Sick Boy[s] Paddle Club↓

Chu Chu

Zhongxia Li 李中夏

Translated by: Lucy Ren

Yang Chuchu is my best friend, and we’ve known each other since we were kids. We were classmates in elementary school, then middle school. We briefly separated in the first year of high school, but reunited in the same class as juniors. I never thought I could be so lucky. As freshmen, we talked, hung out, and for a while, it felt like nothing had changed since childhood. But she was placed in the advanced class, while I stayed in the regular one. Our classrooms were in different buildings. The distance between two buildings might as well fit in the whole Pacific. Day by day, we stopped talking.

Still, I had one small advantage. We shared the same teachers for three subjects. Two of those teachers, one for Chinese literature and one for biology, had offices in her building. And among those subjects, Chinese was the one I was best at.

So throughout my entire first year of high school, I took the job of Chinese class representative both semesters in a row. The real reason was simple. I wanted an excuse to travel all the way to Chuchu’s building: carrying the heavy stacks of homework across to the Chinese teacher’s office there. I wanted the chance to run into Chuchu upstairs. I did come across her a few times, but she was either leaning against the railing, contemplating, perhaps, I didn’t know about what. Or she was laughing and joking loudly with friends, and I was too embarrassed to approach her. To be honest, I missed her very much and was willing to scream at the top of my lungs like a crazy person just to catch her attention. Instead, I just stared, analyzed the length of her hair, and the angle of her moon-like eyes when she laughed. I thought to myself that she might have seen me, but was too shy to talk to me, just like me. But I never had a chance of confirming my guesses with her. In my memory, I had no phone back then, and the only computer at home was inconvenient. I kept missing opportunities to talk to her while she was online. What about passing paper notes at school? Nah, too indiscreet, and what if we get caught?

There was one time, though. At the end of freshman year, I saw her in the teachers' lounge. We said hi with our eyes. She was being yelled at by a Chinese teacher, her head down, silent. I wanted to say something nice, so I waited for her outside the door. When Chuchu came out, I opened my mouth with a few words of comfort in mind, but what came out was a giggle. I couldn’t help but laugh at the way she acted when she was getting yelled at. Chuchu stared at me, then burst into tears. The teachers heard the commotion outside and rushed out. I was panicking already. “Chen Xian! What do you think you’re doing?” I was embarrassed, my face was firing up like a frying pan. I started crazily apologizing to Chuchu. I thought to myself that perhaps Chuchu was only trying to scare me. She had a habit of scaring me like that. But what if this time I’d really messed up, because when I was apologizing, Chuchu looked deeply gloomy, like a dark storm. She didn’t say a word, only dragged three words out from between her lips in that eerie little voice of hers: “It’s fine.” Those words stung and yanked my heart up.

Luckily, the second the teachers left, her whole face lit back up. She swaggered two unseemly, exaggerated steps in front of me, then curled her mouth to one side and laughed. “Serves you right for making fun of me.”

Class was about to start. I watched her skip away down the hallway.

That was the Chuchu I knew: eyes darting around as bright marble, a little puffed-up, arrogant, carrying herself like some tiny campus tyrant, yet somehow also a master at pretending to be pitiful. She could change expressions faster than flipping a page.

I stood there for a long time watching her walk away, watching her light little shadow thinning beneath the fresh air and sunlight. Back then, we weren’t in the same class. I was in an ordinary class, and she studied at the upper level. I had no proper reason to speak to her.

By the start of sophomore year, I’d moved up into the advanced liberal arts class level, and when I realized Chuchu was there too, I felt overwhelmed by joy. Of course, I couldn’t let it show. Someone might notice.

So while Chuchu was introducing herself to the class, I kept staring out the window at the birds swooping back and forth, imagining myself flying somewhere up there with them. Still, I heard every word she said. She said her name was Yang Chuchu, that she lived on the east side of town, that she liked going to the Xinhua Bookstore to read books—which, if I remember correctly, was probably made up, everyone in the advanced class said things like that. She also said she played basketball, jersey number eighty-four.

I remember thinking, with a strange little pride, that there were things she hadn’t said. Like how she loved icy watermelon in the summer, how obsessed she was with computer games, how she rolled around in the grass in spring seasons. I knew her better than that classroom ever could. We hadn’t seen each other in a year, yet somehow she had only grown fresher and more vibrant in my mind.

What I didn’t expect was that after school, before everyone had even scattered, Chuchu came storming over. She slammed her backpack onto my desk and demanded, “Chen Xian, what did I ever do to you?”

“Nothing.” I gasped.

“Is it nothing or not?”

“Nothing.” I repeated in confusion.

“Then why do you keep avoiding me?”

I lowered my head, feeling awkward as my face heated up and turned red. Before I could even figure out how to apologize, she said coldly, “You really hurt my feelings.”

