Chapter 5

10

The night my admission letter arrived, I finally told my parents the truth.

I told them how my youngest aunt had lured me to her home with the promise of tutoring, then forced me into that filthy ordeal.

I told them how powerful the Jiangs were. Shuoke Group was the district’s largest taxpayer. Jiang Li’s father, Jiang Feng, was a deputy to the district people’s congress.

Once the rage and panic passed, all that remained was fear of what would happen next.

Then Chen Shu arrived with her son and daughter-in-law.

She knocked, cried, knelt, and begged.

She spoke of how hard it was to be a widow. She admitted that taking Dad’s return-to-city quota had wronged our family.

But her husband had died of cancer. She had raised her son alone.

Would her brother not save his sister, just once?

Outside the security door, she cried until she was hoarse.

“Brother, help me! You don’t know how hard it is to raise a child alone!”

“He’s my only son. His fiancée is pregnant!”

“Can you bear to see your own nephew forced to have his child aborted?”

Just then, the courier arrived and handed Dad my Renmin University admission letter.

That brilliant red seemed to stab my aunt in the eyes.

She sent her son and daughter-in-law away at once, pressed herself to the gap in the door, and hissed.

“Chen Ke’s got into university. She’ll have a job, a home, money.”

“Don’t think I don’t know about that girl in your home that night…!”

My blood seemed to freeze.

Dad hurled the plate at the door.

“Get out!”

On the bed, Mom lowered her voice for the first time, choking on her tears.

“My girl… why does she have to suffer so much?”

The night settled. My aunt finally left, kicking our door twice on her way out.

I stared at the Paraquat on the dining table. Despair filled my chest.

I could still see the awl piercing Jiang Li’s chest.

Even now, his phone lay on our table. It held hundreds of photographs of me and girls I had never met, all in a single folder.

Dad sat at the table for a long time.

“Tomorrow,” he said quietly, “I’ll turn myself in.”

“I’ll say it was all me. I saw what he was doing to you and lost control.”

“If the Jiangs want revenge, they can take my life.”

“No!”

I screamed.

“We have to call the police! I did it. It was my fault. Let me confess!”

As he spoke, Dad poured himself a drink and swallowed it in one go.

“Daughter, I’m very ill. Cancer. I don’t have long.”

“Better for my death to be worth something than to lie in hospital and drag you down with me.”

The yellow light flickered.

A moth flew into the bulb, sizzled, and dropped onto the dining table.

As Dad said those words, Jiang Li opened his eyes on the floor.

He had lost too much blood. He was dying.

Hearing us discuss what would happen after Dad’s death, he gave a desperate hiss, his eyes wide, tears mingling with blood.

The man who had been arrogant enough to invade my home and attack me now knew only primal fear.

I had seen that fear before.

When he pinned me to the floor, I had seen my own white face reflected in his eyes.

“What about him?”

I pointed to Jiang Li.

Dad took his phone, pulled the rag from his mouth, and aimed the camera at him.

“Talk!”

“Tell us about every girl on this phone!”

“Tell us how you and Chen Hui worked together to hurt my daughter!”

Jiang Li wept, weak and broken, looking almost harmless.

Before the camera, he finally confessed everything.

Every word was filthy, revolting.

At the end, he begged.

“I’ve told you everything. Please… let me go…”

There it was.

Even someone who ground others into the mud knew how to say please when someone else held the power.

I stood trembling as Dad handed me a drink.

“You’re grown up now. Old enough for liquor.”

“Have a sip.”

Without a trace of suspicion, I tipped my head back and drank.

The next moment, my sight went dark.

The world blurred as though submerged in water. Every sound receded.

Someone seemed to sigh. A rough, gentle hand stroked my face.

“My daughter’s brilliant. She’s going to make something of herself…”

“Sleep. Go to sleep…”

Then darkness took me.

11

I went to the police.

I told them how Chen Shu had stopped me outside the bank and forced me to transfer the entire tuition check into her account.

They arrested her immediately and froze the account.

At the same time, a video spread across the internet.

In it, a blond young man, Jiang Li, confessed how he preyed on and raped young women.

The person who uploaded it had paired each confession with photographs of the victims.

Their faces were blurred, but one thing was clear.

Many girls had fallen into his hands.

Public outrage exploded.

[Oh my God, I know him! He’s the Shuoke heir!]

[His father plays philanthropist for poor students while his son treats other people’s daughters like toys? That’s sick.]

