Broken Stars

by Ken Liu

  We grew close again, but it wasn’t the same as our childhood friendship; rather, our budding adolescence colored everything. It wasn’t love, of course, but it was more than just friendship. Qiqi got to know my good friends, too. Heizi, in particular, came over to my home much more frequently now that a young woman was living there. One time, Heizi and I took Qiqi to hike the Fragrant Hills. Heizi paid a lot of attention to Qiqi: helping her up and down the rocky steps and telling her jokes. While Qiqi and Heizi chatted happily, I felt annoyed. That was when I first noticed I didn’t like others intruding between Qiqi and me, not even Heizi.

  Near the end of summer break, Qiqi had to go back to Shanghai. Since neither of my parents was free that day, I took her to the train station. The two of us squeezed onto the train half an hour before departure time, and I made up my mind and took from my backpack a gift-wrapped parcel I had prepared ahead of time.

  Hesitantly, I said, “Um, this … is a … present for … for you.”

  Qiqi was surprised. “What is it?”

  “Um … why don’t you … open it … um … later? No!—”

  But it was too late. Qiqi had torn open the package and was staring wide-eyed at the copy of High-Difficulty Mathematical Questions from the High School Entrance Examination with Solutions and Explanations.

  “Well, you told me you had trouble with math …” I struggled to explain. “I like this book … I figured … um … you might find it helpful …”

  Qiqi was laughing so hard that tears were coming out of her eyes. I felt like the world’s biggest idiot.

  “Whoever heard of giving a girl a test-prep manual as a gift?” Still laughing, Qiqi opened the book to the title page. Her face froze as she read the Pushkin poem I had copied out:

  Life’s deceit may Fortune’s fawning

  Turn to scorn, yet, as you grieve,

  Do not anger, but believe

  In tomorrow’s merry dawning.

  When your heart is rid at last

  Of regret, despair, and fear,

  In the future, what has passed

  Shall in kinder light appear.6

  After the poem, I had written two lines:

  To my friend Zhao Qi: May you forget the unhappy parts of life and live each day in joy. Love life and embrace ideals!

  I felt very foolish.

  Qiqi held the book to her chest and gave me a bright smile, but tears were spilling out of the corners of her eyes.

  3.

  Qiqi left and my life returned to its familiar routines. But my heart would not calm down.

  When Qiqi visited, she brought a book called Season of Bloom, Season of Rain, which was popular among middle school girls back then. She had wrapped the book’s cover carefully in poster paper and written the title on it in her neat, elegant handwriting. Curious, I had flipped through it but didn’t find it interesting. Qiqi left the book behind when she returned to Shanghai, and I hid it in the deepest recess of my desk because I was afraid Mom would take it away. The book still held Qiqi’s scent, and I pulled it out from time to time to read until I finished it. Afterward, I couldn’t help but compare myself and Qiqi to the high school students involved in the novel’s complicated love triangles: Was I more like this guy or that one? Was Qiqi more like this girl or that girl? One time, I brought up the topic with Heizi and he almost died from laughing.

  Just because boys weren’t into romance novels didn’t mean we weren’t interested in the mysterious emotions portrayed in them. Anything having to do with love was popular among my classmates: everyone copied love poems, sang romantic ballads, and watched Divine Eagle, Gallant Lovers, imagining we were also star-crossed martial arts heroes and heroines. “Matchmaking” by astrology became a popular game. Once, one of the girls in my class, Shen Qian, and I were assigned classroom cleanup duty together, and somehow that inspired everyone to think of us as a couple. I vociferously denied this, not realizing that this only made the game even more fun for others. I resorted to ignoring Shen Qian altogether, but this only led all our classmates to postulate that we were having a “lovers’ spat.” I didn’t know what to do.

  In the end, Shen Qian came to my rescue. She made no secret of her interest in a high school boy known for his wit and generated a ton of juicy gossip—as a result, rumors about Shen Qian and me naturally died out.

  Shen Qian’s early attempt at romance soon ended when parents and teachers intervened, alarmed by this distraction from our academic development. Afterward, she acted aloof and cold to all of us, but spent her time reading books that appeared profound and abstruse: contemplative essays about Chinese culture, collected works of obscure philosophy, and the like. Everyone now said that Shen Qian was going to become a famous writer. However, her class compositions often took original and rebellious points of view that led to criticism from the teachers.

  Despite the rumors about us, I didn’t grow closer to Shen Qian; instead, I became even more convinced of the depth of my feelings for Qiqi. I thought: She might not be the prettiest girl and she’s far away in Shanghai, but I like her, and I’m going to be good to her. Unfortunately, with thousands of kilometers dividing us, I only heard news about her from occasional phone calls between our mothers. After the divorce, Qiqi lived with her mother, and though they were poor, Qiqi did well academically and managed to place into one of the best high schools in the city.

