The day he left for Peking University, his luggage was left behind

> In 1983, a boy from a village in Jingjiang was admitted to Peking University.
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> On the day he left to register, his luggage never made it onto the train. His admission letter was in it. His household-registration papers were in it. His whole future was in it.
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> This is a story my husband has told for many years. Every time he tells it, he pauses at the words "where is that trunk?"
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> From today, the Gushan Family Letters series will be published piece by piece. More than a hundred family letters will bring back the life of an ordinary rural family in the 1980s.

A note before the story

While sorting these letters, I kept thinking about one thing.

His family was poor then. And yet, as I read, what I felt was envy.

The son and his parents could say everything they needed to say. His father and mother were remarkably of one mind about how to raise him. There was little quarreling in the house. The letters come back, again and again, to ordinary lines: study hard, look after your health, don't save money by skipping meals.

What moved me even more was a living picture of the Chinese countryside in the 1980s — how children were taught, how neighbors got along, how people earned a living, how a family got through one day and then the next, until the days slowly got better. Those marks of the time are hard for young people now to imagine.

So I decided the letters were worth setting down. Not because of Peking University, but because this one family's days keep a record for the many ordinary families of that time.

1. The whole world he had seen

Before 1983, the farthest place he had been was the county town of Jingjiang.

It was the New Year. He was seven or eight, his younger brother five or six. An older cousin from Taixing led the two boys more than ten li along the paths into Jingjiang town.

They watched acrobatics and small folk shows at the sports ground, bought a kaleidoscope, and bought a little monkey toy tied to a string that jumped when you squeezed it. Later they went to the cinema and saw a film.

That was the whole world he had seen before he went to Beijing.

2. Gushan

His home was Gongjiadai, Xinzhuang village, Gushan, Jingjiang. To the west of the house there is a hill called Gushan.

Gushan is not high. It rises 55.6 meters, and it is the only natural hill on the whole plain of central Jiangsu. Everything around it is flat — flat fields, flat rivers, flat houses. Look out for a dozen li and there is only this one small mound, standing by itself.

It is different now. Tall buildings have gone up, and Gushan no longer looks as grand as it once did.

That is where the name Gushan, the solitary hill, comes from.

As a child he did not care how many meters it was. He only knew it was a high mountain, and that climbing it took real effort.

3. Filling in the application

Looking back, the way he chose a university is striking.

Nobody guided him. Applications were filled in after the exam and before the scores came out.

The first choice still had to be filled in. He saw that the first name on the admissions poster was Peking University. The campus in the drawing was beautiful, with a lake, a pagoda, and pavilions, so he applied for biology at Peking University. His second choice was information studies in the department of library science.

The biology cutoff was high, and in the end he was admitted to library science.

The thought behind library science was a vague one: he had grown up with almost no books to read. In those days, brown sugar was sold in bags pasted together from scrap book pages. Every time the sugar was poured out, he took the bag apart and read every character on it.

Because there were no books, he thought: if I go to a library, there will be many books to read.

That is how he applied to Peking University.

He did not expect to be admitted.

After he was, the neighbors who had traveled for a living — the ones who had been out of Jingjiang and had ridden a train — all came to tell him what a train was like, how to get on, how to find a seat.

Listening, he thought a train was just an iron shell, an iron box. If he could get inside, that was enough.

He did not care about the train at all. He was entirely taken up with excitement.

The day the admission letter arrived, the whole family was glad. But he only really understood that he was going to Beijing on the day he left.

4. The trunk that was lost

On the day he went to Beijing, his father saw him off.

From Gushan to Baxi, they took the ferry across the river to Jiangyin, changed for Changzhou, and boarded the train at Changzhou station.

It was a green train. Changzhou to Beijing took twenty-one hours.

The same journey takes less than four hours by high-speed rail today.

Twenty-one hours — he had never sat on a train that long in his life.

The train was packed that day. He was not tall. The crowd lifted his feet off the floor, and he was pushed along until he reached a seat and sat down.

The whole way he looked out the window. Until then he had only seen the country around Gushan and the village. Out here, the trees and the houses were all different.

Somewhere around Dezhou station, already not far from Beijing, he suddenly remembered.

His father had put a trunk on the train with him. Where was that trunk?

He felt beside him. Nothing.

The admission letter was in it. The household papers were in it. His whole future was in it.

Without the letter, would Peking University still take him? If not, he would be back in the village. The whole journey would have been for nothing.

What happened next is the next chapter.

One thing to say

Every time I hear him say "where is that trunk?", I think: in our generation, whose luggage did not hold a whole future?

How old were you the first time you traveled far from home? What was in your luggage? Does your family still have a letter kept at the bottom of a chest, or an old ticket?

Next: His father brought the trunk to Peking University

First published on the WeChat account Jian Nanshan Notes: The day he left for Peking University, his luggage was left behind