When he was taken away by the police, Zhu Shoucheng managed to maintain his composure, forcibly suppressing the fear of having cold handcuffs knocked on his wrists, even following the instructions in his travel brochure, and when confronted with questions about where the video and pictures of the child’s injuries on his computer came from, he said that he would not say a word until his own lawyer arrived.

He had heard that the United States was a country of evidence and that if they didn’t catch him in the act, as long as he didn’t admit it, then they had no recourse.

As he was escorted to the police station, a police officer gruffly asked Zhu Shoucheng if there was anyone who could post bail for him, and if so, he might get lucky tonight and not have to spend the night in jail.

Zhu Shoucheng gulps in the face of the orange and red telephone.

The only family he has in the United States is his son.

But he didn’t have the courage to let his son see those videos and photos, because he couldn’t guarantee that he would remember the faces of the children in them.

Between hesitations, the policeman had grown impatient, “Do you have someone to contact?”

Zhu Shoucheng asked, “How much does bail cost?”

”Depends.” The policeman was extraordinarily rude to him, “Judging by your potential for being a danger to society, $100,000.”

”…… hundred thousand?”

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Zhu Shoucheng was horrified.

Even after studying English, his Chinese thinking was still deeply rooted, and when he encountered such things, he instinctively started to bring out the big ideas and questioned the motives of the other party: “You suspect me first and violate my privacy second, this is clearly blackmail, I want to contact the embassy ……”

The other man, however, didn’t even take him up on it, “Can someone bail you out.”

That said, Zhu Shoucheng was too afraid to contact his son, so how could he dare to contact the embassy so easily?

His heart was still in a panic and his hands were shaking so much that he could not think of a good excuse to justify himself.

He thought that he might as well calm down for a while, as his son would be off work in a few hours anyway and would soon find out that he was missing and would naturally come looking for him then, and that he could probably get better results by spending those few hours getting his thoughts straight and talking to him face to face than over the phone.

Thinking about this, Zhu Shoucheng replied, “For the time being …… is not available.”

The policeman opposite gave an undisguised sneer, swiped and signed a slip, and handed him over to another policeman.

Zhu Shoucheng was too angry to speak out against such a bad attitude, so he secretly memorised his police number and was prepared to file a complaint against him as soon as he got out.

He was first taken into a makeshift holding cell, a small, four-square concrete room with an iron grille on one side and unplastered, hairy concrete on the other three walls. There was nothing but an iron toilet, a sink that was constantly seeping with water, and a standard-sized iron bed.

It was a cloudy day, and even at midday, the deep autumn breeze still sent chills down Zhu Shoucheng’s spine. Wrapped in the disinfectant-smelling quilt, he looked out at a fat policewoman dozing off, and layers of unease and fear surfaced in his mind.

The cold handcuffs were still cuffed to his wrists, a constant reminder of its presence.

For Zhu Shoucheng, this is a great insult.

The handcuffs prevented him from thinking at all, and Zhu Shoucheng curled up on the bed, even as he could not resist the tempestuous thought of smashing it up, his grievances rising to the surface, tearing apart the thoughts he had managed to put together over and over again.

Soon someone came and pointed at him and rattled off a series of words in the American dialect, as if to take him to some “jail”.

Zhu Shoucheng’s level of English is such that he can only translate it as ‘prison’ and is not very good at distinguishing it from ‘prison’.

He had heard of the American police’s six-pronged approach to shooting and knew he couldn’t offend them too much, so he had to go along, and Prime waited for his son to come and pick him up when he realised something was wrong.

But the more Zhu Shoucheng walked, the more he felt something was wrong.

He was led to a special place, given his prison coat, a towel and picked up matching shoes.

…… How does this seem to mean he’s staying here for a long time?!

As he was pushed into the cell with his basin, where six people were being held, Zhu Shoucheng’s hair stood on end as he was greeted by a number of sordid glances from the narrow space.

He stepped in, pretending to be calm, and hunkered down in the only empty bunk, bellyaching, intent on finding a reason for the existence of those things on his computer, unaware of the guards’ bizarre attitude of contempt with a hint of sympathy for him.