  Oh, one more thing: during my middle school years, a short man named Deng Xiaoping rose to prominence and became a member of the Central Committee. Although Jiang Zemin was still the General Secretary, Deng held all the real power. Deng started a series of reforms aimed at nationalizing industry, and he justified his policies with many novel theories: “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”; “it doesn’t matter whether it is a white cat or a black cat; a cat that catches mice is a good cat”; and so on. Lots of people became rich by taking advantage of the new opportunities, but many others sank into poverty. Because the economy was doing so poorly, the small company Dad worked for had to shut down, but with the Deng-initiated reforms, he got a job with a state-owned enterprise that guaranteed we’d at least have the basic necessities. Honestly, compared to the rest of the world, China wasn’t doing too badly. For example, I heard there was a financial crisis in Southeast Asia that affected the world; Russia’s economy collapsed and even college students had to become streetwalkers; there was a civil war in Yugoslavia and a genocide in Africa; the United States had pulled out of Iraq but maintained a blockade and sanctions….

  None of this had much to do with my life, of course. The most important things in my life were studying, cramming for the college entrance examination, and sometimes thinking about Qiqi.

  During my first year in high school, many people had “pen pals,” strangers they corresponded with. This wasn’t all that different from the web-based chats we used to have when we were little, but the practice seemed a bit more literary. I missed Qiqi so much that I decided to write her a letter in English—full of grammatical errors, as you might imagine—with the excuse that I was doing so to improve my English skills. Email would have been easier, but computers had disappeared from daily life, and so I had no choice but to write an actual letter. As soon as I dropped it into the mailbox I regretted my rash act, but it was too late. The following two weeks crept by so slowly they felt like years.

  Qiqi answered! She’d certainly made more of that English-immersion kindergarten experience than I had: her letter was much better. Leaving aside the content, even her handwriting was pretty, like a series of notes on a musical score. I had to read that letter with a dictionary by my side, and I ended up practically memorizing it. I did feel my English improved a great deal as a result.

  Qiqi’s letter was pretty short, just over a page. She mentioned that the math book I had given her more than a year earlier had been helpful, and she was grateful. She also recommended New Concept English to me, and told me some simple facts about her school. But I was most pleased by her last paragraph,
in which she asked about my school, Heizi, and so on. Her meaning couldn’t be clearer: she was looking forward to another letter from me.

  We corresponded in English regularly after that. We never said anything all that interesting: school, ideals in life, things like that. But the very fact that we were writing to each other made me incredibly happy. Just knowing that someone far away, practically on the other side of the world, was thinking about you and cared about you was an indescribably wonderful feeling. Qiqi told me that her mother had gotten married again. Her stepfather had a child of his own and was rather cold to her. She didn’t feel that her home was her home anymore, and wanted to leave for college as soon as possible so that she could be independent.

  I finished high school without much trouble and did really well on my college entrance examination, so I could pick from several schools. Summoning my courage, I called Qiqi and asked her what schools she was picking. She said she didn’t want to stay in Shanghai, and filled out Nanjing University with a major in English as her first choice.

  I wanted to go to Nanjing as well: one, I wanted to be with Qiqi; and two, I wanted to be away from my parents and try to make it on my own. But my parents absolutely would not allow it and insisted that I stay in Beijing. We had a huge fight, but in the end I gave in and filled out Peking University with a major in Chinese as my top choice. Heizi never made it into a good high school and couldn’t get into college at all, so he joined a department store as a sales clerk. Still, all of us believed that we had bright futures ahead of us.

  4.

  Compared to the close supervision we were under back in high school, college was practically total freedom. Although the school administrators, in loco parentis, weren’t keen on the idea of students dating, they basically looked the other way. Boys and girls paired up quickly, and the Chinese Department was known as a hotbed of romance. Several of my roommates soon had beautiful girlfriends, and I was very envious.

  Shen Qian also got into Peking University, majoring in Politics. Our high school classmates all predicted we would end up together, but Shen Qian soon published some outrageous poems and articles in the school paper and became part of the artsy, literary, avant-garde crowd. Other than occasionally seeing each other at gatherings of old high school friends, she and I ran in completely different circles.

  Qiqi and I continued our correspondence, but we no longer needed writing in English as an excuse. We wrote to each other every week, and our letters ran on for dozens of pages, covering everything silly, interesting, or even boring in our lives. Sometimes I had to use extra stamps. I really wanted to make our relationship formal, but just couldn’t get up the courage.

  By the time we were second-years, the name of some boy began to appear in Qiqi’s letters. She mentioned him so casually—without even explaining who he was—as though he was already a natural part of her life. I asked her about him, and Qiqi wrote back saying he was the class president: handsome, fluent in English, and also in the Drama Club with her.

  Unhappy with her response, I tried to draft a reply but couldn’t find the words. I would have pulled out my cell phone to call her, but by then no one used cell phones anymore. China Mobile had long since gone out of business, and the cell phone in my desk—a birthday present from my father when I turned ten—was just a useless piece of antique junk.

  I went downstairs to use the public phone. Every residential hall had only one phone, and the woman who picked up on the other end was the matron for Qiqi’s residential hall. She interrogated me for a long while before she agreed to go get Qiqi. I waited and waited. One of Qiqi’s roommates eventually picked up.

