A Thousand Thoughts

On the same evening, Tang Xu contacted Wen Ying.
Wen Ying apologised to him in a gentle tone and then said that the appointments were really full.
If he didn’t mind, they could meet on the weekend.
She could squeeze in some time on Saturday and meet him in the evening.

Tang Xu looked at the calendar in the bottom right corner of his computer screen.
Saturday seemed a bit late, but there was no way around it.
Wen Ying’s schedule sounded really tight, and she probably had already tried her best to fit him in within a week.

“Okay, at your clinic?”

Wen Ying said that she was no longer at the clinic and suggested that they meet at a coffee shop instead.

After agreeing on a meeting time and place, Tang Xu breathed a sigh of relief when he hung up the phone.

This semester, Tang Cuo took an elective psychology class once a week on Thursdays.
In terms of the number of students enrolled, this was an unquestionably large class.
He Zhong saved a spot for him in the lecture hall that could accommodate more than two hundred people, and Tang Cuo had to look up and scan the room for a while before finding him.

For most students, this elective class was essentially an entertainment class.
In today’s world, where smartphones have taken over people’s lives, entertainment is equivalent to playing on one’s phone.
As a result, this psychology elective was roughly equivalent to a class on playing on one’s phone.

A while ago, there was a PhD student who committed suicide by jumping off a building at a nearby university.
Although the university tried to keep it quiet, the news still spread around the academic community.
In fact, for third-year college students, this is not a rare occurrence, as there are always one or two cases each semester that make people sigh.
However, the psychology teacher was deeply saddened and sighed with a frown when he started class.
He said that the psychological quality of today’s college students is far from standard.
He urged the students to learn how to regulate their emotions and recognise their own problems.
If they really have problems, they should not be afraid to seek help and talk to the psychology department in our school, as the service is free of charge.
This conversation received responses from some of the classmates, and the teacher sighed before starting today’s lesson.
Perhaps because the suicide of the doctoral student had such a great impact on the teacher, he used some examples of suicide without mentioning any names to analyse why humans choose to commit suicide under certain psychological pressures.

Although the topic was somewhat sensitive, it was just an ordinary psychology class, and few students were paying attention in the classroom.
Some were still addicted to mobile games, and others were doing homework from other subjects.
However, Tang Cuo, who didn’t expect to hear a familiar example,
“The next example is a bit complicated.
The woman’s body was found on the riverbank downstream, a month after she jumped into the river.
Local villagers found her while fetching water from the river.
However, because her body had been carried downstream for too long, it was difficult to determine her exact location of entry into the river.
It took the police almost two months to confirm her identity.
Surprisingly, she was a college student who had been abducted.”

Perhaps because of the last sentence, many students below lifted their heads.

“It was also because of her death that the police were able to trace back to the trafficking group.
This group is quite special; they come from an extremely impoverished mountainous area, and they would abduct young girls and take them to remote, underdeveloped, and impoverished mountainous areas to obtain money while helping the local people complete their reproduction tasks.
Later, the police basically investigated all the abducted people.
This woman who committed suicide was the only one who chose death.
Other people basically accepted their changed fate after a brief resistance, but this woman, in my opinion, never accepted it.
She had an alcoholic husband who often physically abused her despite having no legal relationship with her.
They had a child together, and this woman tried to escape many times but failed every time.
What kind of psychological change do you think led her to choose the path of suicide in the end? And do you think this choice was right or wrong for her?”

After the teacher finished speaking, the classroom fell into a commotion.
Surprisingly, several students raised their hands.

A female student stood up and said, “Teacher, I think her choice is right.
Many times, living is not necessarily the right thing to do.
You said she had tried to run away many times, so she must have been desperate for life after so many failures.
She was originally a female college student with a good future, and she couldn’t accept living with that kind of life in that kind of place.
People commit suicide because of pain, and we all think that suicide is wrong.
But if that pain cannot be changed or improved, why can’t we choose to end our own lives?”

The girl’s words were very bold and clearly went against the original intention of this class.
However, the teacher on the stage nodded silently and did not make any comments.

After she sat down, a male student immediately stood up to refute her.
“I think she committed suicide because she was abducted and the living conditions there were too harsh.
Moreover, the man who beat her was also a reason.
But I think she may also have some personal problems.
Based on the teacher’s case introduction, her abduction was probably more than 20 years ago, and at that time, the value of a college education was much higher than it is now.
Why would a college student be abducted? I think that’s the first problem.
Additionally, I think she should have found a better way to save herself.
At least if it is today, I don’t think there are any places absolutely isolated from society.
If she wanted to contact others, there would always be opportunities and ways.
Besides, she still has a son.
What will happen to him if she dies? So, although her experience is very sympathetic and regrettable, suicide is still a wrong choice.”

“After she was abducted, the child was not born out of her own will, so it should not be used as moral blackmail…”

Although it was just a classroom speech, it gradually evolved into a situation of opposing opinions.

Despite the voices in the classroom rising and falling, He Zhong remained engrossed in playing mobile games until Tang Cuo, who was sitting next to him, stood up.
“Firstly, I would like to correct a mistake made by the teacher.” Tang Cuo stood there quietly, speaking in a measured tone.

He Zhong was momentarily stunned and forgot to use his special move as he looked up at Tang Cuo.

