We've walked the whole day, just like the previous four weeks. We stopped to eat or for the bathroom. Well, the bathroom is most of the time just behind some bushes. We are walking. A lot of other people were taking the train or buses, and they are free for us, just as the food and the beds are free, but we decided to walk our way, all the way to the capital. Like the old revolutionaries who had to march through much worse terrains and under constant threat of ambush. At least we will walk, with just our old comrade shoes. We never stopped to admire the country side or the forests or even the distant mountains. We just keep walking. We travel from one welcome center to the next each day, planning carefully so that we maximize our walking distance and still get to the next welcome center by dusk. After dusk, who knows what evil lurked in the dark.
It's almost five, the sun is still warm and quite far from the distant mountains in the west. A young man is coming towards us. We've not seen too many people on the road. There have been peasants and other wanderers walking like us. We are walking around the country to see all the great monuments to the Revolution, and everything is paid for by the munificent government. But we never stop to talk to anyone. We don't talk to anyone in the welcome centers either. You just don't talk to people. You just don't. You don't want to end up saying things you will regret later, especially if it's so easy nowadays to misinterpret, often deliberately, what you say, and then you are off to the public humiliation and possibly much worse for your counter-Revolution views, real or misinterpreted. So we keep our mouths shut about anything except, maybe, the weather, which is getting colder as we ascend the mountains.
The young man stops and asks us where we are going. We told him that we are going to the next welcome center down the road. He shakes his head. He is about eighteen, nineteen, age of my students. Of course, I don't have any more students; our great Leader has told them to stop studying and just go around the country admiring the great monuments of the Revolution and help root out enemies of the state, of the Revolution, of the people. He is not studying, obviously. But he has a huge smile on. He has three pins on his gray blue shirt, pins of our Leader you work hard to earn. Upon hearing our goal, his smile fades a little and he tells us that the center we want to lodge in is closed. We have heard that some centers do close without notice, but we somehow don't want to believe that this one is going to close. If it does, it would be very bad as the following one is far and will be reached in the dark. We ignore the young man's warning and ask what he is doing. He is going to another center. He says he is not sure if he will be let in because he is just a peasant, never been a student or a teacher, qualifications for being let in the centers. We wish each other good luck and we continue our way.
About forty minutes later, forty minutes of more silent walking and inner thoughts and ignoring the changing landscape around us, we reach the welcome station. My heart sinks. The boy was right: it is closed. Suddenly, I start to feel the cold wind lurching into my bones and the ever slanting sun descending more and more. I suddenly can see the surrounding becoming more orange. Then I see my panic mirrored in my colleague's eyes too. We both instantly take a look at the map, as if somehow by some divine help of the great Leader the next station is closer than we had originally thought. No, it's still the same distance written on that little piece of paper.
There's no time to lose. We pick up our pace and start walking. Instead of the pleasant and introspective way that I've been carrying in the walks of the past four weeks, now I am full of worries. I normally worry a lot, worried about food, about being targeted for public humiliation, about my Mother, and who knows what else. And before now, I have been slowly getting used to the idea that I need not worry. But now, panic rushes in my veins and moving those cold feet faster. The blueness of the sky is darkening, and the shadows are stretching. We are in a foreign land, suddenly. There is no one on the road and not in the fields. I can hear our panting as we quicken our pace. But our pace is slowed down gradually but the rising mountains.
The sun is setting. I used to paint, oil paint, the Western way, the modern way, as opposed to the traditionalist way of watercolor. I would have loved to admire the sun setting over the mountains with all the cirrus clouds hovering over quite happily. Here, in this company of two people, there are no happy thoughts. Only worry. And as soon as the sun disappears over the mountains, the road becomes dark. It is still distinguishable, but everywhere else is pitch black. And within a few minutes, the cold wind becomes more fierce and biting. We come from the warm south, near the sea. And although it's not that far away, the altitude is very different and so are the people.
"If there are bandits we will certainly be dead," says my colleague. I chuckle and say, "In these times there can't be bandits; all the evil people would have already been executed by our Red Guards." I try to assuage him as well as myself, but there is a part of me that doesn't believe what I had just said. Then they came. Not the bandits, but the patches of snow.
