a bloody assistant. I have been telling you to do so for the longest. The person can fill in the social skills lacuna…err, I mean, help you communicate better,"

Eric tried to cover up his gaffe.

He sighed and recalled the first time he had met Ying Hui. He had heard such vile things about the man that he had nearly not gone for the interview. The realisation about Ying Hui being uncaring of social graces hit him during their first round of talks. He wasn't deliberately mean. Basic etiquettes and the strings attached to them ranked really low on Ying Hui's list of priorities. And anything which was not important, was a waste of his time. Hence he didn't dwell upon it much, nor practice it.

A child prodigy, Ying Hui's potential was discovered early on by his Chinese parents, who had migrated to London before his birth. They ran an authentic oriental cuisine restaurant in Marylebone, London. When their six months old baby had started speaking, they had taken it as a sign of him being a fast learner. By the age of two, Hui had started reading independently.

He finished his A-level exams in Britain at the age of 10 years and 3 months, becoming one of the youngest people to pass maths A-level with an A grade in the world, gaining A's in Mathematics and Further Mathematics. He also wona bronze medal at the International Physics Olympiad. He graduated from the university at the age of 15 with a double major in mathematics and physics and finished his PhD at 20 from Princeton University.

Throughout his entire student life, his parents didn't have to spend a dime on his education. Scholarships kept him afloat and when he had to shift to America for his further studies, he had enough part time projects running for various companies, to fund his stay there.