Chapter 410: The Original Is Filed in the Court Record

The notebook lay open on the dining table, a computer on the left, the Intermediate Court's notice sheet pinned under a bowl and half a water bottle on the right, one at each corner.

June 7, 9:00 p.m. The roll-up shutter downstairs had been down for a while. Zhi'an was doing homework behind his closed door. The fan turned; a corner of the paper lifted, then dropped back down.

The first thing she searched was "Qingyuan Testing."

Over a thousand results. The top entries were sales contract disputes, labor disputes, and two trademark disputes of Qingyuan's own. She read the second one from beginning to end and saw no mention of "Baixi Village." She typed "Test Report" and "Baixi Village" into the search box together. What came back was a single line: No relevant documents found.

She took a sip of water. It was the tea she'd brewed during the day, cold now.

She filled in the advanced search slowly: court, Chengbei District; cause of action, it took her two tries to click the right one; year, she left blank—she wasn't sure which year it was and didn't want to guess. A captcha popped up when she finished: a two-digit addition problem. She got it wrong once, then got through on the second try.

The same results came up again: labor disputes, sales contracts, property management fees.

She cleared the search bar and typed the characters one at a time: Cen, Shou, Ye.

Nine results.

The first two were from other cities—same name, one a sales contract dispute, one a traffic accident. Neither was him. The third read: Jiangzhou Municipal Chengbei District People's Court, Civil Judgment, Cen Shouye v. Jiangzhou Qingyuan Testing Technology Co., Ltd., labor dispute.

The cursor stopped on that line. The text on-screen was small and blue, with a string of numbers behind it that didn't move.

She clicked.

The page spun twice, then loaded in text-only form—all the table lines stripped out, the "The Court Finds" paragraphs crushed together. She scrolled to the bottom first to read the signature block: one judge, one court clerk, names she didn't bother to note. Below that: September. When she copied down the year and day, she skipped those digits entirely, wrote only: September.

September. The case was decided in September.

That was her father's method: read a judgment back to front. Look at the disposition first, then the signature block, then work backwards to find who won on which sentence. He said the most valuable part of any judgment was those two sentences under "The Court Finds"—don't believe anything else. She used to think he was long-winded. She said a judgment wasn't a menu. Her father laughed and said, if a menu's wrong you can send it back; if a judgment's wrong, who do you send it back to?

She scrolled up to the parties section: Plaintiff Cen Shouye; Defendant Jiangzhou Qingyuan Testing Technology Co., Ltd. After the plaintiff's name, one line: "Plaintiff Cen Shouye appeared in court to participate in the proceedings." The authorized representative column was blank. On the defendant's side were two names—a lawyer and someone from the company.

That morning at the courier hub, Cen Hong had said he went to the first hearing by himself. This line in the judgment—"Plaintiff Cen Shouye appeared in court to participate in the proceedings"—pinned that trip onto paper.

The plaintiff alleged that the defendant made a decision on March 26 removing him from the position of center director; that the decision was never discussed at a meeting, had no meeting minutes, and was never delivered to him. He sought to rescind the decision and recover back pay at his original position.

The defendant argued the removal decision was made in March, that from April onward he worked in a technical post, and his wages were paid according to the technical post. He said he was still the director, but he hadn't chaired any meetings in April, and his signature wasn't on April's reimbursement forms.

The Court found upon trial: The plaintiff had served as director since the center's establishment. On March 26, the defendant issued the "Decision on Removing Comrade Cen Shouye from the Position of Center Director." The decision was not served on the plaintiff, and the defendant did not submit meeting minutes showing how the decision was made. The plaintiff, dissatisfied, sought arbitration in a labor dispute and then brought suit in this Court.

The plaintiff submitted four items of evidence: the decision appointing him center director, pay stubs, attendance sheets, and the Test Report. The defendant submitted two: the removal decision and the position appointment document. Of the plaintiff's four items, the defendant cross-examined only the last one.

To prove he was still performing the duties of center director as of April 1, the plaintiff submitted one Test Report, dated April 1, signed by the plaintiff himself. The defendant argued on cross-examination that the report had not been formally issued by the center and did not accept it for the purpose offered. This Court holds that the original of the report was verified in court and filed in the court record, and it can prove the plaintiff was still issuing reports as center director at that time. This Court accepts it.

She read that paragraph three times.

The first time, she stopped at "one Test Report." The second time, at "had not been formally issued by the center." The third time, at "the original was verified in court and filed in the court record."

She selected the paragraph, then deselected it, letting the words settle back into black on white.

One more screen down was the disposition: 1. Rescind the defendant's removal decision; 2. The defendant shall pay the plaintiff back wages for the position; 3. Dismiss the plaintiff's remaining claims. The amount of back pay was a number on the page; she didn't copy it into her notebook.

That morning, Cen Hong had said he "won half": the removal was too rushed, not done by the rules, so the wages were awarded—but nothing else. On paper, that came down to these three lines. She stared at them for half a minute. By the court's reckoning, he hadn't fully lost. A man stripped of his director's post had used a single test report to prove he was still in that position on that day, and won back several months of wages.

