The roar of the trains in the station brought a rush of warm wind, dust and papers rose into the air. Though there was much more than the rush of the incoming and outgoing trains to stir the air in the industrial metro. Though it would be a hazard to say it was only the trains that brought this gust. The passing of life and business on the platform rose it higher on their breaths. The watchful gaze and chirping shrills of the whistles of the station men rose it with magic. The alarms and shouted announcements of the conductors to the departure of trains cheering it to greater heights. Children ran between the legs of tall strangers. Somewhere a busker played a song on a Erhu adding to the ritual that brought the particulate to life. Even the station itself seemed to breath its own life. Its construction pulling in air to push it out again. Though the station was only a few years old, the smoke of trains and of people covered the great throat with a patina as a smoker. The concrete floor was scuffed and rubbed smooth by the leather and rattan soles of a millions shoes. All was full of a tense life. And in the green glow of a light shining over a map of China a young man with a fistful of yuan looked up at the routes of the trains.

	Shin Yu had for his eighteenth birthday been given a package of bills he had saved away and given the orders to, “go out, see the country I fought for” by his proud father. His gift had lifted the otherwise sallow and distant gaze of his already eighty-year old pa, who was really well into his forties. Some venom in the past had sapped away his life faster than he had to live it. So, he was often tired. It was only the moment the young Yu became an adult that his father found the life remaining in his heart, where it flicker secretly like a hidden jewel.

	Shin Yu had prior to any grand plans expressed a desire to join the army. This, several years, perhaps really a year and a half before his eighteenth had at the time made his old father distraught and depressed and he disappeared for a time within himself. But somewhere in the old man he came around or thought of some strange, alien plan to distract him. Whatever it was, he had conjured the money and foisted it on his son and told him to, “go out, see the country I fought for”. And what was a young man to do with such money? He obliged.

	Packing out from his provincial village in southern Hunan he meandered the countryside to Hengyang. He went by foot, by ox cart, and even stumbled into a man with a car who brought him to a small town. There, at a train station that he bought a twenty yuan ticket to board and complete the rest of his journey to Hengyang in only an hour. The youth was struck by the city emerging from behind the hills with its great expanse of human life, thriving traffic, and activity. He stepped off the train aroused by it. From the factory smoke to the bustling of the streets, the trams and trolleys, and all the small stores and hidden homes in the old streets. To him it all seemed amazing. He spent a day in the city, living out of his packs and sleeping outside in the parks. He had conspired to see as much of the sights in the city as possible, to be entirely romanced. But he soon found himself disoriented at the city. He became lost. He paid another fare for a street car and arrived back at the train station and looking up at the map.

	A handsome youth, he was kissed by the provincial countryside. Dark sunny complexion, bright brown eyes, and his black hair was largely untamed. He had a carved figure about him, and thin stubble of beard grew in the round valleys, the round hills of his youthful cheeks and jaw. Despite the weight he carried on his shoulder, he walked light and bouncy. He could walk as far as any good bull. Though his clothes were old and dirty, it was only by time; care had been made to keep them right and well patched.

	If there was anything someone might say was lacking, it was confidence. At least in this moment. He stood at the map of the country following with deep concentration the network of railroads drawn in red. He thought he would go to Nanjing and see the capital, and from there wherever the winds take him. Maybe turn around and go back home if he realized he didn't have the money anymore. But as he stood looking up at the map he found that translating it wasn't as direct as he would think. He fuddled with it, thinking of the rough maps he would draw in the dirt or on a piece of wood to help a friend find something or to be shown by his family what field was to be worked that day. These were all fairly routine: go to the old tree split in the middle like a fish's tail, and head east until you come to the ancient tea shop, follow the road north from the old abandoned store and it will be on the right. This was all known. He could handle the abstraction. It was always handled in words. It all involved land he was familiar in. He could walk it asleep. He knew the way the road was that a brisk walk would get him to the field in twenty minutes with energy to spare. He also knew the relation between the old tea shop and his family's hut, and that if it was rainy to not go to the fish-tailed tree and he could take a higher route that while more circuitous would bypass both it and the tea shop, and he would arrive at the field straight on because all four things were known like the sun and the moon and the stars. But this was new, and its newness confounded him. Because in what direction was anything?

	He knew nothing on the map, though he could read the names just fine. But he could not see any of these routes. It bothered him. He became frustrated and turned from the map. Perhaps it would not bother him. Perhaps he could ask. He took his money and went to the window.

