I don’t consider myself an emotional person. Like most people, I generally alternate between the same 4 to 5 facial expressions per day. When I see something funny, I smile a bit and  blow air out of my nose because laughing takes too much energy. But there’s this one occasion where I couldn’t stop myself from revealing my emotions.

Last year, my parents took me back to China for two weeks to visit my relatives. The “vacation-y” part of the trip was great. Hotels, airplanes and visiting different places as a nosy tourist is always fun and exciting because who doesn’t like traveling? I can’t say as much for the “get-to-know-your-family” part of the trip. Like all family reunions, it was beyond awkward. Even though I was related to these people, I didn’t feel any connection at all to my relatives. I’m sure my grandparents, uncles and aunts all love me very much, but to me, they felt like strangers who literally and figuratively spoke a different language, people I kind of knew but not really, and certainly not the type of people I would share my deep, dark secrets with. 

So for the majority of the visit, I kept to myself. Whenever anyone would talk to me, I would nod along, pretending to understand their Chinese or laugh and hope what they said wasn’t a question. At best, I must have said at most five complete sentences a day.

The day before we left, we took the high speed rail from Xi’an to the airport in Chengdu. I had to sit next to a young, maybe 18-year-old guy whom I tried to ignore. He kept trying to peek over my shoulder, as if he wanted to talk to me but wasn’t quite sure how. I kept my nose buried in my book. Every five minutes, I would catch him staring at the book and he would look away.

This went on for half an hour before I finally asked in bad Mandarin: “Do you need something?” He asked me how I could read English so well. I told him that I was from the U.S., and I was visiting family. I then asked why he was on the train. He told me he was going to Chengdu to start majoring in English. Eventually, the small talk spiralled into a conversation about how he was struggling to pay rent for his sister living in Fujian, and how I couldn’t bring myself to empathize with other people. Everything that was bottled for the last two weeks suddenly came tumbling out of my fat mouth into the ears of a total stranger. He gave me his WeChat but I forgot about it. I don’t even remember his name, but by the end of the train ride, I felt like this fellow passenger was an old friend.

I know it sounds creepy to spill your guts to a stranger you met on public transportation, but in the moment, it felt good. Maybe I did it because talking about your insecurities to someone you will never run into again guarantees that nothing you confess will come back to bite you. Maybe he was actually a scammer secretly trying to steal my personal information. Regardless, it made me realize how little people express how we actually feel.

Even with close friends, conversations are generally limited to conversation topics like, “How was the track meet?” and, “I hate/love (insert class here).” Emotions are heavy-handed, and it’s common courtesy not to reveal them to other people. After all, it’s your problem, not theirs. Our cultural norms don’t allow us to be open and vulnerable, so we build safe spaces and counseling offices to allow ourselves to vent without hurting anyone’s feelings. But eventually, everyone needs some way to cope with their emotions. Some people project their insecurities onto other people, others talk to friends and family, while some don’t talk about them at all. I look forward to the day when strangers empathize with strangers on public transportation, when expressing emotions isn’t limited to safe spaces or locked doors or even seven-hour train rides, and where no one is afraid to show their true colors.

-Li, a sophomore, is a reporter