Undergraduate / "Hot pressed rice" - Common App [2]

This is where I write.

Midnight. I was woken up by the hubbub of the people getting on and off the train, which had stopped just a few minutes before. Dark and cold, the station was engulfed within the shadow of the night, illuminated here and there by a few lamps. From the dim glow of the train's fluorescent headlights, I could roughly make out the figure of a woman approaching my window.

"Hot pressed rice," she exclaimed.

So different, yet so similar, her accent brought a downpour of fragmented memories through my subconscious - a miniature film of six-hour journeys on the train through rice fields, hills and tunnels reappeared, flashing and rewinding on the wheels of déjŕ vu.

During the misty early years of my life, I was always on the road, either heading to Lang Son, a distant town to the north where my dad worked, or back to Hanoi where my grandmother lived. It was harsh, especially in the winter, in the railcar without any heating, gusts of wind hitting the closed window still managing to creep in, chilling bones and souls.

As much as I liked the train, my mother preferred the coach. Less waiting, less time spent onboard and somewhat less packed (probably because the coach was more expensive). But every time I insisted we take the train. I wanted to go through tunnels, when everything became nothing, I could hardly see my mother's face but still feel her hand, holding mine as we rolled through the familiar darkness.

The best thing about traveling the train was that every time I could eat com nam, or pressed rice, which are cooked rice pressed into circular or cylindrical solids. The train would stop for fifteen minutes at this station called Dong Mo where a lot of people changed routes. On the station platform, which was basically a long block of concrete constructed between two paths of rails, scarily simple and dangerously minimal, the vendors scurried back and forth, passing the railway in just a fraction of a second in spite of the roaring siren from a coming train some dozens of meters away. Though young, I could still recall the image of my mother reaching over the railcar window, a tiny rectangular gap above the wire-woven transparent plastic panel, asking for some pressed rice from a local vendor. The train began to move. My mother quickly squeezed the money into the vendor's hand, and in return she held out a pack of com nam. But it was too late, the train was moving too fast now, and although the vendor was running along the platform holding the pressed rice high, the chance had passed. The concrete platform ended, the vendor stopped running, and my mother's hand still stretched out as if she was trying to grab a piece of the night air.

Midnight. The dark train. The pressed rice.

This is where I write from.

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