“How could a thirteen-year-old plan something so wicked?”
Zuin Chen’s Bad Kids is a perfect addition to the Pushkin Vertigo line. This vicious crime story explores how social issues impact innocence and how easily one murder leads to another. …
13 year old Zhu Chaoyang is a model student. His divorced mother has a low-paying job which necessitates her absence for days at a time, yet Zhu not only gets to school on time but is at the top of his class. Small for his age, and badly dressed, he is subjected to constant bullying. He has no friends, and carries a deep sense of shame and abandonment. His father, Zhu Yongping, a wealthy man, had an affair and subsequently divorced his wife, remarried a sour, domineering woman named Wang Yao and had a daughter, Jingjing. Zhu Yongping, yielding to his second wife’s demands, gives his first wife very little money. During a visit to his father’s seafood factory, Zhu Chaoyang discovers that his half sister doesn’t even know of his existence. Zhu Yongping’s card-playing friends chide him for his treatment of his only son–a son that anyone could be proud of.
At a low point of Zhu Chaoyang’s life, Ding Hao, a former classmate, shows up on Zhu’s doorstep with an 11-year-old girl in tow. Ding Hao and Pupu have run away from an orphanage. Both children are orphaned as the result of their parents’ executions for murder. As the children of murderers, they carry a heavy stigma, and landed in the lowest orphanage possible. Here they were exposed to sexual abuse and physical abuse with the result that both Ding Hao and Pupu are completely corrupted and lack any moral compass whatsoever. The two orphans beg Zhu Chaoyang to be allowed to stay for a few days. He agrees out of pity and guilt, but at the same time there’s a sliver of fear as these two youngsters have survived in a world he cannot even imagine.
The three kids take a trip to Sanmingshan and there snapping photos, they accidentally capture a murder on video. Teacher Zhang Dongsheng, acting the perfect son-in-law, takes his elderly in-laws to a scenic view on a mountain top, and there, while posing them for photos, he pushes them to their deaths. The police rule the deaths as a tragic accident, but the three kids know otherwise. Zhang’s wife, who wants a divorce, begs her uncle, Professor Yan Liang for help as she believes that she will be murdered next. The professor poo-poos her theory as Zhang was one of his best students and is, in his closed mind, incapable of murder.
Bad Kids is extremely well-plotted and the twists and turns take the reader on a ride as these opportunistic ‘bad kids’ seek financial security and revenge. Moral judgments are made by the police during the investigation of the string of murders that take place, and these judgments cloud the investigation. Moral judgments don’t occur in the minds of Dang Hao and Pupu who have been thrust into an adult world too soon, and in their need to survive, they have both done (and do) awful things. They don’t stop to think about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’; they just do what they think they have to do in order to survive the violent corrupt world in which they have no adult protectors. And that brings me to Zhu Chaoyang, am extremely intelligent, self-controlled, disciplined teen who does know right from wrong, but that is overridden by a cold, calculating desire for revenge. This is a fascinating dark read.
Review copy
Translated by Michelle Deeter
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