Hook
It happened in November 2024, in the literature section on the fourth floor of the Bao Yugang Library at Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Minhang campus. The air conditioner hummed at a low frequency, mixed with a faint musty smell—the carpet hadn’t dried completely after last week’s water leak repair. Lin Xiaojing (second-year Master’s student in Literature, INFJ) was buried in page 42 of the Fan Ye translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Her index finger traced the sentence, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” slowly, as if touching a secret about to explode—but there was still soy sauce stain from lunch’s shrimp shells under her fingernails. She didn’t notice.
Suddenly, a tap on her right shoulder—not a brash pat, but a tentative, hesitant touch, like a cat pawing at an unknown object. She turned to see a guy with black-rimmed glasses and slightly greasy hair (obviously hadn’t washed in three days) holding out a note. The scrawled handwriting shimmered faintly under the dim light: “You like Márquez? The way you read that book is so focused—way more than that classmate behind you who’s been scrolling through TikTok.”
Lin Xiaojing froze. Should she take it? How did this stranger approach so silently? She had chosen the most secluded spot—inside the U-shaped bookshelf, back to the aisle, even the light above her was broken (she sat here on purpose because the dimmer light made her more immersed). The note hung in the air like an unsolved multiple-choice question. Her palm gripped the page tightly, knuckles white—her hands were sweating, leaving marks on the “PENGUIN CLASSICS” logo on the title page.
Personality Settings
Lin Xiaojing
- MBTI: INFJ (Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging)
- Core cognitive functions: Dominant Ni (Introverted Intuition), auxiliary Fe (Extraverted Feeling), tertiary Ti (Introverted Thinking), inferior Se (Extraverted Sensing)
- Current identity: Second-year Master’s student in Chinese Literature, advisor is a young associate professor named Chen Sihe, working under Wang Dewei’s Latin American literature direction
- Current goal: Complete the book list for an intertextuality study between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pedro Páramo in a quiet environment, find the original source of the “ice” imagery in Latin American mythology
- Current dilemma: Social anxiety—afraid of being disturbed, and even more afraid of the awkwardness after rejecting a disturbance. After turning down a junior’s approach in the cafeteria last time, she took a detour for three consecutive days
- One bad detail: Yesterday in her notes, she wrote “Aurelian” as “Aurelian” (a typo that she circled in red and fretted over all evening)
Chen Zeyu
- MBTI: ENTP (Extraverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving)
- Core cognitive functions: Dominant Ne (Extraverted Intuition), auxiliary Ti (Introverted Thinking), tertiary Fe (Extraverted Feeling), inferior Si (Introverted Sensing)
- Current identity: Third-year undergraduate in Computer Science, skipped Data Structures and Algorithms elective (professor Liu Qi—three absences and you automatically fail) to “wander” in the library
- Current goal: Kill time, and casually find a niche book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. But he couldn’t even remember the full title, only that the cover was blue
- Current dilemma: Extreme boredom—everyone around was either scrolling on their phones or sleeping, until he noticed the girl in the corner who was as focused as a sculpture. But to make things worse, when he pretended to look for a book, he accidentally knocked Introduction to Algorithms Volume 2 off the shelf—onto his own foot.
Story
Act 1: The Spark
At 2:15 PM, Chen Zeyu wandered into the library. He had planned to nap on his dorm bed, but his roommate Zhao Ming was playing the Genshin Impact Abyss domain with the volume maxed out. He just wanted a quiet place to “do nothing.” He randomly pulled Programming Pearls from a shelf, flipped two pages, and got sleepy—page 17 was about binary search, but his eyes kept fixating on a water stain at the bottom, as if deciphering a code.
Then he saw Lin Xiaojing.
She was leaning by a window in the corner, her profile facing him, completely absorbed in the book as if sucked into the pages. Her eyebrows were slightly furrowed, her lips silently moving, as if having a secret conversation with Márquez. Chen Zeyu found it intriguing—he rarely saw anyone read so intensely, like conducting a mass. And she was reading the Fan Ye translation, not the Huang Jinyan version—which reminded him of a comparison analysis video by a Bilibili UP主 called “Latin American Literature Bot” that he watched in his freshman year. His Ne (Extraverted Intuition) instantly lit up: What was she thinking? Why did she pick this edition? Would she be open to chatting?
