Violin on the rails: an odyssey of self-discovery
Print Edition
“He’s a Pirate.” Huang Dongxin may not be Johnny Depp, but when he played the music from the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean” on his violin, there was no mistaking the spirit of a swashbuckler.
Only Huang’s adventure wasn’t on the high seas. It was on the rails.
Huang, a Shanghai native who is studying economics and management at the Minhang campus of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, spent five days of his July summer holiday traversing China by train. Fifteen provinces and cities, 21 trains and not a penny in his pocket.
He relied solely on the donations of travelers as he busked in the passenger cars. Before playing, he introduced himself with a short speech about his journey.
“Everybody has his dream in life — no matter what, but some of them have been depressed by reality,” he told them. “I am young, and I am here to fight for my dream. I also want to encourage you to fight for your dreams and help other people.”
The journey started on July 25 as Shanghai withered under one of the hottest summers in a century. Huang spent 46.5 yuan (US$7.59) on a hard-seat ticket from Shanghai to Hangzhou, capital of neighboring Zhejiang Province and another 3.5 yuan on a bottle of water. He took only a few clothes and his violin along.
“I didn’t know how far I could go,” he said, “My plan was to contact classmates in other cities if I ran into trouble. If nobody gave me money for playing, I would have to end the journey and go back home.”
His worst fears never materialized. On the Shanghai-Hangzhou leg, he collected almost 500 yuan, allowing him to continue his trip to Fuzhou in Fujian Province.
On that train, a passenger from Wenzhou, Zhejiang was so taken by Huang’s introductory speech that he gave the biggest single donation collected on the trip — 400 yuan.
“He was a broke businessman,” Huang said. “After I performed and talked about the dream, he cried.”
Huang stuck to hard-seat class, the cheapest tickets on China’s rail system.
“That was actually what inspired me to start this journey,” Huang said of hard-class.
Last year during summer holidays, he and several classmates on a shoestring budget went to Beijing, paying 170 yuan for hard seats.
It was the first time he had ever traveled in the lowest class.
“The people on the train were generally very poor — hard workers who have to settle for very basic things in life,” he said.
He recalled seeing a young family with a small daughter on board.
“To let the daughter sleep well, the parents sat in one seat very uncomfortably,” he said. “I was really touched by this and realized the plight of so many people struggling for life.”
Huang said he received 4,850 yuan during his five-day trip, which included trains to Shandong, Shanxi, Sichuan and Guizhou provinces and to the city of Chongqing.
He started playing the violin when he was three, learning from cousins and on his own. His rail repertoire included popular melodies that brought smiles to passengers — tunes like “Hey Jude,” “You and Me,” “Friends” and “The Same Song.”
He had collected more money than he needed by the time he reached the impoverished province of Guizhou, so he donated some of his earnings to a primary school for poor children in Liupanshui City.
In fact, apart from the 1,000 yuan he spent on 21 tickets for the journey, Huang ended up donating 3,850 yuan to the Dazhai Primary School in Dazhai Village.
“As I promised to those who donated money for my playing, I called them or wrote letters telling them what I did with most of the money,” he said.
After returning to Shanghai, Huang took up an internship with a company. He also helps run Takagism, a popular game room close to his university. “If you want to realize your dream, you must take action. If not, you will never know how far you go,” Huang said. In his case, it was about 6,800 kilometers.
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