Just before the start of university, Lin Qile’s family took a short trip to Qingdao, a coastal city.
At the station, they were greeted by an unfamiliar businessman in a shirt and trousers, accompanied by his secretary and driver. Lin Qile stared blankly at him on the platform until the man smiled and tapped her forehead. “Cherry, have you forgotten me?”
Lin Qile hesitated, unsure how to address him.
Her father, Lin Diangong, chimed in from beside her, “This is your Uncle Wang, the one who bought you taro from Lipu when we were at the mountain construction site, remember?”
Lin Qile’s eyes widened in recognition. “Ah! Uncle Wang!”
Uncle Wang, with his thick eyebrows, beamed at her. “Cherry was so tiny back then, just a little thing. Now look at you, all grown up into such a beautiful young lady! It must have been ten years since we last met.”
Uncle Wang had started a trading company in Qingdao and owned several properties. He warmly invited Lin Diangong’s family to stay at his newly renovated beachfront villa. “It’s empty, no trouble at all! Brother Lin, please, there’s no need for formalities between us. It’s been so many years, and you’ve never come to visit Qingdao.”
This was Lin Cherry’s first time seeing a real villa. She ran into the first floor, looking up in awe. Uncle Wang followed her in, smiling. “Cherry, go upstairs and have a look! See which room you’d like to stay in!”
Lin Cherry bounded up the stairs, her hand gliding along the banister.
Standing on the garden balcony, feeling the evening sea breeze of Qingdao, she typed a message to Jiang Qiaoxi: “I saw a villa today! Just like the ones you see in TV dramas!”
Uncle Wang’s driver brought in a barrel of Qingdao beer, and a table full of seafood was ordered. Lin Diangong felt embarrassed by the hospitality, but Uncle Wang insisted, “This is all freshly caught by local fishermen. Brother Lin, you might not get this chance in other seasons!”
At the dinner table, Lin Diangong and Uncle Wang reminisced about old times. Lin sighed, “My annual salary now probably wouldn’t even buy one square meter of this place.”
Sitting across from him, Uncle Wang wore the kind of smile typical of successful businessmen, one they might not even be aware of themselves.
“After all these years, you still haven’t been promoted in the system,” Uncle Wang remarked. “Good people don’t always get their due, eh, Brother Lin?”
Just then, Lin Cherry came out of the kitchen, which was still new and unused since the renovation. She set down a plate of scallops and sat down, her face brimming with excitement.
“Which school in Beijing did Cherry get into?” Uncle Wang asked.
“Beijing Normal University,” Lin’s wife answered proudly from the side.
“Oh my!” Uncle Wang’s eyes crinkled as he smiled at Lin Cherry. He nodded and said to Lin Diangong, “See? Good people do get some rewards after all.”
Her father always said, “Cherry, you’re only eighteen.”
But Lin Cherry felt she was experiencing some of the most painful and heartbreaking things in life, at least a part of it. She wasn’t a child anymore.
Lately, every song she heard seemed to reflect her own experiences, whether it was “I kiss you goodbye on an empty street, my heart waiting to embrace sorrow” or “My longing for you grows day by day, lonely I remain unchanged.”
Often, as she listened, she’d end up sitting on her bed, hugging her knees and wiping away tears.
She was about to embark on her journey to Beijing, towards a new Our Generation – Chapter in her life. Lin Cherry packed her new MP4 player, filled with melancholic songs, into her backpack. Her father had bought it for her recently.
She had lost the MP3 player that had accompanied her for so many years, but thankfully, the cassette tape Jiang Qiaoxi had given her was still there. On the cover, Stefanie Sun, who debuted at the turn of the millennium, crouched with her youthful short hair, exuding a naive determination to face the world.
Because her father had to work overtime, he could only see Lin Cherry off at the train station. On the platform, Lin Cherry hugged her father and couldn’t help but cry again. She wanted to be strong, but it was hard to hide her reluctance to leave.
Lin Diangong smiled and patted her back. “You’ll be back for National Day. Study hard at school, be sure to stay safe, and call home often.”
Lin Cherry nodded, wiping her tears with her sleeve. “Goodbye, Dad!” she said.
Her mother boarded the train, having added an extra ticket at the last minute. Still worried, she decided to accompany her daughter to the school in Beijing, along with Team Leader Yu. Yu Qiao, his son, and Qin Yeyun were seated in the next compartment. Lin’s mother took out a plastic bag from her daughter’s luggage, containing apples she had peeled at home. She broke an apple in half and shared it with her daughter.
“When you were little, we always wondered if our Cherry would ever make it to university,” her mother said. “You disliked studying so much, always just wanting to play.”
Lin Cherry ate her apple silently, leaning her head on her mother’s shoulder.
“When you get to school, make friends, get along well with your roommates,” her mother advised. “And if you happen to like a boy, it’s okay to date…”
Lin Cherry suddenly started coughing, as if choking on the apple.
“Isn’t Yu Qiao’s school quite close to yours?” her mother asked abruptly.
“Not really,” Lin Cherry mumbled. “It’s a half-hour ride away.”
