Chapter 4

7

Shuoke Group made its donation ceremony for me far grander than anyone had expected.

Reporters and journalists filled the room. Popular streamers had been invited, too, their live cameras trained on President Jiang and me.

The host stood onstage and offered a few polite remarks. Then his tone changed.

“Chen Ke, we all know that your parents killed themselves on the day your university admission letter arrived. Everyone was deeply saddened.”

“But this morning, your school counselor sent us a video.”

After a burst of static, two voices came from the large screen.

“You said you hated your parents and your family. Is that right?”

The counselor’s voice.

A few seconds passed.

“Yes.”

My answer was firm.

“I hate them. Living like this is exhausting. Sometimes I wish they would just die.”

A horrified murmur swept the hall.

I stared at the screen, at the pale, still-childish face of the girl I had been in tenth grade.

My parents’ pressure and the shadow of the Paraquat bottle on our dining table had kept me at the top of my year throughout junior high.

High school delivered a painful lesson.

Before we separated into academic tracks, physics and chemistry were my downfall. In every exam, I barely scraped a pass.

But my parents demanded more.

I had to excel at everything. Every ounce of attention had to go into studying. I wasn’t allowed a single moment’s distraction.

At the end of tenth grade, my physics score fell below the pass mark.

I was still first in the humanities subjects, but physics dragged me down to twelfth in my class.

Report card in hand, I stood below our old apartment building for a long time.

The sun burned behind me. My wrists and the back of my neck felt scorched.

I didn’t dare go home.

I couldn’t face my paralyzed mother’s disappointed eyes or that familiar bottle on the dining table.

Just then, Lin Binbin came past, grinning.

“Well, look who it is! What’s our star student doing sitting here? Aren’t you going home?”

Then he saw the report card.

He lived next door. With Mom’s booming voice, there wasn’t much about our family he didn’t know.

He put an arm around my shoulders.

“If you’re scared to go home, don’t. I’ll take you somewhere to unwind!”

He took me to an internet café and put on a Korean film he called the biggest tearjerker of the past five years.

“You’ve been bottling everything up too long. Watch this, have a good cry, and you’ll feel better.”

“Your parents are only scaring you. They’re not actually going to drink poison because you failed one exam.”

But when Dad came home from work, I wasn’t there.

Mom called my homeroom teacher and learned about my grades.

When Lin Binbin and I returned, Dad was waiting in the corridor.

His face was dark. In his hand was the bottle labeled Paraquat.

We were only a few dozen meters away.

Right before my eyes, he unscrewed the cap and tipped it into his mouth. Dark green liquid spilled from the corner of his lips onto the ground.

Every word pierced me.

“I told you. If you won’t study and make something of yourself, your mother and I have nothing left to live for.”

Something exploded in my head.

8

The host’s microphone was almost touching my mouth.

Below the stage, hundreds of cameras pointed at me, waiting for me to say my parents were a burden.

Waiting for me to say I had poured Paraquat into their liquor.

The hall was perfectly silent.

Slowly, I took the microphone.

***

Three years earlier, in the corridor of our old building—

I shook all over. My eyes felt ready to burst. I couldn’t breathe.

“Dad!”

When I saw him tip back his head, the scream tore out of me.

I lunged forward and knocked the bottle from his hand, desperately trying to make him spit it out and be sick.

“Spit it out! Please! Don’t die! Don’t die!”

“It’s my fault! It’s all my fault!”

One second. Two. Three.

Time crawled until I could hardly stand it.

Dad pushed my hands away and looked at me coldly.

He stamped on the clear glass bottle on the floor. A sharp peppermint smell filled the corridor.

“Chen Ke. Remember how this feels.”

“Because next time, your mother and I will really drink it.”

Lin Binbin was so frightened that he stumbled and fled upstairs.

It was the first time I realized my honest, unassuming father knew how to torment someone.

After the fear came despair. Panic rose through me.

“Why would you do this to me?”

“Why?”

The next day, I went to the school’s newly opened counseling room on my own.

***

The hall was still silent.

I tightened my grip on the microphone.

“Yes. I used to hate my parents and my family. They forced me to study. Forced me to get ahead.”

“They weren’t simply parents who nagged their child. They strapped a time bomb to me.”

“Its name was Paraquat.”

For the first time, I cried in front of a crowd. Sobs caught between broken breaths.

“But I loved them, too. I loved them with everything I had.”

“Will you show the whole video? Do you dare?”

At the host’s signal, the video continued.

“Your parents may be extreme,” the counselor said, “but they do it because they love you, don’t they?”

Yes.

How could I not know?

The day Mom had her accident, I was on the back of her electric bike.

I had just been chosen as a Young Pioneers captain. Three bright red stripes marked my arm.

I kept touching them, brimming with excitement.

“Mom, when I grow up, I’ll make lots of money and buy you a big home.”

“You won’t have to be a housemaid anymore. You won’t have to work so hard.”

A gust of wind blew the badge with its three red stripes into the road.

I jumped off. All I could see was that flash of red.

Just as I picked it up, I heard Mom scream.

Then came the piercing shriek of brakes.

Wheels scraped the road. People shouted for help lifting the little car.

They pulled Mom out from beneath it like a torn doll.

The three red stripes fell, fluttered, and lay still.

From that day on, my kind, hardworking mother became a disabled woman with a loud voice and a furious temper.

Guilt, hatred, and love twisted around me like three threads, tightening until I couldn’t breathe.

I took a deep breath and answered the counselor of three years before.

“Yes. I know.”

“I’ve wished I could be the one lying in bed. The one working myself to exhaustion on a building site.”

“Then I wouldn’t have to feel guilty every night.”

Every lens, every pair of eyes, was on me.

My tears poured down. I couldn’t stop them.

On the screen, the younger girl spoke her final words.

“If I could choose, I’d rather they had never had me or raised me.”

“Because I’m the one who’s a burden to them.”

9

That supposedly compassionate donation ceremony became a media sensation thanks to the controversial video from three years earlier.

Shuoke’s owner, Jiang Feng, was thoroughly satisfied.

He told reporters, “Shuoke isn’t simply doing charity. We want to help capable students fulfill their potential and give back to society.”

A reporter took the cue at once.

“I hear your son will be taking the university entrance exam next year. What are your hopes for him?”

The ceremony and that solemn, artificial interview climbed the city’s trending searches the same day.

Moved viewers placed charity orders in droves. Shuoke’s TikTok account gained millions of followers, and sales soared.

There was only one small incident.

As everyone prepared to leave, an expensively dressed woman with a haggard face burst into the hall.

She pointed at Jiang Feng and screamed.

“Your son’s been missing for a week!”

“And you’re still here putting on a show?”

“Jiang Feng, listen to me! If my son isn’t found, I’ll take you down with me!”

“Don’t think I don’t know. Those two bastards you had with that slut are coming back to China. You want them to inherit the company, don’t you?”

“Over my dead body!”

In one corner, I saw several streamers secretly filming before security dragged them out.

I left the hall with an enormous check in my hand.

Just as I was about to turn into the bank, a voice stopped me.

“Chen Ke. I saw everything that night.”

“You and your father killed that Jiang boy.”

“I’m the only witness. Your parents may have killed themselves, but you won’t get away.”

“Unless…”

I tilted my head and looked at the woman in front of me.

“Unless what?”

My elder aunt, Chen Shu, stared greedily at the check.

“Unless you hand over every bit of the money and that flat Shuoke gave you.”

“To me.”