What is special about friends we made when we were young? Things happen to threaten our bonds. Distance drives us apart. Time puts wrinkles on our faces and hearts. And yet, the closeness we feel, the comfort we derive, the love we bestow—they remain constant.
Lin was one of those special friends I made in the impressionable years of high school and one that I would never forget.
We both went to Dongyang High School, a boarding school in Zhejiang Province, China. We lived in the same dorm for two years. In the classroom, her desk was always near mine. Three years of taking the same courses, listening to the same lectures, and suffering through the same exams forged a remembrance of a lifetime.
On the surface, we were very different. She was a rebel, disliking any rules that restricted her freedom. I was the class vice president and head of the girls’ dorm. Lin caused me endless headaches. Her bed was often unmade, because she woke up late and had to rush to the morning exercise. When she did make it, it was often not done properly, or she would have pens, handkerchiefs, female sanitary napkins, and a host of other items on the bed sheet. I ended up having to tidy up her things almost every week before dorm inspection.
We were also different in strengths. While I enjoyed writing essays and proving geometry theorems, chemistry was not my strong suit. Lin, on the other hand, moaned every time we needed to write a paper. But in a chemistry class, she was, to quote a Chinese saying, like a mouse dropped into a rice jar—couldn’t be happier. Her eyes twinkled and shone like bright stars. She laughed at every bad joke the chemistry teacher uttered. Everything he wrote on the blackboard went into her notebook.
We also differed in personality. She talked fast and loud and laughed a lot. I was not an introvert, but compared to her, much quieter.
But none of these hindered our friendship.
Dongyang High School was located at the edge of the city. Turning right led us into the city streets, and turning left brought the beautiful country scenery into our view. Lin and I, and another friend Xili, often took after-dinner walks. We always turned left, heading to the country.
We did all sorts of crazy things: running as if being chased by a demon, jumping from high banks, singing at the top of our lungs, imitating the Sichuan accent of our political science teacher. The open air provided a perfect vent for relieving our pent-up energy and stress.
We talked about our families. Lin sometimes complained that her mother was always paying attention to her younger brother. She and her sister did not seem to matter. Her father, a chemist and a nerd, left all child caring and household matters to her mother.
One afternoon during our senior year, I felt sick. The homeroom teacher sent me to rest in the dorm. I climbed up to my bunk bed, took a nap, and upon waking, felt better.
The door creaked. A head with short black hair appeared near my bed, a face with a boyish grin. Lin had come to check on me.
Seeing me awake, she hoisted herself onto the bed with one agile push of her arms, sat down on the opposite side of the bed, and covered her legs with the blanket. We discussed our worries about the college entrance exam, which would come upon us in less than a month.
Lin excelled in math and science, but she said her humanity grades might drag down her total score, which would be the sum of all seven subjects we would be tested on: Chinese, English, math, physics, chemistry, biology, and political science. The total score mattered more than anything else.
Our conversation then turned to the future.
“We should go travel after college when we have enough money,” she said, hope mingled with longing. “All my life I have wanted to see the forest and the lakes in Nine Village Valley. And then we can ride horses in the grasslands on the Tibetan Plateau! I heard you can travel for days and never reach the end.”
Neither of us had been out of our province at that point. Nine Village Valley with its crystal-clear water, the grasslands with their endless green and vast open space, enchanted our imaginations.
The entrance exams took place in June of 1985. Three days of straight testing. The combination of high temperature and tension made us lose both appetite and sleep. We all lost weight and looked haggard.
But finally, it was over.
The night before we left the campus, our class held a party. Lin and I sat together, munching on sunflower seeds and watermelons. With the exams over, we came back to life again.
Little did I know that would be the last time we saw each other.
I went to a prestigious four-year university in Shanghai, but was assigned a major I had little interest in. I did not know how Lin did during her years. Her humanity grades did drag down her total score. She was admitted into her third-tier choice, a technical two-year college.
We began our different lives in different cities, far away from each other. There were no phones in dorms; we kept up letter correspondence. New life enveloped us, and the frequency of the letters lessened. She graduated with an AA degree after two years and started working.
In spring 1988, I received a letter from her. “I wonder what is entailed in this life?” she wrote. “Everyone says youth should be a joyful time in our lives. I say it is not. Youth is a hurried, sad traveler. She runs fast but does not know where she is heading and what her aim is.”
I read this enigmatic letter many times but could not figure out its meaning. I wanted to reply, but did not know what to say. I was feeling down myself. College, and in her case, life after college, was not what we had imagined. We found, as a popular song at the time stated, “The outside world is splendid. The outside is also hopeless.”
