The Color of Qing

art by Corinna Keum, words by Danielle Z.

I couldn’t remember a time when the sky was blue.

But my mom could, and sometimes when she told me stories of her youth, I could almost picture it, a clear blue expanse as far as the eye could see. Qingtian, she called it, a sky the color of qing. Her Mandarin was elegant and melodic, while mine was hesitant and unsure. I carefully mimicked her pronunciation, the foreign syllables stumbling in my mouth. She explained that translations failed to capture the essence of qing. It was the blue of skies, the green of spring, the black of earth—all the colors of nature embodied in a single character. 

Sometimes it would be dotted with clouds—fluffy white puffs or towering gray pillars. And when night fell, the sky would deepen to a midnight hue, revealing millions upon billions of little lights—stars—twinkling gently above. My mom called me Xiaoxing, Little Star, after them, those pinpricks of light in a shifting green-blue-black sky I would never meet.

The only sky I knew was a hazy, rust-colored thing, hanging low and oppressive over the world and obscuring any view of the stars my mom named me for beyond. Like a tiger, she’d say, ready to pounce. I asked her what a tiger was, and she flipped through one of her old books until she found what she was looking for, a powerful-looking creature with piercing amber eyes and the Chinese character for king inked upon its forehead. And when I looked back up at the orange sky striped with black columns of smoke, the hot wind suddenly felt like the breath of a waiting animal.

—

There’s no view of the heavens aboard the Perseverance. Its interiors are windowless, hallways and rooms lined with shielding and insulation to protect against the radiation and cold of space. Once, when I’d just boarded and hadn’t yet learned the ship's layout, I accidentally stumbled into the command deck. There were no windows there either, just several large screens at the front of the room with displays of images and complex streams of numbers and data indecipherable to me. Carefully calibrated instruments and sensors allowed the crew to chart our course and make fine adjustments to the solar sail suspended above us, unfurled to catch the steady breeze of photons from the increasingly-distant sun. I stood in the doorway, transfixed by a holographic model of the solar sail fluttering gently in an invisible wind, until one of the crewmembers noticed me and ushered me away.

—

“My mother—your grandmother—was born in Shanghai in the year of the rabbit.

The year was 1939. Two years earlier, the Japanese captured Shanghai and began their occupation. Your grandmother grew up watching Japanese soldiers marching in the streets and Japanese bombs falling from the sky. When she turned six, the Japanese surrendered and the civil war picked up right where it left off. Many of her relatives fled, and your grandmother feared that she would have to do the same. By the time she finished her schooling, the Cultural Revolution was well under way. Upon graduation, they assigned her a job in Nanjing even though she had lived in Shanghai all her life. But what could she do? She had no choice but to pack her things and leave. So she spent most of her time in Nanjing, only returning home once a year for the Spring Festival. Once I was born, I made the journey back and forth with her. And when I grew up, I left China for here.

Xiaoxing, Little Star, I’m telling you this because the world is a rapidly changing place. Life is unpredictable. Every generation of our family has faced hardships, but every time, we’ve overcome them. Yi dai bi yi dai qiang; each generation becomes stronger than the one before. When it comes your turn, remember this and have courage.”

—

Tonight was my final night aboard the Perseverance. Tomorrow we would arrive at Abeona, five hundred billion miles away from Earth, where I would begin the difficult task of living in a new world. The only things I knew about my new home came from books I read in school, the glowing text of the e-reader reflected in my eyes as I skimmed the rows and rows of words. Abeona was one of the closest populated exoplanets to Earth and one of the first to host a permanent colony. It was also the birthplace of green energy technology. Her first inhabitants vowed to never repeat their parents’ mistakes back on Earth and endeavored to live harmoniously with the surrounding environment. 

I always lingered on the passages that gave vivid descriptions of the planet itself: the flowing rivers, the smokeless sky, the wind, whistling through forests of trees and dancing through fields of grass—a world that wasn’t ravaged by runaway climate change or violent disputes over diminishing natural resources.

But when I tried to picture it, I could only see Earth. A planet long past its expiration date.

—

“Baobei nuer. Beloved daughter. Little Star. There’s no future for you here on a dying planet.” She pressed a folded slip of paper into my hands, and I carefully opened it, uncomprehending. It was a ticket; departure time: 1400. Tomorrow afternoon.

