Broken Stars

by Ken Liu

  The pale woman bent over the star chart, as if gazing at a baby she had given birth to who had just died. Tears flowed down her cheeks and dropped onto the paper; ripples expanded over the chart as though pebbles had been tossed in. The symbols on the paper trembled like reflections in the water, and then cautiously began to move, heading for their former positions.

  Jiaming watched them expressionlessly, unmoved. This was nothing more than another cheap trick.

  The stars did not speak; the stars did not tell the future; the stars were powerless.

  She understood this better than anyone else at this moment.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done!” The pale woman sobbed uncontrollably.

  “I know what I’ve done. Almost, almost I believed you. This morning was the first time I’ve ever believed that I might deserve happiness after all.”

  *

  My name is Tang Jiaming.

  My mother is insane.

  Dad told me that when I was four, my mother died coming home on a ferry. I didn’t understand why Dad told me such a story until I was much older.

  Not long after my mother’s death, Dad and I moved into our current home. Dad is an architect; he spent a lot of time renovating our new home. Our new home didn’t feel as spacious as it looked, but it was plenty big for us. Later, I went to school like other kids. One night, I dreamed of the pale woman. She had a sheet of paper filled with strange symbols, and she told me that the paper told her the future. I didn’t believe her. Although I dreamed about the pale woman every night after, I never believed her predictions, the words of the stars.

  Until I met Zhang Xiaobo.

  Because I wanted love.

  That’s humanity for you.

  *

  He opens the door and is surprised to find me sitting on the sofa. “You’re home?”

  “Sorry. I know we said we’d go out for dinner. I forgot it was tonight.”

  “No big deal.” He takes the Sarah Brightman CD out of his briefcase. “For you.”

  No matter what I want, he always tries to get it for me. No matter how disobedient I am, he never disciplines me. None of the other fathers are like this.

  He doesn’t ask about the bruises on my face. He’s been like that since I was little. If I got bullied he always pretended that he saw nothing.

  “That’s why you have to be smart and take care of yourself,” the pale woman had said.

  “Did you get out of work early because you wanted to tell me something?”

  “No. I just wanted to have a good meal with you. Aren’t you going to get in trouble for skipping study hall tonight?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Since you’re back early and I’m not going to study hall, why don’t we sit and chat a bit?” I get up and dim the living room lights.

  The living room has never been so dim in my memory. Day or night, the lights and the TV have always been kept on.

  “What are you doing?”

  I walk in front of the mirror facing the TV. I press against the glass and look in. I see what he doesn’t want me to see: the pale woman and her prison cell.

  “One-way glass?” I stare at him. “Daddy, I guess our living room isn’t so small after all.”

  *

  My name is Tang Jiaming.

  My mother is insane.

  My father is an excellent architect. He built a secret chamber into our living room, where he has imprisoned my mother for more than a decade. The pale woman has never been a dream. It took me a long time before I understood this, but I continued to insist that she was just a dream. Like the story he told me about her drowning.

  Before we lie to each other, we always have to successfully lie to ourselves.

  *

  “When did you find out?”

  “When I realized that I always felt extra sleepy after drinking the milk you gave me.”

  My father doesn’t know that although the drugs could put me to sleep, they couldn’t stop me from waking up in the middle of the night to find the pale woman. No matter how soundly I slept, sometime during the night I’d be awakened by some force, and, like an object in midair tumbling to the ground, I’d come to be by the side of the pale woman.

  If you didn’t want others to know that you had a mad wife, why didn’t you just seal her inside solid walls?

  If I asked him this question, he would surely reply that he did it for me. He didn’t want others to know that I had a mad mother.

  I don’t think so. I’m not going to let him get a chance to say this.

  “Drink this. You haven’t been getting enough sleep.” I bring out a glass of warm milk from the kitchen and put it in front of him. I look at him solicitously.

  He drinks it down. I knew he would. No matter what I had put in it, he would have drunk it.

  Anything would be better than having to face me like this.

  “When did she start to say those crazy things?” I sit down in front of him, my hands gently covering his trembling knees.

  “She was always different, even when we first met. She said she heard strange voices. She was always very interested in the exact time and place of people’s births. She disliked some people for no reason at all. I just attributed those to harmless quirks. But then you were born, and she—” He looks up at me, and continues only with some effort. “She calculated your fate by the astrolabe, and said that you were a child destined to alter the talk of the stars; you had to be protected. She became more and more deranged—”

  “You got scared.”

  “I don’t know if she’s really crazy. Some things have come to pass the way she predicted. No, I wasn’t scared of her. But you didn’t see how others were looking at us.”

  He knows I’m not crazy, the pale woman had said once. I remember her expression as she said it. I remember other things, as well.

  Before he closes his eyes, I ask my last question. “Did you stop loving her a long time ago?”

  “No, not at all. I love her. Always have.”

  That is the worst of all possible answers.

  Thanks to that glass of warm milk, he falls asleep before he could begin to cry uncontrollably. Of course he loves her. For her, he had installed the one-way glass so that she could watch that TV in the living room, always left on. More important, the pale woman could see me through that mirror.

  But Daddy, you really have given me the worst answer.

