Chapter Seventeen: Karmic Debt

Page 1 of 3

By the time he came home, darkness had already fallen.

Cheng Kaiyan pushed his bicycle into the courtyard. The whole place was brightly lit, with every household’s lamps burning. Some people were even drawing water from the courtyard well to wash their clothes.

At the very center of the room stood an iron brazier, glowing red with burning charcoal.

His mother and Auntie Wang Qiang sat around it, warming themselves and chatting. He had no idea what custom it was, but the fire certainly kept the room pleasantly warm.

When Auntie Wang saw Cheng Kaiyan return, she took her leave.

After closing the door, mother and son began to talk.

“Where have you been, you rascal? You went out without even leaving a note, and made your mother worry sick!”

The moment Xu Yuxiu saw Cheng Kaiyan, her brows rose sharply in anger. Clearly, she was upset that he had come home so late.

“I’m already grown up. Do you still take me for a child?”

As he spoke, Cheng Kaiyan wheeled the bicycle over and leaned it against the wall.

“Ma, have you eaten? I brought you some food.”

Seeing his mother glaring at him, he hurried to curry her favor. From inside his military coat, he took out an aluminum lunchbox.

Xu Yuxiu gave him a sarcastic look. “Of course not. I was waiting for Young Master Cheng to come home. How could I possibly dare eat?”

“Ah, well… Auntie Jiang came by. She said she was moving, so I went over to help. Since I did all that hard labor, Auntie Jiang took me out for a meal.”

Cheng Kaiyan smiled as he explained, then leaned the bicycle against the wall.

“So that’s what happened.”

Xu Yuxiu nodded in understanding. Jiang Ting had mentioned it the last time she visited.

Then she noticed the bicycle. “This one belongs to her too?”

“It does. I’ll return it in a few days. I’ll get you some chopsticks. Look—there’s braised pork and soy-braised beef. I saved them especially for you.”

Cheng Kaiyan touched the lunchbox. He had kept it tucked inside his coat all the way home. Although the weather outside was cold, the food was still warm to the touch. He eagerly opened the lunchbox and held it out for Xu Yuxiu to see.

“What a little flatterer.”

Xu Yuxiu scolded him with a smile. She had been waiting since she got off work and was hungry by now.

Cheng Kaiyan went to the kitchen and brought her a pair of chopsticks. Only then did she begin to eat, slowly and unhurriedly. She had the composed grace of a refined young lady from a scholarly household.

Seeing how happily his mother was eating, Cheng Kaiyan suddenly remembered what he had seen that afternoon and asked curiously, “Ma, what kind of background does Auntie Jiang have? When I went to help her move this afternoon, a guard came to pick her up—and get this, he was driving a jeep!”

Page 2 of 3

“Background? Nothing extraordinary. She simply married a man with an impeccable revolutionary pedigree.”

Xu Yuxiu smiled. She swallowed the food in her mouth before continuing.

Impeccable revolutionary pedigree?

“How impeccable?”

“His elders climbed snow mountains and crossed grasslands during the Long March. What do you think? You’re better off knowing less. All you need to do is be a good son. In the future, treat Auntie Jiang the way you would treat your mother-in-law.”

Xu Yuxiu cast him a sidelong glance and spoke in a leisurely tone.

That powerful?

Cheng Kaiyan’s expression tightened, and he asked no more.

As far as he was concerned, he was only a small-time nobody. All he wanted was to earn some money and live a simple, happy life with a wife, children, and a warm bed.

After dinner, Cheng Kaiyan returned to his room and sat down at his desk once more, recalling everything he knew from his previous life about sent-down youth literature.

There were quite a few famous works in the genre.

The sent-down youth novels of the late 1970s and early 1980s often carried the character of “scar literature.” They described lives of hardship and were marked by anguished accusations written in blood and tears. Among the major works were Ye Xin’s *Years of Futility*, Zhulin’s *The Road of Life*, and Li Ping’s *When the Evening Glow Fades*.

Ye Xin?

Mentioning him reminded Cheng Kaiyan of a very famous television series.

