His father brought the trunk to Peking University

The last chapter left him at Dezhou station, realizing the trunk was gone. The admission letter was in it. The household-registration papers were in it.

This chapter is what happened after that.

1. The trunk was not found

The whole carriage was in a panic. He went to find the train police. Wu Yanqiang, in the same carriage, ran to help him reach the chief conductor. Wu was also on his way to register at Peking University. Later they shared a dormitory: Wu slept in the lower bunk, and he slept in the upper one.

The chief conductor must have broadcast a lost-property announcement for him. How many times, and what was said, he can no longer remember. It was not found.

This was 1983. There was no telephone and no mobile phone. After it happened, father and son had no way to reach each other. He could not know where the trunk had gone, or what his father was doing. Today one phone call would have settled it. Then, each of them was shut in the dark, and the truth had to wait until they met.

All the rest of the way, he never knew where the trunk was. He only half remembered that the platform at Changzhou had been so crowded that he and his father were separated — and at the time he had not even noticed how. Only later, hearing his father tell it, did he piece the story together.

From the moment at Dezhou when he knew the trunk was gone, he was like a man who had lost his soul. There were no tears. He was seventeen that year, and he had already made up his mind for the worst: if it came to it, he would go back to the village.

In that daze, he rode from Dezhou into Beijing.

2. Arriving at Peking University

When the train reached Beijing, he came out of the station. On the square, the Peking University welcome party was already waiting. He walked straight over, and the first thing he said was:

"I don't have my admission letter. I can't find my luggage."

His name was already on the list of new students. If you were on the list, the piece of paper did not really matter. The person who received him seemed to be a student from a higher year. After hearing him out, they only said:

It's all right, come along.

He still felt unsure. Without the letter, he had no proper standing. He told himself he was only going along to get through the day.

The university gave him a bed that same day. Without his luggage, he can no longer remember how that night actually went. Looking back, he thinks the quilt had been mailed to the school ahead of time, so at least there was bedding for the first night. What weighed on him was the trunk. He had no idea whether it would ever be found. He lay in the dormitory with that hanging over him.

3. His father brought the trunk to Peking University

The next day his father bought a ticket himself and brought the trunk to the university.

Only later did father and son work out what had happened. The station had been too crowded. His father had not been able to get onto the train, and so had not been able to hand the trunk to his son. With no ticket in hand, he had to go back home first, buy a ticket the next day, and come the same way again — back to Changzhou, then onto the train — to deliver the trunk.

The trunk was simple. Inside were a few changes of clothes, and the papers needed for registration. The admission letter and the household papers were both in there.

The admission letter had been in that trunk the whole time.

4. The road inside the south gate

Once the trunk had arrived, father and son came out of the dormitory and sat on a bench along the road that leads in from the south gate of Peking University.

They did not talk. There was only what was going on in the son's mind. He glanced at his father — and that glance carried a little disdain. He looked around at the city, and thought: I am pretty rustic myself, but he is more rustic than I am.

That year he was seventeen and his father was forty-five. A man from a hamlet in Jingjiang, who had only finished primary school, had carried a trunk for his son, ridden all day, and stood at the gate of Peking University.

It was his father's first time in Beijing too. He did not go anywhere to look around.

5. A meal in the university canteen

The night his father stayed in Beijing, the two of them ate in the Peking University canteen.

This was 1983, and the canteen still used meal tickets. The tickets were issued each month according to the state grain ration. Vegetables had their own tickets. Staples were split into flour tickets and rice tickets — flour tickets for steamed buns and rolled buns, rice tickets for rice. There was a monthly ceiling, and flour tickets made up most of it. You could not, as people do now, buy rice whenever you wanted rice and buns whenever you wanted buns. If you ate rice, you still had to eat buns.

At that meal, his father looked at the white steamed buns in the serving window and did not say much.

6. Early the next morning, his father went home

His father did not leave that evening. The two of them squeezed into the dormitory for the night — the son in the upper bunk, his father crowded in beside him.

Early the next morning, his father went back.

Many years later, after he had graduated and started work, he thought of that scene and suddenly felt ashamed.

After his father returned from Beijing, he told the boy's mother some of what he had seen at the university. At home, the parents often worried about it.

Getting into Peking University was a proud thing in the village. But once the parents were home, they were often unhappy, and quite heartbroken.

What were they worried about? His younger brother told him the reason later. That is the next chapter.

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First published on the WeChat account Jian Nanshan Notes: His father brought the trunk to Peking University