Ever since getting in the car, Ye Yuhuan hadn’t said a word. Even though she was usually taciturn, it wasn’t like her to stay completely silent for so long.
Through the gaps in her hair, Song Zhiqing could see the faint blush on the curve of Ye Yuhuan’s ear.
She understood that Ye Yuhuan was probably still embarrassed.
In fact, it was more than just embarrassment. Ye Yuhuan was also grappling with the incredible fact that she could even be in such a state, to the point where she couldn’t quite face herself.
By the time the car was nearing their destination, Ye Yuhuan, as the planner of the day’s outing, finally let her sense of responsibility overcome her other thoughts. She said nonchalantly, “I come to this theater often. It’s a bit out of the way, but the equipment is good and it’s never too crowded, so you won’t be bothered by any weird audience members.”
Song Zhiqing first nodded in agreement, then decided to be mischievous. With a look of surprise, she said, “Oh, Ye Yuhuan, why are your ears so red!”
Ye Yuhuan’s ears instantly turned an even deeper shade of red. She subconsciously pinched the tip of her ear, but quickly dropped her hand when she noticed Song Zhiqing’s teasing gaze. Unable to handle this side of Song Zhiqing, she could only confess, “Because I’m still very shy right now.”
Ye Yuhuan’s directness made Song Zhiqing feel as if she’d thrown a punch and hit nothing but air. No, it was more than that—there was even a bit of a recoil.
Otherwise, why would the tip of her heart feel a slight tingle?
Song Zhiqing cleared her throat and changed the subject. “What movie are we watching today?”
Seeing that Song Zhiqing didn’t press the issue, Ye Yuhuan instantly relaxed. Speaking of the movie, she was quite proud of her choice, and her voice grew a little louder. “It’s your mom’s movie!”
The internationally acclaimed actress Gao Yiren had produced a steady stream of masterpieces over her twenty-year career. After a two-year hiatus, she was returning to the public eye with her new film, First Love Paradise. The film was an adaptation of a famous female author’s autobiography. The director chose to tell the story from the mother’s perspective, with the award-winning actress playing the mother of a young girl who was lured and molested by her teacher.
Between the fame of the original work and the actress’s reputation for never starring in a bad film, public anticipation was at an all-time high. At the same time, nearly every major film-related media outlet was predicting that this movie would win Gao Yiren her third Best Actress award at Cannes.
Today was the movie’s premiere. Ye Yuhuan had thought that as Gao Yiren’s daughter, Song Zhiqing would be eager to support her mother’s film on the very first day. But seeing the somewhat somber expression on Song Zhiqing’s face, Ye Yuhuan realized she might not have chosen the right movie after all.
She said quietly, ”If you don’t like it, we can switch. There are plenty of other good movies out for the National Day holiday.“
Song Zhiqing shook her head and explained, ”It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just… I haven’t watched one of Mom’s movies in a long time.”
“Why?”
Song Zhiqing didn’t know if she should say it, or how to say it. These were all rather dark thoughts.
But under Ye Yuhuan’s clear gaze, Song Zhiqing tried to organize her words. “Mainly, whenever I think about how the days Mom is gone are spent acting in these movies, I can’t help but feel jealous. Of course, I know she’s doing something incredible, and I’m very proud of her, but I still feel some resentment, more or less.”
“And love is love, resentment is resentment. They can’t cancel each other out.“
The girl in the car had a sorrowful look in her eyes. She wore a long white dress with ruffled edges, its shoulders gathered by thin straps, and a delicate belt cinched her slender waist. How could the person before her possibly be the villainess everyone supposedly reviled? Ye Yuhuan couldn’t help but turn and grasp her hand. The mole that Song Zhiqing was always noticing was right before her eyes. Ye Yuhuan hugged her and said softly, ”Then let’s not think about all that today. Let’s just go watch a good movie.“
Song Zhiqing was stunned for a few seconds, then nodded in Ye Yuhuan’s embrace.
It was, indeed, a good movie.
The story was told via flashback.
The film opened with a group of well-dressed middle-aged women playing cards. They naturally started chatting about their children. One mentioned her child had gotten into an Ivy League school in America. Another said her child had been accepted into a graduate program in the country. A third complained that her child wasn’t ambitious enough and wanted to study art, but had recently won some international award, so at least it seemed they could support themselves in the future.