*The Debts of Sin* premiered on Shanghai Television on January 9, 1995, and achieved the astonishing rating of 42.62 percent. After its broadcast, it won third prize at the 1995 Flying Apsaras Awards, as well as five Five-One Project Awards.

In 2008, when Cheng Kaiyan was still in middle school, he watched several episodes alongside the woman who collected payment at the school shop.

That year, the series was rebroadcast after an interval of thirteen years, yet it still claimed the highest ratings of the year and the number-one position overall. Its enduring classic status was plain to see.

The series told the story of a group of children of former sent-down youth who traveled from the distant southern frontier to Shanghai in search of their parents. When the former sent-down youth left the borderlands, they abandoned both their youthful ideals and the fruits of their love—their children.

As the children grew older and began to understand, some gradually learned the secrets of their birth. A few of the bolder ones gathered together, secretly boarded a train to Shanghai without telling their adoptive parents, and set out to find their biological parents.

After recalling the plot, Cheng Kaiyan decided to use it as the foundation for his own work.

He had no intention of simply copying it. Copying alone would never do.

In his first novel, *The Submarine at Night*, he had already planted the foreshadowing that his talent would one day run dry. He had claimed that he had once possessed great talent, but that it had been too powerful… His own flame had gone out when he was sixteen. What people called his career was nothing more than a few wisps of smoke rising after the fire had died.

Even so, he wanted to write something.

He believed that although *The Debts of Sin* was beautifully written, it inevitably contained a certain degree of beautification.

If Cheng Kaiyan were to write it, he would be like a certain man with a scruffy puppy haircut, pushing suffering to its utmost limits, tearing away the glossy skin of appearances and exposing what lay beneath: the bloodiest, most authentic reality.

Page 3 of 3

Once he had made up his mind, Cheng Kaiyan did not rush to begin writing. He prepared paper and pens, as well as the documents he would need to complete his formalities at Beijing Normal University over the next two days.

After organizing everything, he hurriedly washed up and soon fell into a deep sleep.

The next day.

Cheng Kaiyan rode his bicycle to Shang Cui and her daughter’s home and began conducting a written interview.

Shang Cui began with the very first time they met. She described how the two of them had come to know each other, how they had eventually fallen in love, and all the circumstances in between. She spoke of the stirrings of her heart at their first meeting, the night they made their relationship official, and the happiness of marriage and children.

Then came the pain of separation, the anticipation of letters, the longing to meet again—and finally, the day when all news ceased.

“All right. That’s everything recorded.”

Cheng Kaiyan set down his pen.

“Already?”

Shang Cui smoothed the hair beside her ear, her voice still somewhat dazed. For her, recalling the past was like drinking a poison laced with happiness.

Cheng Kaiyan nodded. He glanced up at the sunlight outside the window. It had not even been two hours.

“Could I take a look?”

“Of course.”

There seemed to be a trace of anticipation in Shang Cui’s eyes. She wanted to see what the happiest period of her life would look like when set down by a writer.

“In just over a thousand words, you’ve written down the brightest, most precious years of my life… They weren’t great or earth-shattering, but they’ve been reduced to little more than a thousand words…”

Several minutes passed before Shang Cui spoke, her expression strangely sorrowful.

“Yes, a thousand words. But the rest won’t be limited to a thousand. It will be a hundred thousand… two hundred thousand.”

Cheng Kaiyan gathered up the manuscript pages and smiled.

After leaving, Cheng Kaiyan took his documents to Jiang Ting’s home.

Jiang Ting accompanied him as they hurried back and forth between the university and the education bureau. At last, they completed all the formalities before his official appointment.

At noon, standing before the statue in the plaza outside Beijing Normal University’s library, Cheng Kaiyan looked at the photograph on his teaching-assistant identification card. In it, he appeared youthful, confident, and full of promise.

For some reason, a line came to him:

“I was twenty that year. In the golden age of my life, I had so many desires. I wanted to love, I wanted to eat, and I even wanted, in an instant, to become a cloud half-lit and half-shrouded in the sky…”