7.
Trần Nguyên’s Account (3)
To make me a normal person, my mother took me to live right next to the execution ground, hoping it would change my mindset.
But after watching so many executions, I gradually grew used to them. Everyone reacted differently before being executed, but death was always the same. Little by little, I came to feel that execution wasn't all that frightening.
My mother's counterintuitive approach to raising me not only failed to turn me into a good person, but also made me even calmer about the price I'd pay for becoming worse. She had no idea, so every day she still bowed her head and opened that window for me to watch.
Of course, my mother didn't give up on positive treatments, either. There was a doctor named Giang who ran a clinic in town and worked part-time as a psychological counselor.
Back then, very few people came in for counseling. Most of the time, he treated minor illnesses like colds and fevers.
Later, I became a regular at his clinic and received psychological treatment from him. To hide the fact that I was being treated for mental health problems, my mother carried on with Dr. Giang, a single man in his fifties, pretending she was asking him to look after me.
People in town mocked her, saying she was old and already had a grown son, yet still wanted a man.
Whatever was going on between them, we still had to pay for my treatment. Psychological therapy was expensive enough, and the medication cost even more. Since Dr. Giang wasn't qualified to prescribe psychiatric drugs, he got them from illegal sources and prescribed them to me.
It wasn't that I couldn't go to a regular hospital for treatment or a prescription. My mother simply didn't want me to. I kept all of this secret because she didn't want me to have a psychiatric diagnosis and treatment on my record.
She hoped I could recover quietly without it affecting my future life. She trusted Dr. Giang's abilities completely and always believed I still had a future.
For my mother's sake, I never had any psychiatric diagnosis or treatment entered into my records. Dr. Giang thought my antisocial personality might have been caused by childhood trauma.
He said hypnosis could help me find the root of my illness, then uncover my hidden pain and reshape my subconscious to achieve the goals of therapy.
It sounded wonderful, but it never worked. That's because a crucial prerequisite for hypnosis to succeed is trust.
I didn't trust Dr. Giang at all, so he found nothing. If he couldn't treat the root cause, he could only treat the symptoms.
Dr. Giang prescribed a medication called Chlorpromazine, which could help people stabilize their emotions and suppress criminal behavior.
However, the drug had serious side effects and could easily make patients lethargic and drowsy, or even impair their cognitive abilities. He prescribed it for me, but I never took a single dose.
As a result, neither the root cause nor the symptoms could be addressed. This did no harm to Dr. Giang. If my condition didn't improve, he could just keep treating me. I'd be his patient forever.
In the end, I went to the clinic just to snack and read, making the excuse of 'looking after the child' truly worthwhile. Dr. Giang and I worked together to fool my mother, but she was the only one who didn't know what was going on.
To cover the high cost of my treatment, my mother not only worked at a machine factory but also took on odd jobs in her spare time. She was not yet forty then, with a youthful face, but half her hair had already turned gray.
Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night and hear my mother crying and sighing; sometimes I'd see her full of hope, working tirelessly. My father had seen my true nature and decided to leave at once, but my mother stubbornly refused to give up.
So many women are weak like that. They can clearly support themselves, yet still long for someone to lean on. She had only one son left. She placed all her hopes for the future in me.
She hoped I could study, work, get married, and have children like most normal people, so she could rely on me when she grew old and frail. She had done nothing wrong; she was just a mother like any other.
But I wasn't a normal child. I couldn't live up to my mother's expectations, and being with her made me feel frustrated and miserable. Studying, working, getting married, and having children were not what I wanted. The only thing I craved was crime, and it was a path I was destined to take.
You may be wondering why I'm so sure I'll commit a crime. It's because this is what happened after I tried to save myself.
My time at the clinic was not wasted. I read Dr. Giang's psychology books and discovered that the path to salvation lay there.
Traumatic childhood experiences can create a butterfly effect and have a profound impact on a person's life. That's the horror of childhood shadows. There was a traceable path by which I had changed from a good boy into a bad one.
I used to run away from that pain, which left me helpless for years. After studying psychology on my own, I gradually understood that unless I untied the knot formed by the darkness of my childhood, I would keep suffering and never escape it.
In second grade, I locked my classmates in an abandoned storage room and anxiously watched as everyone searched for them. But what grudge did I have against those classmates? One of their fathers had hurt me.
His name was Chu Hồng Hưng. Chu Hồng Hưng sexually abused me when I was seven or eight years old.
I was little then and didn't understand much, but seeing a kind adult suddenly turn vicious, and the fear and pain I felt, were all very real. Afterward, I was terrified and told my father what had happened, hoping he would help me seek justice.
But my father hesitated and eventually told me not to go to my classmate's house anymore. If my father didn't dare fight back, then I was even less likely to. I couldn't let go of the pain, so I had no choice but to take revenge on Chu Hồng Hưng's son.
Ordinary revenge doesn't make people feel any pain. As soon as I locked his son in the storage room, he sexually abused me again and warned me not to touch his child anymore.
Chu Hồng Hưng always made himself out to be a good, kind man. He was always friendly and cheerful with everyone.
The first time he saw me, he smiled and said, “What a cute little boy.” He bought me all kinds of delicious treats. But in the end, he showed me his most terrifying face.
No one would believe a child's accusation against such a good man—not even my father. After that, I never told anyone what had happened. But gradually, I became sensitive and gloomy, the kind of person who always got even.
Usually, it was over trivial things, and I struck back viciously right away. Every act of revenge felt like compensation for the regret of not having fought back the first time.
But it was like scratching an itch; a strange hatred still welled up inside me. Gradually, I realized that Chu Hồng Hưng was the knot in my heart.
No one could save me but myself. I had to kill him. I'd been planning to kill Chu Hồng Hưng for ten years.
When I was a child, I wasn't strong enough to resist his violence. But now I was grown, and he was old. Killing him would be as easy as squashing a fly. You say I destroyed Chu Hồng Hưng's happy family. What about the way he destroyed my life and my family?
Only by killing him could I be free. That was the real reason I killed Chu Hồng Hưng.