American Adventure: My Uncle is Don Quixote

"Postpone it?" Kelly was taken aback. "Why?"

"You know," Rachel said, a bit sheepishly, "it’s just... I was hoping Ethan could watch the Super Bowl before his surgery. To watch it live... and then have the surgery..."

Kelly fell silent for a few seconds, her expression troubled.

"Rachel, I’m sorry." She shook her head. "Everything is already scheduled."

She glanced around before adding, "To be blunt, if you were a parent from Beverly Hills and made a call to the hospital director, or if you had a personal connection with Dr. Weber, changing the date might be possible, but..."

She didn’t finish the sentence, but her meaning was clear.

In the hospitals of the United States of America, everything is determined by money.

For a regular single-parent family like Rachel’s, getting a surgery scheduled within half a year was already fortunate. Rescheduling would mean getting back at the end of the line.

"I understand," Rachel nodded. "Then let’s stick with Monday."

"I’m sorry," Kelly said. "If there’s anything else I can do to help..."

"It’s okay." Rachel waved her hand, forcing a smile back onto her face. "I wasn’t getting my hopes up anyway. Just thought I’d ask."

She picked up the box of chocolate cookies and headed toward the hospital room.

The hallways of the children’s hospital were covered with drawings by the young patients. They were crooked and crude, but Rachel loved looking at them.

As she walked by, her gaze swept over one of them. It was a stick figure in a dark blue outfit with a "1" on its chest and a crown on its head. Next to it, Li Wei’s name was scrawled, along with the artist’s signature: Ethan Horton, age 7.

Rachel glanced at it for a moment before looking away, her expression impassive as she continued walking.

Pushing open the door to room 308, she saw Ethan propped up in his hospital bed, wires from an ECG monitor connected to his body. The hospital gown hung on him like a cape.

A Super Bowl special was playing on ESPN on the TV.

"Mom, look! They’re analyzing the Giants’ tactics," Ethan said the moment he saw Rachel, pointing at the TV. "They’re saying the 49ers’ defense will use a Tampa 2 scheme to limit Li Wei’s long passes, but Li Wei’s rushing ability is too strong! Their linebackers won’t be able to stop him!"

If not for the color of his face, you’d never know he was about to have surgery from his machine-gun-like pace of speaking.

Rachel placed the cookies on the bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed.

She reached out and stroked Ethan’s hair, not saying a word.

Ethan kept talking, rattling on about Li Wei’s 40-yard dash time, how much the Giants’ veteran defender Lawrence weighed, and how if the Giants won the Super Bowl, he would cut out all his posters from this year and paste them above his bed.

"Mom, do you think I can turn the volume up when I watch the Super Bowl? Last time, Kelly said I have to be quiet after 9 PM... but I really can’t hear if it’s too low..."

Rachel was still smiling, and she still didn’t answer.

She didn’t know how to break the news to Ethan that he wouldn’t be able to watch it live. He would even need to be under observation for three days after the surgery, so he couldn’t find out the result right away. They were afraid that getting too excited might cause other complications, especially since it was heart surgery.

Ethan was in the middle of talking when he suddenly stopped.

He was only seven, but children are often the most sensitive to emotions.

"Mom," he said, "when is my surgery?"

"Tomorrow afternoon," Rachel said softly. "The sooner you have the surgery, the sooner you can leave the hospital, right?"

"So... can I listen to the game?" Ethan asked in a small voice.

Rachel shook her head again.

"I get it," Ethan nodded. "Kelly told me I have to be under observation for two days after the surgery."

He didn’t say anything more.

"Mom did her best," Rachel said.

"I know," Ethan said, his eyes fixed on the TV screen. "Mom already works so hard."

Rachel stroked Ethan’s hair.

"So... when I get out of the hospital, will I be a healthy person?" Ethan looked up. "Will I be able to join the school team? And I can watch the replay, right?"

"Yes." Rachel smiled brightly this time. "When you get out, you’ll be a healthy person. We’ll watch the replay together, and you can be my commentator, how does that sound?"

"Okay!" Ethan nodded emphatically.

Rachel squeezed Ethan’s small hand. "For now, you need to get ready and rest up. You still have a few tests today. Eat the cookies now, because when the anesthesiologist comes this afternoon, you probably won’t be allowed to eat."

For the rest of the day, Rachel stayed with Ethan as he completed all his pre-operative examinations.

Echocardiogram, blood tests, anesthesia evaluation... By evening, Ethan was finally exhausted. He curled up under the covers, clutching a Li Wei trading card, and fell into a deep sleep.

Rachel pulled his blanket up a little higher and quietly slipped out of the room.

By the time she got back to her apartment, it was almost 10 PM.

Rachel was completely running on fumes. She had worked a long night shift and then stayed up the entire day.

’If it weren’t for the extra 10 USD an hour plus overtime for the night shift, who would want to work it?’

