By the time she finished, it was already dark. Xu Huiqing’s arms were so weary they had no strength left. Fearing a long night brings many dreams, she didn’t look at the oilcloth package. Using the household’s packaging bags, she packed the goods and hid them under the earthen bricks of the collapsed ox shed behind the yard. After giving Xiaoxi and Zhao Bei some formula and food, she washed up and went to sleep.
Around three in the morning, seeing that Xiaoxi was sound asleep, she fed Zhao Bei milk, changed his diaper, and he too slept soundly in his cradle. Taking advantage of the night, she quietly retrieved the items hidden under the ox shed out back, took a flashlight and shovel, and rode her bicycle towards the neighboring city.
Not far from Water Wharf Town, on the road towards the neighboring city along the embankment, there was a Martyrs’ Cemetery. It was about a ten-minute bike ride away.
Qingming Festival had only recently passed, and scattered spirit money still drifted on the ground around the cemetery. Perhaps because it was near the river, the hazy moonlight draped the martyrs’ tombs in a layer of eerie, light smoke, making it seem somewhat terrifying.
Though it was a cemetery, for some reason, Xu Huiqing felt no fear—rather, a sense of peace.
She went to a spot not far behind the cemetery, found a rock, dug a hole underneath it, stuffed the items inside, and covered it with a patch of sod. To make it easier to retrieve later, she didn’t even take the shovel with her. Instead, she hid it in the tangled grass behind the cemetery tombs.
According to local custom, things around graves are not to be taken. Even if someone found the shovel there, the most they’d do is sell it to a scrap station for a couple of dimes. They would never bring home something found beside a grave.
Returning home, she first checked if Xiaoxi was sleeping soundly, then felt the newborn’s diaper. It was May—weather neither too cold nor too hot. As long as he slept swaddled and his nose and mouth weren’t covered, nothing would go wrong.
She quickly washed her hands and feet, changed out of her dirty clothes, fed the newborn once more, then lay down beside Xiaoxi, holding her as she slept.
Two days later, the city news channel reported a story: Comrades from the Wu City County Public Security Bureau had retrieved two skeletons from a public toilet not far from the ancient county city wall gate. Based on the remains, the time of death was estimated to be over twenty years ago. The case was still under investigation.
Although Xu Huiqing didn’t go out, she kept close tabs on the local news.
The Zhao family mainly sold televisions. Unlike the countryside in this era, which typically only received three or four channels, the sets in town could now pick up seven or eight. The clearest reception, aside from the well-known ‘CCTV,’ were the local provincial and city stations.
During this time, Xu Huiqing was called to the County Public Security Bureau two more times, primarily to ask if she knew anything else about the traffickers. Xu Huiqing picked and chose what she said, sharing whatever she could.
About another half-month later, police car after police car drove along the Provincial Highway through Water Wharf Town. Many locals came out of their homes, curiously watching the procession of police cars passing through the town and back again, sirens blaring endlessly.
That very evening, on the city and provincial TV news programs, they saw another report: the Wu City County Public Security Bureau, in coordination with the Municipal Public Security Bureau, had cracked a major human trafficking case, capturing a trafficking gang of fourteen and rescuing over a hundred women and children sold into the deep mountains.
In this era, the number of channels available was limited. Basically, every household with a TV, besides watching the central channel daily, tuned into their local city station. They hadn’t paid much attention to the two skeletons found in the county town’s public toilet, but they all focused on the major local trafficking case, because the distant shot that flashed across the screen was none other than the local landmark mountain range, the five peaks soaring into the clouds: Five Peaks Mountain!
The Zhao sisters, who had been constantly checking for news about their maiden family, finally lost all hope.
Because the Zhaos themselves sold televisions and radios, all the Zhao sisters had televisions at home. Normally, villagers had to beg them for the chance to watch a couple of episodes of a drama at their homes. But during this period, due to the Zhao family scandal, the sisters had cut ties with the village, locking their doors and no longer letting people in to watch TV.
But the sisters themselves, and their in-laws, kept close watch for any news about the Zhao family members, sitting in front of their televisions every day without fail.
Eldest Sister Zhao’s father-in-law even stopped watching his must-see nightly “News Broadcast,” focusing instead on the local station’s 6 o’clock news. There he saw it: a fleeting glimpse of police car after police car on Water Wharf Town’s streets. The background of the shot was none other than the Zhao Family Store’s sign—”Fortune Electronics”!
The trafficking case had been solved. In Xu Huiqing’s expectation, once Mother Zhao and Zhao Zongbao were interrogated and cleared of involvement, they should have been released within ten to fifteen days at most. Because she had indeed framed them, and they could completely shift the blame onto Second Sister Zhao’s head.
Even in her initial ideal scenario, Xu Huiqing had only hoped that Second Sister Zhao might get an extra couple of years, or perhaps, with next year’s Strike Hard campaign, be executed. If not that, a sentence of ten or eight years would have sufficed.
But the case developed completely beyond Xu Huiqing’s expectations.
Of the fourteen traffickers, three were former Little Red Guards who had fled the area over a decade ago to hide in the neighboring city to escape persecution. And that neighboring city, even decades later, was still known as the province’s infamous hometown of crime, notorious for trafficking, theft, and drug dealing. Even the local common folk kept their distance from these criminals, afraid of being tainted.
In this era, human trafficking was rampant and brazen in the neighboring city.
