Hometown Beyond Recognition
2015-02-25
Just two days away from the lunar new year, I boarded a coach along with my luggages. It's already late afternoon, and this trip would take me more than two hours. I was exhausted, because just two days ago, I stayed overnight on a slow train from Shenzhen to Yueyang for my friend's wedding. Then I took another train from Yueyang to Changsha -- my home city, after the wedding, and I was still not yet home, only closer. After spending yet another night at my sister's home, I was finally on my last leg of trip home.As the coach hurtling towards my home village, the sky was getting darker and darker. Through the window, I saw a row of buildings, with the same tiles and outer appearances, standing alongside the road, where paddy fields once lay. In the past, I could recognize the location of a fork in the road, where I should get off the coach and take a different path towards home by foot, by looking at houses of our fellow villagers at distance. But now, a row of new buildings blocked my sight, and those buildings were of the same look. It all rendered my mission of identifying that fork impossible. It's not until my intuition told me that I should go no further did I stop the coach, only to know that the coach had run past that fork roughly 300 meters. When I got to the fork, I saw my dad standing there, anxiously waiting for me. He's afraid that it could be hard for me to find the path leading home because of all those changes our village had undergone over the year. So he wanted to be a unique sign in my eyes that could guide me towards home. But because of the darkness, I didn't saw him through the window while my coach was passing him by.
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