Zhong Wanzhen's Class 18

Zhong Wanzhen is the “perfect student” in Class 1, Grade 12, at Wutong High School: top three in her year, obedient and sensible, with a bright future ahead. There’s a surveillance camera outside her bedroom door, and her mother’s eyes are always scrutinizing every part of her life. Every day is planned down to the minute. She’s like a wind-up doll, dancing and spinning without end. Then she meets Ren Yi. Ren Yi is from Class 18, Wutong High School’s most notorious “problem class.” Fighting, skipping school, and talking back to teachers are his trademarks. But he’ll hand a bottle of mouthwash to a girl he doesn’t know on the rooftop, walk away smiling after someone splashes soy milk on him, and solve the hardest problems in math competition prep class using the most unconventional methods. They meet through a math competition and cautiously grow closer in the gray area where everyone thinks they “shouldn’t be hanging out.” Their homeroom teacher’s warnings, their classmates’ whispers, and screenshots from her mother’s surveillance camera: every pair of eyes is like a wall, trying to push them back onto their separate paths. But Zhong Wanzhen doesn’t want to go back. She has to make a choice: let other people’s eyes define her life, or tear off the labels stuck to her herself? This is a story about labels and tearing them off, about good students and bad kids, and about teenagers trapped in the cage of being “someone else’s perfect child” as they search for their own true voices in an imperfect world.