Chapter 136

After he said this, the private room fell silent for a moment, and only the faint hum of the air conditioner could be heard.

Song Wen looked up at Qian Jiang. “So, you’ve admitted to everything you did in the videos?”

Qian Jiang shrugged. “Since you’ve seen it, there’s nothing for me to hide.”

Song Wen continued to press. “And was it also you who killed Teacher Zhang?”

Qian Jiang shook his head. “I know someone hated her, wanted to kill her, but that person wasn’t me. I wasn’t involved in this matter.” Then he turned his head and asked, “After watching the videos, what do you think? Do you think we, this group of students, are all crazy? Are we morally bankrupt?”

The three people in front remained silent, but Qian Jiang read the answer from their eyes. He continued, “Everything has its cause and effect. How we treated her today, we need to ask how this woman treated us before.”

Song Wen said, “Since you think what we saw are just appearances, then go ahead and explain. What happened ten years ago?”

This time, Cheng Mo didn’t interrupt.

Luo Suyu hurriedly recorded beside them, and there was only Qian Jiang’s voice in the room for a moment.

Qian Jiang’s eyes looked into the distance, sinking into memories. “We graduated from various primary schools and entered the junior high school together, the junior high division of Nancheng No. 1 Middle School. You should have heard of it. Eighty percent of the students in that school can enter provincial key high schools, especially its directly affiliated high school, which has always been the top in Nancheng. Countless parents scrambled to send their children there, as if it were a ticket to a top university. I was two points short at the time, so my father paid some money to the school. Students like us were called transfer students.”

“In short, we thought of ourselves as the pride of heaven. When we arrived at the school, we met Teacher Zhang Dongmei, who became our homeroom teacher and math teacher.” Here, Qian Jiang sighed, “At that time, we didn’t expect to encounter such a teacher…”

Qian Jiang recalled how he felt when he first saw Zhang Dongmei. At that time, Zhang Dongmei wasn’t as fat as she is now, nor as old. At almost thirty, she didn’t seem to smile often.

In his memory, Zhang Dongmei was tall and somewhat stout. Walking through the classroom, she resembled a walking tower. She paid great attention to her appearance, always standing upright. Her voice was loud, with a sharp tone. This female teacher seemed incapable of smiling. Every day, she had a stern face. But one day, when they saw Zhang Dongmei talking to the principal, he realized that she wasn’t incapable of smiling, but rather, she didn’t deign to smile at them, the students.

Seeing Zhang Dongmei again today, Qian Jiang found that the woman didn’t seem as tall as he remembered, nor as ruthless. She could cry and plead now.

Perhaps because they were too young at the time, their memories had deviated, or perhaps it was because they had grown up. Their frames of reference were completely different.

Qian Jiang continued, “You have no idea what kind of life we lived during those three years of junior high school. We joked among ourselves that we weren’t attending school but entering a concentration camp.”

“On the surface, Teacher Zhang seemed like a very good teacher. The classes she taught always had top grades, and she won various awards. But in reality, this woman was a pervert. Our whole class was under her rule. Each of us seemed like a puppet in her hands, subject to her whims, abused and tormented. This behavior wasn’t temporary but prolonged.”

“Where should I start?” Qian Jiang paused here, then organized his thoughts.

“Let’s start with our daily life. Every morning when we arrived at school, if you were the last student to arrive, you couldn’t enter the classroom and could only stand in the hallway to listen to the class. So, every day, our class arrived at school early, to the point of being abnormal. And every day, we had heavy homework, with the most being math homework. It was impossible to go to bed before midnight.”

Qian Jiang still remembered the feeling of getting up at six in the morning in the dead of winter to go to school. He was fine because his family had a car and a driver to take him, but other classmates either walked or rode bicycles. When they arrived at school, it was still dark outside, just beginning to get light. The classroom was cold, and the students shivered. At that time, the school didn’t have air conditioning in the winter.

“As soon as her class started, she would make everyone stand up when she entered the classroom. Only those who answered her questions correctly could sit down. But how many questions could there be in a math class? Most of the time, we stood for the entire period. When her class ended, she liked to extend it, never letting us go to the restroom. During self-study sessions, she would stick her head out of the back window of the classroom and look down at the entire classroom with those eyes. Even now, I still remember her gaze at that time.”

In Qian Jiang’s memory, it was a chilling gaze, like that of a cold-blooded animal, a lizard or a snake. It seemed as if sharp words were embedded in those eyes, suffocating and capable of piercing people. Every time he inadvertently met her gaze, it took a long time for him to calm down.

Song Wen, who had been listening quietly until now, couldn’t help but look up and say, “These things just show that Teacher Zhang was rather strict. Moreover, most teachers act this way, not just in your class. Her demanding that you arrive early means she had to get up early too. She assigned you homework, which she also had to correct. Ultimately, it was all to improve the class’s performance.”

He had been to middle and high school too, and each class had teachers with such behaviors. When dealing with disobedient children, these strict measures sometimes proved more effective than gentle persuasion.