  5.

  My name is Tang Jiaming.

  I don’t have a father, and no mother either. I can change the talk of the stars; that is, I can change fate.

  Tomorrow morning, I’m going to get to school on time. I’ll continue to pretend to be a student as if nothing has happened. I’m not going to pretend to be like the others, and I’ll never allow anyone to hurt me again. I’m going to be myself, completely. Once you know how to change fate, this is not difficult.

  The pale woman should be happy. I believe her, and I’ll fulfill her prediction. I’ve copied her astrolabe, and I’ve tried to move her stars. As my first experimental project, she died. I didn’t want her to die, but I don’t need an excuse to absolve myself. There’s no question I killed her. Still, she should be happy.

  Zhu Yin will make up with me. That’s what her stars say. The stars also say that she wants many other things.

  At the next full moon, nude pictures of Lina will appear in the inbox of every student. That night, Lina’s stars will become utterly fragile. She’ll want to die; she’ll hang herself from the tallest pole in the school, where her nubile body will swing in the wind like a leaf.

  On that night, the fragrance of her feminine body, the smell of death, and the stench of her excrement will attract Zhang Xiaobo to her corpse. He’ll be like some lost worker bee, confused by the smells, hovering around the dangling girl. Even death won’t be able to completely stop the cinnamon aroma of her body. She’ll be so entrancing. Especially then. Serene, calm, a chocolate sea calling to him.

  If not for fate, why would h
e pass by just then? If not for fate, how could he have been able to light the fire in the gale?

  Xiaobo will loosen the rope and let Lina down. Her body will still be warm, filled with the scent of summer. Her natural, tanned skin will glow and be filled with the elasticity of youth. He’ll be especially attracted by her round, smooth legs, covered by her excrement. On that night, he’ll experience unprecedented levels of hunger and obsession, his blood boiling in his veins. Death will swell his blood vessels, will make him feel harder and stiffer than he’s ever felt. By the time his hands reach into her blouse, greedily kneading those chocolate breasts, he’ll no longer be an insect driven mad by the rotten stench of the corpse flower. He’ll no longer be lost. He’ll have encountered himself. He’ll lick those purple lips, and then gently wind himself around that tongue, again and again, tirelessly. That will be how he confirms who he is. He’ll understand what he fears; he’ll know what he yearns for; he’ll know himself.

  My frail lover, come to me. We’ll be bonded together on a foundation of evil.

  From now on, you can blame me the way you blame fate.

  I am your star.

  *

  As I smile at the mirror, I know he’s looking at me from behind it. He’s now trapped in the cell he built himself.

  On the table is the meal I prepared for him. “This is made from the flesh of the pale woman. You’ll be eating the same thing for a few years.” I told him the truth, and now I’m waiting here, patiently, on the other side of the mirror. I know he’ll start eating sooner or later.

  He’ll think that I’ve moved his stars, making him eat it.

  But he’ll be wrong. I haven’t moved his stars at all. From the moment of his birth, his stars have said that he’ll consume the pale woman.

  *

  “When you move the stars, you change fate. When you move the stars, you also break them. Don’t move the stars lightly.”

  Those were the pale woman’s final words to me before she died.

  Many stars have been broken tonight, and many more will break in the future. Even so, the sky will never be completely dark.

  There will always be a star that remains eternally lit. A star that doesn’t need my guidance.

  HAN SONG

  Han Song is often described as one of the China’s most influential older science fiction writers (along with figures like Liu Cixin and Wang Jinkang). He has won many awards and published multiple novels as well as collections of short fiction. Few of his works, however, have been translated into English—something I hope will be remedied soon.

  As a senior member of Xinhua, China’s state news agency, Han Song occupies a unique position as an observer and chronicler of the cataclysmic changes transforming China. There are things he can say that perhaps no other writer can say. He has suggested, using various phrasing, that what is happening in China is more surreal and shocking than has been seen in (or could be captured by) science fiction. Like many of his stories, this sentiment is subject to multiple interpretations, some of which are mutually contradictory.

  He has a distinctive style and voice that is instantly recognizable: a preference for cumulative, run-on sentences and dense paragraphs that build and build, threatening to teeter over, bringing to mind the urban landscape of contemporary China; a narrative voice that offers mordant, acerbic metafictional commentary; a cool, detached tone that describes surreal suffering as though cataloguing species of flowers; a knack for imagery that hovers on the edge of horror and humor, pathos and bathos, realism and transrealism.

  “Submarines” and “Salinger and the Koreans” are both short but showcase Han Song’s style well.

  Some commentators describe Han Song as a dystopian writer who uses science fiction to critique China’s breakneck pace of development that leaves behind millions of victims. Others view him as a nationalist who uses his fiction to lacerate and mock Western hypocrisy. Some see in his stories a continuation of Lu Xun’s bitter attacks against the dark aspects of Chinese history and culture. Others think he’s railing against a Chinese modernity that is without values or ideals.

  What is clear to me is that all of Han Song’s stories are intensely political, but they’re couched in layers of allegory such that what message one takes away from them depends largely on what baggage one brings to them.