She read the "The Court Finds" section again to confirm: nobody asked how large the report was. The judgment didn't say how many pages it had, and didn't say whether there was any attachment behind it.

She used the in-page search: "Baixi"—zero matches. Deleted. "Cadmium"—zero. "Well"—zero. "Second sample"—zero.

In the entire judgment, that report was just "one Test Report." No village name before it, no project after it, no numbers. To anyone reading, it was a signed piece of paper.

And it decided only one thing: the day he stopped being director. Which village the well belonged to, whether the levels exceeded the standard—no one asked from beginning to end. The defendant's agent said "not formally issued by the center," and the judge didn't press on what "formally" meant. He only needed one answer: was the signature that day his?

Nine years. This page had been sitting online for nine years. Anyone could read it, and to anyone it was just a labor dispute. To see anything else in it, you first had to know what you were looking for: that the sample was well water from Baixi Village, the second sample; that the date was April 1; that the signatory line bore his name. And you had to know what "the original was verified in court and filed in the court record" meant in a civil case file—verified in court, noted, bound, paginated, archived. It wasn't in anyone's hands; it was in the court's hands, with page numbers, part of that volume, unmoving from that day forward.

She copied "not formally issued by the center" into her notebook, and under the word "formally" she drew a line. They had used the word themselves. That meant the center should have a "formal" version of something—with a registration number, a ledger, a signature from whoever accepted the sample. That sentence was meant for her, but that sentence couldn't be used as evidence. She had to get those pages in her own hands first.

[Thud. Of those who could read it, one is gone.]

She saved the webpage into the folder on her desktop called "Baixi," naming the file the way her father would have: Chengbei District Court, Labor Dispute, September.

At ten o'clock, she printed.

The printer was old, placed under the TV cabinet. It printed one page, paused half a beat, and the paper crept out from the back a little at a time. Halfway through, it ran out of paper. She dug an opened ream out of a drawer, pulled several sheets, smoothed the curled corners, counted—enough. One page came out with faint ink; she checked it character by character against the screen before moving on.

The printed stack came out warm, the smell of toner spreading under the fan. She touched it and got a smudge of gray on her finger. With a pencil, she drew a rough box around the evidence paragraph—the corners didn't line up—and wrote in the margin: The original is in the court record.

This stack of paper couldn't be used as anything. A printout was a printout; what people recognized was those five pages in the file—pages she hadn't seen yet, only knew from a scanned image. This stack was a route she'd drawn for herself: from this phrase "filed in the court record," all the way to that archive room.

She flipped the notebook to the "Still Don't Know" page. Item four had been added days earlier: which court file Director Cen had placed it in. In the space after it, she wrote: Chengbei District Court, the labor dispute file of Cen Shouye v. Qingyuan (to be reviewed).

Below that, she started a new line: September.

When she finished, she pulled Volume Nine from the stack of notebooks. It was the thinnest—it slid right out, and the volumes beneath it settled lower.

The page for July 11. Her father's handwriting was cramped into the lower half of the page: He said he put it in the court file, where no one can take it back. Two lines down: Which file—he said he'd tell me when the case was done.

She moved the printed judgment next to that page, lining up "the original was verified in court and filed in the court record" with "put it in the court file" so they sat nearly level.

He'd finished the case. September. Which file—this one.

The half-sentence at the bottom of the page was her father's "he'd tell me when the case was done." After that, nothing. The half-sentence her father never finished—it had landed in her hands now.

The notice from the Intermediate Court window had a third question: Where is the original, and who can verify it? Before today, she couldn't answer a word of it. Now half was settled—the original was at the Chengbei District Court, in the file of Cen Shouye's own case. The remaining half required someone to bring the file out, let her see it, and then let her turn what she saw into a written statement. Only then would anyone verify anything.

Her phone was at the corner of the desk. She turned it over; the screen lit, and she pressed it dark again, flipped it face down. Calling the courier hub at ten at night meant starting from the beginning, and that couldn't be done over the phone. She'd go in person tomorrow.

The kitchen light came on.

Zhi'an came out holding a glass, stopped when he saw the two things spread on the table. The glass turned half a circle in his hand.

"Dad's stuff again?"

"No." She gathered the printed judgment and Volume Nine together. "It belongs to someone who was keeping something for Dad."

Water fell from the kettle into the glass, loud in the night. He stood there holding the glass and didn't ask the person's name.

"What was he keeping?"

"A piece of paper."

"Is it still there?"

"It's in a court file."

"And him?"

She took her hand off the paper. "He passed away the year before last."

Zhi'an let out an "oh," carried the water toward his room, stopped at the door with his back to her. "Sis, you going to Chengbei again tomorrow?"

"I have something in the afternoon."

"Then go to bed early." The door didn't close all the way; a strip of light leaked out. It fell on the edge of the table, lighting exactly on the words "filed in the court record."