In the second semester of her freshman year, Lin Qile joined the university’s English Association. Initially, she only intended to improve what she perceived as her weakness, as she had always thought her English was poor.
However, after attending a few sessions, Lin Qile discovered that she could already remember most of the high-frequency TOEFL vocabulary words.
On a weekend morning, she flipped through a vocabulary book in her dorm room, toothbrush in mouth, covering each word with her hand as she went down the list.
Unconsciously, these words began to pop out of her mind one by one, as if beyond her control.
While eating with Yu Qiao, Lin Qile suddenly asked, “Do you think a person can be unknowingly changed by many people and events throughout their life, even after those people and events have passed?”
Yu Qiao replied, “Isn’t that obvious?”
Lin Qile took a deep breath. If Du Shang and the others were here, she wouldn’t have resorted to sharing such personal thoughts with Yu Qiao.
“Yes, yes, it’s obvious!” Lin Qile used her spoon to mash a cooked carrot into a small pile of carrot puree.
The boyfriend of her senior roommate from bed number 2 was studying for a Ph.D. in Physics at the Beijing Institute of Technology, where the entire department was full of single men. The senior found some tourist photos on Lin Cherry’s campus network account and sent them to her boyfriend, saying she wanted to introduce a quality boyfriend to Lele: “Otherwise, you’ll keep pining for that guy who went abroad. What’s the point? You’re wasting your youth!”
Lin Cherry stood by her bed, mumbling, “Sis, I don’t want to find a boyfriend yet…”
Meng Lijun hung her head down from the upper bunk, her black hair dangling. She said, “Are you still keeping yourself pure for your dream guy?”
The senior from bed number 3, wearing a face mask, turned and asked, “Lele, do you want to be his Xiao Fang?”
Lin Cherry didn’t understand, “What Xiao Fang?”
The seniors all burst into laughter. They started singing an old song that Lin Cherry had heard as a child but never understood. She only vaguely felt it was a love song. The seniors explained, “The scumbag is about to return to the city from the countryside or go to America from China. He’s slept with Xiao Fang, loved her, and then just before leaving, he says, ‘Thank you, I won’t forget you!’ Then he leaves without looking back, feeling completely justified!”
Meng Lijun hung her head down again from the upper bunk and said, “Lele, don’t wait for men. They’ll never appreciate you!”
Sometime later, Lin Qile was painting her toenails with her senior roommates. Her feet were white, and she painted her toenails bright red. Suddenly, a senior from across the room said, “Lele, my boyfriend has a junior who saw your photo and wants to meet you, but…”
Lin Qile looked up.
The senior frowned, “He said he came to our school to play basketball last week, and his teammate mentioned that there’s a guy from Beihang University who often comes to eat with you. Is that true?”
Lin Qile was stunned.
She realized she had never mentioned Yu Qiao to her senior roommates.
And for over a year, the seniors had never run into them.
“That’s my former classmate,” Lin Qile said.
“What kind of classmate?” another senior asked.
Lin Qile thought for a moment and honestly replied, “Kindergarten classmate, elementary school classmate, high school classmate.”
“Lele, that’s not right,” the senior from bed number 2 said, trying to suppress a smile. “We thought you were always thinking about your dream guy, but it turns out you’ve been secretly hiding a handsome Beihang University boy!”
The next time Yu Qiao came, he found that besides the awkward-looking Lin Cherry sitting across from him, there were also three senior sisters at the table.
“Two others had activities and couldn’t come,” one of the sisters explained to him.
Another sister, with long straight black hair and wearing lipstick of a strange color, rested her chin on her hand and smiled as she observed Yu Qiao from across the table.
Yu Qiao uncomfortably asked Lin Cherry, “What’s going on?”
He wasn’t obedient at all, lacking in social graces. He didn’t know how to nod and flatter when meeting pretty senior sisters, or even how to smile. Meng Lijun couldn’t help but whisper in Lin Qile’s ear, “This guy is so Beihang!”
After that, the senior roommates rarely mentioned the “math dream guy” again. Instead, they started asking Lin Qile what it was like to have a Beihang University boyfriend.
“No, no!” Lin Qile hurriedly explained, “Our families have lived close since we were young, we’ve always eaten together often…”
But it was no use. The seniors started chatting among themselves: “I heard Beihang’s School of Aeronautical Science and Engineering boys are super busy. Dating them is like a long-distance relationship!”
