71: Chapter 74 The Tiger Mom's Siege: Control is More Terrifying Than Rebellion

A floral quilt and a snake-skin bag were piled up in the corridor outside the Academic Affairs Office.

The mouth of the snake-skin bag was tied with a red rope, revealing half of a folded bed sheet and a pair of plastic slippers.

Auntie Zhao was sitting on the bench in the corridor, her eyes red, clutching a wad of tissues in her hand.

She was wearing a washed-out dark blue plaid shirt, and her hair was hastily tied back with a black hair tie; she looked like she hadn't slept properly for at least two days.

The door to the Academic Affairs Office was ajar, and the face of Director He Rencai poked out from inside. When he saw Fang Jiming approaching, he let out a huge sigh of relief.

"Teacher Fang, you've finally arrived! This parent refuses to leave no matter what I say; my office is about to turn into a guesthouse!"

Fang Jiming: (¯ ^ ¯) ゞ

"Director He, you go ahead and get busy. I'll chat with Auntie Zhao."

Director He Rencai was eager to dump this problem off, so he clutched his thermos and slipped out of the Academic Affairs Office. As he left, he glanced back at Fang Jiming with a look that clearly said, 'Brother, you're on your own.'

Fang Jiming let Auntie Zhao into the Academic Affairs Office.

He closed the door and sat down on the chair opposite her.

As soon as Auntie Zhao saw Fang Jiming, tears welled up in her eyes again.

"Teacher Fang, Bingbing still hasn't come home. Didn't you say you would help me find her? She doesn't reply to my WeChat messages, and she won't answer my calls."

She wiped her face with a tissue, her voice beginning to tremble.

"I'm just a mother who wants to see her own daughter. What have I done wrong?"

Fang Jiming did not respond immediately.

He leaned back in his chair, hands clasped over his knees, waiting for Auntie Zhao to release her emotions.

Auntie Zhao cried for about two minutes, then looked up at Fang Jiming with a pleading look in her eyes.

"Teacher Fang, tell me where she is living. I'll go pick her up and bring her home."

Fang Jiming shook his head.

"Auntie Zhao, I cannot tell you that."

Auntie Zhao's expression changed.

It shifted from pleading to confusion, and then slowly twisted into something else.

"By what right are you hiding my daughter? She's my flesh and blood; don't I even have the right to know where she lives?"

"The place she is staying now is safe, someone is looking after her three meals a day, and she will come to school for class as usual tomorrow."

"I don't care about any 'looking after' or whatever! She must come home! She's only seventeen; what kind of sense does it make for her to live outside!"

Auntie Zhao's voice rose an octave, and she slammed her palm against the desk in the Academic Affairs Office, making a dull thud.

Fang Jiming didn't dodge, nor did he raise his voice.

He waited for the sound to dissipate before speaking.

"Auntie Zhao, let me ask you one thing."

Auntie Zhao looked at him, breathing heavily.

"The matter of you installing a camera in her room—she told me that herself."

Auntie Zhao's face, from the corners of her eyes to her chin, went completely rigid.

This lasted for about three seconds.

Then she spoke, her voice much lower than before, but no less firm.

"That was for her safety! She used to stay up all night playing on her phone, her grades were getting worse and worse, and it was bad for her eyes. If I don't keep an eye on her, who will?"

Fang Jiming looked her in the eyes.

"You installed it on the shelf directly above her desk. She said she felt anxious even when changing her clothes."

Auntie Zhao's lips moved.

"Mine only covers the angle of the desk, it doesn't record other areas…"

"Auntie Zhao."

Fang Jiming interrupted her.

His tone was neither heavy nor light.

"Checking her phone, going through her diary, locking the bedroom door, installing a camera."

He counted them off one by one.

"You've read her social media chat logs, right? You've gone through what she wrote in her diary, right? The day she climbed out the window, you locked her in her room for two days, right?"

Auntie Zhao's breathing began to quicken.

Fang Jiming paused for a beat.

Then he asked a question.

His voice wasn't loud, but it was heard clearly inside the Academic Affairs Office.

"Are you protecting her, or are you imprisoning her?"

Auntie Zhao sprang up.

The chair was kicked back half a meter, emitting a harsh screeching sound.

She stood in front of Fang Jiming, pointing a finger at his nose, her fingertip trembling.

"You're a new teacher, what do you know about being a mother?!"

Auntie Zhao: (ᗒ ᗩ ᗕ)

"Do you have children? Have you ever raised a child for a single day? Do you know what it's like for a woman to raise a daughter alone, with a husband who is never home all year round, playing the role of both father and mother?"

Her voice grew hoarser, eventually tinged with a sob.

