Literal draft. Sentences flagged for naturalization are listed separately.
A while ago at a school gathering, someone asked what the saddest love story in the world was, and I said the saddest love story I remember is Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem — and then I was startled by the puzzled looks on my friends’ faces. We read that book too, and there’s no such story in it, what are you talking about, they said, and I was a little flustered, and then I asked back: there are three heartbreaking love stories in there, what do you mean there aren’t any? My friends looked dumbfounded, so I told them one of them, the story of Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming. Toward the end of my telling, my friends’ reaction was that they had never known until that moment that the story was so sad; they all seemed to lament it, and said they would have to go home and read it again. Today, at the school gathering where we met again, one friend who could not forget the shock of the story I had told back then brought it up once more — and it occurred to me that a book can be read differently depending on the reader, so I want to set down here the story I told that day.
This is a story that begins in my university days. I was, at that time, a quiet, reticent, introverted student. The department I studied in was a somewhat unfamiliar field — aerospace engineering. I had liked looking at stars at the observatory when I was a child, and I just entered the university like that, and it was there that I first saw Cheng Xin. Cheng Xin was a bright, shining student. I do not remember how she introduced herself that day. I was too lost in looking at her. And whenever our eyes happened to meet, I was too busy hurrying to look away. Cheng Xin, I think, said a few shy words of introduction, and afterward went on with an ordinary school life.
Just as I was a person who did not stand out, Cheng Xin was not conspicuously active either. She was simply a student who came and went quietly. But there is one thing I cannot forget: how everything around her brightened when she came walking from far away. Bright, clear light filling the dark corridor, giving off warmth with all its force, sending out a fresh vitality — that was exactly the feeling I always received.
Her brightness and warmth felt so unreal to me that I did not have the courage to go close and confirm it. There were a few times our eyes met in passing, but I was never once able to speak to her. There was even a time she spoke to me lightly, and I think I was so startled that I answered quickly and hurried away from the spot.
At that time my thinking went like this. I had no particular attachment to the world; I had no intention of meeting someone, liking them, dating, loving, marrying. I had no intention of making friends either — just passing each day like this, drily, was the portion of life given to me, I thought. For a man like me, what could I possibly do properly if I met someone whose mere sight made my heart pound? No matter how I thought about it, there was nothing. If she and I ever spoke to each other, she would certainly be disappointed by my complacency, disappointed again by my lack of any goal, and disappointed still more by my not being manly. The more her sunlight fell on a man like me, the more my shabbiness and loneliness would cast a shadow, and the more that happened, the less she could expect from me except disappointment.
Unfortunately, that is what I thought. I never once approached her; I only circled her from far away. Circling at a distance around her, bright as the sun, I felt like the Earth. Perhaps I thought that way because I was an aerospace student. And so, like the distance between the sun and the Earth, it seemed only natural that there should be a distance between her and me, and I think I believed that circling at that far remove, like a planet of hers, was the only portion allowed to me.
Cheng Xin of course knew me, from the same department, and I think she also knew I was a lonely, fragile man. Well, how she knew me was not particularly important to me. A man as bright and clear as she is would suit her. Life is not like the universe, so the bright is joined to the bright. And darkness simply remains in darkness. That is just what I thought.
Time passed and both Cheng Xin and I graduated. After graduation I did not know where she was or what she was doing. I had no close friends other than “Hu Wen,” so naturally there was no way for me to hear news of her. Hu Wen was a very sociable friend; perhaps that is why he widened his circle far enough to include even me. Then one day I lost touch with Hu Wen too, and time simply went on passing.
It was many years later that Hu Wen came to me again. He contacted me out of nowhere and said that back in our university days he had gotten an idea from watching me grind grass and make a drink out of it, and had started a business, and that this was the green-juice business. He said he had made an enormous amount of money from that green-juice business, and that he wanted to repay me for the idea. And so Hu Wen gave me three million yuan.
I had no intention of taking such a large sum, and I did not know what I could do with it. Above all, the timing was wrong. I had terminal lung cancer at the time. Yes, that’s right. Like a lie, terminal lung cancer. I had never smoked, never drunk, and yet I just had terminal lung cancer, like that. I did not feel especially wronged about it. I was simply sad to have been born into this world; I had not lived in it actively; and I had nothing in particular I would regret leaving behind. It was a situation in which I only had to undergo, calmly, the day my life would end without anyone knowing.
Even though I clearly refused, Hu Wen sent me the money. I thought about what I could do with it. The money printed in my bankbook was nothing but a number, and it could not become a comfort to me, who had lived a whole life alone. There was nothing I wanted to do with this money, and no meaning in it, and no satisfaction.
That was when I saw a promotional video announcing that stars were for sale. To be exact, the Stars Our Destination program. It was a promotion saying that humanity was selling the ownership of stars and planets outside the solar system. The proceeds, it said, would go to research for the defense of the solar system. People sneered. Who would buy a star on the far side of the universe that they could never visit in their lifetime, and why? Naturally, not a single person bought one.