There is a saying that “strict teachers produce outstanding students.” Endless drills, relentless exams, and an unending stream of homework might not be ideal methods, but they are often effective.

“No, it’s not the same,” Qian Jiang shook his head and continued, “She wasn’t just strict on the surface; she physically punished students. She would pull girls’ hair and slap them, kick students with high heels, and there was a cane in the classroom that she would break and replace. Once, the boy next to me made a mistake on a problem and got slapped so hard he fell off his chair. Sometimes, right after lunch, she made us run two kilometers in a line.”

Qian Jiang experienced for the first time what it felt like to be slapped after meeting Zhang Dongmei. With a loud smack, his head was struck to one side, his face stinging and burning, his ear ringing for a long time, and red finger marks gradually swelling. More excruciating was the psychological humiliation. This was just the basic punishment Zhang Dongmei dished out.

They had seen Zhang Dongmei’s hands. Her palms were thick and flat, with a few broken lines. Some classmates said these were “broken palms,” indicating a life of hardship and loneliness. Such hands hurt the most when hitting.

Qian Jiang remembered once when Zhang Dongmei was beating a very honest girl in the class. The girl, beaten hard, lifted her head, her eyes full of hatred, and said, “My mother said if you hit me again, she’ll report you to the education bureau.”

Zhang Dongmei kicked her hard, “Then go report it.”

She was fearless because she knew that the girl’s parents were divorced, and both were ordinary workers with no connections or influence.

Sure enough, the matter ended unresolved.

Hearing this, Song Wen fell silent. He had also encountered teachers who used corporal punishment, especially ten years ago when oversight was not as strict as it is now, and surveillance was not widespread. Most students did not have mobile phones.

Qian Jiang continued to smile, but his smile grew more bitter. “If it were just these things, they would have been minor annoyances. We could have endured them. The worst part was the psychological warfare. As long as she stood in the classroom, she was its queen. She could set and change rules at will. We all had to follow her will. Sometimes, we were like dogs begging for her favor.”

“She would scold and humiliate people with words. You can’t imagine such vile words coming from a well-educated teacher.”

“She sowed discord in our class and planted informers. She encouraged students to report on each other, rewarding those who did.”

“She didn’t just beat people herself; she taught us how to beat people. She told us how to hit without leaving marks. When slapping, fingers should be together to cause ringing in the ears and headaches. When pinching, grab the flesh and pull it out before twisting for more pain.”

“History and political science books, those thick books, should be rolled up to hit the back of the head. Even a delicate girl like Tan Shan could make a boy cry this way. Do you think good students like Tan Shan could escape? She had collective punishment. If someone didn’t finish their homework, the group leader and class president were also punished. Tan Shan often got punished the most, copying math textbooks repeatedly and never getting to sleep early.”

“If she targeted someone, she would make the whole class isolate and bully them. There was a classmate with probably some intellectual issues who always scored the lowest in exams. Zhang Dongmei made us beat her, bully her, throw her books out of the window, pour water into her desk, and spit on her food. These were all done under her instructions. If you didn’t bully that girl, you would become her next target.”

“Meng Tiantian had a good relationship with that girl and refused to bully her. Zhang Dongmei kicked her from the back of the classroom to the front, saying, ‘I want you to understand what it means to kill a chicken in front of a monkey ^[1]Make an example out of someone by punishing them n=in order to frighten others.’ Only when Meng Tiantian joined in beating her friend did Zhang Dongmei stop. Eventually, we drove that girl out of school.”

Qian Jiang continued, still smiling, “Before graduation, our class had five fewer students than other classes. Naturally, our class’s performance was better. We were like hostages, kidnapped by a bandit, who forgot to even struggle. Luckily… we graduated.”

Qian Jiang spoke quickly about these past events. Lu Siyu took notes at first, but later found it hard to keep up and realized they would have to rely on the recording. He flexed his sore fingers and looked up. From Qian Jiang’s eyes and words, he could sense a deep hatred for this teacher. He believed Qian Jiang was telling the truth, not lies.

Zhang Dongmei was undoubtedly a person who pursued results and had a strong desire to win. She was afraid of achieving nothing. As a teacher, she had no love for her students; her various actions were ways of harshly criticizing them. She also projected her many misfortunes in life onto her students. By instilling fear in her students, she made them obedient.

At that time, Zhang Dongmei was eager for promotion and a salary increase. She was dissatisfied with a teacher’s meager salary. She had marital discord and faced family pressures, which left her life in a mess. Only in front of those students was she an absolute ruler.

Perhaps she herself did not realize the psychological trauma her actions would cause her students, possibly ruining their lives.

Zhang Dongmei did not kill anyone or set fires, but as a teacher for over twenty years, she taught hundreds of students. Teaching so many people was like killing those innocent children over and over again.

Lu Siyu was momentarily unsure of how to judge the gravity of such a crime.

However, he felt that these were not sufficient reasons for the students to kill their teacher.