It was 2006 and the snow had not yet melted after the New Year. The red lanterns hanging outside our school were still there, but they were a little faded as if the colors were going to be the last things left from the holiday. I groaned in chemistry; I was only half there with memories of firecrackers and family dinners.
Then our teacher decided to talk to Chen Qian.
She was silent—the kind of girl who was unnoticed in the crowd. She acted like she didn’t hear when her name was called, sitting there with both hands on her lap, stiff.
“Chen Qian?” the teacher repeated.
After a long pause, she said, “I need to use the bathroom.”
A scream was heard along the hallway twenty minutes later. Someone came running back with the face of a ghost: “Chen Qian slit her wrists!”
She was taken in an ambulance, her face was dark, her arms were bleeding, and her eyes were empty.
No one was expecting it to happen.
Chen Qian was not only a little girl—she was unexplainable like a ghost in our class. She was given a scholarship to study in the city because she was from a poor village but she was very far from being a top student. She was barely able to scrape through.
There were all sorts of rumors. For instance, the “uncle” of her “family” was said to be an important official—otherwise, why would the extremely strict homeroom teacher, who is known for being very serious during parent-teacher meetings, smile so much at her mother?
After the suicide Chen Qian returned but she was even more quiet. The atmosphere was so heavy that it was like you could feel walking on “eggshells.”
Then Feng Yachong made the single confession that he was the only person she ever talked to occur at lunch with the help of some paper napkins, not very eloquently but extremely emotional.
Chen Qian’s “aunt and uncle”? They were her real parents.
When she was a baby, they had taken her away from her—her father wanted a son. She grew up with ‘her parents’ (actually the brother of her uncle) in the village, completely unaware. But when her biological mother eventually informed her of the reality, both families turned up to fight over her.
“Choose,” they said.
She chose the only parents she knew.
The following day, she was in the school restroom with a razor and she had sealed the door.
After finishing high school, we all went our different ways for college. Chen Qian disappeared—no social networks, no news. Out of the blue, she contacted me several years later:
“Can you sign me up for a credit card?”
She pretended to be a bank temp worker but was in the opposite position. Her “dad” could have gotten her a job at the bank, but she wouldn’t accept his help.
Then the wedding came.
The family of her husband only consented due to her influential father. But when they allowed her to become aware of Chen Qian, she still did not request for help—no transfers, no connections and their grins disappeared.
Then they saw her hitting their toddler.
The separation with her was bad. Giving up the little one, she said to Feng Yachong: “I do not like her. I regret having her.”
She wanted the school admission for her daughter and last year, she called me.
“Her father could have easily done it, but I wanted to do it because it was new to me,” she said. She shared a terrifying secret over dinner:
She observed the child she cared about from a distance—outside the school, never getting close.
“I am not a good mother,” she said quietly. “I am not worthy of her.”
When they started talking about the past, she uttered a phrase that will always be in my memory:
“The bathroom incident? I wasn’t only gone for a while.”
She smiled weakly at me.
“I made it.”
Not even the girl we used to know returned.
End.
