The son on the other end of the phone had no idea what was going on at home, and was overjoyed: “Yes, you’ve never been abroad, so you don’t know. You have to prepare at least half a month in advance to come to the US, and the procedures for the visa are quite complicated. Come if you can, I really miss you. ……”
Zhu Shoucheng spoke to his son in a perfunctory manner, and hung up the phone in a daze.
He looked at the phone, wrinkled his brow and thought for a long time, his demeanour surprisingly relaxed.
…… Zhu Shoucheng is back.
To no one’s surprise, after disappearing for a whole day, he came to the police station, dressed up in his own clothes, on his own initiative, to apply for habeas corpus, claiming that someone was spreading bad rumours and accusations against him.
And those allegations are all nonsense.
Zi Yu took the man to the questioning room.
Old Dai looked extremely pale and asked him, “Did you really not do those things?”
Zhu Shoucheng said sincerely, “No.”
Old Dai slapped his palm on the table, “Then why are you hiding?”
Zhu Shoucheng opened his mouth: “If you are being falsely accused, it is only natural that you would want to run away, right? Zhu Shoucheng, who has been clean all his life and is about to retire, has come across this kind of thing, and I didn’t want to face it for a while. But now, I want to open up.”
Old Dai narrowed his eyes, “I see you’re not too upset about being ‘falsely accused’.”
Zhu Shoucheng: “I’m not a child, I know it’s useless to be angry. The most important thing now is to solve the problem, isn’t it?”
Old Dai didn’t talk nonsense to him anymore and cut to the chase: “Someone heard that you took it upon yourself to admit that you did all those nasty things to the students.”
Zhu Shoucheng said calmly, “That’s anger.”
Old Dai looked into his eyes and found it hard to tell whether the words of this overly calm man were true or not.
Undeterred by his opponent’s scrutiny, Zhu Shoucheng further questioned, “Is it still possible to be convicted for one’s words in this world?”
Zi Yu put down the biros that was taking notes, “While you were away, we had applied for a house search warrant, entered your room and found a bloody bed sheet. How do you want to explain that?”
”Bloodied sheets?”
Zhu Shoucheng thought about it for a while and then showed an enlightened expression: “Ah, you’re talking about that bed sheet? That was a child who came to my house to tutor, his leg was cut, and a lot of blood dripped onto the bed sheet, which couldn’t be washed off, so I made do with it. You know, I’m a teacher, my salary is just a little, my family’s living standard is not enough to throw away a dirty bed sheet. If you don’t believe me, you can ask the boy.”
When he finished, he raised his eyebrows and gave a slightly regretful and sad expression, “I’m so sorry, by the way, that child doesn’t seem to be alive now.”
The biros in Zi Yu’s hand makes a very loud “click”.
Old Dai’s face twisted slightly, “Are you provoking us?”
Zhu Shoucheng Wen denied it courteously: “No, you have misunderstood. I think it is imperative to find a victim who can accuse me and clear my name as soon as possible. I don’t think someone else can just find a paragraph from the Internet that sounds similar to mine, splice it together and call it hard evidence, right?”
Zhu Shoucheng’s terrifying frankness even caused Lao Dai’s judgement to waver a little.
Zi Yu : “You mean, someone planted evidence against you?”
”Isn’t that so?” Zhu Shoucheng spread his hands and mouthed, “Every student is a precious jewel to me. There is no way I can hurt them.”
Zi Yu’s face grew colder: “And how do you explain your verbal harassment of the child next door to you?”
The words “children next door” irritated Zhu Shoucheng and reminded him of something extremely disgusting.
He looked less than pleased with himself: “You mean Chi Xiaochi? …… to him, did I say anything I shouldn’t? Like asking him to sleep with me?”
Zi Yu was at a loss for words, “You-”
”Yes, I do like children, I might even say I love them. So there are times when some of the expressions can be rather over the top.” Zhu Shoucheng speaks with conviction, “but it’s all within normal limits. You guys are really chilling an old teacher’s heart by taking things out of context like this.”
