Cultivation Commentary – Chapter 3: “Fermin Delton University”

NOTE: Full spoilers for the book contained below.

Julia was walking ahead of them, finally convinced to wear a jacket, albeit a thin one. Hair was straighter today, but not completely. Leonard couldn’t quite read the expression on her face. Awe? Shock? Uncertainty? Overwhelm? Probably a bit of everything.

Whatever she was feeling, he was excited for her. To get out and experience the world was probably not what she wanted, but it sure was what she needed.

A good example of the disconnect between father and daughter. He assumes she doesn’t want to grow up, when really she does, but she’s just slightly afraid to.

“What’s this?” asked Essie as she approached a plaque
posted by the fountain. It read:

DEDICATED TO KELLY CAYLIN KENNEDY
1990 – 2019
FOREVER GUIDING US TO A NEW AGE

I decided to make Kelly’s full name evoke a certain cultish organization. Though I chose to be slightly more subtle about it than I could have been.

When it was their turn, Essie and Leonard leaned in to Maxine over the bin full of four cell phones and Essie whispered, “Maxine, why do we have to give up our phones?”

Maxine looked over to Jenny with some anxiety on her face. Arms held behind her back, Jenny grinned and said in her well-honed and positive voice, “The places we’ll be going during the tour are some of the most technologically-rich places not only on the campus, but in the entire tri-state area. The interference from cellular devices can cause damage both to university equipment and potentially to the cellular devices themselves, which the university cannot be responsible for. All devices must be surrendered temporarily, but they will be returned at the conclusion of the tour.”

As implicitly confirmed later on, the hidden purpose of this phone-taking during the tour is to make the devices compatible with FDU’s surveillance software, giving them access to all calls and messages and so forth. Total control.

I suppose this must mean that they haven’t gotten to the phone companies yet…

Jenny added her second witness to Maxine’s praise of the food, explaining that many fine chefs were hired to run most of the places in the cafeteria. “Unfortunately,” she added with a cock of her smiling head, “there has been a shortage of some rarer ingredients as of this week, so some meals are using more common substitutes. All the more reason to come back again when things have changed.

Another mention of the running low motif. I wonder if “common substitutes” for “rarer ingredients” means anything? Heh.

“This is the Hall of Culture. Decorated by our fine art majors just four years ago, it stands as a monument to American culture as well as the diverse faculty and student body of FDU,” said Jenny, sounding prouder than ever. Leonard wondered if she practiced crying too.

I suspect the Hall of Culture is less of a monument to American culture and more of a hitlist.

That last line of the paragraph always catches me off guard somehow. I think it’s funny.

“Bú yào,” the Asian girl said.

Her mouth trembled, her hair was unkempt, and her eyes—her brown eyes were ballooning wide as twin moons and…twitching. Twitching like dying insects.

“Wǒ bú huì shuō Yīngwén! Duìbuqǐ! Wǒ huì shāng. Yīnggāi zǒu le!”

Pangfua’s line here translates to: “I don’t speak English! I’m sorry! I know entropy. I have to go!” Roughly speaking. Mandarin 101, everybody.

At any rate the family, including Maxine, forgot about the strange Chinese girl and gathered together for their first family photo in over a year, stretching their jaws and then putting on smiles, surrounded by beautiful art and cultural photography.

This is one of those things that’s really sad in retrospect. The taking of their last family photo ever. Leonard and Maxine do a lot of “last” things in this book, I guess.

Sorry.

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