Gu Family Estate Case: The Truth Fund
The lavender in Provence hasn't bloomed yet; the green seedlings in the fields are barely ankle-deep. As Ah Yu squatted in the backyard of the guesthouse turning the soil, his phone vibrated rapidly on the stone table. The three words "Lawyer Zhang" flashing on the screen made his fingers pause for half a second.
Zhong Hua was stuffing the dried lavender bouquet into a glass jar when she heard the noise and turned around: "Is it news about the inheritance case?" As she spoke, there were still some dry grass clippings on her eyelashes, which she had picked up this morning while tidying up the storage room—where the last batch of boxes they had shipped from China were piled up, with the old file folders of the Gu Group at the bottom.
Ah Yu wiped the mud off her hands and answered the phone. The wind blew in through the open wooden window, carrying the distant sound of church bells. Attorney Zhang's voice came through the phone, hoarse with a sense of relief: "The court has finally ruled that the seventeen properties and some liquid assets under the Gu family's name will be used to compensate the families of the victims of the arson case."
"How much?" Zhong Hua leaned closer, the ends of her hair brushing against Ah Yu's wrist like a light feather.
Ah Yu covered the microphone and looked at her. The morning light fell on the scar on her right eyebrow, the mark carved by rubble in the mudslide, now as faint as a pale pink line. His Adam's apple bobbed: "That's enough."
It's enough to cover the follow-up treatment costs for those injured people who have been hospitalized for years, enough to compensate the three children who lost their father in the factory explosion until they reach adulthood, and enough to allow the suppliers who were driven bankrupt by Gu Yanting to rent a small shop again. Attorney Zhang added on the other end: "There is also a special fund that the court recommends you supervise—after all, it is the key evidence you found."
After hanging up the phone, Zhong Hua suddenly squatted down and hugged her knees. Ah Yu thought she was reminded of the flashing lights at the press conference—when she stood on stage exposing Gu's forgery of the quality inspection report, her right hand trembled so much that she could barely hold the microphone. He had secretly slipped her a mint backstage, and the rustling of the foil was the only whisper that day.
"What are you thinking about?" He squatted down as well, the dew on the grass wetting his trouser legs.
“I’m reminded of Gu Yanting’s suicide note.” Zhong Hua’s voice was muffled between his knees. “He said, ‘I spent my whole life building an empire, only to find that the foundation was broken glass.’”
Ah Yu remembered the man who committed suicide in prison. In the tucked compartment of his suicide note, besides a video of the arson scene, there was a yellowed photograph: a young Gu Yanting holding the hand of a little girl with pigtails, the background being the groundbreaking ceremony for Gu's first factory. Later, they learned from an email sent by Lin Wanqing that it was his daughter who had died young, killed in a kindergarten fire caused by substandard building materials—the beginning of his later frenzied accumulation of wealth and self-destruction.
"Let's go to the office." Ah Yu reached out and pulled her, the calluses on her palm brushing against Ah Yu's fingertips.
The ground floor of the guesthouse they rented in Provence had been converted into a temporary office. A world map was pinned to the wall, with all locations related to the Gu family case marked in red: the apartment in the 17th arrondissement of Paris (where Lin Wanqing had hidden evidence), the pilgrimage route in Tibet (where Zhong Hua said, "I want to be a journalist again"), and the steps of Montmartre (where Ah Yu first held her hand).
Zhong Hua opened the asset list sent by the court, her pen pausing on the "Victims List" page. Next to the third name was a small sun drawn on the page. It was the first story Ah Yu told her after she woke up in the ICU: a boy named Xiao Yu whose father died in the explosion at the Gu's factory. He refused to leave the house after that until last week when he sent a drawing—a drawing of three little people holding sunflowers, signed "To the uncles and aunts who helped find the truth about my father."
“This money can’t just be used for compensation.” Zhong Hua suddenly looked up, his eyes shining like stars in Tibet. “Let’s set up a fund.”
Ah Yu was putting filter paper into the coffee machine when he heard this and stopped. Sunlight streamed through the blinds, casting stripes of light and shadow on his face, much like the rock formations they had seen in the snow-capped mountains.
“Call it the ‘Truth Foundation’.” Zhong Hua pushed the list over, his fingertip pointing to the words “Gu’s Laboratory”. “It’s not just about giving money; it’s also about helping those voices that have been covered up to be heard. For example, the safety hazards in Xiaoyu’s father’s workshop, or the drug scandal that was suppressed three years ago—I actually wrote about this in the interview transcript I read in the hospital.”
Ah Yu recalled that early morning in the ICU. He was leaning over the bed reading her old interview notebook, and when he got to the "person I want to thank the most," the monitor's waveform suddenly went off track. Later, Zhong Hua said that she heard it at the time, but she didn't have the strength to open her eyes—the page that said was "the person who gave me the last piece of compressed biscuit in the mudslide."
“We need to register an organization and find professional people to manage it.” Ah Yu picked up his coffee, the steam from the rim blurring his expression. “We also have to face the counterattack from the remnants of the Gu family.”
“I know.” Zhong Hua’s thumb traced the edge of the list, where the bloodstains from when she attended the press conference with her injuries still remained. “But do you remember the postcard Lin Wanqing sent from Paris? On the back it said, ‘The truth is not the end, but the beginning.’”
They spent three months preparing. Zhong Hua flew to China four times, selecting team members with the help of non-profit organizations: there was a journalist who had been fired for reporting on inside stories, a young lawyer specializing in labor law, and a doctor who switched careers to become a psychological counselor after losing his daughter. Ah Yu stayed in Provence to handle funding, working late into the night in front of her computer every day, with chamomile tea brewed by Zhong Hua always under her desk lamp—she knew he would suffer from insomnia when he was anxious.
On the day the foundation was established, they didn't hold a ceremony. Zhong Hua drew a tree on the whiteboard in his office, with the word "Truth" written on the trunk, and sticky notes hanging on the branches: "Xiao Yu's drawing," "Master Li's work injury assessment," and "The altered quality inspection report." When Ah Yu was pasting the last one, Zhong Hua suddenly laughed: "You pasted it upside down."
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