Recently I started to dream often about my hometown. The first image I remember when I wake up in the morning is myself on that muddy country road with rain boots, just walking. I couldn’t see my face, the only thing I could see was the boots. Everything seemed very refreshing in the dream: the smell of the plants, the sound of the rain coming down to mother earth. Then came the image of a green train moving forward, far away from me. I could see steam coming out of the horn.
I’m not sure why these images keep coming to my dreams, but waking up from them to the present moment made me realize life is like a one-way ticket on a train. Along the way, we encounter people who get on the same train with us. We may chat, share interactions, or do activities with them for a while until they get off.
When I look back to my teenage years and the few times I rode the train to different places, I never felt sad when others I met on the train got off. New people would get on at different stops, and I would start the same conversations or activities with them again. Even though the feeling wasn’t the same as at the beginning of the journey, it was still part of moving on, new people getting on and off, new scenery, new towns, new stages.
I thought of the first train I ever took alone, going to see my mom in Ruili, a border town by Burma. It was a week-long journey on a hard seat, on a green train that no longer exists today in China. As I sat there, I watched people coming in with their enormous bags. I could see the strength on some of the men’s faces. Clearly they were from the bottom of Chinese society at that time, but instead of seeing only struggle, I saw their inner strength. I could see courage and power in their wrinkled faces. As everyone else watched their movements, I never saw them flinch. They never shrank down from themselves.
At one point, a middle-aged man got on the train and sat right next to me. During those moments, I didn’t want to talk with anyone, but he started a conversation and asked me:
“Girl, where are you going?”
I told him I was going to Kunming, and my parents would be there to pick me up. He asked if I was from Yunnan province. I said yes. Then he asked how to say “Have you eaten?” in my local dialect. I immediately responded with the Japanese sentences I had been learning on my own at school. He left me alone for a while, but around dinner time he used the same sentence again to ask if I had eaten. To my surprise, I didn’t even recognize it at first. It wasn’t until 30 seconds later that I realized what it was.
Before I got on the train, my mom had warned me not to talk with strangers, since I was a young girl traveling alone for a week. I don’t remember what became of that man, but I do remember getting off the train with my legs so swollen they didn’t even feel like mine.
A week on the train, I saw hundreds, maybe thousands of people getting on and off. Most of them were hardworking Chinese at the bottom of the social ladder, but they never shrank from their hardship. They never turned away from difficulty. They never complained about the heavy loads they carried onto the train.
A train ride has a beginning and an ending, just like life itself. Once we get on, the journey starts. We don’t know what will happen in between, but we do know where it begins and where it ends. The people, the places, the events we encounter along the way are all temporary in this massive universe. The timer is set the moment you board. Whatever happens in between, unless we crash halfway we are carried forward to that final destination.
Should we be sad when people we meet on the journey get off? Or should we cheer their departure, so new people can get on with us? And in what form do we want to reach the final stop? Do we want to reach it in pain, beaten down by mental and physical challenges? Do we want to arrive feeling like life has crushed us? Or do we want to arrive with courage and strength etched into our wrinkles? Maybe with dignity?
That final choice is in our own hands.
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