Then she grabbed her backpack and turned to leave.

Truthfully, when she first dropped her bag onto my desk, I’d felt secretly happy, because it meant she wanted to stay and talk to me a little longer. But now, with things turning out like this, panic started creeping up my throat. Still, what could I do? I wanted to stop her, but my hands and body froze. There was no way I dared grab a girl by the arm. Everyone was watching.

Luckily, my brain didn’t freeze. I came up with a plan. As soon as she left, I bolted down the other staircase, sprinted to the school gate, bought an ice cream, then hid along the road she took home. By the time I got there, sweat was pouring down my forehead. However, the ice cream was intact, I felt relieved.

I waited for Chuchu. She took forever to show up.

And when she finally did, something about her movements felt strangely unlike herself. I hid behind the corner watching her clearly: lips curled downward, brows knitted tight, arms folded across her chest. As always, she took big strides when she walked, but now they were much slower. And when she finally did, something about her movements felt strangely unlike herself. I hid behind the corner watching her clearly: lips curled downward, brows knitted tight, arms folded across her chest. As always, she took big strides when she walked, but now they were much slower. Every few steps, she turned back to look behind her. Then a few more steps, and another glance back again. The sunset softened the edges of her figure.

Because I kept staring at her, she spotted me almost immediately. Chuchu lifted an eyebrow, grabbed my shirt collar, and asked, “What are you doing here?”

I held out the ice cream. “Waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me why?” she laughed. “What, are you confessing your love or something?”

“No,” I said. “I’m apologizing.”

I explained that I never actually intended to avoid her. Sometimes I was just scared to see her, so I ended up hiding instead. Of course, I didn’t tell her that; I told her some boy from the class next door liked her and had threatened me, warning me not to talk to her anymore. I believed I had made up a perfect lie.

Chuchu got furious immediately, all claws and fangs, looking ready to throw a punch at this entirely fictional boy I’d invented. I hurried to calm her down, saying I already knew I was wrong and that I’d go yell at him later.

“You don’t have to yell at him,” she said. “But you should make sure he understands he never had a chance anyway.”

I asked, “You know who it is?”

“Who?”

“It’s probably better if I don’t tell you. You’ll definitely get mad.”

She gave a sharp little hmph and declared, “I wouldn’t like him no matter who he was. Let alone, he tried to control who gets to talk to me. People who try to control my life are even more annoying than my dad.”

She forgave me somehow, entirely, and ate up the ice cream.

I loved watching her eat ice cream. She always looked unbearably happy doing it. But that day, I didn’t get to watch for long. Our routes home split in different directions, so after a while, I could only say goodbye and head home.

A bit of excitement still lingered with me when I arrived home. I kept thinking about this reunion, this “making-up” with my best friend. I wrote in my diary: “September 1st. I saw Chuchu again.”

I crossed it out.

“My best friend Chuchu.”

Crossed that out too.

“My best friend, Yang Chuchu.”

That finally felt right. Serious enough. Proper enough. Nothing playful about it. I added her last name like I was writing some important official letter, because she was important, she was my best friend.

That night, I drifted deep in my sleep. I dreamed that Chuchu and I were picking mushrooms, bending and searching for more than half a day. We split up to look on our own and agreed to meet again at sunset.

While I was wandering around, I ran into a three-headed elk, a golden axe, and a drone that could talk. But when we finally met up again, I didn’t even get the chance to tell Chuchu about any of it before she pointed at my mushrooms and burst out laughing.

“Chen Xian, you’re so dumb. Your mushrooms are all bright and colorful. Most of them are poisonous. If we ate them, we’d both die for sure.” I felt awful. Chuchu patted my shoulder and said, “It’s okay. Mine are good. And I picked a lot, so I can share with you.” Then she opened her bag, tilted it gently, and mushrooms came rolling out onto the grass. The grass was soft as a belly and held them gently in place.

I acted stubborn and said, “I’m not eating them. The colors are ugly, so they probably taste bad too.” Then I said, “I’m not hungry at all. Not even one bite.” But when the smell drifted over, I gave in. “I think I’m hungry now.” So Chuchu handed me one of the mushrooms she’d roasted.

But no matter how hard I bit down, I couldn’t actually bite the mushroom. At first, I thought she was messing with me, but she looked surprised too, and started anxiously trying to hand it to me again.

I told her, “Don’t rush. There’s still time. We still have time.”

Then I opened my eyes.

Suddenly, there was no Chuchu, no mushrooms anymore—just my mom waking me up for school. I sat there for a long time, still thinking about those plump mushrooms, shiny and rich like meat, and thinking that if it weren’t for Chuchu, I wouldn’t want to go to school at all.