He put down his book, circled two bookshelves, pretending to look for Introduction to Algorithms Vol. 2, but actually observing her movements—he even noticed she licked her index finger lightly before each page turn (a habit he found both endearing and slightly unhygienic). After five minutes, he saw her close the book, rub her temples, and close her eyes—seemingly moved by a passage, because there was a faint, barely perceptible smile on her lips. Chen Zeyu decided to act. He tore a piece of scratch paper—it originally had pseudo-code for an “automatic poetry generator” mini-program he’d planned last night—flipped it over, wrote the note, walked over, and gently tapped her shoulder.
Act 2: Escalation
Lin Xiaojing took the note, read it once, then again. Her Ni (Introverted Intuition) quickly activated defense: How long had this person been watching me? The handwriting was messy but the pen pressure was heavy—“very focused” didn’t sound like a casual comment, more like an academic appraisal tone. She looked up to meet Chen Zeyu’s eyes. There was no malice in them, only a childlike, naked curiosity—but that curiosity made her uneasy, like a fruit fly being observed in a lab.
INFJ > “Thanks, but I’m not really free to talk right now.” She replied in a whisper, her voice light as dust—actually her throat was hoarse from staying up late drinking too many pour-over coffees, leaving a sticky sour taste.
Chen Zeyu didn’t leave. He tilted his head and lowered his voice to ask, “So would you recommend the book? I’ve never read Márquez.” He actually had no intention of reading it—he couldn’t even get through the first page of One Hundred Years of Solitude, finding the names too many. But his Ti (Introverted Thinking) told him: asking questions extends the conversation, and in the library, volume must be kept to a minimum, which itself compresses conversational flexibility. Lin Xiaojing froze, realizing he intended to persist. Her Fe (Extraverted Feeling) started sweating—refusing a friendly stranger would seem harsh, but accepting would mean breaking the quiet atmosphere she had carefully maintained.
“It’s okay,” she said, then quickly stood the book up, using its spine to block eye contact, making a clear “do not disturb” gesture—the spine read “Nanhai Publishing House” right in his face.
Chen Zeyu understood, but Ne’s inertia kept him going. “In that passage you were reading, there’s a character about ice, right? I remember someone saying ice in the book symbolizes the technological superiority of colonists…” He bent down to try to see the page number she’d been reading. Lin Xiaojing quickly closed the book with a loud smack. Three nearby students looked up—the girl sitting diagonally behind her even took off her headphones and tsked in annoyance.
Act 3: Low Point
Lin Xiaojing felt her temples throbbing. This stranger’s intrusion had completely shattered her afternoon rhythm—she had just built a metaphorical framework in her mind, and now all the threads were broken, like a puzzle piece suddenly yanked away. She started packing her bag, zipping it harshly—the zipper caught on a pen cap in her side pocket, and she yanked twice before freeing it, almost flinging the pen to the floor. Chen Zeyu stood nearby, his expression shifting from excitement to confusion to dismay—the corners of his mouth drooped like a Corgi splashed with water.
ENTP > “Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt… I just thought… you were reading so intensely, it reminded me of when I used to take apart radios as a kid.”
His voice finally dropped, carrying a clumsy sincerity—but he didn’t control the volume well, and his last word became hoarse because he choked on saliva.
But Lin Xiaojing wasn’t listening. She stood up, grabbed her bag, and prepared to leave. Chen Zeyu’s hand froze in midair, the note crumpled and stuffed into his pocket—he would later find it had disintegrated into pulp in the wash. He realized he’d messed up—his Ne (Extraverted Intuition) had run too fast, completely missing the alarm bells from her Fe (Extraverted Feeling), and his own Fe (tertiary function) was now belatedly kicking in, futilely trying to repair. He stood still, watching her back disappear down the aisle—she was wearing canvas shoes, laces untied, but she didn’t stop to tie them.
Quote: Some approaches aren’t about courage, but about rhythm—ENTPs hit the drumbeat, INFJs dance the adagio. But reality is often harsher: when the drumbeat is off, the adagio becomes fast-forwarded.
Act 4: The Turning Point
When Lin Xiaojing reached the corridor exit, her canvas bag suddenly slipped off her shoulder—the strap was old and the threads had started loosening two days ago; she hadn’t sewn them. Notebook, pen, keys, a pack of opened Mentos mint candies scattered everywhere; two candies rolled into the corner. She crouched down to pick them up, flustered, her ears burning—she heard footsteps behind her, knowing that guy had witnessed this, and her heart raced faster than when he first tapped her shoulder.
At that moment, Chen Zeyu had already walked over quickly, crouched down, and helped pick up her things—he first picked up the two candies, wiped them with his sleeve, then picked up the notebook. Then he saw it.
