Jun Wangchen pricked up his ears, listening closely to every word Li Chuan said.
"I was born into a deeply traditional, authoritarian family. The rules at home were harsh from the start. When I was little, just fussing about wanting the peanut milk Dad had brought home could earn me a slap hard enough to make my nose bleed."
"His idea of parenting was violence. He slapped me or made me stand as punishment over the slightest thing, so my childhood was spent in darkness and fear."
"When I was little, my grandparents said they'd give me one yuan every time I scored a hundred on a test or got an A at school. My exercise books ended up full of As, but eventually, they stopped giving me the money."
"Even so, I found a sense of superiority in getting good grades and being a top student. That was about when the label stuck."
"Then, in third grade, our Chinese exams started including essays. I was introverted and bad at expressing myself, and the sheer amount we had to write compared with before scared me."
"Essays always lost me at least a few points, so I couldn't get perfect scores anymore. There were other reasons too, but that was probably when I started hating essay writing."
"After third grade, Dad brought me to a new city. He'd suffered a lot growing up, which left him with some psychological issues and a bad temper."
"In the new city, he still hit me over every little thing. I got scolded for scoring ninety-eight. If I burped while eating, he slapped me. If I held my chopsticks wrong while picking up food, he slapped me too. It was laughable. His own childhood was miserable, so why did he insist on being so strict