Finally, only Du Meijuan, played by Gao Yiren, remained silent. Someone next to her asked, “Didn’t your child used to get first place in the whole school every year? How come we haven’t heard anything recently?”
Du Meijuan feigned a worried sigh and said her child had missed the score for their desired major on the college entrance exam by a few points. Being proud, the child had decided to enroll in a cram school to retake the exam.
The group of women all comforted her, saying things like, “If your child is that motivated, you should just let her go for it.”
After the card game, Du Meijuan returned home and opened a door. Inside was a room piled high with books by authors like Eileen Chang, Dostoevsky, and Osamu Dazai—all literature. Du Meijuan pulled the books out one by one, tearing out the pages with neat annotations, muttering as she did, “This is what teaches you bad habits, reading all this romantic nonsense all day.”
The scene shifted. In the same study, a beautiful young girl was sitting at a desk, reading. This was Du Meijuan’s daughter, Lin Qi.
At seven in the evening, the girl slung her backpack on and said to her mother, “I’m off to cram school.“
Du Meijuan waved her hand impatiently, as if shooing away a fly.
When Lin Qi arrived at the cram school, the first thing she did wasn’t to open her bag and study, but to follow the male teacher into his small room. Lin Qi took off her clothes and let the teacher molest her. In this scene, the lighting was dim, and Lin Qi’s snow-white skin formed a stark contrast with the middle-aged man’s flaccid, ugly body. Many people in the theater couldn’t help but close their eyes.
After they came out of the room, the male teacher stood at the lectern, passionately lecturing on the meaning and value of literature, spittle flying from his mouth. Below, Lin Qi took notes diligently, but all she wrote were the words “disgusting.”
Du Meijuan noticed something was off with her daughter’s state. She was always suffering from insomnia at night. When Du Meijuan got up in the middle of the night, she would see light seeping from under the study door. Every time this happened, she would rush in, snatch the book from Lin Qi’s hands, throw it violently to the ground, and order her to go to sleep immediately. Lin Qi would return to her room, but once Du Meijuan was asleep, she would slip back into the study like a ghost to explore the world of literature, book by book.
At this point, a voiceover that sounded very much like Du Meijuan’s began in the darkness: She was asking literature why a teacher who taught people about truth, goodness, and beauty could do something so disgusting. Why parents could be so indifferent to their own child. Literature couldn’t give her an answer, but it contained many of the emotions she couldn’t find elsewhere. She became captivated by literature.
Lin Qi’s distracted state caused her grades to plummet. Du Meijuan scolded her daughter, telling her to focus more on her studies and not to think about “all that nonsense,” especially not to get into a relationship.
The woman before her was exquisite in every way, and so she demanded her daughter be exquisite as well. Lin Qi glanced at her and obediently agreed.
But as soon as she left the house, she called the male teacher and asked him to meet her at a hotel.
After the teacher left, Lin Qi immediately rushed to the bathroom and vomited nonstop. Yet, after she wiped her face clean, she couldn’t help but smile at her reflection in the mirror, praising herself, “So beautiful.”
Eventually, the affair between Lin Qi and the male teacher was exposed. Du Meijuan noticed her daughter had symptoms of pregnancy, bought a pregnancy test, and confirmed that she was indeed pregnant.
Du Meijuan was so furious she slapped Lin Qi several times, demanding to know who the bastard was that she had slept with.
Lin Qi smiled and said, “It was the tutor you found for me.”
Here, the actress playing Lin Qi perfectly conveyed the complex mix of grievance and revenge in her character’s heart.
Du Meijuan froze. She immediately grabbed her bag to leave. A brief glimmer of hope appeared on Lin Qi’s face, but it vanished when Du Meijuan took off the shoe she had just half put on. Du Meijuan said, “A family like ours cannot have a scandal like this. If your father finds out what you’ve done, he’ll beat you half to death.”
Lin Qi lowered her head. “Mom, what should we do then?”
Du Meijuan’s voice was dry as she said, “First, you’ll get an abortion. Then we’ll find a new cram school. Don’t have any more contact with him.”
