The Martial Arts Stunt Double of the Entertainment Circle – Chapter 23
by Little PandaGu Min watched Tuoba Xiu storm toward her, his face twisted with murderous rage, and her whole body jerked with fright. She hastily pushed Tuoba Jiao, who had wandered out after being woken by the commotion, behind her. “Jiaojiao, hurry — go back to your room!”
Tuoba Jiao refused to let her mother face her alcohol-numbed father alone. She was terrified to her core, her legs gone soft beneath her, yet she clung to Gu Min’s thin arm and wouldn’t budge.
Gu Min grew frantic. “Jiaojiao, listen to Mom — go back to your room! Don’t get involved in grown-ups’ business!”
Tuoba Xiu had already reached Gu Min. He glared down at his slight, frail wife with violent, hateful eyes — his gaze clouded and unfocused, the muscles in his face twitching unnaturally. The reek of tobacco and alcohol rolling off him was so strong it made Tuoba Jiao cough.
Though Tuoba Xiu was drunk and couldn’t quite keep his balance, his strength hadn’t diminished in the slightest. His powerful hand seized his young daughter by the shoulder and dragged her out from behind Gu Min. Tuoba Jiao’s face went white; she looked up at Tuoba Xiu in sheer terror.
“Jiaojiao,” Tuoba Xiu suddenly laughed. “What’s that look in your eyes? I’m your father. What are you looking at me like that for?”
Tuoba Jiao couldn’t force out a single word. She shook her head between sobs, utterly unable to hold back her tears, weeping silently as she desperately wanted to crawl back into her mother’s arms.
“Tuoba Jiao!” Tuoba Xiu bellowed at his daughter, veins bulging at his temples. “I’m your father! What’s there to be afraid of?! All you do is fucking cry — I’ve had enough! Your old man works himself half to death to feed and clothe you women, and you’re cursing me?! Your old man isn’t dead yet! What the fuck are you crying for?!”
Tuoba Jiao was truly frightened out of her wits by her father, who looked like a raving madman, his face contorted with fury. She barely managed to sob aloud, trembling and whimpering like a kitten — there was no way she could answer him.
Jiang Guilan stood at a distance, her earlier anger still simmering, without the slightest intention of stepping forward to stop Tuoba Xiu’s rampage.
Gu Min, who had been desperately shielding her daughter, found strength from she didn’t know where and shoved Tuoba Xiu away. She pulled Tuoba Jiao tight against her and cried out with a courage she had mustered from nowhere: “Why take it out on Jiaojiao?! The child is already frail, and you’re terrorizing her! Tuoba Xiu, if you’ve got the guts, come at me!”
Tuoba Xiu lost his footing and staggered backward, the back of his head slamming hard against the alloy doorframe. The pain jolted through his tear glands, springing tears to his eyes. He grimaced, reaching back to feel the swelling lump on his skull. Though Jiang Guilan was angry at Tuoba Xiu for talking back to her, she still depended on her son. Seeing Gu Min actually dare to resist, she shrieked, “You whore, you’ve plucked up the courage of a bear and a leopard1!”
Tuoba Xiu recovered his wits and nearly went mad with rage — this woman had actually dared to shove him!
He lunged forward and grabbed Gu Min by her pinned-up hair, dragging her away from Tuoba Jiao. Tuoba Jiao screamed, her heart tearing apart, crawling after her: “Mom! Mom!”
Gu Min’s long hair was ripped out in clumps by Tuoba Xiu’s grip, but she clenched her teeth and refused to cry out. Tuoba Xiu hauled her upright, and Gu Min felt a sudden, searing pain on her right cheek — her ear rang, and her vision went blank. It took her several dazed seconds to realize Tuoba Xiu had slapped her hard across the face. Half her face burned with a scorching ache, and a warm trickle ran from her nose — he had hit her hard enough to give her a nosebleed.
“Mom!” Tuoba Jiao nearly fainted, her voice cracking as she screamed. She tried to stand and protect her blood-covered mother but couldn’t get her legs under her, falling again and again each time she tried to rise.
Tuoba Xiu still wasn’t satisfied. He threw the frail, slight Gu Min to the ground. Now she didn’t even have the strength to cough, curling weakly into a ball, her nose blocked with blood, gasping through her mouth with desperate, shallow breaths.
“Mom…” Tuoba Jiao murmured. She crawled to Gu Min’s side, trembling, barely daring to touch her — as if the slightest contact would shatter Gu Min, whose face was as white as paper.
The worst of the pain eventually passed, but Gu Min’s head still swam in a dazed, wretched fog. She comforted her daughter in broken fragments: “Jiaojiao, I’m fine.” The two of them helped each other sit up. Gu Min hung her head, her hands utterly drained of strength, and let Tuoba Jiao press the side of her nose to stop the bleeding. Drops of blood pattered onto the gleaming floor, one after another, before the flow finally stopped.
