The following is from Claire Jia’s Wanting. Jia is a writer from Illinois. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, The Rumpus, Reductress, and more. She writes for television and video games, including the 2024 Peabody Award-winning We Are OFK. She lives in Los Angeles with her friends.
Beijing was brimming with hope. Every day throughout the fall of 2007, Lian and Wenyu would pass the to-be Olympic Village on the bus on their way to school, and little by little they watched the opening ceremony stadium rise, the metal hatches clicking together so that they formed the sloping tire shape of the Bird’s Nest. Every billboard and bus stop was emblazoned with grinning athletes drinking Bud Light and driving Bentleys, various Western brands clamoring for attention on the streets of a Chinese city. Liu Xiang in Nike, Zhang Yining in Adidas. They’d snatch gold on the backs of American luxury, leaving the actual Americans in the cold.
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Lian felt the fervor of the city, channeling it into her applications. Like an Olympian, she’d be a representative of her country abroad; she’d bring back the metaphorical gold, much to the envy and admiration of everyone she’d left behind.
Meanwhile, Wenyu fell in love. This had started during their second year. He was the class rebel, a boy with hair in his eyes who refused to wear his uniform and instead showed up to class in a multicolored array of baggy clothes. While Lian was staring in the mirror practicing her hows and lows and preparing for her future, Wenyu was sneaking out of prep class more and more frequently to pull petty pranks with her new boyfriend. Wenyu’s scores slouched down the rankings. The shoplifting of their youth translated to more flagrant defiance. Suddenly, Lian was no longer Wenyu’s main conspirator; her boyfriend was more daring. He, in fact, would steal bigger, riskier things—shoes, clothes, MP3 players—pushing Wenyu to a new limit. She was now the person electrified, as opposed to the one electrifying. When her boyfriend’s antics got Wenyu suspended for the first time the winter of their second year, Lian confronted Wenyu, pleaded with her to get her act together: Why are you tying yourself to an idiot like that? Wenyu shot back, He’s the smartest boy I’ve ever met. He’s destined for greatness. He could be anyone he wanted. Just you wait. Just because he doesn’t have his nose stuck in a book all day and night like you do doesn’t mean he’s not just as smart. Smarter, probably. And he doesn’t need to go to stupid America to prove it.
What about our dream? Lian cried. What dream? Wenyu shot back, cruelly. That was just for fun.
But in the end, Lian wasn’t the one to go to stupid America.
One chilly morning in December of their senior year, Wenyu appeared at Lian’s door, holding two ice cream bars that cut a teeth-chattering profile against the frigid winter landscape. Lian was in the middle of an essay for Harvard. “Why Harvard?” Why not? she always wanted to respond. It’s the best university in the world. Who wouldn’t want the best? She opened the door deep in thought, English phrases still dangling on her lips. She sat back down at her desk while Wenyu threw herself on Lian’s bed and grabbed a magazine in one hand, holding her ice cream in the other. Then, in one quick breath, Wenyu told her the thing that would change her life:
“I’m moving to California.”
Lian couldn’t understand what she was hearing. She turned around, mouth agape.
“My dad’s friend lives in San Jose, so they’re gonna put me in high school there. Isn’t that exciting, Lianlian?” she said, as if she’d just discovered that their favorite band was coming to town, or that their favorite tea shop now sold lychee flavor. Not the kind of voice you use when you’re telling your best friend you’re moving halfway across the world.
“I thought—I thought you hated America . . .” was all Lian could think of saying.
Wenyu shrugged. “Just because you love it doesn’t mean I hate it.” She turned the page of the magazine and took a chilly bite of her ice cream. A dribble of white threatened to unleash its milkiness across the vulnerable expanse of Lian’s pillowcases. “They’re not gonna let me take the Gaokao. I’ve been suspended too many times. So my dad asked his friend, they happen to have an extra room in their house, and yeah.”
“Yeah,” Lian parroted. “Well, that’s a good thing then, yeah.” This had been what she’d feared for her friend, that Wenyu’s grades would slip so low she’d cut off all paths to any future.
What she’d hadn’t predicted was that the one path remaining would lead to America.
Wenyu sat back up. “Maybe we’ll both end up in California. We can buy our mansions on the beach!”
“Yeah!” Lian said again, more forcefully now. But a strange feeling lashed at her.
