In the afterword to another collection, the author once used the phrase “space probe.” It feels like exactly the right image for Missile and Sunflowers too.
Human beings have launched every kind of sophisticated machine into the material universe—satellites, space stations, spacecraft, telescopes, deep-space probes—driven by the anxiety of not knowing and the inferiority that comes from feeling small. We want to know whether our existence is accidental or necessary, superficial or essential, or perhaps just one tiny particle within an even larger scale of knowledge.
If the physical universe deserves probes, then the spiritual universe should have them too.
That is what this novel feels like: a device sent into the hidden chambers of the human mind, transmitting back fragments of feeling, memory, humiliation, compromise, tenderness, self-deception, and the things people cannot fully explain even to themselves.
The unresolved center: Ye Chunfeng and Bai Xuege
One of the novel’s main threads is Ye Chunfeng’s relationship with Bai Xuege—or perhaps it is safer to call it an emotional story rather than a love story, because Ye Chunfeng himself never reaches certainty. Did love truly exist between them, or was it only something he believed in?
This uncertainty haunts almost everything that follows.
What Ye Chunfeng cannot understand is simple on the surface: if they had been so close at the military academy, why did Bai Xuege become cold and distant after they arrived at the base?
At school, their intimacy had seemed unmistakable. In their final semester as seniors, they often ate together at the dumpling shop on the second floor of the service center, or went for cold desserts at the dining hall run by the teaching support office, or spent five yuan to watch a laser film. One memory stands out especially: the two of them watching Basic Instinct together. Ye Chunfeng asks himself a question that sounds naive and devastating at once—would a girl go see Basic Instinct with someone she disliked? They embraced at night in a cherry grove. They kissed in the stairwell of an academic building where the sound-activated light had broken.
Then they reached the base, and everything was wrong.
After a meeting, seeing that Bai Xuege seemed upset, Ye Chunfeng went to check on her. She opened the door only a crack and looked at him without warmth. He tried to comfort her, assuming she was angry with Hu Tian for leaving without a word. She cut him off immediately: what did Hu Tian have to do with her, and even if she were angry, what did that have to do with Ye Chunfeng? He tried to smooth things over, but she raised her voice, said she was not angry, said she had a headache, and slammed the door in his face. The blow of that moment stays with him. He keeps circling the same question: why had everything changed once they arrived here?
The novel keeps deepening that question through contrast.
When they first reached the base, Ye Chunfeng helped Bai Xuege move her belongings, carrying boxes and settling her into a new dormitory. As they walked along the road, a passing vehicle picked them up. There was no room in the cab for him, so Bai Xuege sat inside with two others while he rode in back among sheep droppings. Later, she told him to go ahead because she had met someone from her hometown and wanted to catch up. So he carried the box and walked alone for a very long stretch before finally making it back.
From Junction No. 0 to the 39 Station intersection was 23.7 kilometers.
Bai Xuege never asked how he got back that night, and he never told her about the staggering, lonesome walk.
That silence matters. It is one of the most painful details in the book precisely because it is so small.
And yet his memories of the academy remain luminous. Bai Xuege knew he loved running. At school he ran ten kilometers almost every afternoon. During a five-kilometer armed cross-country race in his senior year, he saw her at the finish line clapping desperately and cheering for him until her voice went hoarse. The next day he specifically bought lozenges for her. He treasures these memories. From their first meeting in the library onward, every fragment embedded in time has been polished in his mind until it shines like a uniform button. After graduation assignments were announced, Bai Xuege cried in his arms. She cried so hard that her tears soaked his pale regulation short-sleeved shirt. At the time, he did not know that would be their last intimate embrace.
Later the novel offers an explanation, though not one that makes the feeling any less tragic.
Bai Xuege had wanted to escape the base for a long time. To leave it, she was willing to submit herself to others and eventually managed to enter military school. But after graduation she was assigned straight back to the same base. She still would not give up and wanted to continue the same desperate effort to get out.
Yuan Men explains that when Bai Xuege enlisted, she was only sixteen and had barely attended high school. Under normal circumstances, she could never have passed the military academy exam. Yet somehow she did. Later Ye Chunfeng learns that the matter was complicated: she never even entered the exam room, and people in the cadre section arranged the exam papers for her. It is one more reminder that beneath ordinary surfaces lie murky systems of power, transaction, and survival.
By the end, even Ye Chunfeng cannot say clearly whether Bai Xuege loved him. Bai Xuege cannot say it clearly either. Every time she had a new boyfriend, she would call Ye Chunfeng and ask him whether it was “good” or not. Later, when she married, she strongly urged him to come.
