by Ken Liu
After spending a few years traveling around and interacting with all segments of society, I realized how immature we had been back at Tiananmen. China was an overladen freight train burdened with the weight of the past as well as the present. A few students fervently shouting slogans could not change the complicated conditions of the country. But how might things be improved? I had no answers. All I knew was that although China had recovered its tranquility and the people appeared to be focused only on the concerns of daily life, there were strong currents and countercurrents of competing social interests. Together, they formed a powerful hidden whirlpool that might pull the nation into an abyss that no one wanted to see. Yet the process wasn’t something that could be controlled by anyone or any authority. No one could control history. We were all simply parts of a great vortex that was greater than any individual.
Two years after Heizi and I started our business, I bumped into Shen Qian while searching for something to buy in Guangzhou. After the protests, I stayed away from the literary elites and rarely got to see her, although I had heard that she became Liu Xiaobo’s lover. Although Liu was married, Shen Qian was willing to be his mistress because she truly loved him. Later, the rumors said Liu had divorced his wife, and I thought he would marry Shen Qian. I certainly didn’t expect to find her so far from Beijing.
Meeting an old friend a long way from home always made me emotional. Reminded of Qiqi, I felt my eyes grow wet. Shen Qian told me that she had arrived in Guangzhou hoping to stay with an old friend and get back on her feet, but the friend was nowhere to be found and she didn’t know what to do. I promised I’d help her.
I took Shen Qian to a restaurant to welcome her to Guangzhou. We talked about the old times, but both of us avoided any mention of Tiananmen. After a few rounds of drinks, Shen Qian’s lips loosened, and she told me tearfully about how Liu Xiaobo had taken advantage of her trust. He had promised to divorce his wife and marry her, but she caught him with another student. They had a fight and broke up…. As she told her story, she kept on drinking, straight from the bottle, and I couldn’t stop her. Later, she began to sing loudly, and everybody in the restaurant stared at us. I quickly paid the bill and hurried her out of there.
Shen Qian was so drunk that I had to hold her up. Since she had nowhere else to stay, I brought her back to my room. I left her to recover in my bed while I slept on the floor.
The next morning, I needed to get out early to browse the markets, and so I left without waking up Shen Qian. By the time I got back, I expected she would be gone. However, when I came in the door, I saw that my messy room had been cleaned up and everything was neatly and logically arranged. There was a new cloth on the small kitchen table, and Shen Qian, in an apron, was carrying a plate of steaming scrambled eggs with tomatoes out of the kitchen.
We looked at each other; she smiled shyly.
I knew that my life was about to start a new chapter.
8.
Shen Qian continued to stay in my rental unit. She made the place feel like home, a feeling I had long missed. And so the two of us, both with pasts that we wanted to forget, leaned against each other for warmth. Heizi had just gotten married, and after finding out that Shen Qian and I were together, he was very happy for us. He treated Shen Qian as though we were already married.
Since Shen Qian couldn’t find a job, she helped us with our business. She was nothing like the young radical student rebel she had been. After all she had gone through, she had abandoned her dreams of revolutions and literary fame and turned all her attention to family. Who was to say this wasn’t a self as true as her former image?
Half a year later, my mother came to Guangzhou for a visit, and my relationship with Shen Qian could no longer be kept a secret. My mother didn’t like Shen Qian at first, but after living with us for a while, she began to accept this future daughter-in-law and urged us to get married. Society was turning more conservative by then, and since we were no longer so young, we returned to Beijing to apply for a marriage license. At our wedding, a few old classmates joked that they always knew we would end up together.
After a year, Shen Qian gave birth to our son, Xiaobao. The wounds of the past were gradually healing. Though I couldn’t say we were happy or that everything was perfect, our life wasn’t without warmth or simple pleasures.
The leadership in Beijing was now deepening the economic reforms and gradually pushing planned economy to displace the market. One of the policies was a dual-price system, which involved one price for goods set by the economic planning authorities and another price set by the market. Many officials with the right connections could become “official profiteers” by buying goods at the low planned economy price and selling them on the market at an enormous profit. Low-level peddlers like Heizi and me, on the other hand, suffered due to our lack of connections. Business became harder and harder. One time, we managed to acquire a bunch of color televisions, but the official profiteers were a step ahead of us and cornered the market. We had no choice but to sell at a loss. We ended up owing a bunch of money and had to close up shop and head back to Beijing.
One of Heizi’s uncles was a shift foreman at a factory, and he managed to get Heizi a job as a driver there. By carrying private goods for people on official trips, Heizi made good money. I couldn’t find any such opportunity, and I was exhausted after years spent struggling in business. I decided to return to university, and began to prepare to take the examination for graduate school.
As a graduate of Peking University, I thought the exam would be a piece of cake. But after being away from a classroom for so many years, it wasn’t easy to get back into the right mind-set. I took the exam two years in a row and couldn’t pass. Since Xiaobao was getting older and our savings were nearing depletion, we relied on help from my parents. Shen Qian finally managed to get a job at a newspaper, which at least guaranteed us a base salary and benefits like housing and healthcare.
