Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 1

Chapter 1: Special Perspective (Can be skipped; please proceed directly to the first main chapter)

(The main story is in the third person and has a less serious tone. You can skip this to read the lighthearted and comedic first chapter. This is the prologue to the protagonist’s book, not the prologue to Overly Intense! It is meant to serve the main murder plot!)

Her Kill, Hidden in the Shadows

Prologue

I don’t know if my prologue will once again stir up heated debate, but I must be honest about this book’s inception.

On April 20, 2018, I was in Berlin with Huang Qihan, the editor-in-chief of Xisha magazine, attending the International Audio-Visual Alliance Conference when news broke back home about the “Feng Yihan case.” The story of this woman, brutally dismembered by her husband, who then hid her body, caused a sensation not only in our country but also became a topic of intense discussion in the foreign press.

Feng Yihan was only four years older than me. We were both born in second-tier cities in the 1980s, and our lives followed a similar trajectory until we graduated from university.

Feng Yihan came from an area with a severe imbalance in educational resources, so for her to get from a township school all the way to the Communication University of China in the capital was no small feat. What shocked me even more was that she had studied journalism. After graduating, she worked as a reporter for a newspaper and was later transferred to the provincial paper. A bright future lay ahead of her, yet she was brutally murdered.

We ordinary people understand a simple fact: the lens of the news is involved in the construction of discourse.

The elites who hold leadership positions in the world of academic journalism are predominantly male. As the beneficiaries of the existing system and the drafters of its language, they ensure the formulation and practice of a certain journalistic mindset.

Although the news they produce covers politics and public welfare, it is undeniable that once the topics they create are released into the sphere of public discussion, they remain confined to the notion that “only men have the right to discuss these topics.”

When a woman speaks up to participate in or comment on the news, it is seen as stripping the news of its proper seriousness, making it sound like mere gossip.

That is why I paid particular attention to Feng Yihan’s performance in such a professional environment. I wanted to know if she felt powerless and oppressed in a workplace that was ideologically suffocating. I was also curious as to why she later gave up her career and chose a man who was not her equal, entering a marriage that would lay the groundwork for her own murder.

When Mr. Huang spoke of this case, he summarized it with a wry remark: “They always elevate women into works of art to complete the artistic experience that was castrated in their youth. They either process the raw material into a piece they like, or they toss it in the trash, even disparaging society’s refinements along with it. But in contrast… women are wholeheartedly devoted to romanticism, even romanticizing the parts of themselves that have been molded by others.”

“Traditional film and television love to write about men killing women. It’s undeniable that the gender ratio of murderers has not changed since ancient times, and criminological research has focused only on men. Even crime has become their privilege. But you might as well go investigate female criminals now; the proportion is rising year by year. They will be afraid too.”

As always, he spoke with a condescending air, a casual jest—or perhaps a comforting reassurance—from the position of authority he was accustomed to.

But Mr. Huang is a staunch supporter of the new women’s cinema movement. He has also participated many times in the women’s aid societies and open reading days that I have organized to help with the re-education of women.

Mr. Huang loves to discuss The Order of Things with female screenwriters, to talk about the stigmatization of the queer community, and to explore imagination in culture and media. He speaks eloquently; it might sound like harassment, but it was akin to one of Žižek’s dirty jokes.

At a film festival symposium, he pointed out that screenwriters still do not understand the plight of women in their creative consciousness and expressive tendencies. The symbolism that art bestows upon groups remains stuck in typical metanarratives. Without providing a fluid new language, any push for rights is just a pool of stagnant water.

The views he expressed in the media coincided with some of my own. We are both pursuers of equal rights; our genders do not automatically place us in adversarial positions.

Of course, if someone here were to criticize my moderate stance as the equivalent of boiling a frog in slowly heating water, I would respect every voice. Any movement will have its cyclical forms. It doesn’t matter if it’s a violent separatist faction or an optimistic revolutionary one; as long as we can find the answers we seek, that is our ultimate goal.

But with the decline of traditional media, the language of personal media has come to the forefront. Impactful ideologies are scattered across social networks. In this internet age of rapid ideological iteration, we have ushered in the fourth wave of feminism.

The factions at the round table have begun to be subdivided, becoming even more sharply defined.

Whether it’s the “Boysober” trend popular on social media abroad, the “Gender-free” concept created as a marketing gimmick, the “Misogyny” within the context of East Asian culture, or the derivative lesbian existentialism, and so on…

I have always believed that the majority of only-daughters born after the 1980s are the waves that crashed most violently in the fissures of change. As only children, they were forced to enjoy equal rights within the family. The idea that “boys and girls are equally good” caused their burgeoning self-awareness to fast-forward at eight times the speed after the millennium. But the consciousness of their family members did not keep up, nor did the supporting educational framework. This led to a situation where, once I became the master of my own desires and was handed the script of liberalism, I was at a complete loss when the desires of others conflicted with my own, and I was cut open with a knife. This sense of being torn apart is the precursor to madness.

