Chapter 1

1

People hurried through the hospital, coming and going.

Someone patted my shoulder, sorrow in their eyes.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

But I was still numb with shock.

The night before, my admission letter had finally arrived. Inside the bright red envelope were the words I had dreamed of seeing: Renmin University of China.

And beneath them: Congratulations, Chen Ke.

That university was the only way out of this house I had ever been able to imagine.

I had always thought of my parents as typical Chinese parents. Unremarkable, mild and honest outside the home, then fanatical about their child’s studies inside it.

Only mine were more extreme. More abnormal.

When I was in fifth grade, a car hit Mom while she was riding her electric bike. A rear wheel ran over her back. She lost all feeling in her lower body on the spot.

Three months in hospital brought no improvement.

The doctor delicately suggested that if we couldn’t afford to keep her there, we should take her home. There was little hope left.

When our money finally ran out, Dad and a few of his friends carried her back.

The neighbors all pitied me. They assumed being carried home meant she had been brought back to die.

It wasn’t like that.

Her legs might have been paralyzed, but there was nothing wrong with her voice.

“Chen Ke! Turn me over!”

“Chen Ke! Get me some water!”

“Chen Ke! Carry me to the toilet!”

Auntie Zhang next door had once been Mom’s close friend. They had started at the textile factory together at sixteen and been laid off together in their thirties.

The difference was that Auntie Zhang’s husband did business in Wenzhou and apparently made a great deal of money.

After Mom’s accident, she visited even more often, always bringing her chubby son, Lin Binbin, to show off.

“My Binbin just won first prize in an English competition! I’m not boasting, but that boy is going places!”

“My husband says qualifications are everything in the big cities now. But your Ke? With grades like hers, she can forget university. She might as well stay home and look after you. Save poor Chen from working himself like a dog.”

Her husband hardly ever came home. People had been talking for years. They said that without their son, Lin Binbin, the couple would have divorced long ago.

So when she saw that Mom, paralyzed as she was, still had Dad and me looking after her, the envy in her eyes only deepened.

That day, Lin Binbin sprawled on our sofa eating KFC, scattering crumbs all over the floor.

I didn’t dare talk back to an adult. But the malice in my chest was almost spilling over.

I held up my thumb and little finger and silently mouthed at him.

“Fat pig. Tiny dick.”

Perhaps he had never met a girl that vicious. He burst into tears.

Auntie Zhang lost all interest in boasting. She gathered up her son and left, slamming the door.

From that day on, Mom stopped calling for me.

She refused to drink a drop of water during the day. Even when I held the cup to her lips, she wouldn’t so much as moisten them.

She didn’t ask to go to the toilet.

Instead, she waited until Dad came home from work, gulped down several glasses, and told him to carry her.

Perhaps that was when they began to demand only one thing of me.

Study.

Nothing but study.

Study until I couldn’t breathe.

The summer before I entered junior high, several new university graduates came to Dad’s building site as interns.

While he hauled cement with sweat pouring off him, they sat in an air-conditioned site office, pointing at plans and discussing them.

That evening, he came home, took a couple of drinks, and spat into the air as though cursing them.

The next day, I brought home my report card.

I was too frightened to ask Mom to sign it. I waited until bedtime before slipping it to Dad.

He looked at me for a long time. A strained sound scraped from his throat, like metal rubbing against metal.

Without a word, he went out.

When he returned, he slammed a bottle of Paraquat onto the dining table.

It was a northern summer night. His skin was dark from the sun. Sweat dripped from his forehead and hands onto the tabletop.

“If you don’t get into university,” he said, “your mother and I will drink this entire bottle in front of you.”

Mom could hear everything from her room. Her voice rose louder than a public-address speaker.

“That’s right! Keep neglecting your studies and losing to that fat boy next door, and you can collect your parents’ bodies!”

***

Someone sat down beside me.

I wiped the blur from my eyes and saw her police uniform.

“Chen Ke,” she asked, “do you know why your parents killed themselves?”

The question pulled me out of my memories.

Yes.

Why had they?

I had got into such a good university. When they saw the admission letter, their eyes had shone with joy.

Mom had even said that once I started earning, I must buy her a flat in a building with an elevator so she could go outside and see the streets.

She hadn’t forgotten to threaten me, either.

“If you’re ungrateful, I’ll drag these useless legs to your university and make a scene!”

