Broken Stars

by Ken Liu

  There isn’t a wall in the world that doesn’t have a crack. Even divided by the Pacific, rumors about Qiqi and me had managed to make their way back to China. Shen Qian was polite but firm in her letter, demanding an explanation. I finally decided to make a short trip back to China to clarify the situation with her.

  Qiqi originally wanted to accompany me, but I asked her to stay put for now. Having her show up at the door with me might be too much for Shen Qian, and I wanted to talk to her alone. We said goodbye at the airport, and Qiqi, in a bright green jacket, leaned against the railing with her cane and watched me go through border control. I turned back to look at her.

  Even decades later, the sight of her watching me—like the woman from that old legend who turned to stone waiting for her husband by the sea—would remain with me like a brand burned into my heart.

  Back in China, Shen Qian was happy to see me. She made no mention of the question she’d asked me in her letter. Wearing her apron, she busied herself about the kitchen preparing my favorite dishes, many of which were not available in the US: sautéed shredded pork with soybean paste, pork with bamboo shoots, steamed chicken with mushrooms … At dinner, she didn’t ask me about my life in the US and only talked about the domestic news: ration tickets were now required for most goods; farmers were no longer allotted individual plots of land, but had to work collectively in communes; her newspaper was in the middle of a debate about the proper authority for Marxist philosophy … Xiaobao was playing at my feet, absolutely delighted with the toy robot I had brought him. Faced with my innocent son and tender wife, I just couldn’t bring myself to say the word “divorce.”

  That night, as we lay in bed, Shen Qian held me and passionately kissed me. I could feel her body trembling. Steeling myself, I gently pushed her away. “Qian, I need to tell you something.”

  “What’s the rush?” Her arms went around my neck again as she murmured, “The night is still young. Why don’t we first—”

  “I want a divorce,” I blurted out before I lost my nerve.

  Her body stiffened. “Stop it. That’s not funny.”

  “I’m not kidding. Qiqi is in America, and we …” I couldn’t continue, but Shen Qian understood.

  “You’ve decided?” She sat up.

  “Yes.”

  “I understand.” As she continued, her eyes flared with anger and her voice gradually grew harsh. “I know you were living with Zhao Qi. I know you used to be a couple. I knew that ten years ago! But what about me? What about all the years I’ve put into this marriage? Without me slaving away to take care of you and your son, do you think you could have gotten the chance to leave China? To see your old lover? Now that you’ve finally made it, do you think you can discard me like a pair of old shoes?”

  “No! Listen … I will make it up to you … I will pay …” I had planned a whole pretty speech but couldn’t remember any of the words. What I did say sounded so cold, so heartless. I was disgusted by my own hypocrisy and clumsiness.

  Shen Qian laughed mirthlessly. She slid off the bed and, without even putting on her shoes, headed out.

  “Where are you going? It’s the middle of the night.” Afraid that she might leave the apartment, I got up as well.

  She went onto the balcony and locked the door behind her. She stood facing me with her hands behind her. Her white nightgown trembled with her breath, and she looked like a ghost in the night. I was terrified that she was going to jump.

  “Don’t, please!” I begged. “Let’s talk about this.”

  “What are you afraid of?” Shen Qian said mockingly. “If I died, wouldn’t that be perfect for you and Zhao Qi? Don’t worry; I’m not going to grant your wish.”

  She raised her arms and tossed something over the edge of the balcony. I saw pieces of paper drifting in the wind, falling like snowflakes.

  My passport, and other documents.

  Behind me, Xiaobao, who had been awakened by our argument, started to cry.

  Shen Qian left with Xiaobao and went to her parents’ home. The next day, her parents and uncle came to our place to scream at me, and I had no choice but to hide in my room. It was impossible to keep something like this secret, and soon all my neighbors and colleagues at the university had heard the news. The rumors mutated as they spread: some were saying that I had found a wealthy, powerful woman overseas, and I was going to abandon my wife and child like one of those villains in the old folk operas. The denunciations were so oppressive that I couldn’t even leave home without feeling fingers pointed at me behind my back. Even my mentor, for whom I held deep respect and affection, gave me a tongue-lashing, and I could say nothing in my defense. My father fell ill because of what was happening.

  This was how life made you helpless. If you tried to swim against its currents, you’d feel resistance at every step. I regretted coming back—it would have been easier if I’d had the strength to stay overseas. But now it was impossible to leave. To replace my passport would require a great deal of paperwork, and now that my reputation was ruined, I couldn’t even get a recommendation letter from my department. I was stuck: I lacked the strength to continue the struggle, yet I was unwilling to give up.

  It took half a year before the situation changed. In the end, as much as Shen Qian hated me, she wasn’t going to shackle us together for the rest of our lives. She agreed to a divorce but demanded full custody of our son. I agreed, and also promised her monetary compensation. Finally, after everything was resolved, I placed a long-distance call to Qiqi, and she was overjoyed by the news. Since I still couldn’t leave the country for the time being, she said she would come back the next month so that we could get married in China and then leave together.

  I waited and waited for her flight, but it never arrived.

  The next month, the era of Mao Zedong began.

  11.

