NOVPUBXu Qingfan sheepishly left the kitchen and returned to his room, where he started drying his hair and turned on his computer.
Because traveling had drained so much of his energy, Xu Qingfan had only paid attention to the small composition incident for the first two days and hadn’t bothered with it since.
The last time he checked on September 2, the repost count of the post had already broken thirty thousand, and the number of likes was about the same.
As soon as the computer booted up, QQ, set to log in automatically, also started, and before long, a continuous coughing and dripping sound began coming out of the speakers.
After muting his computer, Xu Qingfan moved his mouse to the QQ icon at the bottom right corner; a long stream of message alerts popped up, and it took him ignoring them more than twenty times before everything fell silent again.
What Xu Qingfan cared about the most was the repost situation of the post. Ignoring a large pile of unread messages, he went straight to his QQ Zone.
Before even scrolling to the post, he was startled by the number of messages and visitors displayed at the top.
Messages: 132,000, Visitors: 3.82 million.
"Holy shit!" Xu Qingfan blurted out an expletive.
When he clicked into his post, the number of likes and reposts astonished him again.
Likes: 1.8 million, reposts: 7.52 million, and the number of comments in the section below had also rocketed beyond 100,000+.
The Six Degrees of Separation theory states that you can meet anyone in the world through a chain of no more than six people, and this theorem obviously applies to QQ Zone as well.
If A is named for Xu Qingfan’s original post, B for the reposts of A, and C for the re-reposts of B, then whether you’re sharing ABC or DEF, the repost count will be tallied under the very first post A, hence it’s not surprising that there are more than seven million reposts.
Of course, seven million is a big number, but compared to some traffic celebrities who generate tens of millions of reposts in a day, it’s totally dwarfed. 𝓃𝓸𝓿𝓹𝓾𝓫.𝓬ℴ𝓶
In any case, Xu Qingfan’s little composition had completely gone viral. How far away from an avalanche it was, remained to be seen.
After sorting the comments section by the number of likes, many highly-rated comments quickly appeared on his screen.
Netizen a: My junior high school English teacher was Shan Fengtao, I can guarantee with my reputation that all the contents of the article are true!
Netizen b: Shan Fengtao, you still owe me an MP4 player, damn it. You took my MP4 player and didn’t return it even after I graduated!
Netizen c: I spent nearly 50,000 on tutoring with her over three years of junior high and got a 62 in English on the middle school entrance exam. [Smile]
Netizen d: Shan Fengtao’s phone number is 130xxxxxxx, and she lives at...
...
As Xu Qingfan had expected, countless students once taught by Shan Fengtao were leaving backstabbing comments in the section, and some even went so far as to post her home address, personal information, and didn’t spare her second-grade son, unveiling her privacy for all the netizens with "divine skills" to see.
He then searched "Licheng Middle School Shan Fengtao" on the browser, and soon screen-filling keyword links appeared.
Sina, NetEase, Mop, Tieba, and other major portal websites were vying to repost the story; Shan Fengtao had become yet another person reviled on the entire net following "Zhang Ya."
The more Xu Qingfan watched, the more spirited he became, until Yao Jiping called him from the doorway to come out for a late-night snack, and he finally left the screen reluctantly.
The late-night snack was very sumptuous, including fried mushrooms, mushroom soup, blanched lettuce, seafood congee in a clay pot, stir-fried beef ho fun, and Yao Jiping’s signature dish, stir-fried field snails.
The sumptuous meal clearly had been prepared in advance by Yao Jiping, concerned they would be hungry after returning so late.
"Mmm~ this is especially delicious!" Lin Jing praised after tasting a spoonful of the mushroom soup.
"I thought the kid was bragging on the phone, but it turns out it’s really this fresh."
"Not bad."
All three adults focused on the mushroom soup, whereas the three of them, after eating it day in and day out during their travels, didn’t feel much for it and had a special fondness only for the Hong Kong-style late-night snacks like stir-fried beef ho fun and seafood congee.
Returning from a trip, what I missed the most was the familiar taste of hometown dishes.
"Mom, you guys should also take a flight and go on a trip sometime, instead of playing mahjong with a bunch of aunties every day. It’s just a four-hour trip to and from Kun City, though the mushrooms will have to wait until next year," Xu Qingfan felt his mother simply didn’t like to make an effort, using the lack of time as an excuse when, in reality, she just didn’t want to step out of her comfort zone.
