Crossing the Line – Chapter 73
by Little PandaDoes She Still Remember Me?
After showering, they lay in bed.
Lin Ji poured warm water and put on soothing music.
Everything was ready. She hoped these small comforts would keep Jiang Siyi’s emotions from being too badly affected after hearing her story.
Lin Ji held Jiang Siyi and began telling her the story of that past—whispered against her ear.
The full picture had been pieced together from her own lived experience and the fragments later recounted by Lin Xuebo, Kong Yuchen, and other family and friends.
Jiang Siyi hadn’t realized that the year Lin Ji said she’d first planted the seed of loving her was the same year they’d been engaged.
She was three that year; Lin Ji was six.
At the time, Lin Ji still bore the surname Kong.
So she’d even changed her surname.
Jiang Siyi silently mouthed her former name and felt a strange sense of unfamiliarity.
She still preferred “Lin Ji.”
“The second year after our engagement—on my seventh birthday—I was abducted by a middle-aged trafficker. After that, I was gone from J City for seven years.”
On her birthday.
Jiang Siyi’s heart ached.
No wonder she didn’t like celebrating birthdays.
And seven years.
So long…
That span of time exceeded anything Jiang Siyi could have imagined, leaving her with a sudden, vertiginous sense of the ground falling away beneath her.
She could also truly feel that what she was about to hear would be genuinely brutal.
The previous few years, Lin Ji’s birthdays had been celebrated at the Lin family’s, so before that year’s birthday, Kong Yuchen discussed with Lin Xuebo about celebrating it at the Kong family’s for once.
Grandmother’s health was failing, and no one knew how much longer she’d last. She’d been missing the child terribly.
Lin Xuebo didn’t care much for the Kong family—especially Kong Yuchen’s older brother, who treated lecturing as a hobby and liked ordering everyone around to suit his own whims, always playing the big brother no matter who he was dealing with. Every time they met, he’d critique her career, instructing her which investment sectors to double down on and which to pull out of. He’d even hinted that she shouldn’t be too strong-willed—it wasn’t conducive to family stability.
Lin Xuebo disliked dealing with him and visited the Kong family only rarely.
But her mother-in-law was genuinely kind. In all the years of marriage, she’d never treated Lin Xuebo poorly—she doted on her like a biological daughter.
Now the old woman was missing her granddaughter and said she had a special gift to give the child. Lin Xuebo was in the rising phase of her career at the time, very busy—she even had to travel to another city for business that day.
So that year, they’d celebrate at the Kong family’s. Fine.
Lin Xuebo could never have dreamed that the daughter she’d scarcely left for a single day since birth would be lost after just one day with her husband.
Lin Ji’s grandmother had only two sons and no daughters. She possessed an ancestral jade dragon-and-phoenix pendant passed down from the Ming dynasty, to be inherited by women, never men.
She’d originally intended to give it to a daughter-in-law, but with two daughters-in-law, giving it to either one would’ve been awkward.
Giving it to her only granddaughter was perfect.
Grandmother especially adored Lin Ji. She’d once told Lin Xuebo that this child was so beautiful and so clever, with her own mind and a sense of responsibility—she was bound to achieve something extraordinary.
The heirloom pendant was presented to Lin Ji at the birthday celebration.
Kong Yuchen hung the pendant around Lin Ji’s neck then and there.
Lin Ji thanked her grandmother, who was delighted and gave her another gift—a small bunny plushie.
The plushie was a white floppy-eared bunny, adorable and sweet, with a wonderfully soft, fuzzy texture.
For some reason, the moment Lin Ji saw it, she thought of her little fiancée.
She held it tight the whole way home and refused to let go.
Kong Yuchen, driving, asked her, “You like that bunny that much?”
Lin Ji rubbed its head and tugged at its ears.
“Mm, I like it. It’s like Meimei.”
“Meimei? Who’s Meimei?”
They only had one daughter—where would a meimei come from?
“Siyi.”
Lin Ji never called any other younger girl “Meimei”—not even cousins.
The word “Meimei” from her lips referred to one person alone—belonged only to her fiancée.
While chatting with his daughter, Kong Yuchen glanced at the fuel gauge—nearly empty.
Honestly, there was enough to get home, and even enough for the drive to the office tomorrow morning.