I ended up not answering the letter.
It never occurred to me that Lin might be suffering from depression when she wrote me the letter. Until it was too late.
During the New Year holiday of 1989, I went to Hangzhou, two hours from Shanghai, to search for a job.
Then I heard the news, striking me fast and deadly like a lightning bolt.
I stayed in the dorm of a former classmate who went to college in Hangzhou. She invited a few others and a teacher on a business trip to have a reunion during New Year’s Eve. We were playing cards and having fun when Mr. Liu, the teacher, sighed and said, “Life is good! You all need to cherish it. Don’t be like Lin.”
I was suddenly chilled from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes. “What happened to Lin?”
“She died,” he said briefly.
“What? Why? How?” I threw down my cards, hand on my chest, too horrified to do anything other than stare at him.
He said he did not know all the details either. All he knew was Lin was not happy with her job. Some kind of conflict with her boss. There might be some financial dispute too. Her boyfriend of several years left her. She was not acting normally, so her company sent her home. She jumped from the three-story building of her home. Death did not take her then, and she was rushed to the hospital. But she pulled off all the tubes in the middle of the night when no one was watching.
Her life ended before dawn.
Stunned and grief-stricken, I kept asking Mr. Liu why she did this. He shook his head sadly and said he did not know.
I wondered if her family knew about her troubles and helped her. But then I remembered there came a point in our lives when parents could no longer assist in our dealings with the world. We longed to fly and embrace the sky, only to find our wings not strong enough to weather the fierce storms. But we had gone so far that our parents could no longer follow.
For me, as I fought to stay afloat, I knew my mom loved and supported me, even though she might not agree with me or understand everything I was doing. That security held me up when things threatened to tear me down.
Did Lin have that kind of support and security? I was not sure.
Years later, in one of my visits back to hometown, a former classmate told me that she had seen Lin in her work before the tragedy happened. She went to visit a relative in Lin’s city Jinhua and Lin invited her.
“I thought it would be a short trip, but her work is actually more than an hour away from Jinhua, in this desolate warehouse,” she said. “Lin was surrounded by all kinds of electronics and machines, no other human beings besides her and the security guard. I don’t like that man. If he harassed Lin, which I think he did, no one could help her.”
“Did she show any sign of depression when you were there?” I asked.
“She did, come to think of it. She did not like her job but had no way out. I saw a lot of empty bottles of Chinese herbs for sleep.”
She said she also heard rumors about how Lin needed to pay back 20,000 yuan to her company. Quite a few electronic products were found missing. Because she was responsible for the safekeeping of the warehouse, the company told her to pay back.
“20,000 yuan?” I was dumbfounded.
While 20,000 yuan is a considerable amount in China even today, in 1988, it was astronomical, far beyond the reach of a college graduate with an average salary of 80 yuan a month. Her boyfriend, with whom Lin had been together since college and who had wanted to marry, broke up with her, not wanting to be saddled with such a huge debt.
Was that the last straw? She had suffered from depression before this incident. Having to pay this impossible amount, not knowing where the money could come from, and losing the only person who probably cared for her made her lose all hopes of life.
Had she been older and more experienced, she could have fought the company’s decision. Someone could have been stealing, or wanted to frame her. There ought to have been investigations. The police or the court could have been involved. She could have declared a personal bankruptcy.
But then, a twenty-one-year-old young woman, just out of college, in a strange city with few connections, alone, how could she fight this kind of calamity?
When she wrote me that mysterious letter, had this drama been unfolding?
My mind whirled with the ifs in Lin’s fate. If she had performed at her normal level during the entrance exams, she might have gotten into a four-year university. If her family had more power, even if she went to the two-year college, she would have had a better job. By the same token, even if she were assigned to that lousy job and the products were found missing, if her family had high connections, the company would back down and not demand her to pay back that much money.
I carried a huge burden of guilt and emptiness from that point on. I could have written back immediately. I could have traveled to her city and stayed with her. If I had known that she was sent home due to depression, I could have gone to her house to visit. With friends at her side, she might have felt less alone, less despairing, less inclined to feel life not worth living.
From dust thou came, and now to dust thou returned.
If she had weathered that first storm, she might have found life offered rainbows as well. She might have thrived in the Chinese economic boom in the 1990s and 2000s and become an entrepreneur, or even a notable national figure, as some of our former classmates.
I longed for Lin to be on this earth that is filled with calamity and unrest, but also beauty and hope.
But that could not be. As George Eliot said, “There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”
And I lost Lin in that despair.