"I control her because I'm afraid she'll go bad! If those people outside lead her astray, I won't even know where to look for her! I checked her phone because last time she chatted with that boy named A-Fei, saying she wanted to leave this home and never come back!"

"You say I'm imprisoning her? I'm her mother! Would I hurt her?"

The last sentence was nearly a scream.

Fang Jiming sat in his chair, not moving an inch.

He waited for Auntie Zhao's voice to stop, and for her breathing frequency to slow down.

Then he spoke.

He didn't raise his volume, nor did he back down.

"Auntie Zhao, I don't know what it's like to be a mother."

He paused for a beat.

"But I know one thing."

Fang Jiming looked into Auntie Zhao's eyes.

"The night your daughter climbed out of the second-floor window, she sprained her ankle. She endured the pain and walked for thirty minutes alone to the night market, sat in the corner of a barbecue stall, with two bottles of non-alcoholic beer and a cold corn cob in front of her, staring blankly."

"She wasn't rebelling; she was running for her life."

Auntie Zhao's lips were trembling.

Fang Jiming said one last thing.

"Auntie Zhao, the moment your daughter climbed out of that window, you were no longer her mother."

"You were her jailer."

The Academic Affairs Office was silent for about five seconds.

These five seconds felt longer than five minutes.

Auntie Zhao was trembling all over, tears streaming down her face. She opened her mouth twice to speak, but in the end, she didn't say anything.

She bent down, grabbed her bag from the table, shoved the chair beside Fang Jiming aside, opened the door of the Academic Affairs Office, and rushed out.

The sound of high heels rapidly striking the floor echoed in the corridor, growing further and further away.

The floral quilt and the snake-skin bag remained on the bench in the corridor.

Fang Jiming sat in the Academic Affairs Office without moving.

He looked up at the corner of the ceiling where water stains had seeped through, a lump in his throat that wouldn't go away for a long time.

There was a rustling sound of footsteps from the corridor.

Teacher Wen Ruyan appeared at the door of the Academic Affairs Office.

She was holding a stack of weekly test papers, her gaze crossing the door frame to look at Fang Jiming inside.

Fang Jiming's posture hadn't changed, but his expression wasn't great.

Teacher Wen Ruyan didn't ask what had happened.

She stood at the door for two seconds, then turned and left.

Fang Jiming continued to stare at the ceiling.

He recalled what Han Bingbing had said at the night market.

'I feel anxious even when changing clothes in my own room.'

He also recalled what Old Liu had said.

'The more you try to break them up, the more she'll jump into his arms.'

But there was a premise to Old Liu's statement: the object of the breakup was an incorrect relationship.

The relationship between Han Bingbing and A-Fei was, of course, wrong.

But the force that pushed her into that wrong relationship was also wrong.

The System Panel flashed in his mind.

[Han Bingbing's family relationship restoration progress: 0%]

Still zero.

Fang Jiming closed his eyes and stood up from the chair.

When he walked out of the Academic Affairs Office, Auntie Zhao's bedding and snake-skin bag were no longer in the corridor.

He didn't know if she had come back to take them, or if someone else had cleared them away.

Fang Jiming walked toward the office.

When he reached his desk, he saw something new sitting there.

A cup of steaming Caramel Macchiato.

The cup sleeve was the standard brown paper sleeve from the coffee shop, but someone had written two characters on it with a black marker.

'Hard work.'

The handwriting wasn't large, but the strokes were a bit heavy-handed; the last horizontal stroke of the character 'hard' ( bitter) was dragged out longer, as if the writer had hesitated about whether to erase it after finishing.

Fang Jiming picked up the coffee and sniffed it in front of his nose.

The smell of caramel was very strong.

He pulled out his chair, sat down, and drank it in small sips.

The system popped up a box in his mind.

[Teacher Wen Ruyan favorability +5, current favorability: 64]

Fang Jiming glanced at the number and closed the panel without any change in expression.

He removed the cup sleeve with the words 'Hard work' on it, folded it twice, and tucked it into his lesson plan book.

Then he flipped to the blank page for Chen Nuo and added a line of text after 'Key Observation'.

'Han Bingbing thread: Direct communication with mother failed, entered cooling-off period. Zhou Yifei arrives in Nanqiao in five days, needs to be focused on.'

After writing it, he closed the lesson plan book and leaned back in his eighty-thousand-yuan chair while holding the Caramel Macchiato.

Outside the window was the dusty playground of Nanqiao No. 19 Middle School and the crooked basketball hoop.

Fang Jiming took a sip of coffee and said in a low voice.

"Auntie Zhao, I spoke too harshly today."

He paused for a beat.

"But I don't regret it."