For many young people, leaving one's homeland or staying behind can be an entangled, irresolvable contradiction — much like the dilemma in Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged: those inside the walls gaze out at the dazzling world beyond; no matter how comfortable life within may be, they can never shake the regret of not having tasted the outside firsthand. Those who venture far, having endured every hardship, come at last to understand: homesickness cannot be filled with material things. That was exactly how I felt back then. After graduate school I dug in for five years — my work and life were on a steady upward climb, the future bright. Yet watching my classmates and friends leave for abroad one group after another, I felt an inexplicable emptiness. In the end I caught the last train out. But the sky over a foreign land was so strange — the constellations I knew from childhood summer nights, the fairy tales and daydreams that attended them, could never again be pieced together whole. I recall those first days in England. Though I was already past thirty, though I'd come to Manchester alongside many friends, though I'd long since weathered in Beijing years of wandering far from home town — leaving my native land still carried an indescribable anguish: like a blade of grass torn out by the roots, battered by wind and rain, a vast bottomless emptiness and disorientation welling up within. At the start of term, in front of the student union building, every kind of student club was recruiting — bustling crowds, peals of laughter — yet I seemed to inhabit another dimension altogether, displaced from reality, unable to grasp the commotion around me, powerless to dispel a nameless melancholy. Then came a decade of severance. Save for the companionship of Huaxia Wenzhai (China News Digest), and the occasional holiday phone calls or greeting cards to family, I had lost all contact with the motherland. Little did I know that this was precisely the decade in which China underwent its most earth-shaking transformation. Not until my first trip home in 2001 did I realize, with a jolt, that I had once again been displaced in time and space. Standing on the familiar yet alien streets of Beijing, watching the endless streams of people, I felt with an incurable certainty that this world no longer had anything to do with me. Was this the city that had left me so many warm memories? The Beijing I'd yearned for in my dreams now stood before me like a stranger! In the ancient capital I took such pride in, I could not understand the bustle around me, nor could I dispel that nameless melancholy. Only my childhood hometown remains forever vivid in my mind, never fading. Thirty years have distilled the villages of southern Anhui into thick oil paints: golden yellow, fiery crimson. Endless fields of rapeseed flowers stretching to the horizon, and mountainsides aflame with azaleas in full bloom. I have passed through countless cities and towns, witnessed many breathtaking scenes — the Gold Coast of Australia, the bays and forests of Vancouver, the autumn leaves of American national parks, and Niagara Falls in Buffalo — searching all the way, yet never finding rapeseed flowers and azaleas like those of home. Not until I returned to visit my family, catching the rapeseed bloom by chance, did I once again behold those patchwork fields of gold and breathe in the fragrance of the soil of home. I captured those golden expanses on video and stored them away, afraid they might slip away again. Homesickness, like love, is an eternal theme of literature and art. From Li Bai's "Raising my head, I gaze at the bright moon; lowering it, I think of home," to Tao Yuanming's "Come Away Home"; from Chyi Yu's "Olive Tree" to Fei Xiang's "Clouds of Home"; from Ma Sicong's "Homesickness Melody" to the American folk song "Five Hundred Miles." In the still of night, in a foreign land, a gentle folk ballad flows like a quiet stream and soaks into my heart — it is the Kingston Trio singing "Five Hundred Miles," the shared melancholy of every wanderer under heaven. Homesickness is an invisible net — where does the road of wandering end? Written October 6, 2005, Buffalo