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China enters the Spring Festival travel rush – the world's largest migration – with an estimated nearly 3 billion journeys spanning the approximately 40-day Lunar New Year holiday, 99.9% of which are made by people returning home to their hometowns.
Such peak migrations have been a phenomenon since the 1980s, when rural workers migrated to cities in search of employment amid China's accelerating urbanization. These workers only had the time and money to return home once a year for the Lunar New Year.
These weary people, burdened with the weight of a year of hardship and toil, journey together through the final leg of the year, only to then begin a new year with a similar journey in the opposite direction.
Tet (Vietnamese New Year) always brings excitement to children, but over time, that excitement turns into anxiety—anxiety about having a prosperous Tet. And from anxiety, some people dread Tet, some fear Tet, and some become indifferent to it.
In Vietnam, on a large Facebook group a few days ago, two photos were shared. One showed the whole family—father, mother, older sister, and younger brother—sitting on the floor eating instant noodles. The other showed the same people, also sitting on the floor eating instant noodles, but more than ten years later, the two sisters had grown up and the father's hair had turned gray. Among the thousands of comments below, hundreds said, "I wish my family had a photo like that."
My memories of Tet are of my parents going to the market at four in the morning and returning home at eleven at night, and of the bowls of duck noodle soup with plenty of broth and noodles bought from the corner shop, to warm up the dinner table that had been cold since the afternoon.
My memory of Tet is of the morning of the first day, when my parents dressed my siblings and me in our finest clothes, and the whole family went to my grandmother's house. There was a large brick courtyard in front of the five-room house, where my grandmother sat on a wooden slatted table and chairs in the middle room, before the altar where incense smoke wafted, and where my uncles, aunts, brothers, and sisters gathered to share a New Year's meal.
My memory of Tet is of an older brother who always came to wish us a Happy New Year right during the first meal of the year with our extended family—not at the beginning, not at the end, always in the middle of the meal, year after year.
My memory of Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year) is a family photograph – one of two photos of me with my father that I still remember; the other was taken when I was one year old. My father's smiling face in the photo was enlarged, framed, and placed respectfully on the altar for seventeen years now.
For many, reunion is just a journey, but for some, it's simply a memory.
