Chapter Twenty-Six: Old Matters

Two people had come out to keep watch, and if they sat there in silence for hours, they would only grow sleepier. A little idle conversation was better.

Only, Kang Ge’s last remark made Yan Xue suddenly feel a little embarrassed. She had always thought of herself as a very frank, straightforward person, and only now did she realize that yes, she was frank and straightforward, but even a straightforward person could still be shy.

When Kang Ge mentioned just now that he had told Lu Xiaodong he was “trying hard,” Yan Xue felt her cheeks warm.

Fortunately it was dark outside, and there were no lights on inside the car, so Kang Ge did not notice. He simply followed the thread and spoke of the subject naturally.

“You must have had some guesses about this scar of mine, right?” Kang Ge said, lifting a hand to touch his eyebrow. The thin line of the scar was not very noticeable to the eye, but it could be felt quite clearly beneath his fingers. “Tell me what you thought.”

Yan Xue figured she had probably guessed wrong, but Kang Ge was not testing her for a right answer. So she said honestly what she had believed.

“I used to think that when you were in school, you were the kind of person with terrifying fighting ability, invincible in a brawl, so no one dared to provoke you easily. That’s why your family felt safe letting you live in the dormitory.

“But later, when I thought about the way you usually deal with people, that didn’t seem quite right. Especially the things you said to persuade me—if you were the sort of person who solved problems with force, then you should have thought I still wasn’t strong enough.”

“Mhm, you got half of it right. But didn’t I always say that you and I used to be almost exactly the same? So I had my own foolish period too, when I tried to solve problems head-on. It’s just that this scar has nothing to do with that.”

Kang Ge paused, took a sip of coffee, and looked out the window. His expression became somewhat unreadable in the dim night. He was not unwilling to tell Yan Xue about these things, or rather, these were things he wanted her to know. It was only that he had gone so many years without speaking of them that, now that he was suddenly about to, he did not know where to begin.

“This scar was left when the ridge of my brow hit the corner of a table,” he said after drawing in a deep breath, then slowly letting it out. “It split open, bled a lot, and I had to get several stitches at the hospital. I must have been about six that year.”

Yan Xue listened intently, her instincts telling her that this was hardly a memory Kang Ge found pleasant.

A six-year-old child might be a little mischievous, but by then he was far past the age of walking unsteadily and tripping for no reason at all. To hit the brow ridge against a table hard enough to open a wound that required stitches was certainly not the kind of force produced by an ordinary accident. There had to be more to it.

“This scar was a turning point in my life, and also in my mother’s.” Kang Ge seemed to hesitate, then suddenly smiled. “I don’t know whether saying it will just give you a worse impression of me.”

“My father—not my sister’s father, but my biological father—was a man with a violent temper. In my childhood memories, my mother was often covered in bruises and welts all over her body. Sometimes, no matter how hot it was in the middle of summer, she had to wear long sleeves and long pants, or people would see the injuries on her.”

Yan Xue had not expected Kang Ge to tell her anything like this at all. She was a little startled, and when she realized it, she found that her face showed her shock without any concealment.

“Your mother… I haven’t met her, of course, but from the little things you’ve mentioned before, I thought of her as more of a career woman, a strong professional type, so…” She was afraid her reaction might seem disrespectful to Kang Ge.

But Kang Ge laughed. “Yes, that’s what she is now. Your judgment is completely right. It’s just that back then she wasn’t like this. She was ambitious at work too, but she also had a head full of old-fashioned ideas and was rather conservative.

“That probably had something to do with the beliefs her parents instilled in her from childhood—the man handles the affairs outside, the woman the affairs inside. And also the idea that once you’re married, you have to stay married for life; divorce is shameful, something that brings disgrace to the whole family.

“So on the one hand, my mother was very strong-willed and refused to be worse than anyone at work. On the other hand, because of those traditional ideas, she believed a woman had the responsibility to take good care of the family and be a proper support to her husband. Those years were very hard on her.”

“But with your mother living that way, it must have been exhausting, no question. Just thinking about it makes me tired. Still, she handled both sides, keeping the home and the outside world in order. That’s practically perfect! Shouldn’t your father have been satisfied?”