Not long after, during dinner at home, Mom suddenly asked: “Who is Yang Chuchu? Is it THE Yang Chuchu from before?”

“Yes,” I mumbled and looked up in irritation.

My dad looked serious, while Mom had an expression of guilt from peeking at my diary. She looked as if she was trying very hard to act calm. The rest of the conversation falls predictably into cliches: they told me to focus on my studies, and think less of Yang Chuchu. I remained quiet. Luckily, although they embody the fault of every other Chinese parent, they had their own principles and wouldn’t force anything on me. We sat and ate in silence, turning our diner table into a solemn auditorium.

Honestly, my parents didn’t need to worry. Chuchu and I had made a promise that we’d be best friends forever, without letting it affect our studies, and always be honest with each other. Sometimes I think my parents were underestimating our friendship by romanticizing it. I just couldn’t explain it to them; they wouldn’t understand.

Even after ending up in the same class, we still didn’t talk that much. We didn’t need to. At most, we’d stand in the hallway or by the corridor railing and look up at the sky together. What were we looking at? I don’t know. Breaks between classes were only ten minutes long—just enough time to watch birds make a few passes overhead, or clouds float a couple of inches across the sky. I rarely started conversations with Chuchu. Most of the time, I didn’t know what to say, and even when I did, I felt too embarrassed to say it.

What surprised me was that in this new semester, she seemed to lose all her friends, too. She was always alone. Even a little lonely-looking. It was completely different from the Chuchu I remembered from freshman year, the one always laughing and fooling around with a crowd of girls during breaks. Back then, I was the Chinese class representative, so I had excuses to pass by her classroom all the time. I used to wonder what she could be talking about with them that was so funny, so endlessly interesting. Sometimes she’d lean against the railing and sway her head around while talking, suddenly bursting into laughter for no reason at all, like she’d spotted cotton candy floating in the clouds, or the school building had secretly turned into a cat.

But now she stood perfectly straight, her hair moving in the wind, quietly studying everything she could see with this strangely clear-eyed look. Calm. Steady. Almost detached from the world around her. Sometimes she’d say things that sounded weirdly philosophical. It didn’t fit the version of Chuchu I knew, and honestly, it felt beyond our age. Thankfully, she never insisted on making me understand. Like anyone else who might’ve overheard her talking, I’d nod vaguely, completely confused, then forget every word afterward with my head empty as ever.

I always regretted forgetting those things. Otherwise, I could at least write some of them down here now.

But overall, high school life was peaceful.

After working myself half to death through all of freshman year, I finally got into the advanced class when classes were reorganized during the sophomore entrance exam. Honestly, that was my only chance to make it into the top class, and somehow I caught it. Even now, it feels unreal.

Everyone in class listened carefully, kept pace with each other, and stayed out of trouble. No fighting. No cruel arguments. I felt fulfilled there, but nervous too. Our homeroom teacher had also been my Chinese teacher the year before. He loved repeating one phrase: “Catch up from behind.” He always said that because we were just students from a county town, we’d have to work twice as hard to catch up with students from provincial capitals and big cities. Back then, I completely bought into that mindset.

One time during a class meeting, he told us this story: the weekend before, he’d gone to the provincial capital for a conference and ended up seated beside a teacher from the city’s top high school. At first, the other teacher had been polite enough, but the moment he heard our teacher was from a county school, his whole expression supposedly changed—cold, distant, uninterested. To this day, I have no idea whether that story was real. Even if it was, our teacher probably exaggerated the tension a little. Or maybe he was just overly sensitive. But at the time, I believed every word. It felt like I was the one being looked down on. The whole class got worked up together, ready to rush home and do two extra practice papers after school ended.

Of course, maybe some people didn’t buy it. Chuchu definitely didn’t. She quietly told me she didn’t trust teachers at all, and that the story was obviously made up. “How do you know?” I asked. “I don’t,” she said. “It just doesn’t feel real.” “But you don’t have proof either.” “That’s a boring thing to say. Teacher doesn’t have proof either.” I scratched my head. “I guess maybe you’re right. But we’ll probably never know.” Chuchu lifted her chin proudly. “I’m obviously right.”

The class meeting was the last period of the afternoon. Afterward, everyone scattered. Chuchu, I, and two other classmates stayed behind on cleaning duty.

By the time we finished, the whole sky had turned orange-red. Chuchu lowered her voice mysteriously and told me not to leave yet. She said to wait a little, walk around the track a couple of times first, then come meet her downstairs by the teaching building after everyone else was gone. I had no idea what she was planning, but I agreed anyway and wandered aimlessly around the nearly empty field while a few students jogged in the distance.

Just like we’d arranged, Chuchu was waiting downstairs when I came back. The moment she saw me, she started waving both arms excitedly. I thought I was only gone a few minutes. Was all this really necessary? But I still couldn’t help walking a little faster toward her.