  For years, the government had been following a policy of “buy rather than build.” This created the false appearance of prosperity in the economy but hollowed out China’s industrial infrastructure. The gap between the wealthy and the poor grew, and anger at the government grew along with it. Everywhere, a specter-like name haunted China, a name that grew gradually in prominence. People said, This man will bring China fresh hope.

  He was called Mao Zedong. A few years earlier, he had held the post of Secretary of the Sichuan Provincial Committee in the provincial capital of Chongqing, and his various policies—known by the slogan “Sing Red Songs, Strike Black Forces” and involving public displays of Communist zeal and intensive government intervention—had made Chongqing into a prosperous city. Many ordinary citizens, especially poor peasants in the rural areas, supported him. The paramount leader of China, Hua Guofeng, was deeply influenced by Mao Zedong, and once Hua had gotten into power, he initiated the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, which sought to mobilize the people to bring down the capitalist roaders within the Communist Party. The mass movements swept the entire country, and political power within China was redistributed overnight. Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying, Hu Yaobang, and others in their faction all fell from prominence, and with the entire country behind him, Mao Zedong was elected Chairman of the Communist Party.

  After he became the Chairman, Mao continued the Cultural Revolution, focusing on criticizing Deng and opposing rightist tendencies, especially Deng’s “foreigners’ slave” political philosophy. He abolished Deng’s policy of keeping China open to outside influences and essentially cut China off from the rest of the world. Soon after, the United States terminated all diplomatic relations with China. I could no longer go to America, and Qiqi could not come to China.

  And so, once again, history divided us.

  During the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, the personality cult of Mao was extreme, but the movement itself wasn’t too violent. With my mentor’s recommendation, I became an instructor at the university after grad school. Although colleges were no longer admitting students and the social status of intellectuals had declined, it
was at least possible to make a living by writing theory papers on Marxism–Leninism, criticizing traditional Confucian philosophy, and reinterpreting Chinese history through a Communist lens as directed by the central leadership. The Cultural Revolution also interrupted the divorce proceedings, and so Shen Qian and I ended up living together again, doing our best to get along.

  Year after year, we went to work, we came home, and we studied the required political readings. The Revolution was going well, as was proclaimed in public at every opportunity, but life itself had become as still as a pool of dead water. During those years, even bright-colored clothing was forbidden. No forms of culture or entertainment were permitted—since they were all corrupted by feudal, American-capitalist, or Soviet-revisionist influences—except for the eight model revolutionary operas. One time, I found a dirty, ragged copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone abandoned in a public bathroom and tears filled my eyes. I took it home and read it in secret several times. But, in the end, terrified of being accused of harboring contraband, I burned it.

  Sometimes, as I studied the latest directives from the paramount leader, I would think, What happened to all the eras I have lived through? When I was a young man, the streets were packed with bellbottoms and “profiteers”; when I was a teenager, TV dramas from Hong Kong and Taiwan filled the airwaves; when I was a child, it was possible to play games on the web, to go and see the latest movies from Hollywood, and there were the Olympics and 3D films … Did those times really exist? Where did they come from, and where have they gone? Or was all this just a dream?

  Maybe everything was simply a game played by time. What was time? What was there besides nothingness? Before us had been nothingness, and after us will be nothingness.

  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I thought of the woman I loved on the other shore of the Pacific and pain racked my body. Those days when I was half-mad with love, when I was a stranger in a strange land—they felt so real and yet so much like a fantasy. What would have happened if I had listened to Qiqi and stayed in America? Would I be happier than now? Or would I simply be mired in an even deeper illusion?

  At least I would then be with the person I loved.

  In reality, America was no paradise, either. The People’s Daily explained that because the United States was addicted to militarism, it had sunk into the quagmire of the Vietnam War. Racial conflicts within America were intensifying and the crisis in the Middle East was causing an oil shortage. The capitalists were likely not going to last much longer, and American radical leftist movements were gaining momentum.

  The Soviet camp, meanwhile, was growing stronger every day. The Cold War grew heated, and on almost every continent proxy wars were fought between the two superpowers. Ballistic nuclear submarines patrolled the sea depths, and every warhead they carried was capable of destroying an entire city. Even more missiles rested in their silos, awaiting the order that would launch them soaring though the air to rain destruction upon us. Death itself roamed overhead, poised to send all of humanity into hell. Regardless of whether you were Chinese or American, you were headed for the same place.

  Sometimes, I recalled the rumors about the end of the world from my childhood. Maybe the prophecy had been true—except that perhaps the apocalypse didn’t arrive in a single instant, but took decades or even centuries to descend. Or perhaps the world had already been destroyed by the time I was born, and all that I had experienced was nothing but a shadow of a fantasy that was slowly dissipating. Who knew what the truth was?

  In the fourth year of the Cultural Revolution, I received a letter from the US. The very sight of the American stamps on it frightened me—corresponding with foreigners was an activity subject to intense scrutiny. However, the letter’s contents seemed harmless enough, consisting of a few words of greeting cobbled together with some revolutionary language in an unnatural manner.