Lin Qile thought she might as well send a text to Yu Qiao, telling him not to come over for meals anymore.
If there was anything important, they could just call. There wasn’t much to talk about usually anyway.
The seniors continued their excited discussion in the dorm room.
“Based on my years of experience reading romance novels,” the senior from bed number 2 said, “it’s very likely that Lin Lele’s American dream guy will return years later as a domineering CEO, driving a BMW or Mercedes, frantically coming back to pursue our Lele!”
The senior from bed number 1, reading a book called “Montessori Scientific Method for Early Childhood Education,” commented, “Your plot is too cliché.”
“No, it should be like this!” The senior from bed number 3 muted “Kangxi Lai Le” on TV and turned to say, “It can’t just be Lele and the American dream guy—”
The senior from bed number 2 slapped her bed, “I’ve got it, Lele loses her memory!”
“Huh?” Meng Lijun, who was plucking her eyebrows with a small mirror, turned in surprise.
The senior from bed number 2 continued, “She loses her memory, then she quickly marries the Beihang handsome guy, maybe they even have a child already!”
The atmosphere in the dorm room immediately became more excited. Before long, the story had evolved into Lin Lele being forcefully taken by the returned domineering dream guy, miscarrying and getting pregnant again and again, marrying first and falling in love later, regaining her memory, and finally reconciling.
“Why don’t you write novels?” Meng Lijun asked the senior from bed number 2.
She replied with a pained expression, “It’s the great cause of education that’s holding me back!”
The senior from bed number 3 turned around and asked, “Hey, where’s Lele?”
The senior from bed number 1, still reading her book, calmly said, “She went out to do laundry when you guys started making her lose her memory and have children.”
Lin Cherry put a basin of clothes to be washed on the steps. She crouched beside it, thinking for a while before sending a text message: “You’d better not come to eat with me anymore. It’s so far, and we always end up arguing when we eat anyway.”
“Lin Cherry,” Yu Qiao replied half an hour later, probably just seeing the message, “We won’t have many chances to meet up in the future anyway.”
Lin Cherry stared at this message, and for some reason, she suddenly felt very sad.
The sound of high heels clicking on the floor grew closer to Lin Cherry. She looked up to see senior Meng Lijun coming out of the dorm room to find her.
“What are you doing? Texting your study abroad dream guy again?” Meng Lijun crouched down next to Lin Cherry, hugging her knees.
Lin Cherry awkwardly turned her phone screen towards herself and turned it off.
“When I used to watch ‘The Grand Mansion Gate,’ there was a plot that left a deep impression on me,” Meng Lijun told Lin Cherry. “There was a woman, played by Jiang Wenli, who fell in love with a man, but he wouldn’t marry her. In the end, she married his photograph.”
Lin Cherry asked, “Married a photograph?”
“You’re not going to end up marrying your phone, are you?” Meng Lijun gently asked her, with a somewhat pitying look in her eyes.
During the summer break of her freshman year, Lin Qile sat next to Yu Qiao on the high-speed train home. In the past, they often walked together to and from school, but this was the first time Lin Qile felt so uncomfortable. She turned her head away, constantly wearing her earphones and looking out the window.
Yu Qiao napped in his seat, and when he woke up, he asked her which station they had reached. Lin Qile told him but avoided his gaze. Yu Qiao glanced at her but didn’t say anything more.
Back at home, Lin Qile sat alone on her bed, fiddling with a Barbie doll whose hair she had cut short.
“Cherry, don’t forget me.” Jiang Qiaoxi’s voice echoed in her ears.
Lin Qile lowered her head deeply, making no sound. Suddenly, tears began to fall one by one.
During a summer gathering, Lin Qile suddenly asked Du Shang, “Do you think there’s such a thing as feelings that never change in this world?”
Du Shang, who had grown a beard that made his usually thin face look more mature, replied without hesitation, “No.”
Lin Qile looked at him.
“Do you say that in front of your girlfriend too?” she asked.
“No, no…” Du Shang hurriedly said, “With girlfriends, you can’t tell the truth, you have to sweet-talk them.”
Cai Fangyuan came over with a small bowl of dipping sauce, asking Lin Qile and Du Shang if they wanted some dry dip: “What’s up with Yu Qiao? Why isn’t he here yet?”