Zhu Shoucheng had complete confidence in knowing that he would not be sentenced and dared to gamble that those who had been victims knew exactly what they were holding in their hands and therefore simply did not have the guts to come forward and admit to having been violated before.
Even in such a climate of public opinion, he was not afraid.
After all, those victims will only have fun for a while when they blow the whistle, after that. He’ll be unlucky and poked in the back for the rest of his life in this little place.
If a child in his right mind did come forward to testify, as far as he knew, the penalty for rape and child molestation was still limited to the concept of “young girls” under the current level of law in the country.
The only unfortunate thing is that I can no longer teach, and I can’t go home.
The law won’t sanction him, so I guess the parents will try to drown him with spittle.
But he could have gone abroad to join his son and the police station would still have to dutifully issue a certificate of no criminality for him.
As a result, Zhu Shoucheng was dismissed from the school to appease public anger.
Over the next half month, apart from the parents who intermittently came to the silo to cause trouble, things really calmed down.
The non-victimised children were confused, and most of the victimised children were so frightened by their parents’ sky-is-falling attitude that they simply kept quiet.
And the hot-headed parents went and looked up the relevant legal information and gradually calmed down and stopped talking about it.
Only the mother of the child, who is suspected to have committed suicide because of Zhu Shoucheng, went to court to sue Zhu Shoucheng for murder, but the case was not filed due to lack of evidence.
She was so mentally damaged that she hung around the silo day in and day out.
According to the source, she was carrying a fruit knife in her arms and claimed that she would kill Zhu Shoucheng if she saw him.
Even though the police later intervened in this matter, in order to avoid more trouble that followed, Zhu Shoucheng still brought all the information, went to the provinces, found a reliable agency, stayed in a hotel for almost a month, burned a lot of money, finally did the United States 10-year round-trip visa.
It was only in the dead of night that the discontent and depression came to him, causing Zhu Shoucheng to toss and turn and to bang his head on the pillow.
His wonderful garden was exposed, its branches and flowers, all pulled down, trampled underfoot and insulted by people who did not appreciate it.
Luckily, the visa he had applied for was soon issued, which slightly offset the unbearable sadness in his heart.
As he stepped onto the plane with his simple luggage, Zhu Shoucheng looked out of the window at the white clouds and thought sadly that he was about to start a life of upheaval.
…… But, on the bright side, he still has a home to go back to anyway.
The son is clearly planning to settle abroad on a permanent basis. He has acquired a second-hand house with good infrastructure and is only twenty minutes away from where he works, which makes it convenient in every way except for shopping.
He entertained his elderly father attentively, “Dad, what brings you to my place all of a sudden?”
Zhu Shoucheng’s hand holding the teacup trembled slightly, then he smiled and asked rhetorically, “What, do you dislike your dad?”
My son was just about to say something when my daughter-in-law brought the melon seeds and laughed, “Dad, he’s stupid, he didn’t mean it. We welcome you a hundred times, but if we had known you were coming, we should have levelled the yard earlier, so that you could go out in the sun.”
Zhu Shoucheng’s eyes lit up and he got up, rolled up his sleeves and headed for the backyard: “Grading the turf? I’ve done it at school, let me help you.”
My daughter-in-law gave a startled “hey”, “Dad, you’ve come a long way, you’re resting ……”
As we speak, however, Zhu Shoucheng is already walking to the back door.
The son touched his daughter-in-law’s elbow: “See, you’re the one with the stupid mouth.”
My daughter-in-law was furious, “Go and drag your father with you. Your father is here on a trip and he’s just arrived to make people work.
Instead, the son looked adoringly at his father’s back and said, “I’m going to teach my dad how to drive a weed whacker.”
”Ugh!”
”Don’t worry about it. My dad is a hard worker, he can’t be bothered, he brings his kids home for tutorials in the summer and winter. If you don’t let him do something, it’s his life.”
With his back to his son and daughter-in-law, Zhu Shoucheng breathes a small sigh of relief.
The school only knows the mobile phone his son used to use and now he has changed his number, so naturally he can’t be contacted, which gives Zhu Shoucheng some peace of mind.
