A holiday seen from the roadside
I have never thought so seriously about what National Day means to ordinary people as I have this year. In the past, it seemed simply to be a time of celebration, when the whole country was wrapped in a festive mood. This year, however, I found myself standing slightly outside the celebration, watching other people’s lives as an observer. What I saw left me unsettled.
The road is never only a road
Before speaking about people, I want to speak about cars.
In modern life, cars and phones have become nearly indispensable. I once wrote that computers extend the reach of our hands. Cars do something similar for our feet: they allow us to cross vast distances and arrive at places that would otherwise be far beyond our immediate world.
Wherever there is a road, there are vehicles. They move through cities crowded with high-rises and along narrow lanes in remote villages. People use them to reach work, home, relatives, and destinations they may never otherwise see. Some even make a vehicle their home, sleeping inside when they are tired and continuing on when they wake. As people’s needs have expanded, so have the functions of vehicles. What began with the simplest forms of transport has developed into everything from single-wheel vehicles to heavy trucks with dozens of wheels, and from ordinary private cars to recreational vehicles that can serve as temporary homes.
Yet as vehicles have become faster, some people still feel that speed is not enough. On expressways, there are always drivers weaving recklessly through traffic, cutting from one lane to another as if they were slipping between flowers. They do it beneath a blazing sun and in wind and rain, during the day and late at night. Someone is always in a hurry to get somewhere. During the National Day holiday, when both traffic and travelers multiply, accidents increase as well.
Before leaving the city, we checked the highway navigation. It showed a congested section ahead. There was no need to guess at the reason: an accident had almost certainly occurred, so we decided to take another route. On the way back, we checked again. It was the middle of the holiday, and the map showed an open, unobstructed road. Yet before we had completed half the journey, we still encountered two accidents.
Life is like that. Every plan contains the possibility of interruption. The people rushing along the highway may have intended to reach their destinations early, but an unforeseen event can make all their arrangements meaningless. Automobile companies are now pursuing greater efficiency through intelligent systems, but can even the most advanced technology eliminate this kind of uncertainty? I do not think so. The deepest cause is not the vehicle. It is the person behind it.
People on their way back
Human beings are social creatures. Each person lives inside a network of relationships, obligations, and attachments.
My wife’s maternal grandfather is ninety-three years old. By the time of this holiday, he had gone more than ten days without eating, relying only on water and nutritional fluids to stay alive. In an age when countless people leave us every day, death no longer always arrives as a subject of open grief. Taking advantage of the holiday, his children and grandchildren hurried back from different places, preparing to accompany him through the final days of his life.
We returned to our hometown on October 1 and had planned to visit him the following day. But shortly after lunch, we received a call saying that he had opened his mouth wide and could no longer catch his breath. We were asked to come immediately. Everyone put down their bowls and chopsticks and rushed over. Relatives who were still at work quickly asked for leave. Those living farther away had bought their tickets too late to return in time, and their anxiety was evident even from a distance.
When we arrived, however, the old man was calm. His consciousness was clear, and he could still recognize relatives both young and old. After reassuring him, everyone gathered around and began to talk. We shared news about our lives and complained about the weather in the days before the holiday, when persistent rain had made traveling difficult.
Everyone has to struggle through daily life. Apart from the Spring Festival, it is difficult for an entire family to gather, even when there is a wedding, a child’s full-month celebration, or another important occasion. We talked late into the night. Seeing that the old man was safe for the moment, everyone returned home to rest, then came back the next day to keep watch.
But a person who seems to be standing at the edge of death can still surprise everyone. Perhaps the presence of his children gave him strength; perhaps the care surrounding him reached him in ways no one could see. The old man, who had previously been unable to take either food or water, gradually began eating again.
The relatives who had come from far away, as well as those with jobs waiting for them, began to leave one by one. As someone who lived relatively far away and was not a direct descendant, I did not need to remain there indefinitely. On the drive back to the city, I suddenly thought about everyone’s behavior during those days.
They were waiting to lose someone without having lost him yet. Still, their faces were remarkably composed. Perhaps for a ninety-three-year-old man, dying after such a long life could be regarded as a fortunate death. Birth, aging, illness, and death are part of the natural cycle. And when many people close to us have already passed away, farewell is no longer an experience we encounter for the first time. Its sharpness gradually dulls.
I had assumed that waiting for a loved one’s death might be more painful than receiving the sudden news that the person was already gone. Yet no one looked openly devastated. Perhaps grief is not fully released until the loss becomes real. Or perhaps it waits for years, until memory unexpectedly brings the pain back.
The death of my mother
My own mother also died during the National Day holiday.
In 2012, National Day coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival. I returned home for the festival, and my mother roasted chestnuts for me to take back to the city. After I left, I received news that she had suddenly fallen. At that time, we did not own a car, so we had to borrow someone else’s vehicle and hurry home. We took her to the hospital, where examinations showed that a cerebral hemorrhage had compressed the central nervous system. Because too much time had passed and local medical facilities were limited, the doctors said treatment would be extremely difficult. They advised us to give up, explaining that even taking her to Chongqing might not save her, while the journey itself was long and dangerous.
