2025-05-31
I am going to Lanzhou next week, feeling desperate.
I finally gained a few readers who like me after starting writing. When I was happy to meet those loving readers and friends, what they tipped me became the ironclad evidence of my profiteering.
I just passed the postgraduate entrance examination this year, found a temporary job, and made plans with friends to go out for a trip and wait for the start of school in September. Everything was too good to be true.
However, a phone call from Lanzhou, Gansu completely shattered my sweet dream. They said that my graduate school enrollment was voided, and I lost my temporary job. I also had to cancel the travel plan with my friends with vague excuses.
All the profits were just a little over 2,000 yuan (~270 usd), the round-trip air tickets to Lanzhou cost about the same amount. I wrote two books with a total of ~200,000 words, and the combined number of clicks was ~ 100,000.
My first reaction was that this is absurd.
A multi-chaptered novel is one self-contained book, but they treated each chapter as an independent work and added the number of clicks for each chapter. (There are 72 chapters in the two books, and the first chapter, while being the most clicked one, only got 5,000)
Who can guarantee that 5,000 people have finished the whole book?
Who can confirm that there are no repeated clicks among the 100,000 clicks?
What exactly is actual click and effective click?
There is a fundamental difference between one IP clicking 72 times and 72 IP clicking once, but they convicted me in the most crude and rough way.
They did not remove duplicates, turned a deaf ear to my protests, and did not record my words in full in the transcript (when questioning).
Are my clicks really that high? Are there really 100,000 people who have seen my work like they said? Are they really going to sentence me to 3-5 years? Don’t they know how precious 3-5 years of life are?
Writing this, the most I’m feeling is unfair.
I checked the legal terms overnight. They forcibly confiscated my phone without a search warrant, checked my privacy records, flipped through my photo albums, peeked at my chat records, and even asked me to tell them my Alipay password and WeChat password.
Why should I be like this, as if I were stripped naked and gazed at?
I stayed in custody for almost twelve hours after the first round of questioning(with transcript) was completed.
My dad had been waiting for me outside the police station. He asked them gingerly what I had done wrong, and said in a low voice that I was still young and didn’t know what I was doing, it was really not intentional.
I had been enduring the pain, but couldn’t help crying when I saw him.
I said sorry, sorry, sorry to my dad.
My dad held me in his arms, patted my head and said it was okay, it was okay, I’ll talk to your mum when I get home, and you can talk to her after she calms down.
My dad used his phone, which is a model he’s been using for several years, to pay the bail. The phone case had turned yellow, and the phone screen had several obvious scratches on it.
I watched the wind at one o’clock in the morning blowing on his gaunt face, and his fingers were not very flexible in tapping out the amount (of bail).
Tears kept falling, and they kept falling.