Chapter 3

Stalking, ambushes, vandalism—there was nothing they wouldn’t do.

Most of the onlookers were ordinary students and teachers.

They feared being recognized.

Feared what would happen afterward.

And behind it all was a girl the same age as Song Yi’s daughter.

Her nickname was Moon.

The reasoning, such as it was, went like this.

Song Yi’s daughter was too pretty. Too many boys liked her.

Moon felt overshadowed.

When she discovered that the boy she liked was interested in the other girl too, she decided to teach her a lesson.

She contacted the thugs.

That was where it began.

But it was only the beginning.

Moon had plenty of other cruel tricks.

After that, Song Yi’s daughter was repeatedly harassed, molested, and beaten without reason.

Even when the police were called, the gang always disappeared before they arrived.

They threatened her too.

If she told her family or called the police, they would hurt her relatives as well.

They gradually pushed her to the edge of a breakdown.

Even that was not enough.

They isolated her at school.

No one was allowed to be her friend.

Anyone who spoke to her—even to say hello—would suffer for it.

They spread filthy rumors. She was promiscuous. She slept around. Buy her breakfast and she would let you do more.

If she dared report them, they said, they would make every day of her life a misery.

She grew quieter and more withdrawn.

But she dared not speak.

Dared not ask for help.

A middle-school child, carrying a burden even an adult might not withstand.

What a bitter irony.

Song Yi noticed something was wrong.

He asked her again and again.

She always said it was pressure from schoolwork.

In her diary, she wrote:

Dad works so hard earning money for Auntie’s treatment. He only sleeps five hours a night. I understand. I don’t want to worry him. I can get through this. Once I’m in high school, everything will be better… It will. It has to.

…

She never made it that far.

She left this world first.

Song Yi did not know whether she had jumped because she could no longer endure it, or whether someone had caused her death another way.

There was no answer.

So everything came back to one person.

Moon.

The girl who had destroyed his life.

“Song Yi’s daughter was called Song Jia. Does that name mean anything to you?”

Professor Wu’s voice was calm, almost detached.

It gave me goosebumps.

That sense of familiarity rose again.

Something was very wrong.

“I don’t remember… Did you want to continue the massage? If not, I’ll go.”

I tried to sound composed.

Every instinct told me I should never have come today.

He smiled faintly.

“What’s the hurry? We agreed on the whole day. Don’t you want to be paid?

“Besides, surely you can see the story isn’t over. Song Jia’s death still doesn’t seem to explain why Song Yi killed Hu Yue.”

His gaze seemed to probe right through me.

“Let me finish. Will you?”

…

Professor Wu’s Story

What I have told you is really two stories.

In the first, Song Yi killed Hu Yue and dumped his body in the wilderness.

In the second, Song Jia was bullied at school and eventually died in a fall.

Apart from Song Yi, there seems to be no direct connection.

That is what makes it so puzzling.

He was an honest, law-abiding man. Kindhearted, but simple.

He was not the sort of person you would expect to commit an atrocity so difficult to understand.

There is something missing.

A variable.

I left it out earlier.

Now it becomes the central figure in our third story.

My name is Wu Cheng. I am a university lecturer.

I met Song Yi in the summer of 1999.

Do you remember the part about him getting my wallet back? My offer to buy him a meal, and how we became friends?

None of that was invented or exaggerated.

But I left out a few details, which made it seem a little implausible.

Yes, I was a university lecturer.

I had become an associate professor before forty. My career was advancing, and I worked with several universities and companies.

At the risk of sounding arrogant, I was at my peak.

And Song Yi?

A mechanic in a small workshop, with little education or knowledge of the wider world.

What could we possibly have had in common?

How could we have been friends?

I bought him a bottle of yogurt that day. We exchanged a few casual remarks and went our separate ways.

Afterward, I couldn’t even remember whether his surname was Song or Wang.

The summer passed.

Only near its end, while reading a newspaper during my lunch break, did I learn what had happened to him.

The headline read:

Twelve-Year-Old Girl Dies in Fall

There was a photograph.

The face looked familiar. After a moment’s thought, I remembered the man who had retrieved my wallet a few months earlier.

He was holding a girl of twelve or thirteen on an ambulance stretcher, crying as though his heart were being torn apart.

To be honest, it moved me.

Anyone would feel something when a person they had briefly known suffered such a tragedy.

But tragedies happen every moment, all over the world.

No one knows which will come first: tomorrow or death.

It was not, in truth, something I would have grieved over for long.

Just then, some colleagues noticed the report and began discussing it.

I listened.

“You know, that girl didn’t fall by accident.”

“Not an accident? Then what was it? The police have already ruled.”

“My nephew was in her class. He saw several girls drag her onto the roof. Less than half an hour later, she fell…”

…

I went to see Song Yi.

Tabloids and busybodies had already spread his home address and workplace everywhere. He was easy to find.

My arrival surprised him.

He assumed I was another tabloid reporter, there to pry into his grief for money.

He was cold.

He would not even open the security door, speaking to me indifferently through the gap.

Then I said one thing.

His manner changed at once. He invited me in.

“I’m an unfortunate father too. I understand your pain, and your confusion.”

…

That was true.

I had no need to deceive a grieving father with some cheap trick.

But later, Song Yi’s death would catch me completely unprepared.

And haunt me for nearly twenty-five years.

…

That was our first serious conversation.

That day, I learned that Song Jia had been bullied.

He told me what his daughter had endured. About her diary. About contacting the school and waiting for an answer.

It was the first time I realized a child so young could live through such bloody, frightening things.

