Catch up on Part 1 here!

“And then? Did he save your phone number?” When she got to this point in the story, her male classmate cut her off.

“Yes, yes, he did!” Mint quickly replied.

“And has he called you?”

“Uh, no he hasn’t…”

“SMS?”

“No…”

“Whatsapp?”

“No…”

As he saw her smile fade, he quickly asked: “Well, how many days has it been?”

“Three.”

“Oh, then that’s fine!” The boy quickly continued. “Three days is normal, he’s not going to want to scare you off by contacting you too quickly and looking clingy! Right?”

“Right…”

“See, if he wasn’t into you, he wouldn’t buy a drink, right? And then he asked to dance with you, and most importantly he asked for your phone number.” Her classmate smiled slyly.

This revived Mint’s spirits. She firmly believed that Leo must be interested in her—otherwise, why would he come up to her in the bar? Of course, another meeting with him was inevitable!

Mint knew and believed in the phrase “attitude determines everything”. A week later, she was proven correct.

When she finished class at 3 pm on Wednesday, she saw that she had a missed call on her phone, and the name displayed on the screen was “Leo”. She was surprised and overjoyed, and turned to one of her female friends beside her.

“Leo called me, but I didn’t hear it—what should I do?”

“Oh, the ABC? Ah!” Her friend almost screamed. “Hurry, call him back!”

Mint made no sound, but felt incredibly shy suddenly, and thus sent Leo a text message.

Mint had made the smart choice.The two exchanged messages rapidly, and the dialogue between them grew. This caused her friends to define her relationship with Leo as “ambiguous”, and the news quickly spread.

“Mint, how are things with that ABC?”

Similar questions became daily topics of conversation between Mint and her friends.

Mint fully enjoyed sharing the details of her ambiguous relationship with her friends. After all, not every Hong Kong girl had the opportunity to go to Lan Kwai Fong, and not every girl who went to LKF had what it took to meet an ABC. Either way, Mint wasn’t from Hong Kong, but this was her secret, which she couldn’t tell anyone.

In this way, Mint’s life became even more interesting. When she awoke every morning, the first thing she did after opening her eyes was to check if she had any messages from Leo on her phone. If she didn’t, she’d immediately send him one herself. Time flew as she continued to exchange messages with her ambiguous partner.

“Hey, Mint, finals are coming up! Don’t play on Whatsapp in class!”

Mint’s classmate was calling her out, but Mint impressed herself with the cleverness of her own reply.

“I’m sending him messages in English—this is how I practice!”

After this golden quote was posted on Facebook, it received more than 100 likes. Everyone concluded: “Mint is just Mint—different from the rest.”

Before this, actually, Mint had received other “likes”. One time, on the way back to her dorm, she was accosted by a group of people.

“Mint, we’re reporters from the campus Newsletter. Can we take a few pictures of you so that you can grace the cover of the next issue?” The speaker was a small, short male student who spoke quickly and clearly.

“Uhh…”

“It’ll be really quick, and you don’t need to prepare or anything. We just want to capture your everyday likeness.”

“My everyday likeness?” Mint hesitated.

“Yeah, you don’t have to worry, because even your everyday self is outstanding!”

Mint lowered her head to look at her beautiful lime pumps, and felt great. She replied:

“OK!”

A month later, a new issue of the Newsletter appeared with Mint’s picture on the cover. Normally, copies of the publication sat on a rack in front of the Students’ Union office all month, but this month, they were gone almost as soon as they were placed there. The reason was simple: the stunning Mint which everyone had their eyes on from near and afar was now on the cover.

Her classmates saw the outstanding Mint on the cover, half smiling in all her glory, and began to research her style choices.

“I think she has a kind of ‘Euro-American’ vibe”, a girl in a tight, fluorescent-green tank-top opened the conversation.

“I don’t know, maybe it’s how she chooses colors?” A girl in a long summer dress replied.

“Right, look, how she employs both complementary and clashing colors…it’s like a combination of the Caribbean Sea, the Californian sunset, and the verdant green of the Hawaiian palm trees!” The speaker was a student of literature.

“Well, you could say it’s like…a traffic light?” A boy pointed to the picture of Mint saying, “A red top, yellow trousers, and green shoes! This is her calling out the Hong Kong government on the traffic situation!”

“Yeah, that makes sense…”

After that, the campus was full of color. Both boys and girls began to go for clashing colors, and Mint became a source of fashion advice for all. In the girls’ dormitory, there were always people accosting Mint with brightly colored clothes in hand, saying:

“Hey, Mint, today I’m going to do this or that, which of these should I wear?”