Of course, Lin Qi wasn’t the only one the teacher had molested. She had already gathered a good deal of evidence, but seeing the troubled look on her mother’s face, she went back to her room and destroyed it. The girl’s expression was calm yet sorrowful, as if she were setting her own body on fire.
Later, when it was time for the college entrance exam, Lin Qi, as expected, failed.
After the exam results came out, Du Meijuan enrolled Lin Qi in a prep school far from home. There were closer ones, but after the abortion, Du Meijuan had started treating Lin Qi with alternating warmth and coldness. Lin Qi rented a place to live on her own. Sometimes Du Meijuan would visit often, and other times she wouldn’t come for a long time. Lin Qi didn’t study there; instead, she wrote day after day, and day after day, she burned what she wrote. Later, she accidentally set the house on fire. By the time she was rescued, she had gone mad.
Lin Qi’s father eventually found out and beat both mother and daughter half to death. The man rolled up his shirtsleeves and, in their respectable house, beat his wife until she was sobbing uncontrollably. Lin Qi, however, was dazed. No matter how many times he slapped her, she didn’t cry, only hugged herself tightly in a corner. The man glanced at his daughter with disgust and said, “Send her to a mental hospital.”
Half a year later, Lin Qi committed suicide.
Du Meijuan went to collect the ashes. After returning home, she hid them in the basement.
She was a terrible mother, but she refused to admit it and refused to let her daughter remind her of it. That was why she sent her daughter so far away, and why she hid her ashes.
When others asked about her daughter, Du Meijuan would still put on a proud face. ”Oh, she’s studying abroad. Complains every day about how bad British food is. You really can’t raise girls to be too delicate.“
The movie ended there.
It echoed the beginning, yet it was a brilliant piece of irony.
Gao Yiren truly deserved her legendary status as an actress. In person, she was a peerless beauty, still radiant and lovely even in her forties, yet her portrayal of a weary, sociable middle-aged woman in the film was not the least bit out of place. The movie left one feeling as if a heavy stone was weighing on their heart. Beside her, Song Zhiqing had started crying nonstop from the scene where Lin Qi was writing and burning her work in the rental house, and by the end, she was sobbing aloud. Fortunately, the theater wasn’t crowded, and those who were there were also weeping uncontrollably.
Ye Yuhuan put an arm around Song Zhiqing and led her out of the theater. Song Zhiqing’s emotions had calmed a little, but she was still choked with sobs. “How could they do that? All those people were so cruel. They were forcing her to die.”
Ye Yuhuan helped her to a seat in the theater lobby. She had read the original book, so she had some resistance to the increasingly oppressive plot. Lin Qi had tried to save herself many times—by reaching out to her mother, her classmates, her teachers. She used her abnormal behavior to signal her misery, but no one cared. All they knew was that her grades had dropped, and they scolded her, saying it was her own fault. Lin Qi could only turn to literature for help, but literature only brought self-deception. That’s why she wrote and burned her work; she knew literature had failed her, but it was all she had left.
Song Zhiqing was right. Everyone was pushing her toward death, including herself.
While rubbing Song Zhiqing’s back to soothe her, Ye Yuhuan said, “But interactions between people are full of such tragedies. Sartre has a famous line, ‘Hell is other people.’ It describes this situation where people crush one another, because they can only consider their own desires, so they constantly sacrifice others.”
Song Zhiqing had never read Sartre. She only knew he was a very famous philosopher and had seen his books on Ye Yuhuan’s shelf. She didn’t realize his philosophy was so pessimistic. Or perhaps… was this Ye Yuhuan’s own pessimism?
It seemed as if a trace of the fragile Ye Yuhuan from a year ago had returned. Seeing this, Song Zhiqing’s sobs grew heavier. “Don’t say that. Even if it’s true, don’t say it.”
“You need to be happier, Ye Yuhuan.”
Ye Yuhuan smiled and ruffled her hair. “But you’re the one crying right now.”
Song Zhiqing’s tear-reddened eyes widened. She really looked like a little rabbit.
“That’s not the same thing! Ye Yuhuan, stop twisting my words!”
“Alright, alright. I’m twisting your words.”
