On April 1, 2001, over the South China Sea, 81192 never made it back. In a senior-year classroom in Huzhou, eighteen-year-old Shu Yang crossed out every university on her application form except one aviation university. Twenty-three years later, the fighter jet she designed herself took to the skies, answering the question left behind by the previous era in the words, "I can no longer return."
This book focuses on China's efforts to advance science and technology in national defense and aviation as part of its modernization: from the bidding gamble over a canard configuration to fitting a domestically made "Chinese heart" into a fighter; from a blueprint sent back with seventeen sections marked in red to a curve that still wouldn't line up in the wind tunnel at three in the morning. Every step of the effort rests on the shoulders of real people. It rests on her unwavering resolve over twenty-three years, on a drawerful of plane tickets accumulated through a long-distance marriage, and on her father's promise: "You keep your work secret, and I'll protect you."
The echoes of an era are here too: repayment is not a moment of dramatic triumph, but a lifetime of painstaking accumulation. One person stakes their whole life, one generation makes up for what the country lacks, and the next generation flies farther still. This book is dedicated to those who hide their names in the blue skies of their motherland, and to the lives of everyone beneath those skies.