One day a group of students came along, looking to talk about social issues with Mint. They were a group of hot-blooded youths whose leader was the boy who had made the “traffic light” interpretation of Mint’s color combination. They had started a publication of their own, the Minty Bullet. They wanted Mint to serve as their main commentator, sharing her opinions each week on a major issue.

The people who previously knew of the “LKF affair” developed new appraisal of Mint, and those out of the loop were now looped in on the Mint phenomenon. Mint’s fame on the campus rose further and now people weren’t just talking about the “ABC” liaison—or rather, people gradually forgot about the ABC, and more attention was focused directly upon Mint.

However, the love between Mint and Leo was developing stably. They had moved on from just text messages, and sometimes would have long calls before bed. When people heard Mint sweetly speaking into the phone, they would remark:

“Oh, Mint’s practicing English again!”

Even though the development of the relationship was stable, Mint and Leo hadn’t decided to formalise anything. Mint actually wasn’t in any hurry, as she thought that keeping things ambiguous further lent to her status and position as “The Queen of Lan Kwai Fong”. Of course, she still immensely valued Leo and her feelings for him, for were there to have been no Leo, she never would have become the focal point of campus attention.

Just as Mint’s fame was bringing her all kinds of good fortune, an odd incident occurred: a large amount of panties went missing from the girls’ dormitory.

On the one hand, the incident could just be viewed as a simple case of clothes going missing. On the other, however, people were also prone to inflate it to crisis-level proportions; there was supposedly a pervert loose on the campus! In response to calls by militant campus feminists and hot-blooded youths, the free speech board was covered with posters that read “Protect Panties, Punish Perverts”. These bright yellow posters were emblazoned with bold red text, reminiscent of Mint’s characteristic “clashing colors” sense of arrangement.

The hot-blooded youths recommended an expedition to the campus security center to review surveillance tapes, but were quickly shot down by the outraged feminists—the panties were inside the dorm, and in the interests of student privacy, there were no cameras in there. After reading a detective novel, they decided to adopt a technique from within the book: the experience method. That is to say, look for people with a history of lecherous behaviour, and target them as prime suspects. Through their inquiries, they came by a reliable piece of information: on April 1, 2010, a student from the mainland switched the signs for the male and female lavatories, causing a large number of male students to accidently walk into the female lavatory, eliciting many screams. This extremely perverse behaviour was seen by these feminists as an invasion and assault upon a private space for females. The hot-blooded youths eagerly submitted this information to the chief commentator of the Minty Bullet, and prompted Mint to write a warning to hidden perverts: eventually, you will always be found out.

However, to the great surprise of the hot-blooded youths, Mint refused their invitation.

“If I write this, it will lead students to misunderstand—aren’t all mainlanders perverts?” Mint said, eyes wide.

“Well, that is a possibility, but they do have a previous record.”

“Previous record. It was an April Fool’s Day prank, have you never done that?”

“But…”

“So you Hong Kong guys are allowed to put on ridiculous costumes for Halloween, but us mainland Chinese can’t play little pranks on April Fool’s?”

Mint stood there crossly, face full of rage, not yet having realised the slip of the tongue she had just made.

“Us mainland Chinese?” The hot-blooded youths asked suspiciously.

“Uh, I meant, from the point of view of a mainland student, they would say something like that…” Mint backpedalled quickly, trying to cover for her mistake.

“Uhh…” The hot-blooded youths stood in place pensively.

When the next issue of Minty Bullet was issued, where a picture of Mint was normally on the cover, this time was image of the “Protect Panties, Punish Perverts”, but the text had been changed: No more columns by Mint. Mint was no longer the cover model, but she was still the subject of the lead article. The contents were roughly as follows:

We have discovered that the recently popular “Queen of LKF”, Mint, is under suspicion for the Panty Raid. When the editors of our publication approached Mint to discuss the matter, she flew into a rage, defending the Toilet Sign Switcher, claiming that it was just a joke, and, more worryingly, that she is in fact from the Chinese mainland. She is a liar. In our research, we found a line from The Biography of Sherlock Homes, in which a similar case is discussed. The fifth line of page 108 reminds us: he that commits a fault thinks everyone speaks of it.

Mint, hands trembling, threw the copy of Minty Bullet to the ground, and as it made a loud smack upon the ground the fright made her entire body tremble. At that time, the door of the girls’ dormitory burst open, and a group of girls in their pyjamas, unkempt and dishevelled, waving their bath towels and rushed towards Mint, encircling her, howling:

“Give back my panties!” “That was 15 Issue 2/2016 new!” “Mine was Calvin Klein!”

“A Tale of Mint” is a story from our newest issue, “Internet Celebrity”. To read the whole piece, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine. Alternatively, you can purchase the digital version from the iTunes Store.