On the cover was a handwritten label: “A Metaphorical Genealogy of Magical Realism—A Case Study of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Pedro Páramo.” The open page was densely covered with annotations—on the left were excerpts from the text, on the right her thoughts, with some parts circled in red, question marks, and an arrow pointing to a line: “This direction might be wrong. Ask my advisor tomorrow.” Below that, another line in pencil: “But I feel I’m wrong because no one interprets it this way.” Chen Zeyu’s Ti (Introverted Thinking) instantly ignited: This didn’t look like a student assignment at all—it was more like a scholar’s notes, and those written in late-night self-doubt.
He picked up the notebook, didn’t immediately return it, but looked up and asked seriously, “Are you researching the ‘ice’ image? I saw you wrote a note about Macondo’s first ice—‘It’s not cold, it’s hot, because it’s being seen for the first time’—did you write that yourself?”
Lin Xiaojing froze. Not because he was still there, but because he had read her notes and actually understood them—she had written that line at 3 AM, “Ice isn’t cold, it’s hot, because it’s being seen for the first time,” without fully understanding it herself; she was just seized by an intuition. And now this truant computer science student was quoting it verbatim.
“How do you know?” Her voice involuntarily softened, with a faint tremor like being hit by an electric current.
Chen Zeyu scratched his head: “Because I also came across an article about Márquez writing ‘ice’ as a metaphor for colonial culture—there’s a WeChat public account called ‘Jump Island FM’ that had a podcast episode specifically on this. But I think your interpretation is more interesting because it starts from the senses, not from theory.” He handed the notebook back, his fingers smudged with pencil graphite—picked up from the notebook when he grabbed it.
Lin Xiaojing took the notebook, flipped to that page, and found his fingerprint left on it—the thumbprint clearly visible, with messy ridges and what seemed like a knife scar. She suddenly laughed—not a polite laugh, but the kind of involuntary laugh you let out when you hear a sharp insight in class.
Act 5: A New Balance
Fifteen minutes later, the two sat on chairs in the coffee area on the second floor of the library—Lin Xiaojing ordered an Americano (no sugar, but with half a spoon of creamer), Chen Zeyu got a bottle of iced tea. Sunlight slanted through the floor-to-ceiling windows, falling into the gap between them, illuminating page 17 of the open notebook on the table. Chen Zeyu opened his phone’s notes app to show her some of his own “bad poems”—half algorithm metaphors and half literary hodgepodge, one titled “The Sorrow of if-else”: “If the moon were binary / then every full moon / would be an overflow error.” Lin Xiaojing scanned the lines and found one: “Every if statement is like waiting for a nonexistent else.”
She pointed it out: “This line is good. If is hesitation, else is possibility—but don’t you think sometimes hesitation itself contains all possibilities? Like Heidegger’s ‘Dasein.’”
Chen Zeyu’s eyes lit up. He rambled about why he thought programming and literature were similar—both searching for logic amidst uncertainty, just using different tools. But mid-sentence, he realized he was using words like “recursion” and “entropy,” so he braked and switched to more everyday language. Lin Xiaojing listened quietly, occasionally interjecting, but mostly observing: This person wasn’t as noisy and rude as she had thought; he just approached in a way she didn’t understand—a dialect foreign to her, but she suddenly felt she could learn it.
INFJ > “Next time if you want to discuss, you can write a note in advance… just hand it to me. No need to tap my shoulder—I startle easily… and I was just thinking about an important metaphor, and you interrupted it, and I haven’t found it back yet.” She said this with her head lowered, but the corners of her mouth were curled up—her fingers traced circles unconsciously on the table.
Chen Zeyu immediately nodded, raising his phone as if pretending to hand over a note: “Got it. Same time tomorrow, same place, I’ll bring you an ‘algorithm comic’ I drew? Guaranteed better than Introduction to Algorithms—at least no water stains.”
Lin Xiaojing didn’t answer right away. A breeze blew, and the library’s glass door clicked shut softly behind them. After a few seconds, she said, “Okay.”
That copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude still lay in her bag, with a note he had secretly slipped in between the pages—folded neatly, not crumpled. It read: “Next time, I’ll tell stories, and you just zone out. But if you want to interrupt midway, feel free—I’m not afraid of interruptions, I’m only afraid of you leaving.”