I felt as if the sky had collapsed.
My mother had always been the pillar of our family. With a thin and seemingly fragile body, she had supported all of us. If she was gone, would the family still exist?
A home that no longer stands
There are three brothers in my family. After graduating from university, my eldest brother left home and did not return until 2022, when pandemic restrictions and strict identity checks required him to replace his identity card. My second brother’s place of residence changed with each job. In May 2012, after learning that our mother was unwell, I left Shenzhen and found work in Zunyi, still about eighty kilometers from home. I rarely returned.
For years, the old house was occupied only by our parents. When our mother died, our father’s life was immediately thrown into disorder.
He could not cook. At first, we suggested bringing him to the city to live with us, but he said he would not be comfortable there and wanted to remain in the village. Feeding one person alone proved difficult. He began eating sticky rice cakes every day, and within less than a week they upset his stomach so badly that he suffered unbearable pain. In his confusion, he became convinced that Heaven was about to take him away.
We brought him to the city. During his treatment, doctors discovered that he had also suffered a cerebral infarction. He needed regular medical care, going to the hospital roughly once every two months, and he took medication to improve blood circulation in between visits. None of this stopped the hallucinations. Many nights, he would come to my bed, shake me awake, and say, “You can still sleep? I’m going to die.”
I often felt that I would go mad before he died. I endured that life for two years. I did not go mad. Then he died.
We held the funeral in our hometown. Weeds had taken over the courtyard, and the house, which had long been unoccupied, was filled with cold, damp air. It was the period just before the Spring Festival, and it was the last time the old house had any real human presence. After our father’s death, none of the brothers ever lived there again.
I often say that one’s hometown is both a root and a shackle. My second brother is ten years older than I am. Because his household registration had been transferred to the city, mine was the only one still registered in the village. He would often ask when I planned to return and rebuild the old house.
The truth was that none of us were going back. The next generation was born and raised in the city; naturally, they would not return to live in the village either. And yet this was where we had grown up. It was our parents’ home, and also ours.
So I told him that perhaps we could rebuild it on the day we retired. There was no point repairing it now when we had no time to live there; it would only stand empty. And an empty house eventually decays.
I do not know whether I will make it to retirement. No one knows whether tomorrow or an accident will arrive first. Many people never live to see the day they stop working. The old house, meanwhile, continued to deteriorate. It was a wooden structure, exposed to sun and rain and left without maintenance.
In 2025, Guizhou Province carried out a campaign known as “two clearances, two renovations, and two forms of governance,” which included removing dangerous buildings across the province. The village called to say that our house had been neglected for too long and recommended that it be demolished. If we agreed, workers would be sent to take it down.
I asked a structural engineer to return with me so we could see whether the building could still be repaired. The assessment recommended demolition, and we agreed. I never learned the exact day the government sent people to remove it. When I returned later for another matter, nothing remained on the homestead but bare ground. A neighbor had begun raising chickens there.
This August, my eldest brother—who had left and later returned—called to say that he was no longer doing well and wanted to go back to our hometown. I told him that the old house had already been demolished by the government. If he wanted to return, he would have to ask the government to help him.
He had not yet reached retirement age. He had always seemed to live only for himself. He had been away from home for decades without thinking about returning. He was someone familiar, and yet almost a stranger.
Later, he went to the local authorities. They arranged for him to be taken to a hospital, where examinations showed that there was a problem with his brain. He was issued documentation identifying him as a person in difficulty and was placed in a welfare institution.
There is an old saying that when a tree grows large, its branches divide, and when people grow older, families separate. As time moves forward and we age, each person develops a stronger sense of self and wants to follow a different path. But when everything has finally settled, we look back and discover that we are no more than a grain of dust in the human world.
A grain in the current
By the time I reached this point in writing, fatigue had taken over. I felt powerless before language. I could not quite express what I wanted to say, just as in life I often stand before people and events with no way to alter them, able only to watch from a distance.
The great current moves forward. Only a very few people have the ability to turn its course; a small number survive by attaching themselves to others, while most simply move along with the crowd. It is like the traffic on an expressway: when the vehicle ahead speeds up, the vehicles behind it accelerate; when the vehicle ahead slows, everyone slows. Only a rare few can move freely, changing position with the agility of a fish in water.
A family is much the same. One person struggles forward with all his strength; another scrapes by through small schemes and compromises. Each follows the instincts and circumstances that have shaped him.
Human beings evolved from animals, and the instinct to survive is written into our genes. Almost every action can be explained in those terms. Civilization advances through negotiation and conflict. Whether people choose order or disorder, each choice may be temporary, shaped by the moment.
A single grain in the sea cannot raise a storm. But the force of the sea cannot be underestimated. It is the countless ordinary people, each one unremarkable on their own, who together create the prosperity of an age.
Happy National Day. And respect to the ordinary self.