Then she began to complain about my lack of accomplishments.
“Look at you! When we got together, I thought you had some business savvy and might make it big. But in the end, you’re just a bookworm who can’t even manage to get into grad school. The Chinese Women’s Volleyball Team has won the world championship three times, which is as many as you’ve failed!”
Faced with this nagging tirade, I felt lost. What had happened to that passionate, idealistic, revolutionary leader I once knew?
Of course I knew that wasn’t Shen Qian’s fault. This was what happened after life subjected us to its endless grind. The world wasn’t a fairy tale or the setting for an adventure—even if it were, we would not be the protagonists. No matter what ideals and hopes we once harbored, the most we could hope to accomplish, in the end, was to survive.
Since I was feeling low during that time, I sought refuge in fiction and got into wuxia fantasies. The remake of Legend of the Condor Heroes, produced in Hong Kong, was very popular on TV. I had seen an older version when I was little but thought the remake was better, even though the budget clearly wasn’t as big. I borrowed wuxia books by Jin Yong, Gu Long, Liang Yusheng—I would have read Huang Yi’s books, too, but I couldn’t find them anywhere.7 Xiaobao was now old enough that he spent every day practicing “Eighteen Stages to Subdue a Dragon” along with the heroes on TV. Shen Qian got mad and told me that I was rotting our child’s mind. I had to switch to reading something else.
Science fiction was also popular. Ye Yonglie’s Little Know-It-All Roams the Future sold millions of copies, and Zheng Wenguang’s Toward Sagittarius was flying off the shelves. I gradually became a fan—only science fiction could liberate me from the weight of daily life and allow me to enjoy a little pleasure. It was too bad that there were so few Chinese science fiction books, and not many foreign works were being translated. I soon finished all the ones I could find.
Inspired by my reading, I tried my hand at writing and ended up with a book called Little Know-It-All Roams the Universe, which was a sequel to Ye Yonglie’s
famous work. At first, I passed the draft among friends, but then I got to know a young man named Yao Haijun who helped me obtain Mr. Ye’s permission and found me a publisher. The story gained me a bit of fame, and I was called a “rising star of science fiction.” Encouraged, I wrote another book called Little Know-It-All Roams the Body, which was meant to teach readers some interesting facts about the human body. Unfortunately, this book caused a lot of controversy: some argued that I was stealing too much from Ye Yonglie; some suggested I was tarnishing Chinese science fiction with portrayals that encouraged lascivious thoughts; still others claimed that my work was an example of capitalist liberalism and contained metaphors criticizing the Communist Party…. 8
I was writing at a fairly turbulent time when ideological debates were on the rise. There were even sporadic student movements again. The central leadership probably wanted to create the opportunity for another purge, so they initiated an effort to cleanse society of “spiritual pollution.” I became a target and was severely criticized. Luckily, the government wasn’t interested in having the “pollution-cleaning” spin out of control, and I wasn’t punished much. However, it was impossible for me to be published anymore. I had to go back to the textbooks and prepare for the graduate school examination again.
It was only later that I understood how fortunate I had been. The country was also undergoing a movement of “intensive crackdown.” This involved every aspect of life: purse-snatchers were handed death sentences, while public dancing carried a charge of indecency. Liu Xiaobo found himself in trouble because he had several lovers and was executed by firing squad. When she heard the news, Shen Qian was depressed for a long time.
After the intensive crackdown, society grew even more conservative. Many things that used to be common became crimes: cohabitating without being married, kissing in public, wearing revealing clothes, and so forth. Given the shift in mainstream culture, I dared not write about sensitive areas again. Thus did my career as an author come to an end.
9.
Just as weal can lead to woe, misfortune can also lead to lucky breaks. A prominent professor turned out to be a fan of my novels and specifically requested me during the admission process. As a result, I became his graduate student and returned to school the next year.
At my mentor and advisor’s suggestion, I chose Sartre’s existentialism as my topic. Although many people had been studying it, most explanations were half-baked. After so many years wasted drifting in society, I treasured the opportunity to study in depth. I read many foreign books in the original languages—taught myself French—and published a few papers that were well received. Eventually, with my advisor’s recommendation, I was given the precious opportunity to study overseas at a famous university in America at the government’s expense.
This was the first and last time in my life I lived outside China. Visiting this country on the other side of the Pacific that people both loved and hated was quite an experience. The university was in New York, the greatest city on Earth. When I was little, I saw a ton of TV shows and movies set in New York: Beijinger in New York, Godzilla … and I had long wanted to visit. The sights and sounds of the city—skyscrapers, overpasses, highways, subways—were overwhelming.
I remembered the Beijing of my childhood as a prosperous city comparable to New York, but for some reason, after a few decades, New York remained a modern metropolis while Beijing had declined precipitously. I saw in America many goods that had long ceased to be findable in China: Coca-Cola, KFC, Nescafé … These were the brands I grew up with, and I indulged in a bit of nostalgia. I finally understood why so many people preferred to leave China for the US and not return.