But that night, he was possessed by an uncanny impulse1 to fill the tank. A full tank meant peace of mind.
The cruel irony of fate was that no one could know which spur-of-the-moment decision would unleash unbearable consequences.
When everything had already happened and you looked back at fate’s crossroads, that single decision would seem so baffling it made your skin crawl.
Kong Yuchen took Lin Ji to that gas station.
While the car was fueling, he remembered the refrigerator at home was empty and decided to pick up a few things.
He took his daughter along to the convenience store on the far side of the station.
Kong Yuchen rarely took his daughter out alone—he didn’t have that instinctive vigilance.
At that distance he could still take a call, so he worked the phone while reaching for items on the shelves, asking his daughter which snacks she wanted.
And so he let go of her hand.
He couldn’t have known that from the moment he let go, it would be seven years before he held it again.
He grabbed the bread Lin Ji wanted, dropped it into the basket, exchanged a few heated words with a shareholder on the phone, hung up, and reached for his daughter’s hand to go check out.
He turned. Lin Ji was gone.
Kong Yuchen shoved the phone into his pocket, called her name, searched aisle by aisle. No one answered.
He raced through the entire store, the gas station outside, circling frantically until he was drenched in sweat—still no trace of his daughter.
Kong Yuchen rushed back to the convenience store and asked the owner if he’d seen his daughter.
The owner leaned back in his chair, fanning himself indifferently, and pointed toward the back door:
“Maybe the kid got playful and ran out that way?”
No. His daughter was steady by nature, not prone to wandering, never ran off.
Kong Yuchen couldn’t even remember if he’d answered. He bolted straight for the back door.
It was an inconspicuous back door, in a straight line from the aisle where they’d been.
It was already shut.
Kong Yuchen opened it and faced the pitch-black alley behind the store, used for deliveries.
The ground was covered in scattered footprints, carrying that distinctive summer-night smell.
Like a black mouth that had swallowed his child.
He called the police, made frantic phone calls, burning with anxiety.
In an era before surveillance cameras were widespread, child trafficking was rampant.
It was common knowledge: once a child went missing, finding them was harder than reaching the heavens.
When Lin Xuebo heard the news and rushed back to J City, she was in a daze.
Seeing her soul-shattered husband, rage surged through her and she slapped him hard across the head.
“I let you take her out one time. One time—and you lost her.”
Lin Xuebo trembled all over, the taste of blood in her throat.
Faced with his wife’s accusation, Kong Yuchen couldn’t utter a single word. He hung his head, hair a disheveled mess, and just kept making calls.
Close family and friends arrived. Qiao Jin saw Lin Xuebo’s condition and feared she’d hyperventilate into alkalosis—she guided her to sit down, made her drink water, and helped her regulate her breathing.
Lin Xuebo seemed to still have her wits, making phone calls too, but her hands were shaking beyond her control.
Lin Xuebo and Kong Yuchen searched in circles across all of J City, then expanded to other cities, traversing the entire country.
Sleepless, relentless, spending incalculable sums.
Qiao Jin stayed by her side the whole time, taking turns driving. They navigated every narrow alley, combed every suspicious location, chased down every lead with hopeful hearts.
All they got in return was despair that deepened with each attempt.
When Grandmother heard the news of her granddaughter’s disappearance, she was immediately certain it had happened because she’d asked the child to come celebrate her birthday at the Kong family’s that night.
Deep guilt took root in Grandmother’s heart. As leads dwindled and time stretched on, everyone knew the hope of the child coming home was vanishingly slim.
Even though Lin Xuebo had never spoken a word of blame to her, Grandmother passed away in boundless self-reproach, after the year’s second heavy snowfall.
That year, Lin Xuebo’s career ground nearly to a halt under the weight of that devastating blow.
Missing her daughter day and night, her hair turned white overnight.
It was Qiao Jin who ran herself ragged for her, along with a circle of family and friends, who held her up.
Qiao Jin helped her dye her hair, kept her company through conversations, and would fly thousands of kilometers at a single phone call to chase down a lead.
Even so, there was still no news of Lin Ji.
Human legs cannot measure a shifting earth.
“She’s gone.”
One day at dawn, Lin Xuebo curled up on the sofa, watching the sun rise. Her swollen, bloodshot eyes had run dry of tears.
As if speaking to herself—or to Qiao Jin, who sat beside her.