“You busy later?” “Not really,” I said. “But I should head home.”

“Well, obviously you’re going home,” she said. “I mean, do you actually have something important to do?”

“Probably finish homework, then do two more practice papers or something. You know. Catch up from behind.”

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “You actually believed that? We’re only juniors. The college entrance exam’s still forever away. Why are you in such a rush?” Before I could answer, she went on: “Forget the papers for today. Come to Old Street with me.”

“What for?”

“You coming or not? If you come, I’ll buy you fried skewers.” I hesitated a little, but the second she mentioned skewers, I had to admit I was tempted. The smell wasn’t even there yet, but somehow it had already filled my nose. “Pork chops, chicken wings. Whatever you want,” she said. That finished me off. “I want mushrooms too,” I said. The moment I singled out mushrooms instead of the expensive beef skewers, she looked at me with total disgust and said I had no ambition whatsoever. “Mind your own business,” I muttered.

By then, I hadn’t been to Old Street in ages. In my memory, it always glowed this dim yellow color, so blurred and faded that it felt less like a real place and more like a broken slideshow. I remembered endless crowds. People everywhere, packed together like underwater weeds and rocks, impossible to squeeze past without bumping into someone. Noise crashing in from every direction. Dizzying.

And that night really was packed on Old Street. I still don’t know how so many people fit inside one narrow little alley. The heat from everyone breathing fogged up my glasses completely. Chuchu grabbed onto my sleeve and dragged me through the crowd. All I could see was her back, her short hair, the little beads of sweat on the back of her neck. There were too many people. We were both sweating all over. I asked how much farther we had to go, but she didn’t hear me. So I shouted louder, asking where exactly we were even going. She sounded ridiculously happy. “You’ll never guess!” she yelled back without turning around. And I really couldn’t guess. In the end, she brought me to this tiny jewelry shop.

The second we got there, she sat down like she already owned the place and tilted her head up at me. “Which one looks better?” She was pointing at earrings and studs. Then she told me she was getting her ears pierced there, and that I had the honor of choosing her very first pair of earrings. “No dangling earrings though,” she said. “We’re high school students. Gotta keep a low profile.” We’d just spent forever getting crushed through the crowd like sandwich filling, and I was still standing there panting as I’d barely survived. Meanwhile, Chuchu already looked completely calm again, sitting there all smug and pleased with herself. She stared at me until I got embarrassed. “Isn’t this… kind of a bad idea?” I asked. “What’s bad about it?” she said innocently. I started mumbling nonsense. So she asked: “You think getting your ears pierced is bad, too? Like my parents? Or teachers?” Her eyes were bright and direct, and suddenly I felt ashamed for even sounding judgmental. But her voice stayed soft. She really was asking seriously. “It’s not that…” I said. “I was just thinking maybe you should get it done at a hospital or something.” The shop owner immediately protested with great dignity that his shop was just as clean and sanitary as any hospital. I nodded weakly and apologized.

Chuchu laughed when she saw how pathetic I looked. “Hospitals are expensive,” she said. “This place only costs like ten yuan.” She pulled out a bunch of wrinkled bills—fives, twos, a few coins too. Back then, I knew the smell of money really well. Now I almost never see cash anymore.

After counting everything carefully, she handed the money over and told me to go choose the earrings. “But don’t rush,” she added. “Piercing takes time. By the time I’m done, you’ll probably be done picking, too.”

I remember asking a really stupid question then. But I genuinely wanted to know. “Why did you ask me to come with you?” She gave me a very clever answer. “What kind of question is that? Because we’re best friends.” That made me feel a little calmer. Still, while I was picking out earrings, I couldn’t stop glancing over at her. I watched the owner dab disinfectant onto her earlobe. Watched her giggling. Then I saw him pull out this tiny white plastic thing with a needle in the middle and line it up against her ear.

Maybe she noticed I kept staring, because she suddenly asked: “Chen Xian, do you secretly want your ears pierced too?” This time, she wasn’t laughing anymore. But she didn’t look angry either. Maybe just nervous. I snapped my head away immediately and went back to choosing earrings. All those shiny little trinkets made my imagination run wild. Mostly, though, I was imagining Chuchu’s tiny earlobes.

I never actually saw the needle go through.

By the time I turned around again, the owner was already explaining aftercare and disinfecting everything one more time. Now there was a thin little white plastic stick through each of her ears, skinny as thread, sticking out a couple of centimeters straight from her earlobes like strange little marks drawn onto her body. I leaned in too close, trying to look, to the point that I started interrupting the owner’s explanation.

Chuchu glared at me. “Chen Xian, I really think you want piercings too.” I shook my head so fast my neck hurt.