However, I could also see signs that America was on the decline. At the time of my visit, a new blockbuster had just been released: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I remembered seeing Episodes I through III when I was little and had always wanted to find out what would happen next. To reexperience the wonder of my childhood memories, I bought an expensive ticket. But Episode IV turned out to be far less spectacular than the previous three, and the special effects were so bad that you could almost see the strings on the spaceships. I was really disappointed. Apparently the Cold War had drained America’s resources into the arms race, and the economy wasn’t doing so well.
Unlike in the past, opportunities for exchanges between America and China were growing scarce. It was almost impossible to visit America on your own, and even government-sponsored trips were rare. There were only a handful of Chinese from the mainland in the entire university. To celebrate my arrival, they held a party for me, and as we enjoyed our french fries, they asked me how things were in China. Since it took almost a full month for international mail to reach the recipient and phone calls were extremely inconvenient, they got most of their information about China from English-language news reports, which tended to be so narrow in scope that it was like trying to understand a beach by observing a few pebbles. We reminisced about how when we were little we could chat with friends on the other side of the globe just by opening a window over the web, and it felt like another age, another world.
While we were discussing rumors about the transition of power from Deng Xiaoping to Hua Guofeng, a dark horse about whom little was known, the doorbell rang. A woman stood up and said, Oh, it must be so-and-so—but I didn’t catch the name. She went and opened the door and a woman came in, limping with the aid of a cane. I gave her a curious glance, and when I saw her face, I froze.
She looked at me, unable to speak.
It was a dream. A dream.
Qiqi, my Qiqi.
In a moment, everything around me—no, the entire universe—disappeared. Only Qiqi and I remained between heaven and earth. We gazed at each other, our eyes saying what our lips could not. Fate had played a cruel game with us. After the trials and tribulations of more than ten years, we had found each other again on the other side of the Pacific.
Trembling, we came together and held on to each other for dear life. Tears poured from our eyes as sobs racked our bodies. The others realized that something extraordinary was happening and left so that we could be alone together.
Qiqi told me that when she was shot that night, she lost consciousness. When she woke up, she saw a car passing by and screamed for help. A few foreigners from the car came to her aid, but she passed out again … The car turned out to belong to an American news crew who had planned to film a live report, but the danger of the situation had forced them to retreat, which was when they saw Qiqi. They brought her back to the American embassy, where the embassy doctors dressed her wounds.
Later, Qiqi met Chai Ling and the others hiding in the embassy. They told her that I had died. Chai Ling and the rest were wanted by the authorities, and while Qiqi was still recovering, their request for political asylum was approved. Under the protection of the embassy, Qiqi left Beijing, a city of sorrow, and came with the others to New York.
At first, Qiqi didn’t know what conditions were like in China, and she dared not make contact with anyone in the country lest they suffer as a result. After a few years, Qiqi managed to return to Shanghai once to visit her mother, who told her that I had gotten married in Guangzhou. Not wanting to disturb my life, she told her mother not to let me know that she was still alive.
The bullets had left her with a permanent handicap and deprived her of the ability to become a mother. Helpless in this country, she married an old man who abused her. After her divorce, she managed to apply for and win a scholarship and came to study in this university.
We spent the whole night recounting to each other our experiences during the intervening years, and we held each other and cried. What should have been the most wonderful decade of our lives had been lost to the vicissitudes of fate. I said “I’m so sorry” countless times, but what was the use? I vowed to devote the rest of my life to making it up to her, to giving her the happiness that should have been hers.
Naturally, ignoring the gossip, we moved in together.
We barely spent any time apart, trying to make up for our lost youth. Qiqi had her green card. As long as I stayed with her, I should be able to remain in the United States. Since conditions in China had deteriorated further and China was now engaged in a war with Vietnam, Qiqi told me not to go back. But I couldn’t just forget about Shen Qian and my son. Ever since I started grad school, Shen Qian had been living like a single mother, struggling to keep the whole family afloat, pinning her hopes on my success. To simply abandon her felt to me an unforgivable betrayal.
Although Qiqi and I had recovered some measure of our happiness, my heart was conflicted. But I was a coward. All I cared about was the joy of the present, and I dared not think about the choice I had to make.
10.
I stayed for more than a year in New York. After our lives had settled down somewhat, I threw myself into my work. I read many books of literary theory, politics, and philosophy, and felt my understanding grow by leaps and bounds. Often, I pushed Qiqi’s wheelchair and took walks with her in Battery Park, where we both gazed at the distant figure of the Statue of Liberty and debated the fate of China and the future of the world.
My American advisor thought highly of my paper. He told me there was a teaching position open to those with a literary background that might be a good fit for me. If I got the job, I could stay and finish my Ph.D. Excited, I handed in my application right away. But then I received the letter from Shen Qian.
