Leaving on the Journey South

Southbound

In 1976, seventeen-year-old Yuan Shoushan learns to make dragon lanterns at his mother’s bedside. “The Yuan family lantern must never go out,” she tells him. He remembers those words for the rest of his life.

Over the next fifty years, he heads south to find work, starts a family and raises children, and loses both his older brother and his son. He spends thirty-seven years hauling bricks on construction sites, putting three children through school and helping them leave the mountains. Then he uses his compensation money to build a road, naming it Chengye Road after his son, who died in the Wenchuan earthquake.

He is quiet, never saying more than he has to. He is kind, helping one person after another: Luo Xiaofang, who was kept by a wealthy man; Ergou, who was tricked into joining a pyramid scheme; a sworn brother who lost his wallet; a coworker with black lung; and a distant relative with nowhere to go after getting out of prison. He never says “I love you.” In the letter he leaves behind, he writes to his wife, Guiying: “You’ve suffered so much with me. In our next life, I won’t go off to work. I’ll stay home with you.”

This is a story about leaving and coming home, about moving to the city and returning to the countryside, and about the quiet resilience of a generation of migrant workers. It is also a history of labor migration in southern China: from green trains to high-speed rail, from money orders to WeChat transfers, from writing in the dirt to AI portraits. Four generations, sixty years, more than 500,000 words: not a single cry of anguish, only a lamp the wind cannot extinguish and a river that never stops flowing.

The lamp is still lit. The river still flows.