[I’m calling the police. There’s too much detail for this to be made up!]

[That last story… is it about Experimental High’s top humanities student?]

The curtain over the truth had finally been torn away.

More and more people spoke up.

[I know what happened! Chen Ke’s elder aunt stole her tuition and tried to take the donated flat. She’s been arrested!]

Streamers who had attended the charity event posted previously unseen backstage footage.

In it, Shuoke’s owner, Jiang Feng, fought furiously with his wife.

Their argument revealed far too much. Enough to set the internet ablaze.

Everyone demanded an investigation into Shuoke and the Jiangs.

But the question asked most often was:

Where was Jiang Li?

Where had that rapist, who deserved to be publicly disgraced, gone?

The police were searching, too.

The video alone wasn’t enough. They needed living witnesses and more evidence to secure a conviction.

Then, on a building site in the south of the city, workers suddenly screamed.

A human finger protruded from an unset concrete column.

DNA testing identified the body.

Jiang Li.

12

The police soon traced the case to Dad.

That didn’t surprise me.

The policewoman I had met before sat opposite me again, this time in an interview room.

“Tell me about your relationship with Jiang Li.”

Perhaps she could see how hard I was trying to hold myself together. Her voice softened.

“Don’t be afraid. We won’t disclose any of your private information.”

I broke down completely.

“He raped me.”

“My youngest aunt, Chen Hui, told me to go tutor him. Then he raped me.”

They asked why I hadn’t reported it.

Through my tears, I said, “My mother hadn’t been outside for seven years.”

“The flat Shuoke was giving the top student had an elevator. If I reported him, I’d lose the home and the tuition money.”

“I owed my mother. I had to give her a decent place to live.”

“But my elder aunt wanted to take it…”

“I didn’t dare tell anyone. My youngest aunt forbade me to say anything. She made me wash and told me not to breathe a word…”

In front of the police, I was only a girl who had just turned eighteen and endured something terrible.

They also questioned Auntie Zhang, asking whether she had heard anything unusual that night.

She was adamant.

“Nothing at all. The walls in that building are thick. You can’t even hear people talking.”

After repeated investigations, they found footage of Dad and Jiang Li from the building site in the south.

Jiang Li staggered as though drunk, then fell into the unset concrete column.

No one knew why Dad had been there with him, or why Jiang Li had punched Dad in the face.

The camera was too far away. The image was blurry, and there was no sound.

It showed only Jiang Li staggering, turning, and falling into the concrete. Steel reinforcing rods pierced him.

He died horribly.

That night, Dad came home and mixed Paraquat into the liquor.

The examination concluded that my parents had killed themselves.

No one knew what had truly happened on the building site.

The outcome was this.

Jiang Li was dead.

My parents were dead.

The case had no surviving account that could resolve it.

The police also summoned Chen Hui.

She was used to petty neighborhood schemes. Faced with the police, she was so frightened she wanted to flee.

Under questioning, she confessed everything.

Her husband sprang to his feet, red-faced and shaking, and slapped her twice.

“I told you to ask your niece to tutor him!”

“And you did this?”

Chen Hui sobbed in protest.

“I did it for you! Jiang Li told me to keep it from you. He said he’d get you promoted!”

Her husband slammed the table.

“He’s not even of age! Who could he get promoted?”

“You idiot! You absolute idiot!”

The police acted quickly, but public pressure kept rising.

[Jiang Li must have raped her, then used the video to threaten her father.]

[Poor parents with no power. Cornered until they could see no way out but suicide…]

[I saw the footage. He fell into the concrete himself. Serves him right!]

More and more sympathy gathered around me.

I was the only surviving victim. A top student. Dutiful and pitiful.

No one believed I was guilty.

Under that pressure, I was completely cleared.

Meanwhile, Shuoke’s shares plunged.

When Jiang Feng’s wife learned her son was dead, she lost control. She attacked her husband with a knife at their villa.

Just then, his mistress arrived with their two children.

More bloodshed followed.

I no longer wanted to know.

On my way out of the station, I passed Chen Shu.

Her eyes were red as she screamed.

“It was you! You’re the murderers!”

“You killed Jiang Li!”

The policewoman immediately took off her jacket and draped it over my shoulders.

Then she turned and shouted, “Take her away!”

As I stepped through the station door into the sunlight, I heard her murmur behind me.

“Poor child…”

13

Poor?

At certain moments, overwhelming physical and emotional trauma can alter a person’s memories.