The teacher on stage was also stunned.
“Ah, please speak, student.”

Since Tang Cuo stood up, some girls had secretly taken photos.
His shocking remark attracted many classmates’ astonished glances.
Tang Cuo was not used to such inquisitive and voyeuristic eyes.
He squeezed his palms nervously, and his heartbeat gradually became uncontrollable.
For a moment, he wanted to sit back down, but the black words on the screen were like bright red blood pouring into his eyes, and in that sea of red, he saw her again.

“She didn’t commit suicide.
She was washed away by the river while trying to save her child.”

This sentence is like a bomb, exploding into countless scattered words that filled the classroom after a moment of silence.
The teacher was obviously confused.
He pushed up his slipping glasses and stuttered, “Save, save the child?”

Tang nodded seriously at her, “Yes, at the time his child fell into the river, she went down to save him, and finally she lifted the child onto the shore, but she was washed away.
She was not weak, and she was not bad.”

The teacher took two steps forward and still hadn’t come back to his senses from this conversation.
“How do you know it was like this?”

He Zhong had been staring blankly at the people around him, so he saw Tang Cuo’s jaw suddenly tighten and then slump.

“Because I am that child, and she is my mother.”

At that moment, in the full classroom of over two hundred people, no one was looking at their phones.
Even the classmates who were holding up their phones to record or take pictures were shocked and turned to look at Tang Cuo, who was standing in the third to last row.
Sitting in the back of the classroom, with just a slight downward glance, Tang Cuo could easily see the faces and eyes of those who were looking at him.
After finishing his last sentence, he ignored those clear eyes and sat down by himself.
He Zhong swallowed his saliva, came back to his senses, and called out to him, “Cuo Cuo ..”

Tang Cuo continued to look down at the desk, and the formulaic characters in the book made him dizzy.
His palms were even more sweaty, and he didn’t notice He Zhong holding his hand and calling his name repeatedly.

He stood up and spoke for her, but twisted the truth.

She saved his child, but at first she lied to him and told him that it was safe to swim there, and she even encouraged him to swim in the middle of the river.
Perhaps out of guilt, when she saw him struggling in the water, she eventually jumped in herself.

Also, Tang Cuo continued to silently narrate in his mind that after she rescued her child, someone had already seen her fall into the water and come to rescue her, and she had already grabbed the rope that was thrown to her.
However, after being pulled a little bit, she saw the people on the shore, including the person she had saved.

Tang Cuo could never forget the look in her eyes.
Because after that look, she let go of the rope and drifted away with the current, with Tang Cuo’s shouts and gaze following her.

So, in fact, she had committed suicide—after seeing him, she gave up her own life.

In recent days, whenever Tang Xu had free time, he would go to the library to look up some materials on psychology, but as an amateur, he didn’t catch any main points in the past two days.
This day, Tang Xu had been in the library for an afternoon, and around 5:30, he put back the books he had read and returned to the office.
Aromatic control class was on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Tang Xu hadn’t seen Tang Cuo on those two days.
As he approached the office, Tang Xu found that his cigarette case was empty again, so he turned around and went to the office where Tang Cuo’s homeroom teacher was located.

After going in, Tang Xu found that Teacher Wang was on the phone, seemingly discussing some student’s problem with a serious expression on his face.
Tang Xu took out a half-box of cigarettes from the table, picked up a cigarette and threw it back, picked up the lighter, and sat on a nearby stool, waiting.
He was about to light the cigarette when he heard Teacher Wang say, “But Tang Cuo is really good; he has no problems.”

The action of lighting the cigarette suddenly stopped, and his mind couldn’t keep up as he looked at Teacher Wang, who had hung up the phone and asked, “What’s wrong with Tang Cuo?”

Teacher Wang’s forehead was already sweating.
“Oh, by the way, you are relatives.
Come here quickly.
Tang Cuo spoke up in the elective psychology class this afternoon, and it’s one of the top ten topics on the school forum.
The school leaders saw it and were afraid of any emotional fluctuations he might have, so they asked me to talk to him.”

When Tang Xu heard the words “psychology class,” he was already not very relaxed.
He didn’t know that Tang Cuo had taken psychology as an elective course.

He leaned in front of the computer, watching the post with increasing replies; the content was very detailed, and there was even a complete video, enough to let everyone know the beginning and end of the storm that afternoon.

After reading the last sentence of the post, the cigarette in his hand had already shattered into a lump.

He closed his eyes tightly.
Even he had always thought that Tang Cuo’s mother had only committed suicide because she couldn’t bear that kind of life.

Teacher Wang was already calling Tang Cuo, but he couldn’t get through.
Tang Xu turned around, took the contact sheet, and said, “I’ll go find him.”

After speaking, he tightly pursed his lips and wanted to leave.

“Hey, wait a minute.” Teacher Wang stopped him and frowned, “Isn’t Tang Cuo your relative? Why would you…”

Tang Xu paused, but didn’t turn back.
“I went to teach in a rural area at that time, and I was the one who brought him out.”
Teacher Wang had not expected this and was at a loss for words.
“You…”

A child cannot be taken away just like that; there are so many responsibilities to be borne.
In his opinion, Tang Xu was not a kind-hearted gentleman, so what kind of situation could have made him take a child away?