Chapter 1
This story begins after I started high school in 2004.
I'm an only child and we live in a somewhat underdeveloped small city. My parents are both employees of a state-owned enterprise.
They had high hopes for me from a young age, so they sent me to the local school for children of the employees at the age of six. Back then, elementary school enrollment wasn't strict about age, you just had to be able to write your own name. Because my name, Zhang Yibin, is quite complex, when my dad took me to register and I successfully wrote it in the paper, the teacher praised me profusely. This made my dad very proud.
I had already started school a year earlier than most people. As luck would have it, our local education system underwent reforms shortly after. When I was in elementary school, the system was five years of elementary school followed by four years of middle school. But when I entered middle school, it changed to six years of elementary school and three years of middle school. In the end, I completed only eight years of compulsory education and had to go to high school before I was even fourteen.
The high school I got into was quite far from home. My family lived in the employee residential area on the eastern outskirts of the city, while the high school I was going to attend was almost on the western edge of the city. It took 50-minutes from the bus to get there, and I had to change buses in between. For someone like me, who had never gone out alone and was somewhat timid, this seemed like an insurmountable challenge. Plus, even though I was fourteen and not exactly a child, my mother had always been a bit overindulgent with me. I had never even washed my own socks at home, let alone lived independently.
So, my parents were also quite worried, especially my mother. Throughout the summer vacation, she constantly lectured me on how to manage living in a dorm.
Once I started high school, the unfamiliar environment, the unfamiliar classmates and everything around me made me feel very out of place. Moreover, I was young and naive, so I couldn't even hold a proper conversation with my classmates. I hadn't made a single close friend even after a lot of time had passed since school started. Because of this, my studies didn't go well either. At the end of the first semester, my final exam results were only average. For my parents, who were used to me ranking at the top of the class throughout elementary and middle school, this was a clear sign that I wasn't studying properly. After a harsh scolding, my father also smacked my butt with his slippers a few times.
At the time, I just felt extremely wronged and resentful towards them. They didn't care about the reason why my grades had dropped. They didn't know how lonely it had been for me to live with classmates who were two or three years older than me nor did they realize how far behind the educational level of my previous middle school was compared to those in the city. They had no idea how much I was struggling with my studies.
The winter vacation of my high school was very short. I began the second semester carrying a belly full of complaints and indignation at my parents' unreasonable parenting. Due to the separation into arts and science curriculum, I was reassigned to a new class and dormitory. By then, I wasn't as clueless as I had been in the first semester. I got along much better with my new classmates and roommates. Before long, I followed them to internet cafes where I learned how to play games online, and from then on, I became hopelessly addicted to online games.
My first all-nighter at an internet cafe also happened during that time. Even now, I can still recall the nervous and excited feeling of my first overnight stay at a cafe.
It was also during that time that I first saw Japanese AVs. Back then, there were no video sharing sites, we used a software called Vagaa. Those who were around back then should know it. It was a magical little software full of viruses that could slow down the entire internet cafe if just one person used it.
The wide variety of short films and videos there opened the door to a whole new world for me.
The one that left the deepest impression on me was a short clip called "The Telephone Lady." I don't know how many people have seen it. The actress was a Chinese woman who was dressed in a uniform and stockings. She was speaking Mandarin to a client on the phone while being screwed by her boss. Although it was only a short clip, it made me so hard I felt like I was going to explode. Even now, I still have that short film saved on my computer, and every time I watch it, I get so excited I can't control myself.
But what had the deepest impact on me was a novel I stumbled upon called "Big-Breasted Slut." At the time, that novel was simply shocking to me, so much so that I came in my pants right there in the internet cafe.
Having opened the door to this whole new world, my final exam results unsurprisingly dropped even further, almost falling to the bottom of the class.
When I went home for the summer vacation, even my usually mild-mother couldn't take it anymore. She grabbed a clothes hanger rod and beat me with it. For the entire summer vacation, she never gave me a kind look.
However, I don't know if it was because I was a year older and felt more independent, or because I had been exposed to the adult world, but in any case, I didn't listen to their earnest lectures or the beating I got from them. Every day, all I could think about was taking the scenes from "Big-Breasted Slut" or "The Telephone Lady" and substituting my mother into them, then masturbating furiously. Although I would feel guilty and disgusted with myself after finishing for having such filthy thoughts about my own loving mother, I couldn't control my mind. I would always end up fantasizing about it eventually.
During the summer vacation, my parents felt that this couldn't go on. They thought that if they didn't get me under control soon, I would be completely ruined. The solution they finally came up with was for my mother to take a leave of absence from her job and rent a place near my school so she could stay with me and supervise my studies.
At that time, the state-owned enterprise where my parents worked actually encouraged employees to apply for unpaid leave to start their own businesses. This wasn't because the company was doing poorly; on the contrary, my parents' salaries had been increasing every year in those years. It was simply to comply with national policy.
After they discussed it, they decided this was the best solution and told me about it.
My first thought was, "I'm done for." I would never have the chance to go to the internet cafe again, and all-nighters would be completely out of the question.
Then, I felt a bit ashamed. After all, it was still rare for parents to accompany their children to school at that time. The thought of being an adult and still needing my mother to come and watch over me was just too embarrassing. I could see my classmates laughing at me for being a kid who never grew up. It was truly humiliating.
But given my exam results, I didn't have the face to protest anything. I could only accept the miserable reality and move into the rental place my parents had chosen for the new semester. It was a courtyard house built by a family right behind the school.
Back then, the area around my high school was very run-down, pretty much like the countryside.
But the courtyard house we were renting was quite well-built. The landlord was an old man in his fifties, also surnamed Zhang. He had three daughters and one son. The daughters were all married, leaving only the son at home.
The old man lived in the main room of the first floor, while the west room was for his son. The south facing room was the kitchen and the area for the landlord's family, and the bathroom was located in the corner. My mother and I would live in the east room.
Above the main room of the first floor was another large room, which was rented by a young couple. Above the west room were two unoccupied rooms while the east and south rooms didn't have any rooms built on top of them. That space was used for drying clothes.
Fortunately, my mother's application for a leave of absence wasn't processed as quickly as we'd expected. She didn't arrive until a month later. In the meantime, I used that month to enjoy my last taste of freedom, and unexpectedly, I ended up becoming close friends with the landlord's son.