“For the most part, my father had no particular complaints. But he had three big problems. One was laziness and no drive to better himself. Another was a fragile male ego. The third was drinking.”

“He himself was not the kind of person willing to spend much energy or time building a career. Yet, like my mother, he had been fed a head full of old-fashioned notions—men are the heavens, women the earth. He believed women should live by relying on men, that a man in his own home should be looked up to, and that the head of the household ought to act like the head of the household.

“That meant my mother did everything, inside and outside the home alike. Whether at work or at home, she was beyond reproach. Everyone who saw her praised her, said my father must have been smoking on his ancestral grave to have married such a good wife. Some people even joked too far and said he was being kept by his wife. My father’s pride was struck again and again, and that planted a lot of resentment in him.

“How do you relieve that kind of resentment? He chose drinking. And he had poor drinking manners, too, plus he made bad choices in friends. Once he had been out drinking, his so-called friends would say things to fan the flames, and he would come home full of anger, using drunkenness as an excuse to beat my mother.

“The reasons he beat her were all over the place. Anything. My mother got promoted and he didn’t, which made him lose face. My mother got a raise and actually earned a little more than he did, which embarrassed him. And sometimes his cronies would say I looked exactly like my mother and not at all like him, that maybe I wasn’t even his child, and he’d come home and vent that anger on my mother too.

“I was too little to remember much of the earliest years. My memories start when I was four or five. I remember that whenever my father came home drunk from outside, he’d start cursing and picking fights. I was small and didn’t understand much else. I only knew that he came home yelling at my mother and shoving her around, and that was wrong. So I would stand in front of my mother to block him. Every time, I’d end up getting beaten myself because of it.

“Later, whenever my father went out drinking, my mother would send me to my room in advance and tell me to go to sleep, then lock the door. Inside the room, I couldn’t see anything. I could only hear my father cursing outside, the sound of things being knocked over. The next morning, there would always be new injuries on my mother’s body. Never once did it fail.

“My mother was afraid I’d hear her getting beaten in the room and be frightened, so she clenched her teeth and didn’t make a sound. Once, when I got up the next morning, I saw a row of tooth marks on her lower lip that had bled a little. When I asked her about it, she said she had just fallen by accident and bitten herself.”

Yan Xue’s eyes widened. As Kang Ge spoke, she felt a cold wave wash through her body again and again, yet at the same time it was as though a fire were raging fiercely in her chest. Yan’s father and mother both had mild temperaments; in their household, not to mention fighting, even arguments were rare. After all, a couple who did not dare to speak harsh words could only sulk at each other for a little while when truly angry.

So Yan Xue could hardly imagine what kind of pain and torment it must have been for a woman to live for years in the shadow of her husband’s drunken violence, nor could she imagine how terrified and helpless a young child would be in such a home.

“If that’s the case, why did your mother keep enduring it and living that way?” She was the sort of person who could not tolerate even a grain of sand in her eye. Forget years of living on tenterhooks like that; even if it had only happened once, she probably would have fought back on the spot, whether she won or lost. Self-defense or not, she would never let the other side get away with it for free, and then she would cut ties completely.

“My mother did once think about divorce,” Kang Ge said. “But whenever she brought it up, a lot of relatives would come to persuade her to forgive him. Even her own family would tell her that no one in several generations had ever divorced, and if she became the first, it would make everyone in the family unable to hold their heads up, and people outside would point at them and curse them.

“After my father sobered up, he would cry his eyes out too—kneeling, slapping himself, begging for forgiveness. On top of that, a lot of people told her that if she divorced, as a single woman with a child, she simply would not be able to survive. And the child, without a father, would be bullied and cursed at everywhere, unable to catch a break.

“For my mother, the old conservative thinking had been a shackle, and worrying about my situation became her weak point. So when people prodded there, her already shaky resolve to divorce collapsed completely. After all the coaxing and persuasion from every side, she stayed.”