Wenyu’s departure was one of necessity. Her dream, Wenyu’s last-ditch effort. She returned to her essay, hastily unwrapping her own ice cream. It tasted sour in her mouth.
Two weeks later, Lian stood in Wenyu’s bedroom, watching her stuff underwear and blouses and pads into her suitcase. Wenyu was afraid there’d be no pads in California—Americans only wore tampons, according to an older cousin. There was a frenetic energy about Wenyu. She had put on her best dress for the plane ride over. She was supposed to leave for the airport in an hour, but Wenyu was debating whether or not she should bring her rain boots. “Does it rain a lot in San Jose?” she asked, to no one in particular. Neither of them knew.
Lian thought Wenyu might be scared, but Wenyu seemed preoccupied with the trivial things—tampons, rain—and Lian couldn’t muster up the nerve to ask.
“See you in California, right, Lianlian?” Wenyu asked again, locking eyes with Lian.
“Stanford’s gonna snap you right up.”
“Of course!” Lian said, her heart thrumming.
Wenyu tried to stuff her Doraemon plushie into the suitcase, but Doraemon bounced back, refusing to deflate. Wenyu turned and handed Lian Doraemon, his eyes two perfect black-and-white orbs peering out at her. “Take care of him,” she said.
In the end, Lian told Wenyu to leave the rain boots. There was only so much space in her suitcase, and she could always come back for them if it turned out San Jose was a monsoon city.
It was not, and Lian never saw her again.
The rejection letters did not come in a swarm, like in her nightmares. They were a slow trickle of thin envelopes that reached her one by one, her dream chipped away piecemeal. Like Titanic and the unseen glacier, she whispered to herself. There was no explanation, only trite apologies that there were too many qualified applicants that year.
Throughout that spring, she thought about Wenyu, steadily becoming a California girl.
Wenyu went to stay with that classmate of her father’s, who had two sons of her own. Lian was jealous that Wenyu got two built-in brothers, and Wenyu reported back with frequent news of their quirky behaviors, the loud video games they loved, the “Transformers” shirts they wore.
Wenyu sent Lian real-time observations about the strange trees, the overwhelming supermarkets, the stick of fried butter she’d tried at a thing called a fair. At first, Lian responded exuberantly, laughing alongside Wenyu at the weirdness of American traditions. They said they missed each other, and Wenyu counted down the hypothetical days until Lian could join her in California.
Her father’s friend took Wenyu on trips into the city to eat samples from the Ghirardelli store, to walk the Golden Gate Bridge. As Lian’s dreams crumbled, she told Wenyu with more and more conviction that soon it would be the two of them, romping through San Francisco together.
When the last rejection came, from Berkeley, Lian was almost relieved. There would be no her and Wenyu in California, no cleaving of her American dream to share between the two of them. Now, she could throw herself fullheartedly into the Gaokao. She’d sit with thousands of her peers, dripping sweat in a classroom in June, and she would outscore all of them. She’d take the traditional route, the one she’d always been expected to excel in, anyway. She’d get into a Tier 1 university at home, and no one would fault her.
She did exactly that. She tested into Beijing Normal University, one of the nation’s top schools. Wenyu got into a state university in California, and Lian texted her congratulations.
Slowly, however, their updates grew sparser. Wenyu’s reports from California suddenly felt braggadocious, pompous, Wenyu rubbing in Lian’s face the spoils she’d never get to enjoy. Lian stopped responding, eventually. She met an intelligent and caring man. She landed a high-paying job at an American company before she even graduated. She influenced scores of students with dreams like hers. They spoke of literature, film, politics, history. And other friends returned from America with stories of gun violence, racism, a crippled health care system. It was not the land of her dreams. She told herself that America made more sense for Wenyu anyway: a land devoid of rules, of shame, a place that had no respect for tradition or convention. She was silly for ever thinking it was right for her; America was always more suited to Wenyu, the girl who stole and yelled and rebelled because she was never satisfied with what life had given her. But Lian could be content. She would be content. So she focused on her own path: career, husband, luxury highrise.
And indeed, twelve years later, she’d achieved almost all of this. She didn’t need Wenyu roaring back in, reminding her of a wish she’d long since buried.
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From Wanting: A Novel by Claire Jia. Published with permission from Zando/Tin House. Copyright © 2025 Claire Jia.