By Yiwen
This is my seventh month of solo traveling and hopping from hostel to hostel. Since October, I’ve done nothing but moving and leaving. Trains have taken me through the Southern Chinese brown croplands, the snowy Swiss Alps, the idle English grass fields, and the unkempt Polish forests.
Along my trip, I’ve met many fellow travelers, “where are you also traveling” turned into “what passion projects are you working on,” “why did you start smoking,” “so how’s your relationship with your dad,” “how did you learn to argue and confront,” “what’s your view on the German education of the Holocaust,” and “why did you give up on two years of research on nuclear physics,” etc.
The process of getting to know another human with a different upbringing, a different lived experience, and a different aspiration is endlessly fun. But there is always more to ask, and more to know, yet the person I’m talking to is getting off at the next stop, checking out of the hostel tomorrow.
So I asked myself, is it pointless to meet people and get to know them only to depart so soon?
Later on, I was sitting on a train from Birmingham to Manchester; the saturated green grass and the low, grey clouds raced past the end of my periphery. I was thinking of the 30-year-old Chinese doctor I just said goodbye to. We initially met in my hostel in London. She said she was leaving for the University of Birmingham the next day, where she would finish her research. So I visited her and couchsurfed in her apartment in Birmingham. When the sky turned dark and the dim street lights glowed, we strolled to a nearby Tesco to get milk and food for her apartment. On the way, I asked her why she decided to become a doctor. She said it’s because she is impatient; she wants things done fast. Being a doctor, unlike doing research, which could take months to design an experiment and gather data, is much faster. “You can administer medication in the morning, and the patient gets the relief in the afternoon. It is much more fulfilling and satisfying this way,” she said.
It wasn’t a conventional or noble reason, but it felt genuine. She told me her experience as a doctor in China – how she cared for the patients, how there were times she was unable to help them, and how she felt like an unpaid social worker, a sacrificed lubricant for a peaceful society. Nothing she said was within my expectations. While I was on the train moving further and further from her and Birmingham, her opinions and her anecdotes took root in me. During my gap year, there were two things I’ve done too many times. One is taking 200-300 train rides. The second was having many conversations with people of different ages, ethnicities, and professions. (Yiwen, what’s the connection between train rides and conversations?) Part of the reason I liked riding trains so much is that, in the midst of constantly moving from places and people, long train rides are the only time I felt stationary, when I wasn’t walking tens of thousands of steps or dragging my luggage over cobblestone roads or anxiously planning what to do next. Instead, I can comb through the conversation I just had with another traveler, revisit their words, sit with those words until they mold into unexpected shapes that eventually become a part of me.
I think the point of meeting people, regardless of when we depart, is to know them. And to know them is to get into their eyes and their feet and see how they experience the world. Then I leave with the souvenir I couldn’t have gotten elsewhere, and that is a piece of my fellow traveler’s worldview.
