Chapter 61: The Electronic Diary

On the second day of the holiday, Cheng Jiabao hadn’t written a single word of the homework assigned by her teacher.

In the morning, her aunt’s family of four had returned to the countryside for a banquet, leaving her and her mother to manage the store.

The shop wasn’t very busy in the morning. But as soon as lunchtime hit, it filled up with customers eager to eat cold noodles. Chen Xiaofen was busy in the kitchen slicing and mixing the cold noodles, while Cheng Jiabao darted around like a whirlwind, helping her mother serve dishes and clean tables.

By three in the afternoon, the last group of customers wiped their mouths with napkins and left the shop. Jiabao, dizzy with hunger, took the money her mother gave her and went to the neighboring snack shop (Craving Cat Snack Shop), to buy lunch.

She bought a thick, soft flatbread spread generously with bright red beef chili paste, then stuffed it with a crispy fried mini pancake sprinkled with peanut powder and chili flakes.

The chili pancake wasn’t exactly nutritious—just carbs propped up by seasoning—but it was the favorite after-school snack for students in the area. Everyone grabbed one on their way to or from school, and Jiabao was no exception.

Holding the spicy pancake sandwich, her mouth watered as she bit into it before even stepping out of the shop.

By the time she walked back to the cold noodle shop just a few steps away, a third of the pancake was already gone.

Inside the cold noodle shop, Chen Xiaofen sat on a stool, threading skewers through various ingredients for the oden. Seeing those skewers made Jiabao’s heart sink, and suddenly her chili pancake didn’t taste as good anymore. She plopped down across from her mother, sulking, and muttered, “Didn’t you say we weren’t going to the night market tonight?”

“What are you doing threading those skewers again?”

Chen Xiaofen glanced at her, tossed aside a fish roe pouch, and picked up another skewer, muttering, “Your aunt just called. She said she got into an argument with your uncle and isn’t going to his mom’s house for dinner. She’ll be back in an hour.”

“So what if she comes back? That just means I can go to the night market.”

Jiabao immediately became agitated. She slammed the pancake onto the table and flailed her arms like a rattle drum, shouting, “You never keep your promises! You said that if I helped you today, you’d take me to buy a hamster!”

“When did I ever agree to buy you a hamster? I said I’d take you to the pet shop if I had time. And now, clearly, I don’t have time.”

“Then I’ll go by myself!” Jiabao picked up the pancake and resumed eating, biting into it furiously. “You’re always too busy anyway. Just drop me off at the place, and I’ll wander around and buy it myself.”

She’d heard that hamsters were ten yuan each, and she’d saved enough pocket money.

“I’ve already told my classmates about it—I’m buying a curly-haired golden bear hamster and bringing it to show them on Monday.”

Chen Xiaofen’s eyes were dark-circled, her already narrow face sharp like a shoe horn. Her patience thin, she reached for a sausage from the nearby basket, tore it open with her teeth, and shoved it toward Jiabao. “What do you mean ‘go’? I won’t finish until the early hours of the morning. How am I supposed to look after you? It’s dangerous outside once it gets dark.”

“You think selling oden all night is safe?”

“Am I the same as you? I’m an adult—I have to make money.”

“And besides, do you go to school just to have fun? Have you even finished your homework? It’s been days since the holiday started, and I haven’t seen you open your workbook once!”

“What does my homework have to do with you not keeping your word? There’s still plenty of time left in the holiday. I’ll write it later—you don’t need to worry about it.”

“All you know how to do is talk back. Sit down and do your homework this afternoon! You’re always messing around. Raising you is such a hassle. Why do you want some stupid rat? Why can’t you learn to be better? When your sister was your age, she was much more obedient than you. And she was smarter too. What kind of grades did you get last semester? Not enough to even feed yourself.”

Jiabao had already taken a bite of the sausage but spat it out deliberately into the pot of broth Chen Xiaofen had prepared. The sausage floated like a little finger in the red soup.

The entire pot of oden broth was ruined by this brat. Furious, Chen Xiaofen stood up, rounded the table, grabbed Jiabao by the collar, and yanked her to the ground, slapping her bottom hard with her disabled hand.

Jiabao screamed in pain, wriggled free, and ran upstairs, slamming the door to her small bedroom shut.

Her bottom burned, tears streaming down her chin. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, accidentally smearing chili oil into her eyes, making them sting. Huffing with anger, she went to the balcony to wash her face.

“She doesn’t keep her promises—what kind of adult is she?”

“She’s always talking about my sister. My sister doesn’t even care about her! I won’t either.”

Jiabao repeated these words to herself several times before stopping her tears. Listening carefully to the silence downstairs, she pouted and returned to her small room, blocking the door with a chair. Kneeling on the floor, she bent over and pulled out an old pink plastic pencil case from under the bed.

