The Boy from Xiqiong

Beneath the sky over Xiqiong Township, seventeen-year-old Ye Fan learned the first lesson of life: how to breathe quietly. His father worked far away, his mother had vanished somewhere in the city, and only his grandmother, Wang Hongxia, with her scolding, and three old Chinese scholar trees bore witness to his growing up. Through the cracks in glass marbles, he glimpsed the warmth of the past; on a rooftop where no one knew, he counted the stars countless times. His grades were above average, he was quiet and reserved, and he wore “being sensible” like his best-fitting clothes. Then a transfer student appeared, like a pebble dropped into a deep well. “There’s something remarkable hidden in your eyes,” she said. Ye Fan merely lowered his head and went on working through the equation of family affection that could never be solved. The school corridors began to carry a different breeze: notes passed by girls, inexplicable glances on the sports field, and phone screens lighting up and going dark in the middle of the night. Between his grandmother’s scolding, “No dating before you’re older,” and his father’s hesitant phone calls, he stumbled through his first steps, learning what it meant to like someone, what it meant to be hurt, and how to find himself before loving someone else. From a humble, unspoken crush to a passionate, tumultuous entanglement, from tacit understanding to hysterical heartbreak, Ye Fan gradually discovered that the battlefield of adolescence was far crueler than the courtyard of his childhood home. There were no right answers here, and every flutter of the heart could leave him bleeding. But when he finally found the courage to look up The sky he had endured for seventeen years had already broken open, revealing countless miles of starlight.