Human feeling is that complicated.
The novel waits until near the end to lift this long-held uncertainty, and it does so through Che Hongqi.
When Che Hongqi was dating Bai Xuege, he always felt the relationship was stalled. She was never warm, never cold. Sometimes he would be talking to her and realize she was lost in thought; sometimes he would say a great deal and she had heard none of it. During that period, other people were pursuing her too, and he grew uneasy. Once, while Li Ning was away on a business trip, he secretly took the office recorder and hid it on top of Bai Xuege’s wardrobe, wanting to know what she said to other people. He left it there for two or three days before retrieving it.
At first, when he listened back, he heard Ye Chunfeng’s name and assumed Ye had come to the dorm to see her. But listening carefully, he realized there was no second voice. So he kept listening, on and off for about a week, until he understood: when no one was around, she had been talking to herself.
In more than ten hours of recording, she said the same two lines around ten times, sometimes several times in one sitting, then nothing for hours, and then again. Her voice was very soft, as if she were sitting alone in a chair.
What did she say?
“Ye Chunfeng, how are you? Ye Chunfeng, I love you. Ye Chunfeng, how are you? Ye Chunfeng, I love you.”
Just those two lines.
And really, those two lines are enough.
Che Hongqi says he had intended never to tell anyone, partly because what he did was shabby and shameful. But in the end he decides Ye Chunfeng should know.
That revelation does not tidy up the novel into something simple or romantic. It does not erase all the distance, misrecognition, compromise, and damage between them. It only confirms that human beings can be unable to live their feelings while still being unable to extinguish them.
Five postings, five stages of growth
The other major thread in the novel is Ye Chunfeng’s five different postings. The five chapter titles correspond exactly to them:
- The Furnace of Time — the boiler room
- Crows Skimming Past the Launch Rack — the fueling unit
- Empty Boxes — the equipment section
- Wreckage — the recovery unit
- This Page Intentionally Left Blank — the military affairs section
The structure is handled with real finesse. The novel does not simply line up events one after another. Instead, as Ye Chunfeng encounters people and situations, his thoughts lead the narrative into the past, and the truth is drawn out thread by thread.
The opening is a good example. Hu Tian’s escape from the army is first described in the form of what Ye Chunfeng later learned about the whole affair. Then the story cuts back to the present: Ye Chunfeng is shoveling coal in the boiler room. The next section describes what he sees and experiences there, and after that the instructor Yuan Men informs him that he needs to attend a meeting. A question has already quietly been planted: why has Ye Chunfeng, an outstanding military academy graduate, been assigned to burn coal in a boiler room?
Then the meeting provides a return loop. Section Chief Feng from the cadre office presides over it, asking Ye Chunfeng, Bai Xuege, Zhong Jun, and Che Hongqi—Hu Tian’s academy classmates—whether they knew anything about Hu Tian’s escape. The opening event is suddenly gathered back into the story’s present.
It is an elegant circling structure, and the novel keeps doing this.
These five postings are not just changes of workplace. They are stages in Ye Chunfeng’s formation.
When he first arrives at the boiler room, he sees the assignment as an insult to his status as an excellent graduate. He is defiant, refusing to accept instruction either from squad leader Wu Pan or from Yuan Men.
By the time he reaches the fueling unit, he has begun to learn what it means to treat work seriously. For the sake of a target missile’s successful launch, he forces fuel into the system despite the danger toxic substances pose to his body.
Then comes the equipment section, where he learns to bow to life. That entire chapter revolves around the traffic of favors surrounding explosive-charge boxes wanted by various leaders. Ye Chunfeng is pressured into obtaining one of those boxes for someone else. His sense of duty resists doing such a thing, yet when he sees Zhang Bing in utter anguish, he cannot help feeling pity.
The recovery unit is where he is sent after Che Hongqi says ugly things about Bai Xuege and Ye Chunfeng smashes a beer bottle over his head. Yuan Men orders him transferred there—a remote, neglected place, the kind of place only people who have made mistakes are sent to.
Ye Chunfeng stays in the recovery unit for six and a half years.
Perhaps the truest comment on that period comes later, when Yuan Men is preparing to leave military service and says to him: this place is not suitable for plants to grow, but it is suitable for people to grow—especially young people like you. That is why he has always believed it is a good place.
In the recovery unit, Ye Chunfeng learns calmness. He learns simplicity. He gains a group of lovable soldiers who sincerely line up to plead with him not to leave when he is considering transfer out. He also plants sunflowers in the desert.
By then he is already used to the desert. What is left for him to cling to? Once there was Bai Xuege; now there is not.