Psychological Analysis
The core conflict of this story isn’t about “who speaks first” on the surface, but how two vastly different social rhythms collide and find synchronization. Based on my two years as an HRBP at ByteDance (having handled numerous cross-personality team conflict cases), this type of interaction is common in the workplace—when an ENTP product manager asks an INFJ designer a question, the same rhythm mismatch often occurs.
Chen Zeyu’s initiative to strike up a conversation is essentially driven by the ENTP’s Ne (Extraverted Intuition): he caught an “interesting object” in a boring environment, and through Ti (Introverted Thinking) quickly devised the simplest icebreaker—handing a note plus asking a question. He had no ill intent, but his Ne craved instant feedback, causing him to overlook the INFJ’s Fe (Extraverted Feeling) sensitivity to social atmosphere. A telling detail: while observing her, he was completely unaware that he was violating the library’s unwritten rule of “don’t stare at others”—not out of malice, but due to a cognitive blindspot.
Lin Xiaojing’s initial defensive reaction stems from the INFJ’s Ni (Introverted Intuition) valuing deep focus—she was constructing an abstract internal system, and any external interruption was like a sudden power outage, infuriating. Her Fe (Extraverted Feeling) made her realize that refusal could hurt the other person, so she used the ambiguous “It’s okay,” which ironically made the ENTP think there was room to continue—a classic INFJ social dilemma: afraid to hurt, only to be misunderstood. As my therapist friend Li Min puts it: “An INFJ’s ‘It’s okay’ equals ‘no’ in any context, but an ENTP’s ears only hear the word ‘okay.’”
The turning point came when the notebook dropped. Chen Zeyu saw Lin Xiaojing’s notes and accurately identified her research topic—this reveals that the ENTP’s Ti actually possesses a focused listening ability, usually masked by Ne’s jumpiness. Lin Xiaojing gave him a second chance because she sensed that his behavior stemmed not from offense, but from genuine appreciation—he understood her line about ice being “not cold, but hot.” This cognitive resonance mattered more than superficial politeness. What INFJs value most is not surface-level courtesy, but internal cognitive resonance.
Finally, Lin Xiaojing’s proposed “note communication” solution perfectly balanced the ENTP’s need for interaction and the INFJ’s need for space—the note provides a buffer zone that lets Ne release and Ni control the pace. This “asynchronous, low-stimulation” communication mode is often the best bridge between highly sensitive and highly exploratory personalities. In product management terms: a note is an asynchronous communication protocol that transforms immediate pressure into manageable delay, allowing both parties to respond at their own rhythm.
FAQ
Q1: In a quiet library, is Chen Zeyu’s note-handing strategy effective? Effective. A note respects environmental rules more than talking, and gives the other person space to refuse (by not taking it or delaying). But the note’s content should be brief and sincere, avoiding making the person feel watched for too long, which could trigger wariness. If he had added “Sorry to interrupt—if you’d rather not reply, that’s totally fine,” it would have worked better, offering an early “safe exit” for the INFJ.
Q2: How should an INFJ express boundaries without seeming cold? Refer to Lin Xiaojing’s later approach: state your needs directly (“Please use a note, don’t tap my shoulder”) rather than using vague “It’s okay” or silence. INFJ’s Fe tends to over-care for others’ feelings, but a clear, concise boundary explanation actually earns ENTP’s respect—because ENTP’s Ti can understand “logically reasonable rules” as long as the rules aren’t emotionally aggressive. In practice, adding a line like “It’s not that I dislike you, I just need a quiet environment” can eliminate the ENTP’s self-doubt about their social skills.
Q3: How can an ENTP avoid offending an INFJ? Pay attention to body language: if the other person stands up their book, starts packing, or gives very short answers (“It’s okay”), it’s time to retreat. Another key indicator is eye contact: INFJs often blink rapidly or look away when forced into social interaction—a sign of internal system overload. The ENTP should step back, give space, and later try a lighter approach—like leaving a note in the same spot the next day, rather than persisting.
Q4: If Lin Xiaojing had actually walked away, would they have had another chance? Probably not. But Chen Zeyu’s personality wouldn’t give up easily—he might have tried a different way, like leaving a note at the library front desk (with his student ID and contact info), or “accidentally bumping into” her the same time tomorrow. The key is that ENTPs need to learn to leave INFJs time to process, rather than chasing relentlessly. A real-life lesson: I once knew an ENTP guy who sat next to the same INFJ girl in the library for three consecutive days, and the girl ended up requesting a change of reading room—so don’t overestimate your charm, and don’t underestimate the other’s boundaries.
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Author: Shu Yan
Updated: June 2026