The long road home
When the hour hand on the clock hit 12 on January 26, the Spring Festival traffic rush officially began. This year, the festival travel season will last for 40 days until March 6. During this time, Chinese people will make 3.4 billion trips to and from hometowns across the country.
As the capital, Beijing provides hundreds of thousands of jobs for migrant workers, and yet nothing can compare with the place where they were born. This is the time when families reunite and share their joys from the last year with loved ones. That's why no matter how far away home is, no matter how difficult or crowded the road ahead is, nothing stands in the way of Chinese heading home for Spring Festival.
Lines at railway stations are already growing long with migrant workers. They stand holding gifts for their families in bright red packaging, waiting for their rides to come.
Sometimes, to make sure they won't miss their trains, migrant workers sleep at railway stations. A woman in her 40s surnamed Liu, who was waiting for the train to her hometown in Hunan Province, is one of them. Since her train departs in the early morning, Liu stayed inside the station and had only boxed food for dinner. A man surnamed Zhang, whose hometown is Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province, was going back along with his 8-year-old son, who was in Beijing for a visit with his father. While waiting for the train, the father bought his son a bowl of instant noodles. Inside the train, a couple in worn, black down coats sat together as they headed to Hebei Province, bringing dry beef and a bottle of water as their sustenance for the road.
Their faces were anxious and exhausted, but all those feelings will melt to happiness once they arrive at their destinations. For them, the familiar faces of smiling parents and jumping children is the best welcome of all.