"You little brat, I... have a week’s worth of lessons to catch up on, make sure you study hard tomorrow!" Yao Jiping had wanted to say who would cook for you if I went traveling, but then she remembered Xu Qingfan really could cook, so she quickly changed the subject.
"Taking a flight? Xiao Fan, you’re so used to flying, you’re treating it like riding a scooter, aren’t you?" In their area, riding scooters was referred to as "hitting the scooter" or "flying scooter," so Lin Jing said this with a chuckle.
"Yeah, Mom, in first class, each person gets their own seat, and the chair can recline like in a car, it’s much more comfortable than economy class!" Xia Xiaoxiao grabbed a big piece of beef from Xu Qingfan’s bowl into her own and pretended as if nothing had happened as she spoke.
"And you can watch movies, too!" Wu Lingyu added from the side.
"So you all flew first class, huh? Auntie hasn’t even been on a plane before, come on, tell me all about it so I can also broaden my horizons," Yao Jiping said with a smile.
"The plane tickets were bought by Aunt Zhang, we..." Both young girls excitedly shared their first-time first-class experiences like a guide.
"First class must be pretty expensive, right? I’ve seen on TV they can cost tens of thousands," Lin Jing thought to herself that she shouldn’t always take advantage of her daughter’s classmate.
"It’s not too bad; September is the off-season for travel, so first class is just more than double the price of economy. You can find tickets for a little over a thousand yuan. Auntie, those ten-thousand yuan first-class tickets you see on TV are for international flights. Those are a bit fancier!" Xu Qingfan explained.
"That’s quite affordable," Lin Jing said with a laugh.
Xu Qingfan suddenly remembered that Lin Jing worked in the education system, so she might know about Shan Fengtao’s incident.
"By the way, Auntie, while we were away this week, was there anything exciting in the education system? I just saw a lot of netizens online bashing a teacher from Licheng Middle School," Xu Qingfan asked knowingly, feigning confusion.
Xia Xiaoxiao and Wu Lingyu gave him a strange look but said nothing, quietly waiting for Lin Jing’s response.
"You’re talking about that thing with Licheng Middle School, right? I know about it, it’s something Shan... what Peach," Lin Jing said, glancing at her daughter and continuing, "Shan Fengtao!"
"Right, Shan Fengtao." Lin Jing looked at her own daughter and then continued, "I started paying attention to this matter on Thursday because you all attend Licheng Middle School. That day, at noon when school let out, I was about to head home when I saw reporters interviewing at the entrance of Licheng Middle School. I went over to have a look..."
Lin Jing narrated the story; it turned out that as early as Thursday, three days prior, the essay issue had caught the attention of the Hong Kong media. Various news channels, primarily those that covered human-interest stories, had all rushed to Licheng Middle School to conduct on-site interviews.
When Shan Fengtao first heard that a TV station wanted to interview her, she was so excited she was beside herself.
Why would they want to interview her? Certainly, it was because her dedicated, dutiful work attitude had won the acclaim of the masses, a recognition of her ten-year teaching career!
Shan Fengtao even thought about the six empty seats in Group Eight, [I must take this opportunity to give a piece of my mind about today’s students and parents!]
She dolled herself up beautifully, confident as she approached the school gate for the interview, and then she was dumbstruck.
[Is it true that you run a tutoring class outside of school?]
[Someone has reported you for lacking teacher’s ethics and verbally abusing students, how do you respond to this?]
[Licheng Middle School’s Shan Fengtao, don’t you feel any remorse, have you read this article, what is your response?]
[...]
The barrage of questions threw her off balance, and Shan Fengtao stood in the center like a statue, surrounded by enthusiastic reporters, unable to leave or speak.
Shan Fengtao’s disgraceful behavior was widely reported by various news outlets, and her silence was taken by the media as an admission of guilt; she was subsequently publicly condemned.
It wasn’t long before the school’s suspension notice landed on her desk.
She had not even had time to pack her personal items from her desk when the notice from Licheng Education Bureau, canceling her teacher’s certification and revoking her teaching license, was publicized on the official website.
Meanwhile, as the mastermind behind this affair, Xu Qingfan was far away in Dali, enjoying the magnificent landscapes of the motherland with a group of lovely ladies.
