4 ideas
Thirteen-year-old Fang Si-Chi, a bookish girl in a wealthy Kaohsiung apartment building, is raped by Li Guo-hua, a celebrated middle-aged cram-school literature teacher and neighbor who has his wife's and her parents' full trust. Her friend Liu Yi-Ting discovers the truth only afterward, through Si-Chi's diary.
The abuser targets a girl who loves literature because her own literacy becomes the trap. He quotes classical poetry and romantic idiom, so she has an elevated vocabulary ready for turning rape into a love story. The beauty of language does not protect against cruelty. It can be the very medium through which cruelty is disguised, and the reader of fine prose is implicated in finding it beautiful.
Si-Chi reasons that if she loves her teacher, then what happens is not rape but love. Choosing that story makes an unbearable reality psychically livable. This self-authored romance preserves her sense of agency, but it also seals her silence and binds her more tightly to the abuser. It explains why prolonged victims may appear to consent or even defend the perpetrator.
Si-Chi tentatively raises the subject with her mother. Her mother replies that sex education is for people who need it, and the conversation closes. The mother's refusal, the upscale neighbors' investment in appearances, and a culture that shames the girl rather than the man together form the conditions that let the abuse run for years. Read this way, abuse is sustained less by one predator's cunning than by a community's collective refusal to have words for it.