God often strips a person of everything, then offers a little sweetness just as she sinks into despair—only to take it away again the moment she grows attached to it.
Just when I thought everything was finally turning around, my father came back, drowning in debt.
Over those two months, he’d taken his winnings and squandered them, and having tasted a taste of the high life, he’d grown even more dissatisfied with his old circumstances. He forgot the lesson from the time he’d lost so much the family couldn’t even scrape together a meal, remembering only that single taste of winning, convinced he was a dragon merely stranded in shallow water. Instead of settling down to earn an honest living, he indulged in daydreams of striking it rich overnight through gambling.
What he didn’t understand was that when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.
No one gets rich from gambling. My father, least of all.
Starting from nothing to begin with, he lost everything all over again, even selling the one old house the family had left—and still it wasn’t enough to fill the hole he’d dug.
With nowhere left to borrow, nothing left to sell, no one left to lean on, and no way out, he remembered, at last, that he still had a daughter.
Knowing I was living at the Zhou house, he didn’t dare show up at the door directly, so he waited for me along my route to and from school instead.
The first thing he said to me was:
“Look at you, all grown up now, clinging to anyone’s leg who’ll have you. If your mother had known how to play things right like you, our lives wouldn’t be so bad now.”
His eyes swept over me, calculating. “I hear that Zhou kid and the crazy widow both dote on you. So you’re going to ask them for two hundred thousand for me, call it compensation for that beating I took last time.”
The moment he got close, I couldn’t stop myself from shaking.
I dug my nails into my palms and forced myself to sound calm. “Two hundred thousand—do you really think you deserve that? I certainly don’t have that kind of pull.”
He flew into a rage and swung his hand at my face—even though I’d braced myself, I still couldn’t dodge it in time.
That familiar right ear. That familiar ringing sound.
He viciously ordered me to bring him the money by tomorrow, or he’d kill me.
Watching him in that desperate, cornered state, I somehow found myself laughing.
Fear, once it reaches its peak, rebounds from the bottom—when you’re afraid enough, for long enough, you stop being afraid at all.
Once a person breaks free of the cage of fear, shifting from a victim’s viewpoint to that of a bystander, they realize the abuser is nothing more than this, that at their core the two aren’t so different—except that the latter is simply skilled at using violence to mask his own incompetence and cowardice.
The worst that could happen was being beaten to death, but he didn’t actually dare go that far—he was only leveraging people’s fear of death to intimidate.
I said calmly, “I don’t have any money for you. What I have is one life. You can end it right now if you want, no need to wait for tomorrow. Of course, once you kill me, you’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.”
Having realized his usual strategy of violence had been seen through and lost its effect, my father shifted to playing on emotions instead.
A big, burly man, eyes brimming with fake tears, playing the pitiful victim, all but ready to drop to his knees.
“Qingqing, Dad didn’t mean it just now, I just lost my temper for a moment. Won’t you help your dad? In this whole world, it’s just the two of us who have each other. Could you really just stand by and watch me get pushed to the edge like this? Your mother, wherever she is, wouldn’t be able to bear it either.”
Selfish, cowardly, glib-tongued, full of lies, ungrateful, calculating—every negative word ever used to describe a lowlife applied to him.
I felt not the slightest stir in my heart. “Then go join my mother. She must be so lonely all by herself.”
A gambler has no bottom line.
Seeing that neither soft words nor hard tactics worked on me, he started playing dirty.
He showed up at my school again and again, making it impossible for me to focus on my studies.
He waited outside the market to corner Auntie, slandering me, claiming I was being abused at the Zhou house.
He even camped out at the entrance to the alley, spreading rumors to sabotage their business.
But no matter how much of a scene he made, no one was ever going to hand him two hundred thousand.
Because everyone knew a gambler’s appetite could never be satisfied—once you let him taste success, he’d become a bloodsucker addicted to it, and you’d be trapped in an endless struggle with him.
Then, one day, my father got drunk again and lost his mind, spewing filth from his mouth.
He said living at the Zhou house had cursed me with the widow’s bad luck—give him two hundred thousand, and after that he’d act like he had no daughter at all.
He cursed the Zhou family as a family of the doomed—the uncle was, Auntie was, Zhou Haiyan was, and so was I.
He said the doomed could earn money but never live to spend it, so I might as well hand it all over to him.
He said the uncle’s early death was probably his own fault, and he was likely suffering in hell for it now.
Every word was like a blade wrapped in salt, cutting open wounds that had never fully healed, again and again.
Auntie was so enraged she fainted.
The veins on Zhou Haiyan’s forehead stood out; he pinned my father to the ground and beat him savagely, without mercy.