The Last Letter

A Xiang, I've been thinking about the birds on campus—how they sing whatever comes to them, without hesitation. My professor stopped mid-lecture yesterday when I asked about the Hundred Flowers Campaign. The silence in that room felt heavier than all my textbooks combined. I hope the army treats you better than they treat questions here. When we're back in Zhoucun together, I want to sit under our old tree and tell you everything while we share a shaobing. Also, you never answered my question last time. What are you fighting for, A Xiang?

The letter was brief. Li Xiang swallowed hard, folded the paper, and tucked it into his breast pocket before returning to his boots. Eight years with Yuehua—Xiao Yue, as he called her—flashed through his mind. From their first meeting in Zhoucun village when they were barely teenagers, through all the years she outshone everyone in class while he stood tall among his peers, known more for his physical presence than academic prowess.

Her top score on the Gaokao had secured her place at Bei Da University, a fact they both knew would separate them.

"I could stay," she had said that day, her fingers light against his wrist, sesame crumbs at the corner of her mouth as she ate her shaobing.

"Don't be ridiculous," he'd replied with a forced laugh. "You won't refuse Bei Da."

Her lips had thinned into that familiar pout. "But the distance..."

"I'm joining the army."

"By choice?" she'd challenged.

He'd given a short laugh. "If that's how you want to see it."

"And who exactly," she'd asked, rebellion sparking in her eyes, "will you be fighting for, A Xiang?"

Li Xiang squared his shoulders. "For the country, of course," he said, voice firm. "Did you expect me to say I'm fighting for myself?" He lifted his arm in an exaggerated salute, attempting to lighten the mood.

Xiao Yue brushed sesame seeds from her palms. "Just be certain you're fighting for something." Her voice dropped. "And don't you dare die."

"I won't if you don't collapse from all those books," he said, turning to catch her smile. Instead, he found her eyes hard as river stones.

"I mean it, Li Xiang." The formal name hung between them, heavy with concern.

He drew her close, feeling the shaobing oil still slick on her fingers as he took her hands. "I'll return to you, Xiao Yue. Listen for me in the birds' songs, carried on the wind."

"Poetry?" A laugh escaped her, half-bitter, half-sweet. "That's a first from you."

Li Xiang finished lacing up his boots and grabbed his helmet. His fingers brushed against the letter in his pocket, the paper worn soft at the creases from being unfolded and refolded twenty-three times since its arrival. Twenty-three months since he'd watched her board that northbound train to Bei Da, her hair catching the morning light as she turned back one final time. Twenty-three envelopes with her precise characters on the front, each one smelling faintly of the university library's dust and ink.

The bunk room was already clattering with the morning's news. At the far end of the barracks, Chen Yi was animatedly recounting a rumor about the latest assignment. "Beijing," Chen hollered, his accent thickening around the city’s name like a challenge. "They say it’s a mess. All the radios are talking about it. We’re shipping out after chow."

Li Xiang kept his head low, tightening the chinstrap on his helmet. He’d lived long enough with the knowledge that his size and stoic face drew attention—sometimes the right kind, sometimes not. But today he was too busy rehearsing everything he’d say to Xiao Yue when—if—he saw her again.

Chen materialized at his side, slapping the back of his shoulder with a camaraderie that bordered on recklessness. "Looks like someone's finally getting to see his little scholar," Fang teased, grinning with a mouthful of pickled radish.

"Careful or you'll choke," Li Xiang said, but the retort was automatic, his ears ringing with the promise of either reunion or ruin. He pictured himself marching through clouds of peach blossom, but the noise of the canteen swept that away—orders barked, tin bowls clattering, the rough steam of boiled cabbage and millet.

Chen grinned, undeterred. "Maybe she'll autograph my rifle."

Li Xiang snorted. The absurdity barely masked the pang in his chest. "She'd prefer to teach you to read, idiot."

He wondered what Xiao Yue would say if she could see them now: two grown boys in uniforms, still jostling each other like it was the old stone bridge in Zhoucun, daring one another to leap for koi. Instead they ate in silence, save for Chen’s running commentary, flanked by a hundred others in matching olive drab.

After chow they lined up on the tarmac, the June sun already a hard white glare on the regulation buzzcuts. The heavy trucks sat idling at the edge of the lot, their green canvas flapping and the smell of diesel pooling low to the ground. The instructors barked names, and Li Xiang moved as called, shouldering his pack with ingrained efficiency.

Inside the truck, each bench groaned beneath the collective mass. The interior offered little space for thoughts, yet as the convoy jolted into motion, Li found his mind slipping away from the group’s nervous banter and toward the horizon—toward Xiao Yue, each kilometer bringing him closer to the city and to whatever history its streets were writing.