While the door was still open, a short teenager in a prison coat and slippers came to the door and asked the guards a few questions in Mexican, followed by a change in the way he looked back at Zhu Shoucheng.

The iron doors rumbled shut.

Zhu Shoucheng finds the atmosphere in the small room strange and the Mexican teenager gets on his hands and knees in one of the bunks and whispers quietly to the person wrapped in the blanket on the top bunk.

Zhu Shoucheng pretended not to see it, not wanting to cause trouble, but soon after he sat down, a tall cloud of gloom fell silently to his side.

Zhu Shoucheng was shocked when he looked up.

Zhu Shoucheng was already tall, but the horse-faced white man didn’t know what he had eaten and was half a head taller than him.

He was covered in superficial gangsterism and seemed unnerved by being locked up, obviously a vagrant who had been deliberately committing petty crimes for years so that he could come to the prison to dawdle over food and drink: “What were you locked up for, sir?”

Zhu Shoucheng put it succinctly: “A misunderstanding.”

The homeless man was a pester, and when Zhu Shoucheng refused, he still came over shamelessly: “Tell me about it, otherwise it would be boring.”

Zhu Shoucheng, somewhat disgusted by the taste in his mouth, said perfunctorily, “There’s nothing to say, they searched my home and found some contraband …… I didn’t mean to.”

The tramp made a scalding sucking motion to indicate to him, “Huh?”

Zhu Shoucheng was desperate to get rid of him: “It’s not smoking’ drugs, it’s …… computers.”

It dawned on the homeless man, “Oh, let me guess, you got into a site you shouldn’t have.”

As he spoke, the man who had been lying on the bed, listening to the Mexican boy, rolled over and sat up, also Mexican-looking, with a moustache on his chin that looked like a weed.

He rubbed the shit out of his eyes and crushed the filth he’d rubbed down on his fingertips, “Guys, here comes the fun. A paedophile.”

Zhu Shoucheng’s heart was filled with lead and plummeted downward, pulling his cavity into pain: “I …… am not!”

He saw that the situation was not right, and naturally he did not expect to convince them with the “love” line.

He stiffened his neck and tried desperately to explain, “I’m not, you’ve misunderstood.”

The Mexican teenager said in broken English, “We’ve asked around and you have so many pictures of little Asian kids with no clothes saved on your computer that we can’t find the source, it’s very likely you took them yourself, and besides, you used to be a teacher.”

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Zhu Shoucheng’s cold sweat broke out.

These people are really regulars at the prison, and they’re familiar with that guard!

Just now, the teenager was asking the prison guard for information ……

The bearded man stretched lazily and lay on his side, “Entertain him well. I’ll give a reward to whoever behaves well when we get out.”

Before Zhu Shoucheng could react to who the boss in this prison was, the horse-faced white man next to him flipped out abruptly, grabbed him by the hair and slammed into the wall with a bang.

Zhu Shoucheng’s head buzzed with the impact and stars danced in front of his eyes before he felt the heat flowing down through his hair.

He thought it was just his bad luck that he had met an unreasonable son of a bitch and took a couple of hard knocks and let it go.

However, when his legs went cold and he found that his trousers had been ripped off, Zhu Shoucheng finally went into a breakdown, so much so that he forgot where he was and hissed in Chinese Wen, “What are you doing? You’re breaking the law!!!”

Several people in the room looked at each other in disbelief.

They are unintelligible.

To them, the old man was an old pervert, I don’t know if he was Japanese or Korean, but Asians all look the same anyway.

All they know is that in their perception, paedophiles in prison are the lowest of all inmates, trash and something to be fixed and played with.

As he watched the Mexican teenager grab a mop pole in the corner, Zhu Shoucheng’s guts split and he broke free of the horse’s face and threw himself against the door, chiselling it with all his might: “Somebody! Where are the police? Do you care? Do you care?”

He was grabbed back and pinned down hard on the bed, a face squeezed into shape by the bed rail.

Not far away, two guards faintly heard Zhu Shoucheng’s painful, pig-like howls coming from his cell.

They looked at each other with a look of habit.

”They’re conditioning new people again.”

