The First Love

The First Love is a full-length youth campus novel by Tong Feifei, also known as I Want Us to Be Together. It was first serialized online and published in November 2006 by Beiyue Literature and Art Publishing House as part of its "Youth Fine Editions" series. Set in a high school, the story centers on a first love—how it begins, draws close, and becomes tangled: a chance first encounter binds two people who had nothing to do with each other; then come the unspoken flutters of exchanged glances, as the young try clumsily but earnestly to test the waters, draw near, and entrust their most precious feelings. Yet love is not all sweetness; misunderstandings, jealousy, sulking, and unspoken grievances follow, and the relationship is pulled back and forth through mutual testing, sliding toward an unmanageable situation through twists of fate. The legend of Callisto transforming into a little bear to guard love runs through the book as a recurring image, setting fairy-tale guardian wishes against real-world hesitation and misunderstanding, lending the story a faintly fatalistic sadness. The author intersperses lines from Jiang Kui's ci poetry, letting classical imagery resonate with modern campus emotions. The prose carries the light touch and intense emotion of mid-2000s youth literature: bright, reckless, heedless of consequences, and marked by the particular pain of loving for the first time. The book asks the hazy question of what love really is, and depicts the cost of growing up in the face of loss and missed chances—a youth romance novel with a distinct mark of its era.