In return, as a kind of exchange, I told him about my own child.

I do not know how I got to the police station.

I remember only the darkness.

Then, as though no time had passed, I was there.

My parents and my sobbing wife were waiting. They too had heard our son was dead and hurried over.

The moment she saw me, my wife rushed forward and seized my collar.

She screamed as though she had lost her mind.

“Wu Cheng, tell me who did it! How could anyone be so cruel?”

I knew she must have heard how Zijian had died.

Like me, she could not understand what terrible hatred anyone could have borne our family.

We had been married for more than ten years and always loved each other.

We were mild-tempered people.

We had made no enemies.

Who could have done this?

There was no answer.

I held her tightly.

It was the only thing that made me feel I could still stay on my feet.

…

Before long, the police took us into a reception room.

Two officers remained to take our statements.

The forensic examiner needed time to establish the cause and time of death. Until then, they had to begin with Zijian’s habits and anything unusual in his recent life, hoping to find a lead.

The questioning felt cruel.

My son’s body was barely cold.

Yet we had to answer the same questions over and over.

But we wanted them to find his killer quickly. We wanted justice.

So we held back our grief and told them everything we knew.

His life. His studies. His friends.

He attended a leading secondary school and was in eighth grade.

His grades were not outstanding, but they were decent.

What made us proudest was his character.

He was kind and honest, without bad habits.

His friends were ordinary children too. We had met them all.

Nothing seemed unusual.

…

Again and again, we had to stop.

We covered our faces and cried.

It seemed unbearably unjust.

How could a child so dear come to such an end?

Then we began discussing the previous few months.

The more we said, the more something felt wrong.

The more frightened we became.

Zijian attended a state school not far from home. He had no reason to board there.

Yet for a little over a month, he had been coming home very late.

I asked him about it.

He said the school was organizing a competition and he needed extra practice after lessons.

I asked several times. His answers were always smooth.

I never suspected him.

I trusted him.

He was a good boy, I thought. He would not lie.

We were comfortably off, so we did not watch his spending very closely.

I believed it was good for a child to learn to manage money.

We had no fixed allowance. So long as he didn’t ask too often, we gave him what he wanted.

But looking back…

He had not been asking more often.

He had been asking each of us separately.

Me. My wife. His grandparents.

His grandparents, especially, adored him and gave generously.

We added up what we had given him that month.

And stared at the total.

In one month, he had asked for more than he had received in almost the whole preceding year.

I understood then.

There was far more to his death than we knew.

Our account gave the police a direction.

They began checking immediately.

In less than two days, they identified the killers.

A group of youths.

Some of the youngest were still in middle school. All were delinquents who refused to listen to their parents.

The oldest was only seventeen.

All of them had been arrested.

Through the ringleader’s confession, I finally learned what had happened.

The day before the killing, Zijian told me a close friend was having a birthday.

He asked me for money to buy a present and said he would spend the night there.

I knew the family.

The boy’s father also worked at our university. Their background was perfectly respectable.

I was reassured.

Still, I told him to call when he arrived.

He went to his friend’s house.

He used their landline to phone me.

But…

He only stayed long enough to say happy birthday.

He left before the meal.

…

To me, Zijian had always been sensible and obedient.

Why had he lied?

Why leave before they had even eaten?

What could be so important that he would abandon his friend’s birthday?

The answer was that he had to be somewhere else.

He had no choice.

Even if it meant lying to his parents.

A gang had singled him out.

They had been bullying him for a long time.

…

The ringleader was one of his classmates.

He was also a notorious young delinquent among secondary-school students in the neighboring city.

His name was Hu Yue.

Originally, he had neither attended that school nor lived in our city.

He did not keep changing schools for some ordinary reason, such as his parents’ unstable employment.

He was not an ordinary pupil.

His grades were always at the bottom. He had no interest in studying.

The harder anyone pushed him, the more he resented it.

But he was not stupid.

His talents simply lay elsewhere.

He had been unruly from childhood.

He excelled at fighting. More than once, he had put a classmate in hospital.

Schools repeatedly asked his parents to withdraw him, and he was transferred again and again.

Compulsory education made it difficult to force a child out altogether, so they passed him from one school to another.

Hong Kong gangster films were hugely popular in the nineties.

Hu Yue styled himself the school’s big boss and found endless excuses to collect protection money from his classmates.

He discovered that a beating and a few threats were enough to make gentle children obey.

Once he had tasted that easy money, he could not stop.

He copied the films and started his own gang.

Its members were children who disliked school and craved excitement.

But it soon came to light.

At last, the schools had a reason to take firm action. They repeatedly met with his parents.

No school wanted him anymore.

Eventually, he was expelled.

The headmasters were relieved.

Their reputations were safe.

But Hu Yue had not ceased to exist.

…

Before long, his parents moved to another city and found him a new school.

Zijian’s school.

At first, he behaved better.

His parents, busy with their business, assumed he had changed and relaxed their supervision.

But his nature had not changed.

Only his methods.

He realized that beating people for money was too risky.

He began trying something more sophisticated.

Zijian became a target.

Hu Yue’s method was blackmail.

First he acted friendly and made friends with his classmates.

He learned about their families.

Who was poor. Who was timid. Who had money.

Then he began.

His approach was simple and cruel.

He lured classmates to his home.

Once they lowered their guard, he restrained them, stripped them, and took compromising photographs to use as leverage.

Though still in middle school, he was over 1.7 meters tall and weighed eighty-five kilograms.

Almost a grown man’s build.

Very few children could fight back.