Anyway, in the end, Chuchu accepted my taste and bought the pair I picked. Honestly, they were super plain. Just tiny round plastic studs. But they caught the light nicely—kind of like fake white jade with this faint soft glow to them. They cost ten yuan. She said she’d looked it up online and had to keep the little plastic rods in for a few days first so the piercings could settle before switching to the real earrings.

I had no idea what she was talking about and just nodded along. At the same time, I couldn’t stop staring at those little white rods sticking through her ears like splinters. “Does it hurt?” I asked. “Nope,” she said. “Actually, it kind of itches.” A little later, we bought fried skewers to go and were about to split up when I asked again if it really didn’t hurt. “It really doesn’t,” she said. “You’re annoying.” Then suddenly she asked: “So should I pretend it hurts a little?”

Before I could react, she clutched herself dramatically and started yelling: “Ow! Ow! It hurts so bad!” She flailed around wildly, kicking and waving her arms everywhere. I panicked immediately and asked what I was supposed to do. “That’s your problem,” she said. “Figure it out.” When Chuchu went crazy, she became like a tiny lion. Completely unreasonable.

I helped her over to a bench by the road, and she kept yelling with absolutely zero dignity: “Owwww! It hurts! It hurts!” I had no idea what else to do. “Should I… blow on it or something?” That finally broke her. She burst out laughing. “What’s blowing on it supposed to do?”

Now I knew for sure she was messing with me, so I stubbornly leaned closer anyway and tried to blow on her ear. She dodged away, laughing, and finally surrendered. But after all that fooling around, she suddenly frowned again. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Actually… it does hurt a little now.” This time, she didn’t sound like she was joking. I got nervous all over again. “Did the guy do it wrong?” She shook her head. “No. I heard it’s supposed to hurt a little. It doesn’t really hurt when they pierce it—it’s like a mosquito bite. But afterward, it starts stinging slowly. Hot and sore. That’s normal.”

“How bad?”

“How am I supposed to describe that?”

“Try.”

She thought for a second.

“If ‘it hurts so bad’ is a ten, then it’s less than that. Maybe a little less than just ‘it hurts.’ Like… two-thirds of a normal pain?”

“That makes no sense.”

“It feels like there are tiny people inside my ears trying to tear the wound open little by little, and then squeezing their way out.”

I hissed through my teeth.

“That sounds terrible!”

I wanted to make her feel better somehow, so I suggested we eat the skewers there before they got cold.

She agreed immediately.

So we sat there with greasy hands and greasy mouths, soaking in this greasy kind of happiness. By then, it was getting dark. Fewer people were out now. In a small town, that usually meant everyone had gone home for dinner. My parents were probably waiting for me already. Maybe worried. But I wasn’t in a hurry. Neither was Chuchu. Right in the middle of eating, she suddenly said, “Chen Xian, tell me a story.”

I looked at her blankly.

“Why all of a sudden?”

She thought very hard about it. “Because you used to write stories all the time. You said you wanted to be a novelist. I’m supervising you now, making sure you’re still working toward it.” Then she added, “Just tell me anything. Maybe if I listen to you talk, my ears won’t hurt anymore.” There was no way I could refuse.

Back in elementary school, I used to tell Chuchu made-up stories all the time. Once, I told her this ridiculous story about Zhuangzi fishing and catching the biggest fish in the entire universe after traveling forever across the sea. Maybe she still remembered that. But now my mind was completely empty.

So I cleared my throat dramatically like I was about to give a serious speech beneath the national flag to the whole school.

“Alright then. Listen carefully.”

Chuchu nodded.

“Once upon a time, there was a bird—oh wait, a petrel. Above the boundless sea, dark clouds gathered in the raging wind. Between the clouds and the sea, the petrel flew like a black—”

Chuchu slammed her fist against the bench armrest.

“Chen Xian! Why are you reciting our textbook at me?!”

I cracked up laughing.

“Then recite me a poem instead,” she said. “I want to hear one.”

I scratched my head trying to think of something outside the textbook. Actually, plenty came to mind—poems by Bei Dao, Haizi, Borges—but none of them felt right. Then I looked up and noticed how beautiful the streetlights looked against the dark sky, and suddenly I remembered two lines: “It feels like we’re at the bottom of a pond, walking from one moon toward another moon.” I thought there was no way she’d know it. Chuchu never even liked poetry. But she burst out laughing. “What’s so funny?” I asked. She kept laughing without answering. Finally, after a long while, she said, “I know that one. Wang Xiaobo wrote it in a novel.” Back then, I stupidly asked, “So why are you laughing? Those lines are beautiful.” I even told her it was the best novel I’d read recently, full of this lively, floating kind of emotion.