“My daughter is gone.”
While the entire family was drowning in extreme anguish, over a thousand kilometers from J City in a dark woodshed in a remote mountain village, Lin Ji—clutching her filthy little bunny plushie—passed out from hunger once again.
The family that had bought her intended to raise her as a child bride2 and a source of labor—raised to marry their disabled son.
Making her forget who she was, destroying her entire past, using every means to strip away her will to escape—that was the very first thing to be done.
When she was first brought to this household, they gave Lin Ji a new name: Xiao Li.
They told her to call them Mom and Dad.
Lin Ji didn’t even look at them. She just curled up, clutching the plushie tight against her chest.
Naturally, she was beaten savagely and locked in the woodshed.
Whenever she was willing to call them Mom and Dad, they said, she’d get food.
To their surprise, she held out for five days. Dehydration and starvation had already driven her into unconsciousness, and she still refused to say the words.
Stubborn to the bone.
The woman of the house forced some water down her throat and kept starving her.
Let’s see who outlasts whom.
In her brief moments of consciousness, Lin Ji touched her bare neck, remembering that the ancestral jade dragon and phoenix pendant her grandmother had given her had been ripped away by the trafficker.
It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried escaping under cover of night.
She knew she was young, physically weak, and completely unfamiliar with the surroundings. The odds of a successful escape were vanishingly low.
And every window in the woodshed had been nailed shut with boards—no way out, no way to observe the terrain outside.
She could only wait for night, when the family of three was asleep, and use scraps of wood from the woodshed to pry at the boards over the windows.
No loud noises. Don’t wake anyone.
She was patient and clever—prying just a tiny bit each day.
All of this required physical strength.
She hadn’t eaten in so long that the slightest movement sent her heart racing. Her stomach burned, she kept dry-heaving, and she could barely lift her arms.
The escape plan progressed agonizingly slowly, but at least it was moving forward.
But in the end, she was discovered.
The night she was nearly ready to climb out the window, a villager spotted her and dragged her back.
She was beaten so badly she couldn’t stand for days.
After that, she was locked in an even smaller woodshed.
So small, stuffed so full of firewood, that she couldn’t stretch her arms or legs.
No window—just a few air holes chiseled near the ceiling.
And outside in the dark were two dogs larger than she was.
The moment she made any sound, the dogs would bark frantically, and the couple would rush in and beat her mercilessly—no reason, no questions.
After that, whenever she heard dogs barking—even before anyone laid a hand on her—her memory would instantly resurrect the searing pain on her skin.
Her fear of dogs was planted then.
Enduring extreme physical and psychological torment in that sunless, suffocating woodshed, the only thing that gave her even a sliver of comfort was the fuzzy, filthy plushie in her arms.
Sadly, that adorable floppy-eared bunny plushie was eventually thrown out.
She could only hold herself.
In near-death hallucinations, she returned to her family’s embrace—sleeping in her own warm, clean bed at home, carried by her mother and father across endless grasslands, the crisp wind on her face.
She even returned to that warm island, holding her Meimei’s hand, walking on sand as fine as flour.
Her Meimei got sleepy and wanted to be carried.
She picked up her Meimei, kissed her forehead, and said with aching reluctance, “I’ll come back for you soon.”
Wait for me. Please wait for me…
She jolted awake to violent stomach cramps.
All the beautiful visions vanished. Before her eyes was only terrifying darkness—the suffocating crampedness that wouldn’t let her stretch her arms or legs.
Seeing her spirit this fierce—she’d rather starve than call them Mom and Dad—the couple was at a loss.
They’d paid a high price for her, after all. If she actually starved to death, they’d take a massive loss.
So they gave her a little food and water.
Each time, just a tiny amount—barely enough to keep her alive.
Children her age were in bright classrooms, surrounded by family and friends, learning and growing—some focused, some distracted.
While Lin Ji, in that windowless room reeking of mold, unable to stretch her limbs, existed on the razor-thin line between life and death, painfully experiencing it all.
One morning, she knocked on the woodshed door.
She’d given in.
Only by learning to deceive could she survive.
Keep this life alive, and there was hope—hope of leaving this suffocating space, of stepping into open sunlight again, of seeing the people she longed for.
From that day on, she was allowed out of the woodshed to work.
