Sitting across from _老師 vis. his noodle soup

He slowly slurps his noodles in front of me, and I take him for a professor, an old man with a certain academic flair. Of course, I have no such reason for thinking so, he could be any old man at this nondescript, jam-packed hole-in-the-wall restaurant (the best kind). A sky-blue collared shirt hides beneath the neckline of his sweater, the kind that men in their fifties protestingly receive from their smiling wives and children on their birthdays that they don’t remember themselves.

On listening to Betty