With the steaming hot pot between them, it wasn’t easy for Du Shang to talk to Lin Qile. He decided to stand up and move to sit next to her with his sesame sauce bowl. He turned to her and said, “Cherry, your parents have a good relationship. Let me tell you about my parents…”
“Before I transferred to the Qunshan construction site, I heard my mom say that she and my dad had a pretty good relationship,” Du Shang recalled, staring at the goji berries floating in the pot. “Later, my dad went to the Pucheng construction site, and my mom stayed in Qunshan. They grew more and more distant, and misunderstandings and conflicts increased. Whenever my mom talked to other uncles, word would get back to my dad’s ears, and he’d get jealous and angry. He hit my mom, but he still wouldn’t agree to a divorce.”
This was the first time Lin Qile had heard Du Shang talk about his parents’ past and the reasons behind the adults’ disputes back then.
“So now when I have free time during holidays, I go to Shanghai,” Du Shang told her directly. “If we can avoid being apart, we don’t separate. If we can avoid long-distance, we don’t do long-distance. We’re just ordinary people. You never know when things might fall apart. When you’re apart for a long time, who knows what might happen?”
Qin Yeyun arrived with Yu Qiao. Cai Fangyuan was very surprised and asked Qin Yeyun, “What a rare guest! How come you’re here?”
Qin Yeyun scolded him, “What do you mean ‘rare guest’? You never invite me when you host dinners!”
Cai Fangyuan laughed, spitting out sunflower seed shells, and said, “I want to invite you, but I’m afraid you’ll start endless arguments with Yu Qiao at the dinner table.”
Qin Yeyun scoffed and directed Du Shang to move aside. She then sat down next to Lin Qile.
“What’s wrong? Are you not talking to Yu Qiao?” she whispered to Lin Qile.
Cai Fangyuan sat nearby, cracking sunflower seeds. Suddenly, everyone at the table fell silent. Lin Qile kept her head down, not acknowledging anything. Cai Fangyuan looked up and noticed Yu Qiao’s face had darkened as if he was about to lose his temper. Cai Fangyuan broke the silence: “Let’s order, folks. What does everyone want?”
He then said to Qin Yeyun, “Alright, alright, stop teasing her. It’s not easy being a single young woman.”
At the start of her sophomore year, Lin Qile spent her time either in class or practicing spoken English with international students at the English Association. She wasn’t sure why she was practicing, feeling it might not be useful in the future.
During the National Day holiday in 2009, Lin Qile went to her aunt’s house for dinner. Her aunt had a British Shorthair cat, bluish-gray and very fat and clingy. Lin Qile carried it everywhere, feeling particularly needed by it.
Her cousin had accompanied his girlfriend to Japan in the summer and bought Lin Qile several skincare sets from the duty-free shop. Lin Qile looked at the unfamiliar circular logos and joked, “If you put these two circles together, it would be Chanel!”
At the end of the year, after Lin Qile finished her CET-6 exam, Qin Yeyun called to tell her she was dating someone in college.
Lin Qile was completely unprepared.
“You’re dating?”
Qin Yeyun said, “I can’t wait for the person I like, but I can wait for someone willing to buy me Ferragamo.”
Lin Qile asked, “Is he good to you?”
“He’s alright,” Qin Yeyun said nonchalantly. “At least he treats me better than Yu Qiao ever did.”
After starting sophomore year, Yu Qiao never came to Normal University again.
He was very busy. Third-year students at the Flight Academy were preparing to go abroad, and if scheduled early, some would leave in their sophomore year. He had already taken the IELTS exam and was preparing for flight school interviews from the beginning of the semester.
In December, it was Cai Fangyuan who told Lin Yingtao over the phone, “Yu Qiao is going to Canada. He’ll leave around March or April next year.”
Lin Yingtao responded with a simple “Oh.”
“He doesn’t talk to me anymore anyway,” Lin Yingtao added.
Cai Fangyuan sighed, “Maybe he’ll talk to you when you have a boyfriend in the future.”
Lin Yingtao lowered her head, unsure how to respond.
Cai Fangyuan changed the subject, mentioning that Jiang Qiaoxi’s father had recently withdrawn the last of the money stored in Cai Fangyuan’s family’s stock account.
Lin Yingtao’s heart skipped a beat.
“I asked my dad,” Cai Fangyuan said. “It seems his father might be changing jobs.”
Lin Yingtao asked, “Uncle Jiang won’t be working at the Electric Power Construction Group anymore?”
“Mm-hmm,” Cai Fangyuan confirmed.