The journey was long enough that the day collapsed into a haze of head bobbing and sweat. The boy next to Li Xiang, a wiry conscript from Yunnan, threw up after the first hour and fell asleep on his own boots. From time to time, the convoy trundled past villages so hurriedly that only a blur of silk banners and wheeled market carts registered before the next stretch of anonymous expressway. Once, passing beneath an overpass, the graffiti caught Li’s eye: the character 革, "revolution," sprayed in red with a trembling hand. He tried to imagine Xiao Yue, marker in hand, nerves electrified by some ungovernable urge to shout her mind. The image felt foreign, almost forbidden.

As they entered the outskirts of Beijing, the roads clogged with tractors and pedestrians, everything seemed tuned to a strange pitch. The old men wore black armbands and spoke in staccato, and the plum sellers lining the broad streets had packed up, as if something sour had curdled the city overnight.

The convoy stopped at a barracks near the city’s southern gate. They were given a brief, sharp order: rest an hour, then assemble in the central square at dusk. Li’s body ached from the ride, but sleep came only as a thin comfort; beneath, anxiety thrummed. He dreamt of birds—thousands, wings blackening the sky—descending on the square.

Li's eyes snapped open, skull pounding as if someone had struck him with a rifle butt. He fumbled with his bootlaces and noticed Chen hunched in the corner, face drawn tight as a bowstring. When their eyes met, Chen lunged forward, gripping Li's shoulder with fingers that dug into muscle.

"They're students," he hissed, lips nearly touching Li's ear. "Just kids sitting in the square with banners and songs. Like your Xiao Yue."

Li jerked away. "Who told you that?" His stomach clenched. "Command said insurgents, said violence—"

"Lies!" Chen's laugh was brittle as kindling. He yanked his rifle strap so hard the metal clicked. "Why drag us from Shandong when Beijing has its own garrison? Because those soldiers know these streets. Know these faces."

"There must be a reason," Li insisted, hands trembling as he checked his ammunition. "The Party wouldn't—"

"The Party." Chen's eyes burned like signal flares. "The Party that sent your father to re-education? That Party?"

Li's throat closed. "What exactly are you saying?"

"I'm saying when you pull that trigger today, soldier," Chen spat the word, "know exactly who you're killing for."

"A soldier defends his people—"

"And who are your people, Li Xiang?"

The barracks erupted with a whistle's shriek, severing their argument mid-breath. Li and Chen snapped to attention, fingers already finding the cold metal of their rifles. They joined the procession of soldiers, each name called sending another man into formation, boot leather grinding against concrete, gun barrels catching what little light remained.

He half-expected the officer to bellow, but the captain's address began almost kindly: "Tonight, your purpose is clear." His voice carried over the ranks. "Some harbor doubt. But we defend the Motherland from foreign agitation. Even if the faces resemble yours, remember—the enemy wears no color but chaos."

Li's lips pressed together, jaw tight. The words landed on him in places still soft, places he'd hoped the army would harden. He thought of the last time he'd held his mother while she wept—his father two years disappeared, the stories circulating in the village that he'd been sent to till sugar cane in some southern province. Li had memorized the lines of her despair, the way she twisted her hands in her apron, the hush with which she whispered, "Never speak against the Party, A Xiang. Even a tree too straight is cut for timber."

In the yard, Chen's mutter was lost to the wind. They were herded with the efficiency of a production line into the transport trucks, the city waking around them as the convoy choked through the unlit streets. Li counted the seconds, the corners, each turn bringing them closer to the great square that even children in Shandong could draw from memory—though the square in his childhood drawings had always been filled with flags and celebrations, not whatever waited for them now.

Near Tiananmen, the convoy slowed. From inside the truck, Li Xiang could hear chanting rising and falling in waves, echoing between tall buildings. The sound wasn't chaotic as the officers had described. It was unified. Thousands of people speaking together. The air felt different here. Thicker. Warmer. Like the classroom when Xiao Yue had first stood to recite her poetry, but now the dust was mixed with exhaust from the convoy instead of chalk and eraser shavings.

When the truck slowed, he leaned slightly to look past the edge of the canvas cover, his duty to remain seated warring with his need to see.

Streetlights illuminated long lines of people standing in the road. Some held banners. Others simply stood with arms linked. Many looked young—exactly like what Chen had told him earlier. Like Xiao Yue. Like himself, if he'd been born to different circumstances.

He swallowed, tasting duty and doubt in equal measure.

His unit from the People's Liberation Army moved in formation once they dismounted. Boots struck the pavement in synchronized steps. The sound was sharp and mechanical, almost louder than the crowd. Li's own steps faltered twice before he forced himself back into rhythm.

