Essay 3

Fourteen years before I got used to the idea of death I felt what it was like to kill someone. It went down as an accident, as things of this nature must-- certainly no human hand was big enough to set these events in motion.

Before the highway was built, the Cheng-Yu Railroad served as the only mode of transportation between the remote cities in the Sichuan Province of China. The tracks began in Chong-Qing, climbed some three or four thousand feet, and hugged the shore of the Yangtze River for 100 miles as it wound its way through the mountains of Southwest China. Traveling in this direction, your end station was the city of Cheng-Du, which rested on the flattest piece of land in all of the Sichuan Province. My most memorable trips were in the opposite direction, with the river on my left and the satisfaction of heading back to my grandparents' after an exhausting vacation. Then, the water ran in the same direction as my train. I used to imagine it was carrying me home.

With my face pressed against the window I counted mountains. I watched the jutting rocks disappear and reappear with every tunnel we threaded. I swung my legs impatiently under the table. My aunt sat across from me and talked to my uncle as she peeled oranges with a knife. The rind descended in a growing spiral.

Two miles away in the hot summer sun a man put down his bundles and sat down on the train tracks. No one knew why he chose to stop there and at that precise time, but some combination of the elements must have coaxed him to rest. Whether or not he heard the train coming, I'll never know.

Without a warning the train jerked to a halt. The knife fell out of my aunt's hand with the orange and all its peels. The brakes screeched and the luggage tumbled and the passengers screamed. All was sound. I was flung forward into the table and hit my shoulder squarely on its edge, which resulted in a later bruise. A few seconds later we were standing still. For a moment, there was silence.

“Mother fucking hell,” someone said.




Ten years later my mother would relate to me the recent death of her high school friend. She had been out fishing with her boyfriend and two friends in a somewhat remote region of Sichuan. Their fishing spot was on the other side of a small railroad bridge about 30 meters in length. The bridge, which consisted only of bare tracks, spanned a small rocky gorge with a stream running through it. The visibility down the tracks was perfect in one direction, but almost zero in the other, as the tracks curved away immediately into dense vegetation. Carrying in small buckets their catches of the day they stepped onto the rails. When the train came from behind, tearing a path through the undergrowth as it flashed into view, all but one of the group had reached the other side; and there was nothing they could do to save the last.

When my mother told me this story an irrelevant but persistent image surfaced in my mind-- bright and not worn by time. I was looking into a shallow gorge. About 50 feet down resting on a flat ledge was a body partly covered by a white sheet. Shoeless feet were sticking out from underneath the sheet that was clearly not made for human bodies. The feet were dirty and scratched.

Though it represented no person or place I knew, an eerie familiarity made it my obsession. And it was in its examination and re-examination that I traced the origin of the image to this forgotten childhood memory.




“Oh my god, I think we hit something!”

I rubbed my sore shoulder and blinked back tears.

“Was it an ox?” a woman asked.

“Why can't people keep track of their animals?” “What's going on?” Voices overlapped.

My aunt bent down to pick up the orange, now coated in dirt and inedible. She blew on it as if hoping to rescue it, but gave up and put it back into its plastic bag.

The door to our cabin burst open and a man flew through.

“We ran into a hobo! We hit a hobo!” He yelled excitedly, as he raced to the next cabin, panting through his words.

I looked at my aunt. “The train hit a person?” I asked.

Yes. Apparently.

“Is the person dead?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“It's hard to survive being hit by a train.”





Someone yelled and pointed out the window. There was activity in the gorge that fell just to the left of our unmoving train. Curious bodies leaned over us to look down. My aunt, who was sitting next to me by now, put her hand over my eyes.

“Don't look,” she said. “It'll give you nightmares.”

I didn't want nightmares, but when I opened my eyes behind her hand there was a space between her fingers.

- Lulu Liu