“Mom, I don’t understand. Please, I can’t leave you.” I desperately searched her face, and she looked away, trying to find the right words to say to convince me to leave.

“Do you know why I left China and came here?” I had asked once before when I was younger, and the quiet sadness on my mom’s face was so loud I hastily changed the subject. I never dared ask again. But here she was, broaching the topic all on her own on what was possibly my last day on Earth.

“By the time I was your age, the world was already past the point of no return. Sure, we had made wonderful advancements, but we had also done terrible things to the Earth and each other. Shanghai was located on the coast, and every year, the storms and floods were getting worse and worse. Japan to the east had already been reclaimed by the sea, and we knew Shanghai would soon be next. We had to leave. But the cost of leaving was getting higher and higher as more and more people fled. Finally, I found a job overseas that was willing to sponsor me. My mother helped me pack and accompanied me to the airport. Before we parted, I promised to work hard and earn enough money for her to join me.”

She paused. Her hands trembled.

“Three months after I left, the final and most powerful storm hit China. The sea rose up and swallowed half the country. Shanghai was gone.”

I stayed up all night, listening to the words that had never been spoken pour out of my mom. And when the glow of the city lights faded into the glow of the rising sun, when my mom had emptied herself of all the stories she had been holding, we rose from the floor and began to pack. 

—

The gentle hum of the Perseverance’s docking mechanisms engaging told me we reached our destination before the captain’s announcement did. I slowly gathered my things from the room I’d called home for the past month and joined the throngs of passengers disembarking. 

The last time I’d been in a spaceport was when I’d first left Earth and boarded the Perseverance. My mom accompanied me as far as she could until she was stopped at the barrier to the shuttles taking passengers up to Earth’s spaceport. It was time to say goodbye. 

I tried to memorize every detail of her face, to commit every freckle and laugh line to heart. I wasn’t going to cry. On my first day of school, when my mom tried to leave me with the teacher, I burst into tears and clung to her leg. I was five years old, then, and the top of my head barely grazed her hip. But I was older now, and I would be brave enough for both of us. 

She was older now too, I realized, smaller and frailer looking than she seemed in my memories, standing alone on the other side of the barrier. The temptation to join her, to step out of the shuttle and let my mom cradle and comfort me like I was a child again was overwhelming. Before I could move, the shuttle doors began to close.

“Remember, Xiaoxing, yi dai bi yi dai qiang; each generation stronger than the last. Be brave, and I’ll always be in your heart.” The corners of her eyes crinkled as she gave me one last bittersweet smile. For a moment, I saw past and present intertwined; my mom, young and hopeful, all those years ago, boarding the plane and turning around to catch one last glimpse of her mother. I met my mom’s gaze and knew she was remembering the same.

“Ma ai ni. Mom loves you.” And then the doors clanged together, bringing me back to the present with devastating finality, and I shot up, up, and away from Earth, away from my mom, away from everything I knew.

I squeezed my eyes shut and let the tears overflow.

—

“The next shuttle to Abeona is now arriving.” The barriers opened to allow us to board, and I squeezed through the crowd to an empty spot next to a window. The floor beneath me lurched as we took off.

First, darkness. We hurtled through a dimly lit tunnel. Then, suddenly, we shot out from the spaceport, and the world bloomed with light.

Stars. Millions upon billions upon trillions of them, right before my eyes, glowing like beacons in the blackness of space. In their light I saw my face reflected in the window, and in my face, a reflection of my mom’s. This must’ve been how she felt, face pressed against the plane window as it descended through the clouds, watching the glowing city lights grow brighter and brighter. I pressed my cheek against my own reflection in the glass, watching white dwarfs, yellow subgiants, red giants, and blue supergiants stream past. And further in the distance, a nebula, the shifting, swirling remnants of a dying star. From its massive plumes of cosmic dust and gas, new stars would be born to live and shine and die all over again in a brilliant supernova, restarting the cycle.

Yi dai bi yi dai qiang; each generation burning brighter than the last.

—

A small jolt as we landed on Abeona. The doors opened with a hiss, sending a blinding beam of sunlight into the dimly lit shuttle. I raised a hand to my face and stepped into the light.

My mom’s breath ghosted against the shell of my ear. 

“Look, Xiaoxing. Look, Little Star.”

Finally, a world the color of qing.