She didn’t comment on that. Instead, she smiled and said, “It’s just funny because the couple in the story like each other, and one of them is surnamed Chen while the other one’s surnamed Yang.”

I froze.

My heart started pounding so hard it felt ridiculous. I can’t remember what I said afterward. But I do remember Chuchu mercilessly making fun of me because, apparently, my face turned red and I stopped talking completely, as some embarrassingly obvious trick of mine had just been exposed.

Of course, I deny all of this. Those expressions she described? Totally made up. I definitely did not think anything weird, and I definitely did not blush. I’m certain I stayed perfectly calm and manly the whole time, with the cold expression of a stone slab. Still… even now, remembering it makes me feel embarrassed and weirdly nervous. Because if I had secretly been thinking the kinds of unhealthy thoughts she accused me of having, and she exposed me like that on the spot, there really wouldn’t have been anywhere left to hide. Which just proves Chuchu was a complete lunatic who cared absolutely nothing about preserving her best friend’s dignity.

I had no idea how her family would react to the piercings. She’d told me before that everyone at home was strict and old-fashioned and never let her do what she wanted, so I kept worrying for her, like the holes had been pierced through my own ears instead. But the next day, when I saw her, she looked perfectly normal. No signs of fighting or arguments at all. Apparently, her family had unexpectedly let it slide. They didn’t even tack on the usual cold little reminder: “But don’t let it affect your studies.” Nothing. And honestly, I felt incredibly jealous.

My family was different. They claimed how everything they did was “for my own good,” how they respected my space and didn’t interfere with my life. But still read my diary behind my back. Still secretly contacted my homeroom teacher: I once saw the two of them talking to him in his office. The three looked like they were planning for war. Even through the glass window, the air inside seemed cold enough to freeze. I became less willing to cooperate, less willing to listen to them. Quietly. Stubbornly. I rebelled in my own way. I tried my best to protect my friendship with Chuchu, while also hiding how hard I was trying. I didn’t want her to worry. She definitely would’ve worried, I thought.

I liked seeing Chuchu smiling with her whole face lit up, liked the smug little expressions she made. Sometimes she’d put on her earrings and ask me what I thought. I’d say, “They look nice.”

Then she’d call me an idiot and say boys couldn’t compliment girls with something as boring as “nice.” She said she was teaching me this for my own future, so I wouldn’t stay single forever. Very noble of her. Very selfless. How could I let my own problems drag her down with me?

Those were happy times in general, and things lasted like this all the way until the end of the year.

Near the end of the school year, my grades started dropping pretty fast.

I should clarify that this had absolutely nothing to do with Chuchu. Honestly, calculus and conic sections, and I were just born incompatible. But my parents seemed convinced it did have something to do with her. They decided to keep me home and have a serious talk with me, trying every possible way to pry open my mouth and get me to confess something. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and asked them what exactly they wanted to hear from me. What answer would actually satisfy them? Did they just want me to admit I was dating someone? Neither of them said anything.

I was so frustrated I almost started crying. In the end, all they could do was sigh helplessly and say: “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Let’s go on a family trip.”

“A trip? Why?”

“Because you’re under too much pressure,” they said. “We want to take you out for a while.”

Back then, my family didn’t even own a car, and we’d never really had the habit of going on trips, so the whole thing felt suspicious from the start. But since I wasn’t allowed back to school anyway, all I could do was agree. I had no way to contact anyone outside. I felt like a prisoner under house arrest. There wasn’t even anyone I could discuss escape plans with.

The next morning, I got onto a bus with my parents. The whole thing smelled damp and stale in this awful way. Inside the city, traffic crawled along slowly, passing almost every place I remembered sharing with Chuchu: the school, the little convenience shop, the breakfast stand, the tiny park, all of it. I kept staring out the window, hoping she’d appear somewhere, anywhere, for whatever reason.  Maybe she wouldn’t even be coming for me specifically. Maybe she’d just finished buying manga from the comic shop and happened to walk by, happily swaying side to side the way she did sometimes. Maybe she’d seen some new item at the roujiamo place and stuffed it with every topping possible, then gotten impatient at a red light and taken a sneaky bite, only to look up mid-chew and suddenly lock eyes with me through the bus window. Any of that would’ve been enough. Even if she did know I was leaving and ran over just to make a stupid face at me through the glass—I think I would’ve remembered it forever.

The bus sat high above the street, and from up there I felt taller than everyone outside, like my vision stretched impossibly far. I felt like I could spot a single gray hair three hundred meters away. But in the end, of course, I never saw Chuchu.

The place we were headed was a mountain not too far from our county town. Really more of a hill than a mountain. According to the sign at the base, it was only around three hundred meters tall, though supposedly the scenery was beautiful. Every now and then, deep bell sounds drifted down from above because there was a temple at the top that people claimed was very spiritual. My parents seemed oddly excited. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were forcing themselves to act cheerful for my sake, and that made everything feel awkward and exhausting.