She had to finish every chore in the house every day. To prevent her from escaping, she was given the bare minimum of food.
Wherever she went, someone was watching—no chance to leave, no chance to contact the outside world.
At night she still slept in the woodshed, guarded by those two vicious dogs.
The village had a school, but the family wouldn’t let her attend. She didn’t care—she just borrowed books and read them ravenously.
Work required strength, and without food she couldn’t do it.
The family finally let her eat properly.
Eat. No matter what, eat. No matter how vile the food, force it down.
She needed to grow taller, grow up, build strength.
These were the prerequisites for escape.
On the surface, she’d started calling them parents, seemingly assimilating into the family.
But every deep night, she would repeat her real family’s names over and over in her mind, silently recite her own name, and recite her family’s address in J City.
Could not forget who she was. Could not forget where home was.
As she wrote, she thought of someone.
She added one more name.
Jiang Siyi.
How was her Meimei doing? What was she doing right now?
If she hadn’t been abducted at that convenience store, she’d have met her on the island this winter, wouldn’t she?
If she cried again, who would hold her? Who would comfort her?
Her heart was ash, yet somehow there were countless things she couldn’t let go of.
She wrote her past over and over, then erased it.
When she was alone again, she’d write it again. And erase it again.
Everything that was hers, everything she cherished—she forced herself to carve each piece into her very being, to never, ever forget.
The young girl learned to endure, learned to lie low without a trace.
She did every farm chore without a word. Blisters formed on her small hands and hardened into calluses.
No crying, no fussing—she looked perfectly obedient, endlessly compliant.
Only when the disabled son came near did Lin Ji reveal something terrifying.
The disabled son had something wrong with his mind—he couldn’t speak clearly and his legs were unsteady. After Lin Ji frightened him a few times, he became terrified of her and would scramble away whenever he saw her.
Even under constant surveillance, Lin Ji was quietly observing the village’s layout and terrain.
Nestled in a mountain hollow, it was hard to escape from.
The village had a thriving trade in human trafficking—the locals were tight-knit and unified.
Don’t rush, she told herself. Keep waiting for the right chance. Don’t let anything slip.
She reassured herself, keeping her restless heart in check.
And time passed—day by day, month by month, year by year slipping away.
She still did the heaviest farm work, still slept locked in that cramped room.
The opportunity she yearned for never came.
The year she was about to turn fourteen, Lin Ji sat in the courtyard, mechanically winnowing chaff from grain with a bamboo tray.
She’d been looking down when a breeze carrying the scent of flowers drifted from somewhere, making her lift her stiff, blank eyes.
In the distance, a little girl walked past on her way to school. For a fleeting moment, Lin Ji mistook her for Jiang Siyi.
Her eyes were instantly flooded with emotion.
Counting the time—her Meimei would be starting middle school now.
What did she look like now…
Was she surrounded by love? Did she still cry easily? Was there someone to comfort her?
Did she still remember me?
Would I ever see her again?
She’d drifted slightly, and the pace of her work slowed. The “father” sitting on the other side, building an earthen stove, picked up a pair of red-hot fire tongs and thrust them straight at her chest.
“Still thinking about escaping? Stop dreaming. You have no hope in this lifetime.”
The man sneered and went back to building the stove, not caring in the least what kind of scar the hot iron would leave on the young girl.
Physical pain had already numbed Lin Ji.
Pain was nothing. She didn’t care at all—just another scar.
But the weight of disappointment settled over her heart once more, condensing bit by bit into a suffocating despair.
What she didn’t know then was that the wind that day and the thoughts that came with it were an omen.
A hint that fate was about to shift once more.
The person she’d kept in her heart all along was about to send her the long-awaited dawn.
The author has something to say:
Lin Ji: Today is a hold-yourself-tight kind of day 🥺
Footnotes
- 鬼使神差 | gui shi shen chai | Literally 'guided by ghosts and gods'—a common Chinese idiom describing an action taken as though driven by an inexplicable, almost supernatural compulsion, as if some unseen force willed the decision.
- 童养媳 | tong yang xi | Literally 'child raised as daughter-in-law'—a pre-modern Chinese practice, still surviving in remote rural areas, where a young girl is purchased or taken in by a family and raised to become the wife of one of their sons, typically one who is disabled or otherwise unable to find a marriage partner.
0 Comments