By then Tuoba Xiu had sobered up somewhat. He stood beside his wife and daughter, not knowing what to say.
Tuoba Jiao held Gu Min close, glaring with resentment at her father, who had just beaten her, and at her grandmother, who acted as if nothing had happened. For a girl who always spoke softly, who never clashed with anyone, her voice carried a resolve that astonished even herself:
“Mom, divorce him. I’m going with you.”
Tuoba Xiu had been feeling a flicker of guilt, but his youngest daughter’s words sent the fire blazing right back up inside him — an ungrateful little wolf2 that could never be tamed!
Jiang Guilan, who had long been dissatisfied with Gu Min, said acidly, “Hah, a divorce is easy enough. But don’t think you’ll walk away with anything that doesn’t belong to you.”
“Ma!” Tuoba Xiu had to cut Jiang Guilan off. His expression shifted unpredictably. He stood there for a moment, then tossed out, “Think it over yourself,” and stalked upstairs.
Tuoba Jiao didn’t spare Jiang Guilan a single glance. She supported Gu Min, and step by step, they walked out of the brilliantly lit Tuoba Residence.
Both mother and daughter wore bloodstained white nightclothes, their hair loose and disheveled, looking like a pair of ghosts. Thanks to that, they didn’t encounter any lecherous troublemakers on the road — instead, they startled quite a few passing cars and pedestrians.
By late October, Yuchuan had already begun to show the first chill of winter. The two leaned on each other as they walked, not knowing where they were going. When they couldn’t walk anymore, they found a bench in a small park along the street and sat down to rest.
“Jiaojiao,” Gu Min’s head still throbbed. She held her daughter close, warming her with her own body heat, and after a long silence, said, “Mom has let you down.”
Tuoba Jiao, who used to be pampered and prone to tears, seemed to have grown up in the span of just a few short hours. She smiled and said:
“Mom, we finally got out. I’m so happy right now. Look — Aunt Qiao and Sister managed to stand on their own, and so can we. We just need to get through this rough patch, and then we’ll be completely free.”
“You… you saw your sister again?” Gu Min was quiet for a moment, stroking her daughter’s hair.
Tuoba Jiao nodded. “I talked with her for a long while. Sister doesn’t seem to hate me as much anymore. She asked how I was doing and gave me her phone number. Mom, I believe that if I work hard enough, one day Sister will accept me as her little sister.”
Gu Min’s hands trembled. She tried to keep her voice steady: “Your Yan-jiejie and, and your Aunt Qiao, they’re the same kind of people — tough on the outside, soft on the inside. They’re both wonderful people. It’s Mom who’s at fault — I drove her and her daughter far from home. That was never what I intended… I…”
Tuoba Jiao was growing drowsy. She curled up in Gu Min’s arms, her eyelashes fluttering incessantly. Exhausted in body and spirit, she soon fell asleep. Gu Min murmured to herself for a long time, and at some unknown point, she drifted off too. In her dreams, there was herself, Qiao-jiejie, Jiaojiao, and Yanyan.
For years, Gu Min had dreamed about Qiao Chunyi almost every night. In the dreams, the cold, proud woman held Tuoba Yan in her arms and looked at Gu Min with an icy indifference that chilled her to the bone — a gaze that held not even hatred, only pure disregard. Qiao Chunyi would turn and walk away, farther and farther, while Gu Min ran after her with all her might, desperate to catch up, to apologize, to tell her what was truly in her heart…
But Gu Min had chased for fifteen years and never once caught her.
“Gu Min?”
In her haze, Gu Min thought she heard Qiao Chunyi’s voice. How wonderful — this was the first time Qiao Chunyi had called her name in a dream. She told herself, keep sleeping, don’t wake up.
Qiao Chunyi stood frozen in place. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that this battered, bloodied, wisp of a woman could be the same Gu Min — once so young and beautiful, so radiant and vibrant. Her hair hung in tangled disarray, the handprint on her cheek an angry, glaring red, her face streaked with uncleaned blood. She wore nothing but a thin nightgown, huddled asleep on a park bench with Tuoba Jiao.
How could this have happened? Had that old bastard Tuoba Xiu gone bankrupt?
Footnotes
- 吃了熊心豹子胆 | chī le xióng xīn bàozi dǎn | Literally 'eaten the heart of a bear and the gall of a leopard' — a folk idiom for summoning outrageous, reckless audacity, as if the eater had absorbed the ferocity of both apex predators.
- 小白眼狼 | xiǎo bái yǎn láng | Literally 'little white-eyed wolf' — a Chinese term for an ungrateful person who turns on those who raised them; 'white-eyed' denotes a lack of conscience or recognition, suggesting the person sees no debt of gratitude.
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