They pointed at the winding mountain path through the trees and said they wanted to take me to the temple. Honestly, I would’ve rather stayed at the bottom looking at rocks. Or crouched down watching ants move to a new nest.

“The sky seems like it’s about to rain. Are we still going up?”

“We are,” they said. “We almost never go on trips. How could we stop at the foot of the mountain?”

So we started climbing.

The stone path was damp beneath our feet, darkened by moisture, winding upward past thick green trees whose names I didn’t know. The air was so fresh it almost felt violent, like the cool wet smell of it had punched me straight in the forehead. There was a thin layer of fog drifting through the mountain, too, making the twisting path look strangely beautiful. Though honestly, when you were actually standing in it, staring at the road beneath your feet, the fog didn’t seem thick at all. It was light enough that we could still clearly see the tiny purple and yellow flowers scattered everywhere beside the trail, and still see the path stretching upward ahead of us.

Only when I turned back to look downhill—or looked out into the distance—did I realize how heavy the fog really was. It was like the whole world had been buried under thick white snow.

That’s when I suddenly heard someone speaking into my ears. It scared me at first, but as I listened closely, I realized it was Chuchu. “Look at this fog, only three hundred meters off the ground and already this heavy.” She said exactly what I was thinking. Before I could answer—before I could agree or disagree—Chuchu suddenly said, excitedly:

“Let’s go back down.”

“What?”

“I said, let’s go down the mountain. I can tell already—you don’t want to keep climbing.”

I answered weakly, “But I can’t just leave. My parents are here. I can’t exactly leave by myself and go home.”

Chuchu looked completely unimpressed.

“If they want to keep climbing, let them. What does that have to do with you?”

Then she asked:

“When they brought you here, did they ask what you wanted?”

“No.”

“When they locked you at home and wouldn’t let you go to school, did they ask for your permission?”

“No.”

“Then why should you keep climbing up to that stupid temple with them? You should come with me instead.”

And the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. So I ran downhill with Chuchu. I almost slipped because we were going so fast. As we rushed downward, I heard voices shouting from somewhere higher up the mountain: “Chen Xian! What are you doing?!” I clenched my teeth and ran even faster. Their voices echoed again: “Chen Xian! Come back!” This time, there was something almost desperate in them. But I had already decided I wasn’t going back. So all I heard after that was the wind, the temple bells, and those voices growing farther and farther away. Both Chuchu and I understood immediately that we definitely couldn’t get back on the same bus we’d arrived in. That would’ve been the same as surrendering.

Chuchu was smart. She snuck me onto the back of a red cargo truck, and we hid together in the truck bed. I stayed crouched there with my eyes shut tight, too nervous to look around. Chuchu lay on her back beside me, staring up at the sky. Luckily, the truck was tall, with high metal sides, so people passing by probably couldn’t see us. Rain slowly started falling onto us. It dampened the dust and yellow dirt in the truck bed, too, until the whole air around us smelled like wet soil and rust.

Quietly, Chuchu asked: “Did we really get away?” My heart was beating so hard it hurt. My whole body felt hot. I wanted to open my eyes and look at her. But even if I had, everything around us was already dark and blurry enough that I probably couldn’t have seen anything clearly anyway.

Not wanting her to worry, I tried my best to smile and said:

“I think so. Yeah. I think we got away.”

“Where do we go now?” she asked.

I gritted my teeth and answered:

“Anywhere.”

Isn’t it weird? It was Chuchu who took me to escape, but in the end, she knew nothing about where we’re headed. I should ask her, yes, that’s the right way. But I didn’t have the chance. That was the last scene I could remember from that day. According to my parents, the storm that day was unprecedentedly heavy. They called the police, and found me late at night.

I was lying in the back of an abandoned truck that nobody had touched in two years, covered head to toe in dirt and burning with a horrible fever. They said I almost died.

While I was recovering in the hospital, I missed final exams. I missed a bunch of classes that felt terribly important at the time but now seem completely meaningless.

My parents still remember how I used to sit silently on the hospital bed, waiting for Yang Chuchu to come visit me. No matter how many times they told me she wasn’t coming, it didn’t help.

I kept asking where Chuchu was. They avoided the question every time.

Eventually, even my homeroom teacher came to see me. He told me Chuchu had transferred schools near the end of freshman year, and nobody had been able to contact her since.

I still don’t know whether they were telling the truth.

But one thing is certain: after that illness, I never saw Chuchu again.

I remember that I used to love dreaming. But in the hospital, not a single dream ever managed to finish itself. Because the whole trip, the whole year ended in this vague, sad, unfinished way, my family stopped mentioning Chuchu after a while.