Noticing Lin Yingtao’s silence, Cai Fangyuan asked, “What’s wrong now?”
Lin Yingtao’s voice trembled, “Cai Fangyuan…”
“What is it?” Cai Fangyuan was startled.
Lin Yingtao cried, “Now you’re the only one who tells me about Jiang Qiaoxi…”
Cai Fangyuan sighed in exasperation, “What? Did you think we all forgot about him?”
He continued, “Du Shang mentioned recently that he might go to Hong Kong for an exchange program in his junior year summer. He wants to find out which hospital Jiang Qiaoxi’s family stayed at after the incident. He even wants to give Jiang Qiaoxi a piece of his mind.”
As one grows older, it seems increasingly difficult to maintain “pure friendships between the opposite sexes.” Even childhood friends gradually change. Lin Yingtao slowly realized this.
She mustered her courage and called Yu Qiao after class. Yu Qiao didn’t answer. She sent a text message: “Why aren’t you answering my call? Are you too important now?”
Yu Qiao replied late that night, saying he hadn’t seen the call: “I’m busy! What’s your problem? Spit it out if you have something to say.”
At the end of the sophomore year summer vacation, in late August, an incident spread throughout the 05 Experimental High School alumni group.
Cai Fangyuan frantically messaged Lin Yingtao on QQ, but finding her offline, he called her mobile phone. When there was no answer, he finally called her home landline, which her uncle Lin Haifeng answered.
Lin Yingtao had just finished showering when she took the receiver and heard Cai Fangyuan shouting.
“Quick, check QQ! Jiang Qiaoxi’s photos are online!”
A Hong Kong middle school girl had posted a set of photos on her MSN Space.
“Isn’t my new Math + Mandarin teacher handsome!! There can’t be a more handsome tutor in all of Hong Kong!! How could anyone not get full marks in Math with him around!!”
In the comments, someone asked, “Is this Jiang Qiaoxi from Experimental High School?”
The blogger replied, “I don’t know. He’s a top student in Finance at HKU, also pursuing a double degree in Law. He’s the tutor for me and my sister.”
Most of the subsequent comments were in simplified Chinese, indicating that the blog had been flooded with mainland visitors, mostly students from competitive math classes and alumni from the 05 Experimental High School.
“That’s Jiang Qiaoxi, the 2007 IMO gold medalist who turned down Tsinghua’s guaranteed admission. I heard he went to Berkeley for Statistics. He chose HKU?”
The blogger responded, “Is he famous in mainland China? His family situation is quite poor. My Daddy met him at the hospital and hired him.”
“Impossible. Jiang Qiaoxi’s family is very wealthy. He used to have a chauffeur drive him to math competitions, and his shoes alone cost three to four thousand yuan.”
“He was our province’s math prodigy in 2007, a national first prize winner who could have gone to the international competition. I thought he went to the US for research, but he’s tutoring in Hong Kong?”
“Little sister, study math well.”
“Master Jiang explains problems even better than our competition class teachers. How much did your dad pay to hire him?”
The photos were secretly taken through the gap above a book, like a young girl’s furtive glance. The young man opposite was sitting at a desk with his head down, holding a fountain pen and explaining Mandarin Pinyin to a little girl who looked about seven or eight years old.
He hadn’t noticed the camera and his face was expressionless. On the table, besides the books and stationery used by the two girls, there were various colorful snacks and toys, as well as a slightly worn black mug with an Eisenhower quote, and a tea bag hanging from its rim.
The latest comment read: “Sister, please delete these photos quickly. It’s illegal for Hong Kong students to work as tutors. Jiang Qiaoxi could be expelled from HKU and deported. Please delete them.”
As soon as their junior year began, Lin Qile went to Beijing. She took advantage of her free time to process necessary documents at school. On a Thursday afternoon when she had no classes, she stood in the crowded reception hall of the Exit-Entry Administration. Lin Qile queued to fill out forms and take photos. After getting her number, while waiting, she couldn’t help but start crying again.
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Our Generation – Chapter Notes:
“Xiao Fang”: A folk love song written, composed, and performed by Li Chunbo, released in the album “Xiao Fang” in June 1993.
“The one played by Jiang Wenli”: Jiang Wenli played Bai Yuting in “The Grand Mansion Gate,” who held a grand wedding ceremony with an actor’s photograph and remained faithful to the photo for life.
MSN Space: A blog-sharing service launched by Microsoft, which was shut down in March 2011.