People like them—how could they have killed themselves?

2

“Try to remember, Chen Ke. Has anything happened in the past few days?”

The policewoman’s question sent me searching backward again.

After the exam results came out, relatives who used to avoid our family like the plague suddenly competed to visit.

Dad’s two younger sisters, my elder aunt and my youngest aunt, both arrived with gifts and envelopes of money.

“Brother, raising such a brilliant daughter when things are this hard… you really are something,” my elder aunt said, her eyes creased with smiles.

My youngest aunt pushed an envelope straight into my hand.

“Ke, you’ve done so well! Which university are you applying to? It must be those good Chen genes. Your father was clever when he was young, and you’re just like him.”

After a little more conversation, her eyes shifted and she lowered her voice.

“My husband’s boss has a son taking the university entrance exam next year. His grades are terrible. I hear you’re Experimental High’s top humanities student. If you have time this summer, could you tutor him?”

Dad, an honest man who spent his days carrying bricks, could only rub his hands awkwardly.

But we already had plans for the summer.

My homeroom teacher knew about our situation. She had found me a tutoring job at a learning center. As Experimental High’s top humanities student, I could earn a hundred and fifty yuan an hour.

A whole summer’s work would pay for Mom’s wheelchair and my first year of university. There might even be enough left for a Xiaomi phone.

Then Mom swept a desk lamp onto the floor.

The crash almost made my elder aunt jump off the sofa.

“Chen Hui!” Mom shouted from the bedroom. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing! You want to use my daughter to flatter someone!”

“If you hadn’t forced me to sign away my job, I wouldn’t have had to work as a housemaid! I wouldn’t have had that accident and ended up crippled!”

“You bled me dry. Now there’s nothing left to take, you’re after my daughter! Dream on!”

My youngest aunt went white beneath the barrage.

“Well… tutoring one child is the same as tutoring another. We’d pay her…”

But she couldn’t say how much, or when.

Dad’s expression darkened.

As the eldest son and daughter-in-law, he and Mom had worked themselves to the bone for the Chen family for years.

And what had they got for it?

His elder sister took the quota that should have allowed him to return to the city. His youngest sister used his money to finish high school, then invoked Grandma’s authority to force Mom out of her job.

Now both sisters lived comfortably.

Only Dad, once the cleverest of the Chens, had become a sun-blackened laborer, bent over on a building site.

“Get out!”

He shot to his feet and pointed at the door.

His sisters, with their glossy hair and high heels, reluctantly left.

But my youngest aunt’s husband had been stuck in the same position for years. His company was cutting staff. Time to ingratiate himself with the boss was running out.

Then Experimental High announced that the private company he worked for would award a flat to each of the school’s top students in the science and humanities tracks.

My elder aunt’s son had just become engaged. The bride’s family demanded a home before the wedding.

My youngest aunt told her about the prize flat.

From then on, the two of them took turns pressuring us.

Two days earlier, my elder aunt had come with her son and his pregnant fiancée. All three knelt outside our door, begging to “borrow” the flat for the wedding.

“Brother, my daughter-in-law is about to give birth! You’re practically going to be a grandfather!”

“You can’t stand by and let them die. There’s a life at stake!”

The young woman cried, her voice shaking.

“Uncle, for the baby’s sake, please lend us the flat.”

Their sobbing and pleading filled the corridor. Just then, a courier arrived with my admission letter.

My elder aunt seemed to go mad.

She pounded on the metal security door.

“Chen Ke’s so clever! She’ll have a home, a job, everything! Hui’s husband says his boss’s son wants her as a tutor. Two hundred yuan an hour!”

“Help us while we’re in trouble! Don’t be so stingy!”

Inside was silence. Outside was chaos.

Two separate worlds.

Then my elder aunt lowered her voice to a hiss.

“Don’t think I don’t know what Chen Ke did that night—”

Dad suddenly flew into a rage. He hurled the plate of peanuts at the security door, cutting her off.

The uproar outside swallowed the joy of my admission letter.

Our home was dark. To save electricity, neither the fan nor the lights were on.

Dad sat in the shadows smoking the cheapest cigarettes, his hunched back like the trunk of a rotten, knotted tree.

Mom lay rigid in the darkness. Without the rise and fall of her chest, anyone might have taken her for a corpse.

“So…” the policewoman said quietly. “You think your aunts drove your parents to their deaths?”