Cheng Gong and Li Jiaqi go way back. Both hailing from dysfunctional families, they grew up together in a Chinese provincial capital in the 1980s. Now, many years later, the childhood friends reunite and discover how much they still have in common. Both have always been determined to follow the tracks of their grandparents’ generation to the heart of a mystery that perhaps should have stayed buried.

Excerpt

Nothing would have made me happier than riding a train with Dad. Of all the people who’d never been on the K3 service, I must have known the most about it. It set off every Wednesday morning from Beijing, and arrived in Moscow the following Tuesday. I could have recited the name of every stop along the way, and knew the train skirted Mohe City around sunset on Thursday. On Saturday you could see Lake Baikal from the window, and on Sunday you passed the Yenisei River. The route was as clear to me as any of the lines on my palm. I spread out my map, knelt before it, and traced it with my marker, filling the skinny crescent of Lake Baikal with blue, imagining its surface thick with ice, glistening with snow on freezing nights.

All my fantasies about faraway places ran along these tracks. I imagined Dad in a woolen coat and leather boots, standing on the windswept platform with his briefcase. A grizzled pickpocket slouched in a corner of the dining car smoking, hat pulled low over his eyes. A green-eyed prostitute in very high heels tap-tapping her way along the scarlet carpet. Dad shrugging off his coat and pouring himself a glass of vodka in a Moscow hotel room. Dad pushing a towering stack of chips across the table at the famous Crown casino, while a lady with blonde wavy hair expertly dealt the cards.

Thieves, hookers, drunkards and gamblers—the ingredients for my imaginings all came from Mom. She must have regretted mentioning the prostitutes as soon as the words were out of her mouth. In any case, everything she said made me imagine a life full of peril. A wayward life, according to Grandpa. Yet danger and waywardness seemed foreign and exciting to me. They stirred my childish heart, like the scent of poppies.

I never got the chance to take the K3 or to see Moscow, but these images stubbornly persisted into adulthood. You might find it hard to understand, but my eyes grow moist when I hear the word “Siberia.” It makes me think of an ending. Dad didn’t die there, but when I think of his actual death, everything goes white and there’s a humming in my ears, like a train speeding along the tracks.

The K3 train between Beijing and Moscow ferried the last few years of Dad’s life. In Russia, that frozen country, the train is a metaphor for life.