Category: Essay

By Larry S. Su

On the first day of college in today’s China, train stations and campuses unfold like a modern spectacle. Students step off high-speed trains, wheeling sleek polycarbonate suitcases or expandable fabric cases, an impressive display of China’s transformation and prosperity—worlds apart from the scene when I started college in the 1980s. Back then, students from the countryside, like me, arrived weighed down by clumsy, hand-built wooden suitcases—boxy, awkward, sometimes nailed shut or painted over in dull brown or red. Despite their lack of style and ease, these suitcases held far more than just clothes and books. They carried the weight of individual and family expectations, sacrifices, and the deep conviction that education was the key to a better life.

I was admitted to college in 1983, just six years after China resumed its national college entrance exam, which was halted during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. For an entire decade, higher education had vanished like a dream interrupted.  When it returned, it did so with urgency and hope. Admission rates hovered in the single digits, and every name on the list felt like someone hitting the million-dollar jackpot.  

In my village of 150, tucked between dry hills and narrow paths, I was the first to make it to college. The news spread like wildfire down the dusty lanes, from the threshing fields to the courtyard kitchens. Old friends came by to shake my father’s hand. My mother quietly wiped her eyes with the corner of her apron. For families who had known only toil, harvests, and ration coupons, the word college opened the door of paradise.

For years, we had lived under the gaze of quiet scorn of certain snobbish and well-off villagers. Our poverty was visible in our patched clothes, our sunburnt skin, and our empty grain jars. Other villagers had watched us with indifference or pity. Now my college admission lifted my family’s status in a way nothing else could. I was no longer just a poor farmer’s son; I was a future cadre, or ganbu, with a guaranteed salary, a ration book, and an iron rice bowl that would never crack. No one else in the village had ever crossed that threshold.

For more than a decade, my family had invested everything—hope, sacrifice, and a few Yuan they could scrounge into my education. On days when the journey felt too long or the hunger too loud, they were the ones who kept me going. I remember one winter during high school when I was short of just one dollar of my tuition. My homeroom teacher, stern and unmoved, made me walk five miles home and warned me not to return without the full sum. My parents went from house to house in the village, humbly pleading for a small loan just for a week or two. Most turned them away, murmuring about their own hardships, but a few, out of pity or quiet admiration, handed over a Yuan or two. By late afternoon, the small offerings had added up. I returned to school at dusk, the cold wind at my back and the full tuition folded carefully in my coat pocket. This incident, instead of shaming and destroying me, further strengthened my conviction that no matter what price my family and I had to pay, I would go to college.  

To prepare for my departure to college, my father did something he had never done before. He hired a carpenter from a neighboring village to build a wooden suitcase. It was a costly decision, one that must have weighed heavily on him. We were truly poor. There were days when even salt felt like a luxury, when my siblings and I wore the same mended clothes year-round, and when my mother bartered eggs for school supplies. When unused, our tattered clothes were wrapped in a faded cloth, stored in the corner of the kang, our raised earthen bed connected with the earthen stove.

To have a suitcase made, father first had to find wood for the suitcase.  The lumber did not come from a store, nor from a tidy stack delivered by truck, but from the raw ribs of the mountains five miles away, remote, rugged, and indifferent to human need. It was hewn not with ease, but through toil born of necessity, from a land where poverty pressed against every doorstep like a hungry wolf.

In the villages near the foot of those mountains, the stooped peasants in worn jackets would venture up the steep trails in search of timber, not for craft, not for trade, but for survival. When harvests failed or granaries stood bare, they turned to the forest as their last resort. Trees were cut and sold in the black market for bread. A good haul of wood might mean a sack of corn to keep a family fed for another week.

