[Campus Youth and Coming of Age]
In the autumn of 2018, Lin Xunan walked into Minghua High School.
She didn't know that this day would stay with her for a long time.
The first time she met Chen Zan, she misread his name.
He smiled and corrected her. “The Zan has a jade radical. It means a jade spoon, and something beautiful.”
She thought it was just a character.
But later, she learned that some people's names put down roots on the page.
Each time you write it, it sinks an inch deeper into your heart.
By the time you realize it, you can't pull it out anymore.
Back then, they thought youth meant eating candy together, even if the sun turned them into mummies.
Back then, they didn't know that some people would drift apart, and some candy would run out.
But she remembered the taste of that candy for many years.
Three years of middle school, over a thousand days and nights.
She wrote many words on her scratch paper.
The one that appeared most often was “Zan.”
Then came Chengnan High School.
For all three years of high school, they went to the same school but were no longer classmates.
They met in the hallway, nodded, smiled, and passed each other by.
Like everyone else, like people who only knew each other.
She still wrote that character on her scratch paper. She just stopped showing it to anyone.
In 2018, she folded a paper star, thinking it would shine forever.
In 2024, after the college entrance exams, she sorted through her old things and saw that the star had been flattened.
Paper stars were always bound to get crushed.
But it had shone.
On the scratch paper of her fifteen-year-old self, in the hallways of Chengnan High School, in every moment she was too shy to look up at him...
It had shone.
Youth is a series of things you don't have time for: not enough time to write a character correctly, to say what you want, to say a proper goodbye.
But she had no regrets.
Because
“Some stars are destined to be folded from paper, unable to last forever. But they once truly lit up my youth.”
A trilogy, the same Chengnan High School, the same sunset, the same breeze.
Chengnan has no secrets, only stories.
Some stories are short, but enough to remember for a lifetime.
[Reader's Guide]
1. The feelings go both ways, but that doesn't mean they lead to a happy ending. Some mutual feelings stop at “I know you like me, and you know I like you,” but neither of us ever says it out loud.
2. Paper Stars is Lin Xunan's coming-of-age story. It's not about whether she ends up with him. It's about how she comes to terms with a relationship without a conclusion, then keeps moving forward.
3. Paper stars are always bound to get crushed, but they once shone. Some feelings are destined to go nowhere. That doesn't mean they have no meaning. They truly lit up someone's youth, and that's enough.
Theme: The relationships we cannot define are precisely what define our youth.