  “Qiqi is out with her boyfriend.”

  I dropped the phone and ran to the train station to buy a ticket to Nanjing. I was at the door of her residential hall at noon the next day.

  Qiqi came down the stairs like a graceful bird in a white pleated skirt, her hair tied back in neat braids. She appeared to be glowing with the warm sunlight. Other than a few pictures through the mail, we hadn’t seen each other since that summer in middle school. She was no longer a girl, but a tall, vivacious young woman. She didn’t look too surprised to see me; instead, she lowered her eyes and chuckled, as though she knew I would be here.

  That afternoon, she took me to the famous No-Sorrow Lake, where we rented a boat and rowed it to the center of the jade-green water. She asked me whether I had seen a popular Japanese TV drama called Tokyo Love Story.

  I had heard about the show, but since my roommates and I didn’t own a TV, I had only seen some clips when I visited my parents and read some summaries in the TV guide. But I didn’t want to show my ignorance.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “So … who do you like?” Qiqi asked, very interested.

  “I … I like Satomi.” Honestly, I wasn’t even sure who the characters were.

  Qiqi was surprised. “Satomi? I can’t stand her. Why do you like her?”

  My heart skipped a beat. “Uh … Satomi is the female lead, right? She has such a pretty smile.”

  “What are you talking about? The female lead is Rika Akana!”

  “Wait! I read the synopsis, and they said that Satomi grew up with the male lead, and then the two of them ended up together … doesn’t that make her the female lead?”

  “That’s ludicrous.” Qiqi laughed. I loved the way she wrinkled her nose. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  “Because … because I feel that people who knew each other when they were young ought to end up together. For example … uh …” I couldn’t continue.

  “For example?” She grinned.

  “You and me,” I blurted out.

  Qiqi tilted her head and looked at me for a while. “What a silly idea.” She slapped me.

  It wasn’t a real slap, of course—it was so light it was more like a caress. Her slender fingers slid across my face, and I shivered as though they were charged with electricity. My heart leapt wildly and I grabbed her hand. Qiqi didn’t pull away. I stood up and wanted to pull her into an embrace, except I had forgotten we were on a boat, and so—

  The boat capsized, and as Qiqi screamed, we tumbled into the water.

  We giggled like fools as we climbed back into the boat. Qiqi was now my girlfriend. Later, she told me that the class president really was interested in her, but she had never cared for him. She wrote about him in her letters to me on purpose to see if she could finally get me to express myself clearly. She didn’t quite anticipate that I would be so worried I’d come all the way to Nanjing—as she said this, I could tell how pleased she was.

  We held hands and visited all the big tourist attractions of Nanjing that day: Xuanwu Lake, Qinhuai River, Confucian Temple, Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum … I spent the day in a honey-flavored daze.

  For the remainder of our time in college, we only got to see each other occasionally during breaks, but we wrote to each other even more often and were completely in love. My parents, after finding out about Qiqi and me, were pleased because of the friendship between our families. Mom spoke of Qiqi as her future daughter-in-law and joked that she and Qiqi’s mother had arranged for our marriage before we were even born. We planned to find jobs in the same city after graduation and then get married.

  5.

  Just as happiness appeared to be within reach, it shattered into a million pieces.

  The economies of Russia, Ukraine, and some other countries collapsed so completely that the unimaginable happened: a man named Gorbachev emerged as a powerful leader and convinced more than a dozen independent states to join together to form a new country called the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” dedicated to the implementation of socialism. The new country became very powerful very quickly and thwarted the Americans at every turn, instantly adding tension to the international situation. The Soviet Union then encouraged revolutions in Eastern Europe—and even Germany, whose eastern and western halves weren’t at the same level of economic development, split into two countries
, with East Germany joining the Soviet bloc.

  In China, Deng’s planned economic reforms weren’t successful and the economy continued to deteriorate. More and more people grew unhappy with the government. The machinery of the state was corrupt, ossified, authoritarian, and full of misadministration. College students still remembered how prosperous and strong the country had been when they were children, and comparing the past to the present filled them with rage. Rumors were full of tales of corrupt officials, of misappropriation of state funds for private gain, of attempts to fill public administration posts with family members and loyal minions—although few could explain clearly the root causes of the problems, everyone appeared to agree on the solution in debates and discussions: the country was in trouble and the political system had to be fundamentally reformed to implement real democracy. The incompetent leaders had to go! A political manifesto composed some twenty years earlier, simply called “Charter ’08,” began to spread secretly among college students.

  Right before my graduation, the factional struggles within the Communist Party grew even more intense. It was said that the leader of the reformists, Zhao Ziyang, had been relieved of his duties and placed under house arrest. The news was like the spark that set off a powder keg, and the long-repressed rage among the population erupted in a way that shocked everyone. Students at all the major universities in Beijing went into the streets to march and protest, and with the support of Beijing’s citizens they occupied Tiananmen Square, which drew the attention of the world. A city of tents sprouted in the square, and some protestors even erected a statue of the Goddess of Liberty in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself.