You know how all of us have certain things on our Internet history we'd rather not let anyone else know about?

24-year-old Liu Xuelan (刘雪兰) could certainly agree, especially since she was applying to medical school in the United States. There were certain parts of her black history that absolutely had to be crushed and incinerated in a sterilizing flame, lest it show up  in inconvenient places when she started interviewing with various admissions committees across the country. Like heck, wouldn't it be awkward if they dug up:

• The type of X-rated porn she liked to read (...definitely not kosher for medical school...)
• Smut that she wrote and published under a pseudonym
• Her extensive ERP¹Erotic Roleplay (ERP) logs that she had over Discord
• Nudes that she had taken of herself and sent to various guys that she flirted with online
• Even a video of herself that she had uploaded to the Internet when she was young and stupid...

In either case, Xuelan was prepared to instantly deny the existence of any of these as soon as any accusations came up.

If she had learned anything from various American presidents, it was important to deny first and think of the excuses later. As a Chinese national who came to the United States for college, Xuelan was totally fine with the stereotypes of meek and fashion-obsessed rich Chinese immigrants who spoke poor English. She was genuinely an outstanding student, and it was always easy to impress people with her flawless English that lacked any amount of an accent. People often mistook her for an American-Born Chinese (ABC), and she fit neatly into the mold of a model minority, especially since she could play three instruments, took leadership positions in volunteer clubs, and finished top ten in her university's Math Olympiad even though she wasn't even a mathematics major.

Her carefully cultivated resume was beginning to look flawless!

Minus, of course, the parts that obviously had to be blacked out.

Xuelan had been a bit of a wild teenager in the past, and she had been far more rogue before coming to the States.

Much of that had been typical teenage insecurities, and Xuelan hadn't been allowed to date. Her parents had always insisted that there were more important things to focus on, and as sexist as it might sound, they always urged that she should start looking for a boyfriend after getting to a nice Tsinghua-tier university²Tsinghua University: The #1 ranked university in China rather than rolling around in the weeds early.

Of course, like any model Asian child, Xuelan had smiled sweetly in front of her parents, immediately turned around, got on the computer, and did the exact opposite when they weren't looking.

Her first teenage foray into the vast ocean of the Internet landed her with this foreigner from Southeast Asia who went with the online username: "Kestrel". They met on an anonymous chat section of a nondescript BDSM roleplaying site, and he was somewhere four to five years older than her (Xuelan lied about being an adult). Because of language barriers, they mostly communicated in English, which teenage Xuelan incidentally found kind of hot.

It didn't take long before they were dating online. 

Kestrel asked for her nudes, and she sent them. Eventually, they were messaging constantly, and her boyfriend even sent sex toys over international shipping to a P.O. box in Shanghai that Xuelan had set up to discreetly receive his packages in order to conceal her real home address. Some of the vibrators were really nice, and Xuelan was still using them six years later after moving to the United States.

The most intriguing part was that he was definitely some kind of gangster. He claimed that his real name was "Kien", which was a Vietmanese name, and Xuelan would always listen curiously to the stories that he told about the turf wars he got into with rival gangs. Apparently, they were involved in a lot of smuggling and drug trafficking, which stimulated Xuelan's morbid curiosity about the certain darker horrors of an underground lifestyle. Some of the things that he described sounded frightening, but Xuelan felt comfortable behind the relative safety of her computer monitor. 

Overall, he was hot, sexy, and nice, and he always gave her a plenty of wonderful attention.

Aside from the fact that Xuelan always knew that she had an emergency bail-out button in the back of her mind, she genuinely felt like he was her real digital boyfriend through a majority of high school. She dreamt about him, fantasized about him, and maybe even loved him.

Until one day, on her eighteenth birthday, Kien showed up in person and stopped her on the way home from school with a birthday cake.

Xuelan had never told her real address, her real name, her real age, or anything like that. However, he still flew all the way to Shanghai and managed to track down her real identity. She had no idea how long he had known or how he had found out.

Naturally, the high school girl freaked out and immediately pulled the ejection lever.

Fortunately, she was in the process of applying to colleges, so she abandoned all the domestic Chinese universities she was originally planning to attend and instead submitted applications to universities in the US, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. She wanted to get as far away as possible from that freakish stalker, and preferably go somewhere that he could never follow.

Xuelan ghosted him, deleted her account, and stopped responding to his text messages.

Her high school romance ended with an abrupt and frightening scare.

It was a period of her black history that she never intended to discuss with anyone.

Six years later, she never imagined that she'd ever encounter that unspeakable person again.

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