Born Like the Stars: Setting Out

[Fiction] An essay contest themed “Celebrating the 20th National Congress: Youth Writing a Glorious Chapter”

Three generations of railway workers witness, build, and share in China's dream of becoming a great power.

In this prosperous China, everyone, no matter how ordinary, is born a star. Millions of stars come together to form the gleam on the national flag. From here, we set out for a distant land where spring flowers bloom.

Synopsis:

Xu An'an spent her first year of university during the pandemic. On her first high-speed train ride home from college, an elderly man told her about his time as a proud railway engineer, building the Chengdu-Kunming Railway. He hadn't originally been from Yunnan, but after the project was completed, he settled there.

Fang Kangning, Xu An'an's boyfriend, had finished dealing with some work at school and also took a high-speed train to her hometown. Xu An'an's father, Xu Tiejian, gave Fang Kangning a warm welcome. It turned out that Xu Guohong, the old man on the train, was Xu An'an's biological grandfather. Because of his Alzheimer's, in his memories his granddaughter was still the little girl who had to cross several mountains to get to school. Apart from Xu An'an, what he remembered most clearly was his youth as a railway engineer helping build the southwest of the motherland. Xu An'an's grandmother had died not long after giving birth to her father, back when medical care was still underdeveloped. Her mother was now away, providing medical support in a border region. That was why Xu Guohong had been living with Xu An'an all this time.

When the pandemic flared up again, they returned to the high-speed train station. This time, Xu An'an and her boyfriend were headed in different directions. She was returning to school, while he was going to intern at the CRRC Research and Development Department. From this small city on the edge of China's southwest, they each set out on their own paths toward developing and building the country's transport network.