Here, at least, he can get away from the chaos and enjoy a little bit of happiness in his old age.
Zhu Shoucheng stayed at his son’s place.
Both his son and daughter-in-law work here. At first, his son was not quite sure about leaving him at home alone, but he soon relented.
Zhu Shoucheng learned English and settled into the language quickly enough to watch the news, read the newspapers and communicate with people without much problem, even sneaking off on his own one day to take pictures of a nearby church.
What seemed like a month of fun and happiness passed.
Zhu Shoucheng is so active in his studies for no other reason than he is afraid to show any discomfort and give his son an excuse to send him back to his country.
Just like when he first arrived, he couldn’t stand the foreign diet and was constipated for a long time. He didn’t dare to tell his son, but only dared to be a thief, getting up in the middle of the night and gnashing his teeth to solve the problem himself.
The good thing is that time is the cure for people.
The events in China have faded into the shadows in Zhu Shoucheng’s mind, and although it still hurts to think about it, the good news is that it is not as hard to bear.
He found that the USA was a good place to visit, the internet was not as closed as in China, with 404’s, and he could access any website. Zhu Shoucheng used the computer he had brought with him to connect to the internet and clicked around, but through a small unknown pop-up window, he was able to access a website that was very much to his taste.
Zhu Shoucheng was afraid that the site would suddenly disappear and had saved several pictures with great enthusiasm.
A week later, two of the neighbour’s children were playing football at home and the ball flew over the wall, which Zhu Shoucheng picked up for them.
When the babysitter came to ring the doorbell with two little blond boys to ask for their football back, Zhu Shoucheng held the ball and took a look at their cute white faces, tickled slightly.
…… Maybe a nice garden can be planted here too.
The fat nanny seemed to notice his odd expression and gave him a deliberate look, but Zhu Shoucheng didn’t take it too seriously.
He turned back to his son’s home and continued to clean them with the hoover.
Half an hour later, the doorbell was rung again.
This time, however, the sound was cold, one after the other, and it rang out with such urgency that it was like a death knell.
Zhu Shoucheng came up to the door and asked, “Who is it?”
Outside, a man announced himself in English Wen, presumably that he belonged to some department or other, but he spoke too quickly and with a slight accent, so Zhu Shoucheng only understood the key message.
…… American police?
Zhu Shoucheng reflected on the fact that he had done nothing wrong, and that Americans are always so fussy that they would call the police for the slightest thing, perhaps because they didn’t know him and took him for a thief who broke the door and slipped the lock.
So he casually pulled the door open.
Zhu Shoucheng took his passport and asked politely, “What can I do for you?”
Two policemen, a man and a woman, came with a routine look on their faces, “You have been reported to have been inappropriately voyeuristic towards the child next door to you.”
Zhu Shoucheng was stunned as the image of the fat nanny came to mind, followed by a fit of tears and laughter.
Are Americans that sensitive?
He replied with panache, “It was a misunderstanding. I think the lady was a bit paranoid.”
The policewoman said, “But with us, you are on record.”
Zhu Shoucheng is confused: “What records?”
”Sir, may I ask, was it you who used the internet to access a child pornography website and download images with inappropriate content a week ago?” The male policeman asked, “Or was it someone else in this household?”
The corners of Zhu Shoucheng’s mouth stiffened: “What makes you …… say that? What proof do you have?”
The male policeman said, “That site, one of the main sites that the Crown has been monitoring since it took over, is designed to spot potential paedophiles.”
Zhu Shoucheng’s heart burst into flames and his eyes widened: “You’re fishing for justice! What gives you the right to monitor other people’s computers? Besides, I clicked on that website by mistake! I only downloaded the pictures out of curiosity!”
He figured that it was just a few pictures and the other side wouldn’t make him a priority to watch.
Sure enough, the policewoman said, “Yes, it’s true that we can’t rule out the possibility of misadventure, but because someone reported it, we’re still here to do a little routine questioning.”
Before Zhu Shoucheng could relax, the male police officer picked up the conversation, “…… So, we need to clear the contents of your computer immediately, please cooperate.”
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