	If there was one thing that he held in unyielding aw in the station, even as everything else lost the fantasy: it was the railmen. It was not that they were particularly magnificent, they did not wear any grand uniforms like the generals and the soldiers in the pictures books that he had read. It is just that they held a pride that radiated beyond the simple nature of their uniforms. They made up for that in a pride of purpose and of strength that glowed in the way they held themselves. The emblem, small and humble that was its symbol was worn quaintly on their collars. These men were communists. There was not a worker who did not have pinned on them the insignia of the Communist Party. They wore it with an air of coy manner of the mahjong player. “Oh, I do not have the pieces to finish my hand, what do you mean? Don't you want to lay out yours?”

	He had known communists, several years ago a group of them passed into his village. They barely announced it, but everyone knew they were communists. Their small group had moved simply to a table at the local tea shop, and ordering dimsum began to speak with the locals, or whoever would come by. At the time Shin Yu was fourteen. He had heard of the communists during the war from his mother, who worked for a time following the army. Back then they were loud and always shouting. Their officers challenging others to an argument over some issue or another before being shouted down by a more superior officer. She talked about how they would often sneak captured Japanese rifles to the camp followers and teach them to shoot, or to sneak the rifles to the villages they passed and how the military police would find several when an old man would surrender a half dozen to the army. She thought back then they were fools and radical. His father was a republican, Kuomintang and never did such things. But when the communists visited the village, they were not loud and even his parents abided them in silent mutual respect, though they never visited them. He had meant to visit them then, but by the time he worked up his courage they had moved on. Shin Yu wondered at these communists though, they were not particularly meek and humble as the ones he knew before, they were far too proud for that. But they were not loud and preachy as his mother had described them. He considered them, not making up his mind.

	There was a line at the ticket windows. He stepped in and waited, gazing around.  The variety of people were amazing. He was struck always by the sorts he saw in the city. There were Daoist priests, elderly men in the old dress. Younger men in the sleeker western suits. Rugged individuals and a few soldiers. Women in qipao and mothers with children. Others dressed like ladies from abroad. A small huddled group of Buddhist monks stood nearby, gazing out at the station silently and brushing their bald heads with their hands.

	“Hello.” said the woman at the counter as Shin Yu stepped up, “Where are we headed today?” she spoke flatly, without intonation.

	“I was thinking a ticket to, uh- Ji'an?” he started, he felt himself clam up and his fingers began tapping the wooden counter of the ticket booth, “Though, I'm really trying to get to Nanjing.” he added out of reflex.

	“Nanjing then? We can get you a ticket to the capital. You'll need to transfer still.”

	“I can? Well, that's good.” a relieved Shin Yu said, feeling an invisible weight lift off of him. “How long will that be?”

	“Do you have an appointment there?” the lady said, pulling aside a sheet of paper and starting to fill it in.

	“No, I am just out to see the country. I just thought I would go to Nanjing.”

	“Well lucky you.” she said with a polite smile, but Shin Yu picked up it was rather wooden.

	“You don't look like you're having much fun.” he said as he was handed a ticket. The lady at the booth rolled her eyes and shook her head.

	“Eighty yuan, please.” she said.

	“Oh, I'm sorry. And: here.” he handed her the bank notes and bowed nervously as he stepped away. He looked down at the ticket. It took him a moment of concentration to read it. But he would be departing from platform four at fourteen hundred. He looked up at the station clock that hung large and looming like an ashen moon over the gate where the trains came from. Barely thirteen hundred. He mumbled to himself, and walked to the platform and found a bench.

	He would need to wait some time. But he had waited many time before, so unslinging the weight from his shoulders he sat his rump down on the cold metal bench and began his wait, watching the station life move on around him and the song of the train whistles and the engine noise and the talking and shouting, with the Erhu playing in the background and the calls and shouts of the station and locomotive staff. It fell and slipped into a casual dissonance and he leaned back into the bench.

	For much of his life he had known only the relative calm of the countryside. In the mountains and hills where he grew the most that would dissolve the peace were the festivals or the rolling in of a spring and late summer storm. Even the cry of the cocks in the morning was peaceful and in as much harmony as the leaves rustling in the wind or the soft low hum of cicadas. But the bustle of the city and of the urban rail station was new to him.

	He laid his head back and breathed a long sigh and waited.