But obtaining the wood was no simple act. The journey was long and unforgiving. They would rise before dawn, axes slung over their shoulders, climbing through thickets and boulder-strewn paths, deep into the mountain’s silence. There amid the mist and the call of unseen birds, they would fell the chosen trees, their sweat mingling with sap and soil. Because it was illegal to cut down the trees, the peasants had to keep alert not to be spotted by the forestry workers who, though sparse in number, might show up on the roadside, so they often chose dark evenings to carry the lumber home.

The return was even harder. The logs, heavy with sap and sorrow, pressed into their backs. When the burden became too great for one person, they’d cut the timber into several smaller chunks, but even then, each required the strength of two men to carry.  They would strap it to a thick bamboo pole pressured on their shoulders like a yoke of hardship.

Then the carpenter had to be hired.

In the last century, craftsmen were highly revered, especially in rural areas. A person with a particular skill was often treated as an honoured guest. As a result, there were many craftsmen at the time, covering every trade such as stonemasons, carpenters, roof tilers, lathe workers, scale makers, locksmiths, blacksmiths, and so on.

Most rural carpenters didn’t have a permanent workshop. Instead they traveled from home to home, carrying a heavy tool chest on a shoulder pole, often walking long distances between villages. A carpenter might spend days or weeks at a client’s home, eating and sleeping there, crafting everything from furniture to roof beams.

Electricity was rare in villages, so all labour was done by hand. Precision was essential; there was no room for error, and the quality of joints, mortises, and finishes distinguished a true master even though the tools they used were heavy and primitive such as chisels, hand planes, ink markers, hand saws, clamps, files, oiling pads, and so on.   

The carpenter my father hired was an elderly man clad in a worn-out black shirt. He exuded the quiet dignity of a lifetime spent in manual labor. His silver hair was cropped neatly, and his glasses rested securely on his nose, an emblem of careful, measured craftsmanship. Every detail of his posture spoke of experience: His back slightly hunched in concentration, his grip firm yet practiced, and his face calm but focused as he drove a wooden peg into place with a mallet. His labour, a simple wooden suitcase for college, was held together by mortise and tenon joints. Tools lay scattered around him, not as clutter, but as trusted companions making rhythmic movements guided by repetition, trial, and intuition. 

It took him a few days to prepare the timber and to complete the suitcase. It was crafted from elm with a thick lid and slightly raised base. It was built to survive train rides, jostling, and years of storage in dormitories or small rented rooms. He used metal corners and hinges, often made of blackened or rust-resistant steel, to reinforce its solidity. He fixed a metal lock plate to the front where I would attach a small padlock. The box rested on a slightly elevated base, not decorative but practical, to prevent moisture from seeping up through concrete or earthen floors. The inside was unlined, raw wood, rough to touch. It was rectangular and boxy, about 70 cm long, 40 cm wide, 40 cm high, and weighed over 10 kilograms when empty.

When the suitcase was completed, my father carried it on his shoulder to a village a few miles away to have it painted by a painter. Being a painter in rural China in the 1980s was a life marked by ingenuity, hardship, and quiet artistry.  While cities were beginning to modernise and reform under Deng Xiaoping’s opening-up policies, the countryside remained largely poor and traditional. In that setting, rural painters were admired for their skill, often called mister, xiansheng, or master, shifu, yet they were rarely paid well.  Their payment might be in kind—a few eggs, a meal, or a bag of grain. Many painters did manual labor or farming to survive.

These rural painters, to be sure, are not professional artists painting landscapes or portraits for galleries. They were locally recognised for their talent in New Year prints, nianhua, paper cuttings, or village murals. They painted gods, animals, good luck symbols, or local mythologies on temple walls or household altars; they also painted shop names, price boards, wedding banners, walls, furniture, doors, and coffins.

As bleak and barren as the region often felt, the village painters still found ways to infuse life with colour and meaning. With brushes dipped in leftover paint and hope, they adorned rough wooden furniture with scenes that reached beyond hardship. Floral patterns bloomed across cabinet doors. On headboards and chests, magpies took flight, dragons curled in motion, and phoenixes danced in pairs, each stroke a whisper of good fortune, power, or harmony.