But I was not like that. The moment I saw the video I felt a tremor rise through my whole body. I felt I understood why, at this very moment, money enough to buy that star had come to me. The star I chose was DX3906. It was 286.5 light-years from Earth, inside our galaxy, the Milky Way. More than anything, at its position — far, but still within our own galaxy — I felt a strange relief.
On a clear night I observed that distant star closely through an astronomical telescope. It was not one of the stars we know, the ones easily seen in the sky every night. But I had its exact coordinates, and at those coordinates that star is certainly there. DX3906. In the direction extending from the bowl of the Big Dipper, a faintly shining red star of apparent magnitude 5.5.
The person selling the stars said, “In the end all we can do is look.” But my heart, as I paid the money, was beating hard with a strange excitement. What I was thinking was this: “I want Cheng Xin to have that star.”
That was the entire meaning of my life. The entire meaning of my life, of everything I could do at the point of having been born, having lived, and now dying. It was all the value of my life, the reason for my existence, a precious memory I would keep even after death. The conviction burned fiercely in my chest that Cheng Xin was the only person who would treasure a star 286.5 light-years from Earth.
I gave the star to Cheng Xin. Neither Cheng Xin nor I know how large and how hot that star, that sun, would be if we went near it — but my conviction never wavered that the size of that star, the heat of that star, the reason for that star’s existence were the same as my heart toward Cheng Xin.
Even as I heard through the salesperson that Cheng Xin had received the star, even as I heard that she was greatly amazed and wanted to know who had given it to her, I did not run to her. No — there was no reason to run. I had lived that way all along. I had thought I was the Earth, endlessly circling her, and then learned that I was Pluto, expelled from the solar system, and now I was about to vanish from the world. What good would it do for such a man to appear before her and say, “I am the man who gave you that star. I am your Yun Tianming”? It really is all futile. If she was amazed, if she was glad, if she was satisfied, if she kept looking at that star out of curiosity, then that was enough. Even if her curiosity was the only thing I could ever have, it was good.
And so, leaving a gift for Cheng Xin, whom I loved (I feel now that I may dare to say it that way. At least I am the man who gave her a star), I meant to meet death in peace.
And then she appeared before me. I could not believe it. She had not come because she knew that I was the one who gave her the star. She said she was with the PIA, and I thought that was some kind of aerospace company. She was looking for a volunteer for a certain project. To be exact, she was looking for a volunteer who had majored in space engineering and who, like me, was soon to die.
I was not curious about what the project was. Nor did it matter that Cheng Xin, after asking everywhere, had finally found the only person who met the conditions, and learned only after meeting him that it was me. Just to be able to see her — flustered at the sight of me, asking how I had been since we last saw each other at university, answering calmly when I asked how she had been — was already explaining why my heart had gone on beating until now.
She could not bring herself to tell me why she had been searching for a volunteer. I said I would rather hear the reason from her, Cheng Xin, than have it explained to me by someone else. Cheng Xin looked at me for a long while. Her eyes were sad but warm. I had never looked into her eyes this closely, this freely. Through those sad eyes I felt I could tell, without her saying anything, how she had lived until now. And in the fact that I could now be someone she needed — needed uniquely — I felt a motivation more powerful than anything I had felt in my whole life. Whatever it was she was going to say, I would do it, and I would see it through. However impossible it might be in terms of probability, I would do it.
Cheng Xin looked at me for a long time and then calmly explained what the project was and what kind of volunteer she was looking for. That she was explaining this because she did not want me to do it — that she was explaining it for that reason, and not because she wished me to do it — Cheng Xin confirmed again and again. I only nodded, wanting to keep hearing her voice……
In fact, this is all of the story of Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming that I told my friends at the gathering. No — how can you cut the story off here, they protested loudly. I said that this is where the saddest love story in the world, the story of Cheng Xin and Yun Tianming, begins. I said I could not say any more, because it would be a spoiler. My friends made a great fuss, saying they would go home and read it again. And so we parted.
Perhaps those of you reading this will think something similar. The Three-Body Problem is a shocking novel. I respect Tolstoy, I love Dostoevsky, and I regard Solzhenitsyn as a friend — but the writer from another continent, Liu Cixin, is truly great. Liu Cixin seems to be a writer who knows well what a human being is, how sad a being a human is, how fragile and precarious human fate is, and where the size of that sadness comes from. Someday, if the chance comes, I hope I will have the chance to tell the lonely, sad love stories of The Three-Body Problem one by one. In fact I am writing this in some haste. I have a certification exam coming up and no room in my mind. Please wish me a pass.
P.S. Netflix’s 3 Body Problem season 2 is scheduled to be released within 2026, and filming is said to be finished. Season 1 differed so much from the novel that it took me aback, but it was still enjoyable. I look forward to season 2 as well. (The background to how season 1 came to be made is shocking — as if the people involved were characters out of The Three-Body Problem. It’s worth looking up.)
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