  SUBMARINES

  As a boy, whenever I asked, my parents would bring me to the shore of the Yangtze River to see the submarines. Following the river’s flow, the subs had come to our city in herds and pods. I heard that some subs also came from the Yangtze’s tributaries: Wujiang River, Jialing River, Han River, Xiangjiang River, and so on. The subs were so numerous that they looked like a carpet of ants or thousands of wisps of rain-soaked clouds fallen from the heavens.

  From time to time, to my amazement, one sub or another would just vanish from the surface. In fact, they had dived. First, the sub slowly wriggled its immense body, which then sank inch by inch, roiling the water around it in complicated and cryptic ripples, until the whole hull disappeared beneath the surface, including the tiny column on top shaped like a miniature watchtower. The flowing river soon recovered its habitual tranquility and mystery, leaving me stunned.

  And then, a submarine would explode out of the water like a monster, splashing beautiful waves in every direction. “Look! Look!” I would scream. “It’s surfacing!” But my parents never reacted. Their faces remained wooden, looking as dispirited as two houseplants that hadn’t been watered for weeks. The appearance of the submarines seemed to have robbed them of their souls.

  Most of the time, the subs remained anchored on the placid surface, motionless. Wires were strung over the hulls, stretching from tower to tower. Drying laundry hung from the wires like colorful flags, pants and shirts mixed with cloth diapers. Women in thick, crude aprons cooked with coal stoves on the decks, and the smoke columns turned the river into a campground. Sometimes the women squatted next to the water, beating the laundry with wooden bats against the sturdy metal hulls. Occasionally, old men and women climbed out of the subs, looking relaxed as they sat with their legs curled under them, smoking long-stemmed pipes with a cat or a dog curled up against them.

  The subs belonged to the peasants who had come to our city to seek work. After a day of working in the city, the peasants returned to their submersible abodes. Before the arrival of the subs, peasant laborers had to rent cheap apartments in urban villages, plots of land where the rural population stayed as their farmlands were gobbled up by developers for the expanding city, leaving them stranded in a sea of skyscrapers. The urban villagers rented out one-foot-wide spaces on communal beds, and the rural laborers who built the city had to sleep like pigs or sheep in a pen. The submarines, on the other hand, gave the laborers their own homes.

  Ferries operated between the shore and the anchored subs. Peasants piloted these ferryboats, shuttling their brothers and sisters between two completely different worlds. At night, after everyone had returned to their homes, the subs were at their most beautiful. Lit by gas lamps, each boat glowed with a different pattern, like paper-cutting pasted on windowpanes. Bright, lively, they also reminded me of fallen stars adrift on the river. On each sub, a family sat around the table having supper, and the cool river breeze brought their laughter and chatter to the shore, leaving the urban residents with a sense of strange envy. As the night deepened, lights on the vessels winked out one by one until only the anxious searchlight beams from the harbor towers roamed the darkness, revealing motionless hulls like sleeping whales. Many subs, however, chose this time to disappear. Each sweep of the searchlight showed fewer and fewer boats. Without any announcement, they had dived, as if the peasants couldn’t sleep soundly without the comfort of being covered by water, like water birds that had to tuck their heads beneath their wings to nap. Only by submerging their families and homes could they leave their worries behind on the surface, hold danger and uncertainty at bay, and dream sweet dreams without being bothered by the city-dwelle
rs—was that, in fact, the reason they had built the submarines in the first place?

  I often wondered how deep the Yangtze was, and how many subs could lie on the riverbed. How eerie and interesting it would have been to see rows upon rows of metal hulls lying next to each other down there! The thought made me gasp at how mysterious the world was, as though there was another world beyond the visible one.

  In any event, the submarines settled near us like nesting birds and became a hotly debated sight. Every morning, they popped out of the water like boiled dumplings. Under the shimmering dawn light, the perturbed river surface resembled a spring flood. The scene made me think of alien spaceships from the movies. Busy ferries went back and forth between the subs and the shore, carrying spirited peasants into the city for another day of back-breaking labor at construction sites across the city.

  The submarines came from all over China. Besides our city, rumors described pods in other cities and other rivers as well. Every sea, lake, canal, and trench seemed to have its own sub colonies. No one could say for sure who had designed the first sub. Supposedly, a clever folk craftsman had fashioned the first submarines by hand. By the standards of sophisticated urbanites, these boats were crude pieces of technology: most were constructed from scrap metal, though a few were pieced together with fiberglass and plywood. The early subs were shaped like fish, and many had heads and tails painted in red and white, including radiant, vivid eyes, lips, or even fins. These features looked a bit ridiculous, though they also showed the sense of humor unique to peasants. Later, as more submarines were built, the differences in decorative coloration distinguished families from one another.

  Typically, a sub was big enough for a single family, on average five or six people. Bigger subs provided enough space for two or three families. The peasants seemed unable to build large vessels that could carry dozens or hundreds of people. Some city-dwellers had wondered whether the subs were constructed along plans cribbed from Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or perhaps foreign experts had secretly helped the peasant craftsmen. In the end, however, no connection between the subs and Verne was discovered. The sub makers had never even heard of the author. Everyone sighed with relief.