”Let them be.”

The two men each shrugged indifferently and went back to their busy registrations.

……

The other end.

When Zhu Shoucheng’s son and daughter-in-law came home and found his father not at home, they didn’t pay any attention to him and thought he had gone out again, until his son noticed that Zhu Shoucheng had left his mobile phone at home and panicked.

What if he gets lost in this unfamiliar place?

Zhu Shoucheng’s son contacted the local police, only to be informed of his father’s affairs instead.

When he first heard the reason for Zhu Shoucheng’s arrest, Zhu Shoucheng’s son thought it was a funny joke.

But the couple were stunned when they were coldly asked if they needed bail for Zhu Shoucheng, ignoring their questions.

After dropping off the phone, Zhu Shoucheng’s son dropped down on the sofa and spent a full three minutes unable to digest this fact, but after drifting off, he immediately did what he thought was the right thing to do.

He pulled up his suit, “I’ll go down to the police station and bail my dad out.”

However, his wife A Mei, who usually praises her father, was uncharacteristic: “Wait a minute, let’s talk about this.”

The son said sharply, “We’ll talk about it when we get back!”

A Mei yanked him: “Sit down! Get your head out of your ass! Your father is …… in no hurry to fish out!”

Zhu Shoucheng’s son was going crazy, yelling, “He’s my father! How can I let him suffer in jail?”

A Mei did the same, yelling back, “I know that’s your father! But what about you! What about your career? You’ve just arrived in America, your career is just starting, if people know you have such a paedophile dad, and you’re spending huge bail money to bail him out and fight for him, do you want your career?”

The son argued, “My dad isn’t …… he can’t be, he’s just a good old boy, there must be some kind of misunderstanding-”

A Mei : “Don’t be silly! They said that your dad first logged on to a child pornography website, downloaded pictures, left a record with the police, and spied on the kids next door before they came to the house. As a result, in his computer, they found some kind of ‘lesson plan’ of his and pictures of naked children …… That computer was brought over from China by your dad, baby-like, and I thought there was something important in it, but I didn’t expect –”

Son insists, “My dad really isn’t like that!!! He raised me all by himself, it was so hard for him ……”

”You’ve been out working and working early, what do you know about him! Do you really know him?” A Mei had palpitations, “Your dad used to say he would come to America to bring me the kids, I’m getting cold sweat down my spine just thinking about it now …… Can you calm down first, let’s talk about it and see if there is a more appropriate way to handle this ……”

However, despite his wife’s efforts to discourage him, his son went to the place where Zhu Shoucheng was being held overnight to pay bail and have his father released.

When they heard the amount of bail, both their son and A Mei froze in their tracks.

…… US$150,000.

This is simply a sign that the crime is too serious and there is no intention of letting the family out on bail!

A Mei was slightly relieved to hear this figure.

They had just arrived in the United States, and after paying full price for the house, they had less than $100,000 in their account to call on immediately, and would never be able to afford such a high bail amount.

However, what she didn’t expect was for her son to pick up his mobile phone and ask a colleague to borrow money when he heard the amount.

A Mei squashed his phone: “What’s wrong with you!?”

Tears welled up in his son, his business elite look swept away as he scratched at his hair, “My dad raised me single-handedly, I can’t let him suffer in jail!”

A Mei still held his hand and refused to let go.

The son tried his best to convince her, “As long as Dad gets out properly, goes to court properly and gets things sorted out, the money is going to come back! If you don’t agree to borrow the money, we’ll put the house up against it for now ……”

A Mei was so furious that she swung the bag at her husband’s face and slammed it so hard that the diamond-shaped zip slashed his face with a bloody gash and he left in anger.

After a nice cold breeze in the night, A Mei calmed down, fished her phone out of her bag and called her best friend back home.

”Sis, it’s me.” A Mei turned her head towards the lighted police station, “Are you busy? There’s something I might have to trouble you with. My father-in-law came to America some time ago, he used to always say he wanted to work for a few more years, but now he suddenly says the school wants him to step down …… I think it’s a bit strange, if it’s convenient for you, can you ask around for me, did something happen to him in China …… ?”

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