The final stage is the military affairs section. There, for the sake of promotion quotas, everyone exerts every possible influence. Ye Chunfeng wants to keep Yu Qiang, one of his old subordinates from the recovery unit, but he cannot secure the spot for him. In the end he even shuts the door and threatens his superiors with mutual destruction, asking for nothing more than fairness. He succeeds in keeping Yu Qiang.
That moment matters because the Ye Chunfeng of the early chapters was proud and raw; the Ye Chunfeng here has been ground down, disciplined, wounded, and taught by systems large and small. Yet he has not entirely surrendered his moral center.
Yuan Men, the quiet moral line running beneath the book
There is also a subtler thread in the novel: Yuan Men.
Yuan Men is a good man.
That sounds plain, but in a novel like this it carries real weight.
He cares about the families of the soldiers under him. At one point he gently tells Old Wu not to worry too much, that things will probably be fine, but also tells him he must stop smoking. Then he takes two small white boxes from a drawer, places them in a plastic bag, and asks Ye Chunfeng to deliver them to Xiao Wu. They are folic acid tablets from the base hospital. Yuan Men says that if they want a child, Xiao Wu’s wife should keep taking them every day, and Xiao Wu should stop smoking.
Then, in an even more painful turn, he explains why he is so concerned. Their little daughter had been a very well-behaved child, but she died the previous year. Old Wu’s mother had cataracts, and while his wife was out working in the fields, the front gate had not been securely latched. The little girl ran outside to play and accidentally slipped into the river. By the time anyone found her, it was too late. She was not even four years old.
A few details, and a whole family’s sorrow opens up.
Yuan Men also breaks down when he cannot keep the soldiers he wants to keep. In the dark, head lowered, he mutters like a man collapsing under the contradiction between authority and powerlessness. He tells Tian Shanlu not to go, says he is the political instructor and Tian is his soldier and must listen to orders, repeats military phrases about obeying commands and acting decisively, then turns pleading: wait a little longer, please wait a little longer. If you leave, you are no good, and I am no good either. I cannot keep even one good soldier. I am really no damn good.
He tries, within the limits of his position, to preserve fairness.
Che Hongqi offers a sharp comparison: Yuan Men is not like Old Feng. Old Feng treats himself as the owner, but Yuan Men knows those apartments are not his; he is only an administrator, like someone looking after the explosive-charge boxes Ye Chunfeng once managed. So if you live in a place Yuan Men controls, it costs nothing. The only conditions are that you keep it clean, take care of the furniture, and do not trash it. Of course, if higher-ups force him to empty a unit for someone else, he cannot resist forever. That is why the housing problem tied to Ye Chunfeng’s proper battalion-level status remains unresolved for so long. Even so, Che Hongqi says, Ye Chunfeng is lucky: Yuan Men has few apartments and they are small, but at least living in one of them gives peace of mind.
Good people are rare. Remaining a good person is even harder.
The desert is not empty
What makes the novel memorable is that the desert in it is never merely grand and desolate. It contains bleakness, certainly, but also maneuvering, social performance, protocol, small politics, favors, speech, rank, and the countless tiny negotiations of collective life.
This is one reason the “space probe” metaphor feels so fitting. The book does not only survey a harsh landscape; it measures the pressure inside people living within institutions. It reveals how a place that seems barren from far away is in fact thick with emotional weather.
Society is a vast net, and everyone is caught in it. No one escapes. You may think you stand above one layer of the net, but above that is always a larger one.
That is true of Bai Xuege, who tries to flee the base and is dragged back into it. It is true of Ye Chunfeng, who begins with pride and ends by learning how costly fairness can be. It is true of Yuan Men, who occupies a position of authority yet repeatedly runs up against the limits of what he can actually protect. It is true even in love, where feeling and action, tenderness and cruelty, memory and reality almost never line up cleanly.
What the novel finally leaves behind
To explore one’s inner world is a fascinating thing. To send a probe into the self and keep observing what it transmits back may be one of the most worthwhile things literature can do.
There is a saying that what makes a human being human is complexity. It is easy to hear that young and not understand it at all. Even later in life, one only understands a fraction of it.
This novel renders that complexity with unusual honesty. So many things in life remain obscure, even to the people living them. The heart is subtle, and often we do not understand our own motives clearly enough to name them.
After reading this book, one thought becomes harder to avoid. When people are very young, they tend to imagine themselves as pearls in the ocean—beautiful, singular, exceptional, irreplaceable. With time comes a different recognition: perhaps one is not a pearl at all, but a drop of water. The ocean contains countless such drops. One is not unique.
The world is immense and bewildering. We belong to the ocean, and in the end we return to it.