The painter who adorned my suitcase turned a rough wooden box into something radiant, almost otherworldly. He coated it in a deep, lacquered red, and on its front panel, he conjured a scene of quiet enchantment: A still pond cradled by green reeds, golden fish drifting in lazy arcs beneath the surface, and birds poised on willow branches, their beaks open in mid-song as if singing to the silence. It was a landscape none of us had ever truly seen, except in schoolbooks or village tales whispered under oil lamps.

When my father brought the suitcase home days later, the sun hit its polished surface and sent a soft glow across the dusty courtyard. The red shimmered like embers, the painted water seemed to ripple in the light, and for a brief moment, the box did not look like something made for travel, but for reverence. It felt as though something sacred had entered our home, something beautiful and too delicate for hands weathered by fieldwork and ash. For most peasant families in the 1980s, such a thing was unthinkable, a luxury far beyond reach.

The day I left for college arrived under a weeping sky. Rain had fallen for weeks without pause soaking the hills and fields. The autumn wheat sowing, so crucial to the coming year’s harvest, had been delayed again and again, the absorbed fields swallowing the farmers’ footsteps as if resenting their labor. The dirt roads had turned into narrow canals of mud, where every step threatened to pull a shoe clean off your foot and suck it into the earth, but that morning there was no time to think of planting. I was to leave for college, six miles from the train station. We had no way to get there but on foot.

Everything I would need for the new life: My quilt and bedding, summer shirts and padded winter coat, two pairs of shoes, a few notebooks, and my admission documents, were packed neatly into the lacquered wooden suitcase, now wrapped tightly in sheets of plastic sliced from emptied fertilizer bags. The suitcase was too large and heavy to carry alone. No buses ran from our village to town; no donkey cart would dare the mire. My elder brother and I did what necessity demanded: We slid a bamboo pole through the knots tying the box, hoisted it between us, and prepared to carry it to the station in the rain.

Father rose early that morning, long before the faintest hint of light broke through the slate sky. He cut two makeshift raincoats for us from the same plastic sheeting, covering them loosely around our shoulders. They rustled with every movement, thin as cellophane, barely enough to keep the water out. For himself, he wore nothing. There was no extra plastic, and we had never owned an umbrella. He insisted on walking part of the way with us.

His cloth jacket was already damp before we reached the edge of the village, his cotton shoes dark with moisture, but he showed no sign of discomfort. He walked beside us quietly, his eyes fixed not on the muddy road but on the box, on the sum of so many sacrifices, so much hope, now swaying with each step as we bore it forward. Eventually, he stopped and said he would go no farther. “It’s your journey now,” he said simply.

It took close to three hours for my brother and me to carry the suitcase to the train station. It rode with me for seven hours to my college. It was indeed a prized possession handcrafted with care, a costly item that had occupied an honoured place in our home, but within days of arriving on campus, my affection for the suitcase began to falter. What once felt like a treasure now felt like a burden, heavy not just in weight, but in meaning. It stood there beside the dormitory beds, squat and old-fashioned, its lacquered wood and painted pond strangely out of place among the glossy synthetic trunks or sleek leather cases of my classmates who came from cities. Its sturdy bulk, once a symbol of care and craftsmanship, now seemed to shout my difference in the echoing corridors.

I had already felt the sting of dislocation—my homemade shirts hung too loosely, my accent turned heads for the wrong reasons, and my soles were so thin I could feel the gravel beneath them. The suitcase, with its rural weight and painted dreams, added another layer to my growing unease.

I dreaded the glances and the unspoken judgments. Would they smirk at the rough wood, the iron clasps, and the makeshift lock? Would the women in our class notice it when they visited our dorm? I imagined whispers, sideways glances, and quiet laughter. The suitcase suddenly seemed not like a carrier of dreams but of shame. It was a marker of poverty, of distance, and of the village accent still in my voice and the callouses still on my palms.