Inside the pencil case was Jiabao’s secret gaming device and electronic diary—the smartphone her father, Cheng Wei, had used before he passed away.

Plugging the charger into the bedside outlet, Jiabao turned on the phone with practiced ease. The Wi-Fi connected automatically. First, she opened 保卫萝卜 (Defend the Radish) and played a round of the game. She’d been stuck on the final level for months, and this time was no different.

After failing the game, she opened Cheng Wei’s WeChat app and clicked into the chat titled “螺蛳粉加辣加臭” (Spicy and Stinky Snail Rice Noodles). As usual, she used voice-to-text to record her feelings.

“October 2nd, sunny. Sister, Mom hit me again today. She never keeps her promises and gets angry at me. Did she hit you when you were little?”

“I already told her—I made plans with my classmates to bring them a golden bear hamster to play with. Right now, the trend in class is keeping hamsters. Our class monitor, Li Shuran, has a mom who treats her so well. They have tons of hamsters at home, each with its own little room. After school, everyone loves going to her house to play. The teacher always praises her, and she has people accompany her to the bathroom.”

“I told Mom I don’t want to live in the shop. No one in my class wants to play with me. They laugh at me and say I smell like cold noodles. The teacher doesn’t like me either, always criticizing me for messy hair and dirty clothes. Mom says it’s because I’m not a good student, so no one wants to be friends with me.”

At this point, Jiabao lowered her head, looking at her sneakers stained with chili oil, and whispered into the phone, “I know I need to work harder in school, but no matter how hard I try every day, it doesn’t seem to help. I’m so tired every day, and no one notices how hard I’m trying.”

“I wish those human traffickers would kidnap me.”

After sending the converted text, Jiabao noticed that the red dot that usually appeared on the left side of the screen during her diary entries was gone.

Scrolling up, she saw that all her previous diary entries had a red symbol next to them.

The earliest entry dated back to March, shortly after she moved in with her aunt. Back then, her aunt, bored and nosy, loved rummaging through Jiabao and Chen Xiaofen’s belongings.

One day after school, Jiabao was doing homework at the dining table downstairs when her aunt found her diary hidden between the pages of a composition book upstairs. In front of her uncle and guests, her aunt read it aloud, laughing uproariously at Jiabao’s expressions of longing for her sister. “You’re crazy,” her aunt jeered. “Why are you so attached to an outsider instead of your own family?”

If she missed that outsider so much, why was Jiabao still living in her aunt’s shop, eating and drinking there? She should just take a train to Jicheng and find Cheng Simin.

The guests pointed and laughed, and her two cousins mocked her by pinching her cheeks. Her uncle grabbed the diary and teased her about her crooked handwriting and use of pinyin in several places. Furious, Jiabao tried to snatch the diary back, but her uncle was too tall. Jumping repeatedly, she couldn’t reach it. Turning red with anger, she shouted at her aunt, “You’re not adopted—you’re Dad’s biological sister! So why didn’t you leave with Dad?”

That day, Jiabao was punished for disrespecting her elders and cursing someone to die. She stood outside the shop door all night without food.

When Chen Xiaofen came home late at night, Jiabao hoped her mother would stand up for her and take her away from this wretched place. But after hearing her aunt’s complaints, Chen Xiaofen didn’t hesitate to drag her crying daughter into the shop and beat her in front of her aunt.

It was the first time Jiabao had ever been beaten. Unable to sleep that night, she crept into the living room while everyone else was asleep and secretly took her uncle’s charging phone. She turned it off and hid it under her bed.

After all, the phone had belonged to Cheng Wei—why should it be used by her aunt’s husband? It wasn’t fair.

The next day, when her uncle couldn’t find his phone, he flew into a rage, cursing and switching back to his cracked old phone. Meanwhile, Jiabao felt triumphant about her clever hiding spot. From then on, she tore up her old diary at school and only wrote in the more discreet smartphone.

Every time she was beaten, she would turn on the phone, play games vengefully, and send messages to Cheng Simin.

Counting carefully, she realized she had been beaten over a dozen times since Cheng Wei’s death, resulting in over a dozen entries documenting her punishments.

From the first entry to the second-to-last, Jiabao pressed all the red dots again, ensuring every message was sent successfully. Satisfied, she hummed a tune, turned off the phone, unplugged the charger, and hid Cheng Wei’s phone back in the pencil case under her bed.

Downstairs, Chen Xiaofen was still threading skewers for oden. Clearly, there would be no trip to the pet shop today.

Thinking about this, Jiabao’s humming trailed off, but a small hope flickered in her heart. There were still five days left in the holiday. If she behaved well enough, maybe Chen Xiaofen would still take her to buy a hamster.

With a reluctant sigh, Jiabao trudged over to her desk, opened her bag, and began furiously writing her homework.