Take the simple example of sex education.

Whether they were forced to become victims or took the initiative to become advocates, in reality, none of them were ever properly educated on what sexual values are. We used a naive, 1.0 version of understanding to withstand a 4.0 tidal wave, which resulted in sex and gender not being treated as distinct concepts. Sexual rights and gender rights were also blurred together and handled as one.

In this situation, are women who castrate the autonomy of other women true allies? Will men who use sophistry to advocate for equal rights for women end up betraying them? The intersectional theories of queer minorities, and the general lack of capacity to accept diversity and inclusivity… it seems that to voice any opinion, one must first engage in dialectics, unable to present the full picture of its essence for fear of falling into binary opposition, floating in stagnant water, internally divided, and obstructing the fight for “justice.”

Too many words can sometimes lead to a widespread aphasia.

For now, we cannot reduce the noise.

Those who know me know that I am an author, a screenwriter, and I own a new media company. Most of my creative work is related to the development of female consciousness. Ever since The Red String, which was serialized in Qingdu, I have been pursuing the deconstruction of traditional metanarratives. I often feel that my vision is blurred, the path ahead suddenly treacherous, and I subconsciously flee from the storms. In art, what is justice, and what is the middle way? It feels like an unsolvable problem that leaves one with a sense of tightness in the chest and unease.

It has been four years since my last work. Media critics often mock me, saying my artistic well has run dry, but they don’t know the truth. For the past four years, I have been visiting “re-education institutions,” investigating provincial prisons, and with the support of the Women’s Federation, my reading group has further developed into a psychological aid society for women. I have been interviewing visitors, seeking an answer to one question—the motives behind female offenders.

As Mr. Huang said, the rising number of female criminals offers a unique perspective for observation.

If you have ever attended a public lecture on criminal psychology, you would know that in the past, female offenders were relegated to minor special topics due to an insufficient sample size. Even research on the psychology, biology, and sociology of female offenders is very niche.

But they are still a group that can be observed and verified, one that is gradually growing as their participation in society increases.

In our country, the percentage of female offenders rose from 8% to 10% in 2022. Is this the emergence of a consciousness of resistance, or is it due to an increase in the avenues for committing crimes? Looking at the female criminals sentenced to death globally in 2022, there were a total of 12, mostly in the Middle East. The number of offenders I could access and from whom I could obtain usable material was zero.

Without enough cases, it is impossible to analyze the motives of female prisoners. So I went through a large amount of data for comparison and found that the typical cases recounted over and over in textbooks were all male. I never found the kind of female criminals that the media could sensationalize as the “Machete Murderess,” “Scissor Sister,” or “Corpse-Hiding Wife.”

My frustration was merely that I had hit a creative bottleneck, and nothing more.

But for the sake of my work, I could only turn my focus to the female victims at the “Logos Aid Society.” I was very happy that while writing this book, Professor Huang Han from An Gong University’s criminal psychology department provided me with a great deal of help. She gave me a lot of direction in analyzing the gender elements of crime and allowed me to interview and interact with many prosecuted female inmates, which led to the formation of this book today.

Halfway through writing this book, it happened to be the tenth anniversary of my father’s death.

That day, my mother and I went to the cemetery to pay our respects. I suddenly remembered a few things she had said to me during my childhood.

“If it weren’t for you, sometimes I really wanted to stab him to death, to just end it all with him.” After saying this, she would always follow it with: “How much better it would have been if I had never given birth to you.”

These two sentences are, in fact, remarkably similar to “I’ve lived my whole life for you.”

Because my father’s blood flows in my veins, the moment she hated him, I was supposed to vanish along with him. She wanted to kill us. It was a regret that almost happened but was missed. It was the goal she endured half her life for but never achieved, or perhaps it was just the angry personality that couldn’t help but leap out when she stood on the precipice of despair.

But my father did not die by her hand; he died of illness.

When my father passed away, I saw the tears my mother shed at his bedside. The tears were sincere, but they were also an intrusion.

It was as if some strange, supernatural circle had appeared. She was wedged by death between enormous obstacles. The destructive nature of her nearly forty-year marriage had gradually accustomed her to the role of a victim. The moment I wiped away my mother’s tears at the bedside, I suddenly became very curious: would my father’s death bring salvation to this destroyer? Would the latter half of her rescued life still decay? At that moment, did her long-ago wish to kill him stop spreading?

With this thought in mind, I finished the remaining half of the book.

One is a victim before becoming a perpetrator. I am not yet sure if presenting this perspective without complete information will be labeled as “absolving their crimes.” This is my first attempt at the suspense genre, using a semi-deductive narrative style to write about the brutal murderous intent of three women. It is also the first time I have created something without the filter of any particular angle, narrating directly. Therefore, I can only strive to inhabit their beings, to become their eyes, to open them wide and see the full picture of how they operate, to understand where their sense of self disappeared to before they granted themselves the right to pass a death sentence.

—Qin Luo