“You two could explore Beijing together on weekends, visit the sights and all,” her mother suggested with a smile.
At Beijing South Station, there were buses from Beijing Normal University waiting to pick up new students. Lin Cherry said goodbye to Uncle Yu and the others, then boarded the bus with her mother.
At the school, advertisements for new students were everywhere. Following the guidance from the Pre-school Education Major 08 freshman group chat, Lin Cherry registered for a Xiaonei Network account. She searched for Yu Qiao, Cai Fangyuan, Du Shang, Qin Yeyun, Huang Zhanjie, Xin Tingting, Geng Xiaoqing, Feng Letian… She added each one, noticing that almost every classmate had updated their school information from high school to university.
Of course, she habitually typed “Jiang Qiaoxi” into the search bar, but still, there were no results.
According to the dormitory information provided, Lin Cherry wasn’t assigned to live with her classmates from the same major. She was “fortunately” or “unfortunately” allocated to the only vacant bed in a postgraduate female dorm for the preschool education major, meaning she would be living with five seniors four years older than her.
At the bottom of the dormitory building, Lin’s mother called Team Leader Yu, expressing her concerns: “Why did they assign Cherry there? She hasn’t been close to her classmates since junior high…”
Lin Cherry, however, didn’t react much. She looked down at the empty search results for “Jiang Qiaoxi” on her phone, her eyes downcast, clutching the phone in her palm.
Entering the dorm room and putting down her luggage, she found that her senior roommates were out. Her mother helped clean up a bit and organize her belongings. Worried, she said, “Cherry, remember to call home if you have any problems adjusting, okay?”
Lin Cherry nodded. She and her mother then went to check out the cafeteria, walked around the campus a bit, and accompanied her mother to the school gate. There, she watched as her mother walked alone through the unfamiliar streets of Beijing to catch a long-distance bus. Lin Cherry raised her hand to wave at her mother through the bus window as she departed for their home province. Suddenly, tears welled up in her eyes again.
In mid-September 2008, Lehman Brothers Bank in the United States declared bankruptcy.
The Shanghai Composite Index finally fell below 2000 points. Lin Cherry sat on the fourth floor of the Xinle Qun Cafeteria at Beijing Normal University, listening to Yu Qiao, who had come from Xueyuan Road to eat, telling her that Cai Fangyuan’s father had been hospitalized.
“What happened?” she looked up, startled. “Because of the stock market?”
Yu Qiao picked out shrimp from his dish. Noticing Lin Cherry staring at the tip of his chopsticks, he tossed the shrimp into her bowl. “Cai Fangyuan took leave right after school started to go back home. He kept promising that he’d earn back all the money for his dad in the future. Only then did Uncle Cai start to feel a bit better.”
Lin Cherry suddenly smiled from across the table.
Yu Qiao said, “What are you smiling about?”
Lin Cherry replied, “I think Cai Fangyuan is quite reliable, much more so than Uncle Cai speculating on stocks.”
The Hong Kong Hang Seng Index had fallen to 17,000 points, dropping a full 10,000 points since the beginning of the year. While the global economic situation was deteriorating, in the campus cafeteria of Beijing Normal University, all Lin Cherry could sense was the aroma of food, her new environment with old friends, and her fresh university life.
“By the way,” Yu Qiao said, sitting across from her, aware of some girls looking at him, “Jiang Qiaoxi didn’t go to UC Berkeley.”
Lin Cherry suddenly looked up, stunned.
“Those two from Class 8 and Class 15 met Cen Xiaoman,” Yu Qiao said, seemingly casually as he watched her reaction. “Cen Xiaoman kept asking them to find Jiang Qiaoxi, but they couldn’t. They asked some local Chinese students, but no one had any news. Recently, they say they asked a faculty member to check the academic system, and there’s no such person among the new students.”
Lin Cherry stared at Yu Qiao’s face, her lips trembling slightly.
“Maybe he went to a different school,” Yu Qiao quickly added, noticing her reaction.
“Alright, alright!” Yu Qiao soon couldn’t bear it anymore. “How can you cry so easily?”
Yu Qiao was at a loss. He noticed that several girls from the nearby table kept looking at him, their eyes seeming to judge him as a heartless scoundrel. He asked them, “Excuse me, do you have any tissues?”
The dorm leader in Lin Cherry’s postgraduate dormitory was named Meng Lijun. She was a fierce-looking sister with long black hair who usually wore 6-7 cm high black heels to class, her lips as red as if she had eaten children for breakfast every day.
During their first late-night chat, Lin Cherry sat in her quilt, cruelly illuminated by the flashlights from the five senior sisters’ phones. The room lights had long been turned off, and Lin Cherry squinted her eyes, enduring the interrogation.
“Lele,” senior sister Meng Lijun called coldly from the opposite bed, wearing only her underwear and holding up her phone, “come on, tell your big sisters, do you have a boyfriend? Have you kissed? Hugged? Slept together?”
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Note:
Xiaonei Network: Founded in December 2005 by Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang, and Tang Yang, university students from Tsinghua University and Tianjin University. It was renamed “Renren Network” in July 2009.