“That’s gang logic!” Yan Xue listened with growing anger. She knew very well that this was all in the past, and from the way Kang Ge and his mother lived now, the future that followed must have ended with the two of them on the winning side. Still, she could not help the anger rising in her chest. The paper cup in her hand was squeezed so hard it warped slightly. Thank goodness she had already drunk more than half of it, or she might have looked rather embarrassed by now.

“Yes,” Kang Ge said. “But back then, what mattered most was not other people’s opinions. The real issue was that my mother had not made up her mind. Deep down, she obviously still leaned toward enduring it and hoping my father would change his ways, which is why she made that choice in the first place.” Kang Ge sighed. “So, in a lifetime, people are bound to have moments when they are not clear-headed. What matters most is that spark of awakening. Only when you wake yourself up can you find the real way out.”

“Yes. So how did your mother eventually come to her senses?”

“Because of me.” Kang Ge pointed at himself. “That year I had just turned six. Before that, my mother had brought up divorce with my father once again after another beating, and that time she was serious. She even took out the household registration book and her ID card and asked my father whether he was going to the civil affairs office or the court. But in the end, he talked her back down with chest-beating, tears, and remorse.

“After that, my father was indeed quiet for a long while. Afraid of causing trouble, he didn’t dare go out drinking very much either. Those two could never have been called affectionate during that period, but they didn’t quarrel much. In the end, though, it didn’t last long—just a little over a month, I think—before he went right back to his old ways.

“That day my father went out drinking again and didn’t come home until very late. My mother had a bad feeling that something might happen, so when she sent me back to my room to sleep, she locked my door again.

“That night my father came back extremely late. At first I was scared and waited inside the room, but eventually I couldn’t keep it up and fell asleep. I don’t know how long I slept before I was woken by noises outside. Then I realized things were worse than before, because my mother—the same woman who had always clenched her teeth and made no sound when beaten, afraid of other people hearing and afraid of frightening me—was actually begging for mercy out loud.”

Yan Xue adjusted her posture. Her whole body felt tense, and she desperately wanted to know what happened next.

“I was terrified. I wanted to go out, but I couldn’t open the door. At the time I had this feeling that if I didn’t rush out to save my mother, I might never see her again in my life. Luckily, we lived on the second floor, and the school had taught us fire safety. So I tied a bedsheet to the window frame, took the front door key, and used the bedsheet to lower myself from the second floor little by little until I was more than a meter above the ground. Then I jumped down and sprinted home to open the door.

“When I opened it, I saw my father on the floor with red-rimmed eyes, kneeling there and pinning my mother beneath his knees, one hand wrapped around her neck while the other slapped her again and again. By then my mother had no strength left even to resist.”

Kang Ge did not show much expression on his face, but his voice carried a faint tremor. Yan Xue did not think about anything else; almost instinctively, she reached out and grasped his wrist, as though trying to give him comfort and encouragement through that gesture.

Kang Ge, who had been lost in memory, felt the warmth on his wrist. He froze slightly, then a broad smile slowly spread across his face. He lifted his other hand and patted the back of Yan Xue’s hand.

“It’s fine. Don’t be nervous. Don’t forget—we were the ones who won in the end!” he said with a smile, sounding as though he were the one comforting Yan Xue instead.

“And after that? When you showed up, did your father hit you too?” Yan Xue thought of the scar on Kang Ge’s eyebrow and instinctively made the connection.

Kang Ge shook his head. “He was drunk out of his mind and completely red-eyed. He didn’t even realize I was there. He just kept cursing, saying things like if he didn’t beat my mother into submission this time, she’d still want to run away later.”

“I rushed over to try to pull him off my mother, but he was an adult and much stronger. I simply couldn’t move him, and I couldn’t get him to let go of my mother’s throat.

“So in desperation, I thought of a way. I took the shoulder bag I used to carry to school, slipped the strap around my father’s neck, turned my back to him, and pulled with all my strength. He was caught completely off guard, was yanked over backward, and started coughing from the pressure. When he struggled up, he kicked me before I had even turned around. I had my back to him, so that kick landed squarely on my back. I lurched forward, and my face smashed right into the corner of the table.”