Chapter 435= Chapter 293: Past Events_l
Translator: 549690339
In his youth, Harrison Clark had imagined this moment many times.
One day, his birth parents suddenly appeared outside the classroom, calling his
name.
Then he could leave this painful home and return to where he belonged.
But as the days passed, he gradually gave up on such hopes, becoming numb and no longer holding onto fantasies, only wishing to change his fate through hard work.
He was unsure of his feelings toward his birth parents.
Should he be grateful to them for giving him life?
It was only right to be grateful.
But why couldn’t they take good care of him, leaving him all alone in a stranger’s house, becoming someone else’s son bought with money, and feeling no warmth when thinking of his parents?
So, even though he knew it was wrong, Harrison held some resentment toward his birth parents in his heart.
He hated that if they couldn’t raise him properly, why did they bring him into
the world?
Since they gave birth to him, why didn’t they try to find him when he went missing?
If he hadn’t been a bit more stubborn, stronger, and better at hiding his cold-heartedness than ordinary people, he would have almost fallen into the abyss beyond redemption.
This resentment from his youth lurked in his heart, supposedly forgotten, but now it was suddenly brought up by Avril Green, leaving him at a loss what to do.
The impact of this deep-rooted emotion was even stronger than when he faced death as a human leader.
Now he could shoulder the responsibility of saving civilization, but for a moment, he didn’t want to confront his painful past.
Avril understood his feelings, and even before showing the sealed envelope, she had pictured his reaction many times.
Harrison’s seemingly resolute “not looking” made her sense a strong “human touch” from him, who was a genius beyond his age.
Fortunately, he didn’t become immortal.
Five minutes later, Harrison opened his hand, “I’ll take a look.
With an ‘I-knew-it’ expression, Avril handed him the sealed envelope.
Inside were a few pages of thin paper and seven or eight photocopies of photos.
Harrison didn’t dare look at the photos first, but instead read the situation described on the pages.
The truth closely matched one of Harrison’s many speculations about his past.
Although he could still vaguely remember some things from his early years, it all seemed fuzzy now, unable to recall specific times and places, or even the faces of people and details of scenes.
He only knew that when he was very young, his maternal grandparents took him to sell vegetables in town one early morning, leaving him in the care of a young man from his hometown.
Then the young man took him wandering around, likely visiting the village clinic.
There was a small house near the clinic where many people were playing cards, and the young man joined them.
The young man got a straight flush or something in the first round, crushed his opponents, and became excited.
After that, he let Harrison play by himself.
But Harrison didn’t have fun because nobody paid attention to him, and there weren’t other children around.
Feeling bored and lonely, Harrison wanted to find his grandparents.
He had been to town recently riding his grandfather’s bicycle and remembered that there was just one asphalt road leading to the market where his grandparents sold vegetables. He figured by just following that road, he should be able to see them by the roadside.
He decided to go find them by himself.
He quietly ran off.
Five minutes later, he stood at a T-junction formed by the village dirt road and
the national asphalt road.
He realized he forgot whether to turn left or right.
Harrison hesitated for a long time before going left.
Maybe… perhaps… it should be correct, right?
in 1999, in a market in a county town in Boston, a boy crouched in a comer, looking utterly lost.
He hadn’t eaten for almost the entire day and was starving.
He was lost.
A “kind-hearted” aunt took him for a bowl of noodles, saying she would help
him get home.
He believed her.
When he came to his senses, he was thousands of miles away in a rural village.
Three years old and facing strange “parents,” strange “relatives,” and strange surroundings, panicking engulfed him.
“You’re not my mom and dad! You’re not my grandma and grandpa either!”
That was the first sentence he said to the middle-aged couple and the others.
That sentence set the tone for the first half of his life.
Sometimes Harrison regretted remembering it all, wondering if knowing nothing might have been better.
Or perhaps if he had been more clever, knowing how to act and please others, not revealing the truth at the beginning, life could have been better.
But that was too much to ask of a three-year-old child.
What made him even angrier was that he could remember it all but not the details, unable to recall where it happened, and after becoming sensible at the age of eleven or twelve, he always wanted to pack up and leave but didn’t know where to go.In this vast world, there was no place he could call home, so he could only return to the place he came from with a sense of defeat.
As time went by, he gradually grew up.
He didn’t know how children in other families lived, but he knew that he had to start working in the fields from the age of five or six.
When he was in junior high, some of his classmates started dropping out to work, but he wanted to study because his teacher said that studying was useful.
But the pressure and scolding from his “home” grew day by day.