But I never forgot her. I still remember seeing her during junior year.

And even now, I can’t understand one thing: if she had already transferred away long before then, who was the Chuchu who asked me to go get her ears pierced?

This past New Year, I went back to my hometown and stayed for a week in my childhood room. While I was there, I found a little tin box. Inside was a single piece of paper, yellowed by the times passed.

The moment I saw it, I remembered. It was the username and password for the old QQ account I used in middle and high school. I hadn’t logged into it in more than ten years. It had started to feel like the account never even existed. But the paper brought everything back. I remembered clearly that the account only had one friend added to it: Chuchu. She used a side account, too.

So I logged in.

Some of the data was gone already, but the last conversation between us was still there.

She wrote:

“Chen Xian, you’re seriously awful. You even made fun of me! The teacher scolded me afterward.”

I replied: “Sorry. I didn’t know you were sick. I only saw the piercings and the lecture, so I thought you were trying to act rebellious or something.”

Then I added: “If I’d known, I would’ve gotten mine pierced too. I heard it hurts pretty bad. Teacher didn’t know, right?”

“At first he didn’t,” she said. “He gave me this whole serious lecture. The more he talked, the more emotional he got, and then he got angry too. But later I told him.”

“Told him what?”

“I said, ‘Teacher, I’m sick. I’m dying soon. I just wanted to try this once before I die.’”

“He actually believed that?”

“The second I said it, his face changed completely. He still looked kind of doubtful, though, so I patted my chest and promised I wasn’t lying. I told him my parents would explain everything to him in a few days. Then he believed me and immediately started comforting me. He was like, ‘Ah, well, young people wanting to try new things is perfectly understandable.’”

“Wait, was it really that serious?”

“Haha, no. I was messing with him. If it were actually that serious, I wouldn’t be sitting here chatting with you. I’d be in a hospital getting IV drips instead of going to school.”

“That’s good. Honestly, even through the screen, you scared me.”

Then suddenly she changed the subject.

“Chen Xian, do you think teachers are really doing things ‘for our own good’?”

“He kept saying it was for my own good,” she wrote. “That he was afraid I’d turn bad and wanted me to understand him. But before he thought I was sick, he wouldn’t let me pierce my ears and said all kinds of awful things. Then, the second I said I was ill, suddenly it was okay. So was he actually afraid I’d turn bad or not?”

Apparently, I was even more cynical back then than I am now.

I replied: “They’re all the same. No matter what they do, they always think they’re doing it for your own good.”

“Then I never want to become like that,” Chuchu said.

“You definitely won’t,” I told her.

And that was where the conversation ended. No follow-up. Nothing after it. Suddenly, I remembered something. I started digging beneath the bed in my old room. If I remembered correctly, among all the cardboard boxes piled underneath, there was one I’d marked long ago by stabbing two uneven holes into it with a ballpoint pen. That box was full of magazines from middle school. But hidden all the way at the bottom should’ve been a little black faux-leather case. Something connected to me. And connected to Chuchu.

To get to it, I folded up the bedding, lifted the wooden bed boards, and bent down to dig through years and years of untouched dust. It felt like breaking open a door tangled shut with vines. Like digging through hardened earth with my bare hands. By the end, my back hurt so badly I was practically cramping.

While I was searching, relatives happened to come visit. Both families were chatting happily in the living room until the noise I was making interrupted them. I could hear them talking about me, asking questions. But I didn’t have time to care anymore. I didn’t even have the energy to answer. Their footsteps kept getting closer, ticking toward me like the second hand of a clock. I wanted to grab hold of time itself. I wanted to fight for every lost moment. I wanted all the missed things and vanished memories to come back. By then, I already remembered everything perfectly clearly, though I still felt embarrassed admitting it: Whether I found that little box or not—whether its leather had faded or cracked apart inside that tiny space, there should once have been two plastic earrings. Cheap ones. Ordinary ones. Simple little studs with translucent plastic beads attached to thin metal pins. Objectively, they were the kind of low-quality thing only kids would buy.

But to me, they looked like jade. Even now, they still seem to carry this faint warm glow around them. Because one evening during junior year, beneath a sunset so bright it almost hurt to look at, I gathered up all my courage and went alone to Old Street with money I’d folded and rubbed between my fingers a thousand times over. I got my ears pierced. I bought those earrings.

And for them, and through them, I fought with my parents so fiercely, so confidently, so firmly.

Zhongxia Li

Zhongxia Li (1xx9—), not a member of the Shanghai Writers' Association, has not published dozens of novels, essays, poems or anything in periodicals such as Harvest, Contemporary, Flower City, West Lake and Wild Grass. He is also not the first prize winner of the Blancpain Literature Award and works in a field unrelated to literature.