  Comrade Xie Baosheng:

  First, let us express together our fondest wish that the brightest, reddest sun in our hearts, Chairman Mao, live ten thousand years! As the Chairman wrote in his poem, “The seas roil with rage, and the continents shake in fury!” In America, under the leadership of Mao Zedong Thought, the civil rights movement and leftist revolutionaries have made the capitalists of Wall Street tremble before the awakened power of the people! Chairman Mao was absolutely correct when he wrote that the revolutionary conditions are not just good, but great!

  All right, then, how are you doing? …

  Of course the letter came from Qiqi. It had been delivered to my department, where the head of the workers’ propaganda team9 intercepted it. This man read the letter suspiciously and then looked up at me, glaring.

  He slammed his hand down on the desk. “Xie Baosheng, the people’s eyes can see everything! Now, confess the number of foreign contacts you have! What kind of secrets exist between you and the woman who wrote this letter?”

  I laughed. “That’s enough of that. You know everything there is to know about Qiqi and me. Now hand me the letter.”

  By an incredible stroke of luck, I was talking to my old friend Heizi. Formerly just an ordinary factory worker, the Cultural Revolution had turned him into a member of the workers’ propaganda team that, pursuant to directives issued by the Chairman, came to supervise my university. In this manner, a man who had never even gone to college became the most important person in one of China’s most prestigious universities. Without him, the letter would have gotten me into deep trouble.

  Heizi handed the letter to me and told me to burn it after reading. I read Qiqi’s words over and over until I figured out what she was trying to say between the lines. First, she explained that she had obtained her degree and was now teaching Chinese literature at an American college. Second, she was still unmarried and wanted to come visit me in China. I sighed and wiped my eyes. It had been five years since my parting from Qiqi, and she still wanted me. But what could I do? Even if she returned, the most we could hope for was to be like the hero and heroine in The Second Handshake, an underground novel we passed around in handwritten copies, who could only gaze at each other, knowing that they could never be together.

  In the end, it didn’t matter what I thought. I had no way of sending a letter to Qiqi.

  I hid her letter in a stack of documents I took home. I didn’t want Shen Qian to find it, but I also couldn’t bear to burn it. Finally, I decided to conceal it between the pages of the copy of Season of Bloom, Season of Rain that had once belonged to Qiqi. Although the book itself was also an example of feudal, capitalist, and revisionist thinking, I just couldn’t imagine getting rid of it. I wrapped the book in a bundle of old clothes and kept it at the bottom of the trunk.

  12.

  Rationally, I knew that Qiqi shouldn’t come back, but a corner of my selfish heart continued to harbor the hope that she would. Around that time, President Nixon visited China, hoping to form an alliance with China against the Soviet Union. As the Sino–American relationship improved, hope reignited within me. However, somehow Nixon and Mao couldn’t come to an agreement, and the Americans were so angry that they took revenge by manipulating the UN Security Council to expel the People’s Republic of China and hand its seat at the UN to Taiwan as the “legitimate” representative for all of China. What little connection had existed between the US and China was completely cut off.

  Qiqi didn’t return, and I received no more news about her.

  In the sixth year of the Cultural Revolution, my father passed away. A few days before his death, China launched the satellite The East Is Red. It had been many years since China had sent an artificial satellite into orbit, and the occasion was marked with a great celebration. As my father lay dying, he held my hand and muttered, “When I was young, China had so many satellites in space I lost count. We even had manned spaceships and a space station. But this single little satellite is now seen as some remarkable achievement. What has happened to the world?”

  I had no response. That world of my childh
ood, a world that had once existed, now felt even more impossible than science fiction. My father closed his eyes and let out his last breath.

  To be fair, there were some advances in technology. The next year, the Americans managed to land on the moon with the Apollo mission—an unprecedented achievement—and the Stars and Stripes flew on lunar soil, shocking the world. This was not good news for China. Chairman Mao had come up with the proposal that China should lead the revolution of the Third World against the developed nations and the Soviet Union. As a result, bilateral relations between China and the US and China and the Soviet Union were tense. China was also in a border conflict with the Soviet Union over Zhenbao Island and was completely isolated internationally. I only heard about the American moon landing by secretly listening to banned American radio broadcasts.

  Two years later, my son was old enough to be called a young man. His generation was different from mine. They had no memory of the relative openness of Deng’s reformist years and grew up under a barrage of propaganda centered on Mao Zedong Thought. They had little exposure to Western culture, and no knowledge of China’s traditional culture, either. They worshiped Chairman Mao with true zeal and believed it was their duty to die to protect his revolutionary path. They passionately declared that they would fight until they broke through the walls of the Kremlin, until they leveled the White House, until they liberated all of humankind.

  My son disliked the name Xiaobao, which meant “Precious,” because it wasn’t revolutionary enough. He renamed himself Weidong, which meant “Defend the East.” He became a Red Guard, and before he had even graduated from high school, he wanted to quit school and go on revolutionary tours around the country with his friends, sharing the experience of rebelling against authority with other Red Guards. Shen Qian and I did not like the idea at all, but this was something promoted by the leadership in Beijing. As soon as we started to object, our son brought out the Little Red Book and denounced us as though we were class enemies. We had no choice but to let him go.