Officers shouted commands. Soldiers adjusted their spacing. Rifles rested against shoulders, held steady but not raised. Li's fingers trembled against the metal, alternately gripping too tight and then barely at all.

Li Xiang felt the weight of his equipment. The uniform felt heavier than it ever had, like his father's coat he once tried on as a child—a garment meant for a different man.

Chen's voice dropped to a rasp, his breath visible in the cooling night air. "Are you ready to protect the country?" The question hung between them, weighted with all that remained unsaid. Li's throat constricted, the collar of his uniform suddenly too tight against his neck. He swallowed hard, tasting metal.

"Chen—" His voice cracked, betraying him.

A sudden crash from the left—glass shattering, amplified by the megaphones and the concrete echo chambers of the city. Li’s heart lurched. A bottle, maybe, or a stone. He couldn’t see who had thrown it, only the ripple it caused in both the crowd and his own ranks. In one instantaneous wave, a command rippled down the line: "Advance!"

Li Xiang surged forward with his unit, momentum springing from the soles of his boots. The crowd ahead did not move back. If anything, the students—because yes, you could see now that they were students, with their threadbare backpacks and blue wired-rim glasses—held strong, arms locked, eyes lifted not in defiance but in a kind of petrified hope. The banners above them shivered in the city wind.

The crowd’s singing faltered. A ripple of fear, or resolve, Li couldn't tell which, flickered through the tangle of bodies. The next command was louder, metal-edged: "Disperse or face consequence!"

Soldiers raised their rifles in unison—just a warning, Li told himself, but the practice of it seemed more real than a drill, more final than any lecture or training exercise. His lungs felt small inside his chest. He fingered the safety, heard the mechanical chattering of a hundred others doing the same. The rifle in his hands was no longer a prop, no longer a dummy that he used during training.

Someone in the crowd screamed. The wall of students fractured, but did not break; the ones in front clenched one another tighter, their faces locked in bare disbelief. Li Xiang caught a flash of a girl—maybe eighteen, if that—clinging to the arm of a boy barely older than himself. For one terrible second both the student and Li Xiang stared at each other, eyes meeting, the world teetering on a single, unanswerable question.

Then, from behind, an officer barked it: "Fire!"

Somewhere to his right, a burst. Glass again, or maybe the sharp, percussive bark of a rifle, it was impossible to tell. Then a spray of gravel as bullets pinged off the paving stones in front of the students, shattering banners and scattering the words they carried. There was a moment after—a drawn-out, cavernous void—before the students screamed and dropped to the ground, clutching backpacks, books, each other.

Li Xiang’s ears rang. He stared at his own hands, uncomprehending, the rifle still shaking in his grip. The order had been so clear, the logic so absolute, but now an afterimage bloomed behind his eyes: the girl’s mouth open in an O, the boy’s glasses knocked askew by the shockwave, the way the banners collapsed as if the words on them had been hit and bled out.

Chen stood beside him, sweat-drenched and rigid. Their eyes met, held. The next command cut through: "Advance! Secure!" Li's feet moved automatically toward the wreckage ahead. Sweat and fear hung in the air as his leaden boots carried him forward. Students retreated—carried, dragged, crawling. Pamphlets carpeted the ground, some darkening with blood that spread like spilled ink.

Every face in the crowd became a smear of color, a mask of terror or defiance. He could not say how many hours passed, only that his body moved through the square as if he were underwater, every sound arriving a second late, every command distant, muffled, as though the world had slipped loose of its bearings.

He tried to avert his eyes, but everywhere was the same: students clumped together like fallen birds, limbs tangled, faces hidden behind their hands or turned to the impossible dark of the paving stones. Chen lurched beside him, retching. His rifle dangled from one hand. Before them lay flattened heaps that had been students moments ago.

"The tanks—" Chen choked, spitting bile. "They just kept going. Didn't even slow down."

In the tangle of arms and bodies, Li saw a hand, small and unadorned except for the blue ink staining the fingers. He reached down, fingers shaking, and turned the shoulder of the girl attached to that hand.

Xiao Yue. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, jagged as if cut in a hurry. Her eyes were shut, lashes matted with dust and tears, but her chest spasmed in shallow, desperate gasps. Below her waist—nothing recognizable, her blood started seeping outward in a widening pool that soaked through his boots.

"Xiao Yue." Li Xiang's voice cracked open. Her eyelids fluttered, revealing bloodshot whites before finding his face. Her arm shot up, fingers digging into his cheek with surprising strength, nails drawing blood as she rasped through fluid-filled lungs.

“What are you fighting for, A Xiang?"