Those Little Red Guards who had fled there had, by chance, become acquainted with the neighboring city’s criminal gangs. With no way to return home, they naturally fell into the gangs’ trade: human trafficking. Unfamiliar with the neighboring city, the women they trafficked were naturally sold into the deep mountains of their own familiar home region.
Coincidentally, in the late 1980s to early 1990s, the Zhao family became the preeminent ‘wealthy’ family in Water Wharf Town—three large storefronts, its doors open every day with rows of flickering televisions and stereos blasting music from morning till night, their business booming on the street!
By then, seven or eight years had passed since the Revolutionary Committee’s purges. These fugitive Little Red Guards, coming into the mountains to distribute goods, actually spotted Father Zhao’s electronics store right in Water Wharf Town. Naturally, they got in contact with him again.
Father Zhao, in truth, knew nothing of their trafficking dealings. He just saw them all dressed smartly. As a local boss, running into these old ‘comrades’ from his Little Red Guard days, and seeing they had also done well for themselves now that they’d returned, he couldn’t resist showing off his own prosperity. So they started mixing.
Almost every time these trafficker former Little Red Guards returned to Water Wharf Town to ‘distribute goods,’ they’d meet up with Father Zhao and treat him to meals at local street restaurants.
Father Zhao wanted to flaunt his current success to his old Red Guard comrades, and they wanted to ask Father Zhao about his supply channels for electronics.
Having made money from trafficking, they naturally wanted some legitimate, legal business—to be able to openly spend their cash without hiding like rats in a gutter.
By all rights, the trafficking shouldn’t have involved Father and Mother Zhao. Logically, when the investigation was concluded, Mother Zhao and Zhao Zongbao, having little connection to the case, should have been quickly released.
But the key was that the tip-off came from their own daughter-in-law, and the traffickers were caught using information she’d gathered from her past life. The police constantly grilled the traffickers about whether Father and Mother Zhao were involved.
How many of those who were once Little Red Guards and later became traffickers were good people? Seeing their own bad luck, knowing they were probably done for this time, and jealous that Father Zhao, a fellow ex-Red Guard, was living the good life, they pinned it all on him. They stubbornly insisted Father and Mother Zhao were their accomplices, responsible for finding local sellers and distributing goods.
The traffickers’ confessions, combined with Xu Huiqing’s testimony, ended up matching perfectly, accidentally hitting the mark.
In the early 1980s, with nationwide trafficking crimes becoming rampant, the state launched the first three-year ‘Strike Hard’ campaign. The harshest punishment and strongest crackdown of this ‘Strike Hard’ was on ‘Anti-Trafficking’! Some traffickers whose methods were particularly vicious, whose harm was severe, and who stirred great public indignation, were sentenced to death!
Through the ‘Strike Hard’ of the 80s, the phenomenon of human trafficking had been greatly deterred and curbed for several years. But as time went on, by the late 80s and early 90s—the period when this gang was active—trafficking crimes spiked sharply again.
To curb and combat these crimes, at the beginning of this decade, the state promulgated the Decision on Severe Punishment of Criminals Engaged in Trafficking and Kidnapping of Women and Children. In criminal procedure, it demanded timely trials for all serious crimes, and the appeal period was shortened from the 10 days stipulated by the Criminal Procedure Law to 3 days.
Second Sister Zhao had no idea what impact her confession would have on Mother Zhao and Zhao Zongbao.
As the second child, her birth had been entirely unanticipated by the Zhao family.
Grandfather Zhao and Grandmother Zhao’s affection for grandchildren had already been given to Eldest Sister Zhao. Their only hope for the second child was a boy.
Second Sister Zhao’s birth was not expected by anyone, including Father and Mother Zhao.
Having been a child bride who gave birth to a daughter first, Mother Zhao was more desperate than anyone for the second child to be a boy. When it turned out to be another girl, Mother Zhao, at the very bottom of the family hierarchy, poured all her resentment onto Second Sister Zhao.
Among all the sisters from childhood, she was the most beaten and scolded, caught the most blame, did the most work, and ate the least.
Almost like a case of Stockholm syndrome, the worse she was treated, the more she tried to please Mother Zhao, to please her maiden family, craving Father and Mother Zhao’s approval.
This also bred a personality that was both timid and self-loathing.
She thought she’d only sold her own niece, and that her parents and brother had agreed to it. How could this be a crime? After being arrested and interrogated at the County Public Security Bureau, she was scared out of her wits. She kept insisting her parents told her to do it, her brother told her to do it, thinking this would lessen her own sentence and the judge would find her innocent. She had no idea her confession would drag Mother Zhao and Zhao Zongbao into the abyss with her.
Because Mother Zhao and Zhao Zongbao were embroiled in a human trafficking case, and the informant was their own daughter-in-law and wife, and with Second Sister Zhao’s confession claiming she acted under Father and Mother Zhao’s orders—and that Zhao Zongbao not only knew but also nodded in agreement—their testimonies together dragged Mother Zhao and Zhao Zongbao right in, when they might otherwise have been swiftly released.
Xu Huiqing had originally thought that Father Zhao, Mother Zhao, and Zhao Zongbao could shift all blame onto Second Sister Zhao and thus escape culpability, leaving Second Sister Zhao to bear it alone. She thought they would likely be released quickly. The verdict, however, came down with a swiftness that completely shattered her expectations.