Sometimes you think you are a survivor. A fighter.

In truth, you are only someone lost among distorted recollections.

In the first years after Mom lost her job, Dad earned little on the building sites. The rented neighborhood where we lived was chaotic and unsafe.

One night, a man climbed in through the window.

He rummaged through our belongings, then reached toward the bed where Mom and I slept.

When his rough hand touched me, I woke with a scream.

A second later, Mom pulled a red-handled awl from under her pillow and drove it into his thigh.

There was blood everywhere that night.

From then on, in my memory, that awl was the strongest weapon in the world.

So when Jiang Li followed me, my hand instinctively gripped my cloth bag.

I wished the awl were inside.

I wished I had a way to protect myself.

But it wasn’t there.

When Dad found me, I was only a torn doll abandoned beside the old brick wall, my face covered in blood.

Beside my hand lay a sharp stone.

Jiang Li’s head was badly wounded. Blood stained his back.

He was still breathing, faintly.

Dad lifted me into his arms.

In the moonlight, I finally saw his cracked skin, yellowed eyes, and wasted body clearly.

I wanted to comfort him.

I wanted to say, It’s all right, Dad. I’m going to university. I’ll forget all this. I’ll earn money and look after you and Mom. I’ll buy you the best durian.

Then my elder aunt appeared.

She saw everything.

And smiled in triumph.

“Brother. You wouldn’t want word of this getting out, would you?”

“All I want is the prize flat.”

That night, for the first time in my life, I reached for the bottle of Paraquat.

It hurt.

It hurt so badly I wanted to die.

Our home was dark, like the future facing the three of us.

Dad sat bent over the table. Mom lay motionless in bed.

The foul smell lingered.

Was it from Mom’s sores or my injuries?

I couldn’t tell anymore.

For the first time, I loathed my own life.

The next morning, when the admission letter arrived, I picked up the bottle again.

Dad knocked it out of my hand.

Tears ran down his face.

“My girl! What are you doing?”

“I’ve killed someone,” I said. “I have no future.”

“I’m so tired of living. I don’t want to go on.”

“If I could, I’d wish them all dead. Jiang Li. Everyone who hurt our family.”

Dad held me and cried like a child.

Then he kicked Jiang Li where he lay on the floor.

The boy gave a faint groan.

“See? He’s alive!”

“You’re not a murderer.”

“You never were!”

Dad said he would take my place.

He was gravely ill. He was going to die. He would bear the blame.

“You have to live.”

“You have to go to university.”

“You have to walk into the light.”

“Your mother and I worked our whole lives for this one chance for you.”

“This is the last hurdle. You have to get past it.”

His hands gripped my shoulders.

“Do you understand, Chen Ke?”

“Did you hear me?”

“I understand.”

Dad put his tool bag over his shoulder.

Before leaving, he turned to look at Mom.

His eyes were quiet and deep.

Then he dragged the almost unconscious Jiang Li out of our home.

We all knew what would happen that night.

And strangely, my mother, who had been loud and furious for so much of her life, made no sound at all.

The next morning, my parents were gone.

The Paraquat bottle stood empty on the table.

Jiang Li had disappeared.

Shuoke Group gave me the flat and four years’ tuition, a hundred thousand yuan in all.

Everything went as planned.

I smiled and accepted the funding.

As we had agreed, I turned public opinion and directed every eye toward the Jiangs.

Then the policewoman showed me the footage from the building site.

The picture was distant and blurred. Both faces seemed veiled in mist.

Jiang Li staggered, swung a fist at Dad, then turned and fell into the concrete.

And I remembered that night.

Dad came home with his toolbox, washed himself, and bathed Mom.

He helped her sit up.

She smiled as gently as she once had.

Dad poured from the half bottle of liquor that remained and raised his glass toward me.

In it, the clear and dark green liquids lay in two layers.

But they were smiling.

They were joyful, as though about to set off on a new journey.

“Our daughter’s brilliant.”

“She’s going to make something of herself!”

And they drank.

Until the last moment, they were still pushing me forward, letting me step on their shoulders and into the light.

All my life, I had thought myself unfortunate to be born into such a family.

A disabled mother. A powerless father. Poverty.

Yet with the harshest love, with their very lives, they had shaped me.

Forced me to live.

I had thought myself ordinary.

Their love covered me in a blaze of light.

Their silence that night was the last lesson they left me.

All I had to do was keep walking along the road they had laid.

Without looking back.

The End

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