After passing a hump in the road, before us lay patches of snow that in the short distance away merge into a field of whiteness. I've never seen snow before, except in movies. Now I get to walk on them. My colleague murmured more panicky complaints. So we will die of the cold? In the snow. I remember reading a short story about a Russian man struggling in the snow and succumbed to it when he fell asleep from extreme fatigue. I start to imagine ways to avoid falling asleep, though now I am not at all sleepy, just worried and my feet are tired as well as cold. The sound of my feet in snow is unpleasant. It is screechy, like I am stepping on a doomed mouse. Then it becomes slippery. How I have always wanted to see snow, and to taste it, to play with it. Now I am just annoyed by it. It slows us down and threatens bodily injuries. It's like a bandit except it exacts not money but energy. Our shoes are helpless on the icy road.
"How much longer, you think?" he asks. I give him a big grin, though he is too preoccupied with his walk to notice it. I say probably not too long. But I have no idea. My job is to assuage the world's pains and worries, but I don't know what to do with mine.
"Hey there!" a familiar voice calls out. We freeze for a moment, torn between fear of an attack and relief from company of another. We turn to see a shadow coming our way from a road that intersects ours. We are relieved to see the familiar face, the familiar smile. No, it's not our great Leader whose face is everywhere except the barren countryside. Our young friend somehow appears from nowhere. He asks what we have been doing. We tell him, much to our own chagrin, that he was right about the closure of the welcome center and now we are rushing to the next. He immediately sees the helplessness and despair in our faces and tells us with a rejuvenated smile that the next welcome center is not far at all. And he actually lives in the village where the center is located. He is on his way home, anyway.
"So they didn't let you in?" I ask him.
He shakes his head but shrugs off any remaining disappointment. He, probably like most peasants, are just grateful that our Revolution had saved them from millenia of misery. Being treated still less than the city people is nothing compared to famine. And so onwards we three go. The wind is whipping more strongly and the snow is becoming deeper. I can't see much now. The twilight and the stars and the useless crescent moon are all we have for light. There is no electricity out here, let alone street lamps. I see the two shadows walking before me and that is all that matters. We remain quiet. I am tired, very tired, and hungry. I didn't eat much at lunch today because the free lunch consisted of moldy porridge. Usually it's not that bad, but today it was so horrific. I actually gulped half of it down just to be polite, but I couldn't deal with the rest. Food is scarce, even if free, so throwing away any food is at best disrespectful.
After making another turn, I see lights ahead. And I hear a sigh of relief from my colleague. I can hear the smile on his face, I can hear his teeth showing, I can hear his heart beating faster. And when we finally arrive in the center, we welcome the warmth inside. And warm it indeed is, because there are so many people in there. That's probably because a lot of people who would have stayed at the previous center also had to move to this one. It's like a zoo. There is barely space on the floor (forget a bed) to sleep in. But there is an additional problem. Blankets.
There's almost a riot going on in which all these men are ganging up on the center manager demanding for blankets. There probably isn't enough, but to make things worse, the manager, fed up with the verbal abuses lashed at him, closes his doors to the people.
I start thinking about the long night ahead. Despite the warmth now, once the lights are turned off and people crawl in their own insulation, the whole place will be cold. And the night will get much colder. I've never been to such a cold place, but I can imagine, just using my brain. My colleague is equally despondent. We get our ration of food (amazing that there is some left) and we return to our little space.
But that same familiar voice calls out to us again. We turn our heads to that genuine smile. The young man is calling us from the gates of the welcome center. We walk over and see that he is carrying two blankets. He says, with a gleaming smile, "The manager is my uncle. I told him you're my friends, and he gladly gives me two blankets for you. Here." In my country, to get anything more than subsistence you need to have connections, but we generally are talking about positions in the government or extra ration coupons for fancier things like cooking oil and extra salt. But I never thought about friendship as a way to keep me warmer than some of my comrades. I was grateful without words. I ask him, "Is there something we can offer you in return for this invaluable service?"
He thinks for a moment and then says, "You said you are from Canton? I heard that the Cantonese pins of our great Leader is the best. Do you have one?" We smiled, the biggest smile the whole day, probably the whole trip, despite the cold wind that freezes all your muscles. We each hand him one of our few pins. I take a last look at the pin before it goes to its new owner. It is, indeed beautiful, and that makes me feel a little better about our paltry reciprocation to his generosity. Although he didn't give us anything he owned, he gave us his company at the time of so much uncertainty for two strangers in a strange land. And most of all, he thought about us; he knew there was no blanket given out and he thought about us. It's been a very lonesome journey, full of introspection, but sometimes, it's good to connect with another human being, it's good to be thought about, to be someone in someone's lives, especially in a world where you can't trust anyone.