They accused him of being a freeloader who didn’t work; children from other families had already gone out to earn money and send it back home.
Unlike them, all he cared about was reading useless books, and they considered him as a useless and ungrateful burden.
They even said they had spent more than a thousand RMB for him, calling him a waste of money.
As a result, Harrison Clark had his textbook fees cut and his living expenses reduced, leaving him to go without even a drop of oil in his meals.
If it hadn’t been for his teachers noticing that his academic performance had suffered due to malnutrition, he could have died from it in junior high school. So, they often invited him to their homes for dinner.
As for his textbook fees, the school principal personally paid for them, saying he was a promising student who needed to continue his studies.
When he got to senior high school, things got even worse. He couldn’t get a single penny, and his “home” wouldn’t let him return either.
However, the elderly men at the county’s senior citizen center helped him a lot; all he needed to do was sweep the floors, serve tea, chat with the men, and occasionally take part in a losing game of chess with them. In return, he could earn a few hundred RMB a month.
But life wasn’t all good. Harrison Clark was once relatively solitary due to his personality and poor upbringing, which led to him being bullied when he went to high school in the county.
However, after others witnessed his fierce and ruthless spirit, they stopped bullying him and began to avoid contact with him instead.
He had a poor social life among his classmates and had only a few friends, but he had some.
Ultimately, he successfully got into 985-level Oxfordshire University with impressive results, embarking on a life trajectory that truly belonged to him and severed the emotional ties with that “home.”
Time flies, and now here we are in the present.
Harrison Clark had both love and hate for this world.
His hatred was confusing because he didn’t know who to hate, but there was a fire in his heart.
But his love had clear targets, including the teachers who had helped him, the classmates who had shared food with him, the elderly men at the senior citizen center, and Sophia Camp…
If it wasn’t for these people, Harrison Clark didn’t know what kind of person he would have become.
His experiences were destined to make him a complex person.
Over the past six months, besides sending a lump sum to his adoptive parents, Harrison Clark intermittently asked people to visit that place he couldn’t quite call a home and contacted those who had helped him in the past.
He told others that if they needed help or encountered difficulties, he would be there for them.
But most people, whether they had problems or not, told him they were fine and suggested that the best thing to do would be to organize a reunion where everyone could have a meal together and catch up.
It is said that birds of a feather flock together; the kindness of youth turns into the cultivation of youth as one grows older.
At a glance, Harrison Clark’s character and experience helped him complete the process of filtering out unworthy friends early on.
Therefore, he couldn’t promise to help with everyone’s financial needs. In response, his real friends replied, “Money will make our relationship tacky, but if we really reach our wit’s end, we’ll come to you. Don’t worry.
It’s just a pity that some of the closest elderly men in his life had passed away one by one, and Harrison Clark always meant to go back to visit the remaining two but was too busy and kept delaying the trip. Instead, he could only occasionally arrange for someone to send health products and small gifts.
They wouldn’t accept anything too valuable.
He also postponed dinners with his classmates.
He didn’t have a family, but these people became his “home,” even though he didn’t have time to visit them.
But now he had finally seen another side of his home.
It was a picture of a man who he shared about seventy to eighty percent similarity with.
The man seemed to be in his twenties, wearing a green military uniform, dark-skinned, yet with a firm and strong smile under the sun, and a focused gaze that reminded Harrison Clark of his own future portrait in a military outfit.
The photo was a very old-fashioned color photo using film; judging by the colors, it was probably taken with Lucky Film.
“It’s nice.”
He turned to the second photo.
It featured a beautiful woman in a white nurse’s uniform, with a brilliant smile. She was standing in the shade of a tree, with sunlight dappling her face, making it hard for her to keep her eyes open.
Although she was posing for a serious photo, her eyes were trying to look off to the side.
On the left side of the frame, a small foot wearing a Smurf sock was visible.
“My mom looks so beautiful,” he remarked.
The third photo showed the woman holding a two or three-month-old baby with the man standing shoulder to shoulder with her.
Both adults tried to maintain their cheerful smiles despite the bright sunlight, while the baby in the woman’s arms had a crying face and Smurf socks that stood out.
Flipping to the next photo, it changed to two old people sitting in chairs, placed in the center of the composition, with the baby in the old woman’s arms, still struggling.
The two adults were standing behind the elderly, the man maintaining his military posture, while the woman’s gaze drifted downwards, resting on the baby.
There were also three or four pictures taken when he was about one or two years old, including individual shots and pictures of him held by the two old people in affection.
Although he was very young in all those photos, Harrison Clark could still see his own reflection in the eyes and expressions of the child..