I tried to silence that shame by reminding myself what the suitcase had cost my family not just in money, but in care, pride, and hope. And yet despite my best efforts, a quiet sense of isolation would creep in, uninvited. I told myself to be grateful. Still, beneath gratitude lived an ache: The fear that no matter how far I had come, I would never truly belong.

In graduate school, my relationship with the old wooden suitcase quietly shifted. By then, I was no longer the anxious, self-conscious undergraduate who feared that the worn, bulky trunk might betray my rural background. I was now one of four graduate students sharing a cleaner and bigger dormitory room, markedly better than the ones assigned to undergraduates. The simple fact that I had made it to graduate school granted me a certain dignity and status, something visible in the way others addressed me and in the quiet respect I began to feel in myself. With that change came a subtle emotional distance from the suitcase that had once embarrassed me. It no longer defined me.

I began to see the suitcase not as a social burden but merely as a functional storage box. Its outdatedness did not offend me. I no longer examined it with self-doubt or compared it with others’ modern luggage. It just sat in a corner, silent and sturdy, holding things I didn’t need every day. I had more important things to think about: coursework, research, passion in literature, and my future beyond campus. The emotional weight the suitcase had once carried of family expectations, inferiority, and identity began to loosen its grip. I stopped resenting it.  I told myself it was old-fashioned and coming from a different era, but I was now moving beyond it. I believed, with growing confidence, that better things lay ahead: lighter luggage, freer choices, and a life not weighed down by symbols of poverty but propelled by the quiet strength and sacrifice that wooden box had always represented.

By the time I became a university faculty member, my relationship with the old wooden suitcase had become almost purely practical, stripped of the emotional charge it once held. I shared a dorm room with only one colleague, a considerable upgrade from the four-person graduate setup, and my financial situation had improved dramatically. I could now buy what I wanted like new clothes, books, even a suitcase in any style or color. If I had wanted to replace the wooden trunk with a sleek, fashionable one, I could have done it without a second thought. But I didn’t. I had reached a point in life where I no longer needed to prove anything through objects. I had become what I once dreamed of becoming: A university professor.

After I got married in 1992, my relationship with the old wooden suitcase entered its final, quiet stage. As my wife and I began setting up our new home, one of our first major purchases was a large modular furniture set made up of three sections. The middle part held our television and decorative items, while the tall cabinets on either side were designed for hanging clothes and storing household essentials. It was modern, elegant, and capacious, a clear symbol of how far I had come. The suitcase, once essential, now served no practical function. I placed it in the deep corner of the closet. Its role in my life had come to a quiet close.

Though the suitcase now rests on a shelf, its meaning and the stories it carries remain alive. Remembering it brings back the life my father and his generation endured. My father was born in 1938. When I entered college in 1983, he was 45, supporting a wife and five children, the youngest only seven. By the time I finished graduate school in 1990, he was 52, still living a hard life. I could send home a few hundred to a few thousand Yuan for seeds, fertiliser, or wedding gifts—small relief for him, though never enough. From 1990 to 1997, as a university faculty member in China, I sent as much as I could; life was still tough for him, but at least the family had enough to eat.

When I left for the United States in 1997 to pursue further studies, I lived on assistantships and could send nothing home. I knew they had food but still struggled to afford the most basic supplies. In 2004, when I secured a full-time, tenure-track professorship in an American college, I began sending money regularly. Three years later, in 2007, my father died at 69. I could not return for his funeral, but I sent enough to cover all expenses. I wanted him to be buried with dignity, for without him, there would be no educated professor named me.