She opened a can of something for herself, forcing down a few bites, and then collapsed onto the sofa.

She couldn’t fall asleep just yet, so she pulled out her phone and started scrolling.

Twitter and TikTok were flooded with Super Bowl content—likely the result of Ethan using her phone.

She scrolled down a dozen or so posts and saw a popular thread titled, "Why do you support the Giants?"

There were already over a thousand replies below it, with all sorts of reasons.

"Because I’m an old-school New Yorker, born and bred in Brooklyn. New York is the shit."

"I bet on the Giants to win. If they lose, I’ll lose my pickup truck."

"Because my wife supports the Giants, and she said I’m a dead man if I root for the 49ers."

Rachel’s lips twitched into a small smile. Suddenly, she felt the urge to express herself, too.

"My son is 7 years old and a huge fan of Li Wei. He has a heart condition and is having surgery tomorrow, so he can’t watch the game live. I hope that when he gets out of the hospital and watches the replay, Li Wei will have won the championship. Go Giants, go Li Wei."

After posting it, she fell into a deep sleep.

When Rachel woke up the next morning, she discovered her phone was dead.

’That’s strange...’ she muttered, plugging it in to charge. ’Didn’t I have half a battery last night?’

When the phone turned on, hundreds of notifications popped up.

She thought she was being dogpiled and nervously tapped on them, only to find that her reply from last night had garnered nearly a thousand new comments and words of encouragement. The post had even been shared by several major influencers and sports bloggers!

Today was February 15th, the day before the Super Bowl.

And at the same time Rachel was marveling at how she had inexplicably gone viral, 3,000 miles away on the East Coast, Jin Heon had already arrived early at her office in Manhattan.

Part of it was her diligence and not wanting to disturb her roommates; the other part was that she simply couldn’t sleep well.

The past week had been utterly exhausting, but thankfully, everything was moving forward smoothly.

She had to oversee the nationwide distribution of LW beverages, the launch of the 10,000 limited-edition collaboration cups at LV stores across the country, the final cut of the Super Bowl commercial, assisting Don Quixote with the drawn-out negotiations for the Mercedes-Benz endorsement deal, and coordinating interview schedules with various media outlets...

Each of these tasks could have kept her busy for a full day, yet they were all crammed into the same week.

Taking a sip of coffee, Jin Heon collected herself.

On the bright side, the new round of interviews was over. She had shortlisted a few promising candidates, though she hadn’t made a final decision yet.

After Li Wei had given her full authority, Jin Heon had first used three of the open positions to hire two assistants for herself and one media publicist.

Then, in less than a week, she had received over 400 résumés.

The number itself didn’t surprise her. What was surprising was the quality of the résumés, which suddenly made her feel like she was out of her league.

A master’s in communications from Columbia University, an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, a former agent’s assistant from WME, a production assistant from CNN, and even a former consultant from McKinsey!

’This is insane,’ Jin Heon thought, feeling a thrill of delight at the idea of all these people wanting to be an assistant to a COO who was an ungraduated fourth-year undergrad from New York University.

After painstakingly screening one round and interviewing another, she was left with 12 finalists. Jin Heon really couldn’t make up her mind, so she decided to set them aside for now and find a chance for Li Wei to look them over.

Putting the résumés down, Jin Heon opened her laptop and began her routine public sentiment monitoring.

The day before the Super Bowl was the most sensitive window for public opinion. Any piece of negative news about Li Wei could ferment within hours and blow up into a major disaster.

She had to ensure there were no PR time bombs online that needed defusing before Li Wei’s appearance at MetLife Stadium for the Super Bowl Media Day that afternoon.

She opened the back-end dashboards of several professional media monitoring websites and started scanning.

Most of it was routine pre-game discussion and fan interaction, nothing that required intervention.

She scanned quickly, sipping her coffee.

"Footage of Li Wei’s final pre-game practice leaked..." She clicked on it. Official material, no problem.

"49ers’ defensive coordinator boasts: ’We have a secret weapon for Li Wei’..." Trash talk. Nothing to worry about.

"Exclusive: A look into Li Wei’s private life, late-night meeting with a beauty..." She clicked, and it turned out to be a picture of her and Li Wei having dinner together.

’Hmm... it’s a nice photo.’ She saved it, liked it from her burner account, and then had the platform deprioritize the post.

"Repost of a hot thread from a certain forum: ’A 7-Year-Old Boy with a Heart Condition and his Super Bowl Weekend’..."

Jin Heon clicked on it and traced it back to a reposted comment from a user with the ID "RachelH_LA".

After reading it, Jin Heon leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrowing.

She saw plenty of posts like this every day. Some were obviously fake, some were from trolls, and some were from scammers.

But she had a feeling this one was different.

Looking at the post’s metrics and the accounts that had shared it, she felt this could be a great opportunity.

She switched to her main, personally verified account and sent the user a private message.