Chinese literature is compulsory in schools so anybody who's gone all the way to university (aka Zhao Yunlan, because it's also a Chinese policy thing that he wouldn't be able to have that job without a university degree) would and should be using famous poetry lines and references automatically.
On the flip side, though, I help solo out with the Guardian subs sometimes, and some of the things Shen Wei says during climaxes are seriously the most esoteric references ever. It's easy to tell he's not a modern human being in those cases; the effect is like if you were walking down the street and somebody started speaking entire sentences in Middle English or something. Part of it's probably the novel's influence also, since in the novel he's a professor of classical Chinese literature...
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Chinese literature is compulsory in schools so anybody who's gone all the way to university (aka Zhao Yunlan, because it's also a Chinese policy thing that he wouldn't be able to have that job without a university degree) would and should be using famous poetry lines and references automatically.
On the flip side, though, I help solo out with the Guardian subs sometimes, and some of the things Shen Wei says during climaxes are seriously the most esoteric references ever. It's easy to tell he's not a modern human being in those cases; the effect is like if you were walking down the street and somebody started speaking entire sentences in Middle English or something. Part of it's probably the novel's influence also, since in the novel he's a professor of classical Chinese literature...