Remembering the suitcase, I cannot help but think of my father and the sacrifices he made so I could become educated. He remains an unending source of inspiration. His stance toward life, his defiance in the face of hunger and humiliation, and his resilience against the weight of helplessness guide me every day. The hardships I have endured—four years of boarding school sustained by meagre food brought from home, the inability to pay even a few dollars of tuition, the shame of wearing threadbare clothes in public, and over a decade of isolation from my family while living in a foreign land—are nothing compared to what he faced. Because of him, I have always found the strength to forge ahead no matter the obstacles, carrying in my mind the unwavering gaze of my father as if to say, “If I could do it, so can you.”        

Now, at sixty, I have reached an age when I can slow my pace and begin to savour life. How different my days are from those of my father! As a professor at an American institution of higher learning, I can say without hesitation that I have lived my American dream. I am well-fed, well-clothed, and surrounded by all I need. When I buy food, it is not merely to stave off hunger; I choose wholesome meats, fresh vegetables, and ripe fruits—luxuries compared to the corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes on which my father and his family relied for more than a decade. For him, the simple gift of wheat bread once a day would have been a source of deep contentment. My clothing, too, tells the story of this contrast: Nike shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, Banana Republic trousers, each item costing enough to feed my father’s household for half a year or more.

In addition, I have the luxury of traveling internationally. Between the ages of fifty-four and sixty, I have visited France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Monaco, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey. I can say, without boasting, that I have walked the streets of distant lands, savoured their foods, immersed myself in their cultures, and broadened both my horizons and my perspective.

The contrast with my father’s life could not be starker. For most of his years, his movements were limited to the fields near home. Occasionally, he traveled three miles to the rural market to sell produce or buy supplies, and only rarely journeyed twelve miles to the county township to exchange goods for cash. Never did he have the luxury of dining out, attending a show, or taking a day off from the relentless toil of farm life.  Seen in this light, that simple wooden suitcase of his era captures the noble, heroic, and sacrificial spirit of my father and of an entire generation.

Unless someone has lived through such hardships, it is hard to grasp how unforgiving life can be for some. I tell the stories of my school years to my son constantly, and I never fail to mention the wooden suitcase, a thing he has never seen. We brought him to the United States when he was close to five. He never experienced the life of my father’s generation, or even mine. Growing up in one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, he naturally takes much for granted, and I do not blame him.

Our purpose in coming here was to create a better life for him and for us. On the first day of college in the fall of 2014, my wife and I packed all his necessities into our Honda CR-V and drove him to Northwestern University. He needed no suitcase, certainly not a cumbersome wooden one, yet he never forgot the stories I had told him about my wooden suitcase or the depth of its significance for my family and my generation.

He made the most of his college years, graduating in 2018 with a double major in statistics and economics, fully prepared for the career he now has at a Fortune 500 company. In this way, hardships and difficult journeys become wells that nourish the mind and soul of the next generation. And the stories of the suitcase, like a quiet legacy, will continue to inspire his children and his children’s children.

The wooden suitcase that traveled with me from 1983 to 1992 is far more than a piece of luggage; it is a vessel of hope, a keeper of dreams, and a silent witness to the shifting tides of my family’s life. Built and painted by calloused hands in lean years, it carries not only my possessions but also the love, expectations, and unspoken sacrifices of my family, especially my father. For those of us from villages along dusty roads, such a suitcase embodies the weight of our origins and the transformations we endured. Over time, its meaning deepens. It comes to represent not only my personal journey but also the shared story of a generation of rural college students who, rising from poverty, saw their futures irrevocably changed by the power of education. It also stands as a tribute to the previous generation, who gave everything so their children might leave the parched soil behind and begin anew in the cities. Even now, the worn corners of these wooden suitcases seem to murmur stories of struggle, resilience, transformation, and gratitude—tales not only of my own life, but also of a family, a village, and a nation in motion.

.

Larry S. Su has been a professor of literature and writing for the past thirty years.  He has also been a passionate reader and ardent writer since college.  He writes both in Chinese and English, and his writings have appeared extensively in the Chinese and English publications, mostly in the form of articles and essays. 

.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Kindle Amazon International