Walking the Endless Road: Oral History in Rui Lanxin’s Practice

“Beneath assured political speeches, there floats a kind of ‘noise.’ It does not seem to reveal itself, nor can language capture it, yet it troubles whoever tries to speak. Because its force remains uncapturable, it survives, wearing away the speaker’s ability to articulate.”

— Rui Lanxin, “The Endless Road”

Friends of Rui Lanxin, myself included, all call her by her last name, Rui. It is not a common surname, and I have always loved the way it sounds. A researcher and writer, she has returned, through an oral-history-based practice, to the same place again and again: the Chengdu–Kunming Railway in southwest China. Our families come from the two ends of this railway—she is from Sichuan, and I am from Yunnan. Both of our families are deeply bound to it, hers especially so.

Rui is from a railway family. Her grandfather helped build the Chengdu-Kunming line for six years as a construction worker, and spent the rest of his life on other lines. Both of her parents and most of their siblings have also worked their entire lives on tracks. The Chengdu–Kunming Railway was built in the 1960s, when China had limited access to mechanized construction equipment. The railway spans 1,096 kilometers; the development of the section between Chengdu and Xichang alone mobilized around 170,000 workers. With scarce means and little protection, the workers built bridges and carved tunnels into the mountains with little more than their own bodies.

The railway cuts through the mountains, forests, and treacherous rivers of Sichuan and Yunnan, passing through the mist-shrouded Liangshan Nuosu Autonomous Prefecture, part of Sichuan Province. Here, many mountain peoples live, including the Nuosu. It is also my father’s hometown.

Shamalada, the highest point of the entire line, Sichuan Province, Rui Lanxin, 2022.

This is Rui’s fifth year of attending to the lives and deaths bound to this railway. The first time I met her was during the Lunar New Year of 2024 in Xichang—the capital of Liangshan. She had just returned to town from the field and was about to work on a project for the Sailors Program by One-way Street Journal titled “The Endless Road”—a piece of creative nonfiction based on oral histories from elderly workers who had built the Chengdu–Kunming Railway.

I was staying with her where she was living at the time—the home of our mutual friend, Ridu. Many of her friends had come together to celebrate the New Year. As the night went on, we began to talk more and more. She started to tell me stories about the railway.

One of them was an indelible scene from a New Year’s past. Because almost everyone worked on different railways across the country, Rui’s family was often apart and rarely able to spend the holidays together. But there was one rare year when they could all gather. During that reunion, they went for a walk along the tracks as the night approached:

“My dad held my hand, and my grandfather was walking ahead of us, with a searchlight in his hand, the kind that was commonly used on the railway. The light swung back and forth along the tracks, casting swaying shadows of people and things. My grandmother, my mother, my aunt and uncle, and my eldest uncle were walking with us too. I was very little then. All I could see was that swinging searchlight, and the row of grey-blue silhouettes of my family.”

The grey-blue silhouettes.

In retrospect, the scene is shadowed by death: Rui’s family members were growing old, and some had already passed. Late into the night, she began telling me heavier stories about the railway’s construction and the lives shaped by it. As we kept talking, we eventually fell asleep on the only single bed at Ridu’s, curled up together.

After her grandfather passed away in 2021, Rui began searching for people like him—people who had gone to Liangshan sixty years ago to build the railway. She started to interview and record the surviving workers who built it—most of them now in their seventies and eighties, many of them dying.

Dadu River, Jinkouhe District, Sichuan Province, Rui Lanxin, 2024.

In her conversations with the workers, Rui is not only concerned with what happened but also why what happened can no longer be spoken about.

For Rui, writing is living alongside hurt and deaths that have gone unmourned for a very long time. In “The Endless Road,” there is little direct quotation from the workers. Her work is rather a choreography of the environments surrounding the railway, with oral histories as the thread that weaves them together. Lives, and the irresistible changes that sweep through them, unfold alongside the railway’s construction, drawing different geographies and times into the same movement.

Puxiong, Sichuan Province, Rui Lanxin, 2025.

I have read “The Endless Road” many times, from early drafts to its final publication. Each time, I am struck by how her writing lingers on touch and smell, and how her body has had to confront scenes that are hurtful, stubborn, yet spare and unflinching in their telling.

Sometimes it is a breath that grows heavy while standing before a ruin. Sometimes it is a dissected lung, ravaged by silicosis as if stones crawled into it. Sometimes it is bare hands covered in calluses. Sometimes it is the teeth, clenched so tightly against the weight of the rails, that they feel as if they might crumble in the mouth. Sometimes it is the bright eyes of someone who, after years of working in the darkness of the tunnels, sees black, glistening fragments of ore. Sometimes it is the sudden sight of the densely packed ghosts of Han Chinese workers who died in the tunnels.

“The Endless Road” is an extremely slow piece of writing—not only because Rui has spent so long writing it, but because it takes time to arrive at where she is in the writing. Much of Rui’s thinking emerges along the paths she travels. Often, she is alone on the mountain roads of Liangshan. She does not drive, and doing fieldwork in the mountains means that simply moving through the landscape as a woman is already fraught with danger and comes at a cost. I have never travelled with her, but I often imagine her alone, making her way through the mountains from one place to another.

At times, heavy things manifest themselves to her as ghosts:
“Last year, while I was staying in a hotel for fieldwork, a few Nuosu girls from nearby often came to hang out with me. They told me a ghost story and warned me not to come near the railway track at night. People who walked the railway after dark, they said, would be ‘controlled’ by ghosts. When the train came, they would still be standing there on the tracks, motionless, and would be struck dead. The girls told me that the ghosts on the railway were Han workers who had come to build it and died. No rites had been performed for them; they were buried by the roadside and became wild ghosts, drifting along the railway and the river.”

In his 2001 book The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China, anthropologist Erik Mueggler documented rituals performed for “wild ghosts”: the dead whose passings could not be properly mourned during political movements. For him, these rituals involved “a subversive practice of time.” They compelled remembering but also enabled forgetting, attuning to individual and collective grief and communicating death’s immanence to the living. For both Rui and Mueggler, ghosts are not metaphors. To relate to them is to mourn: to see the dead off, and to remain with them. It is an ethics that refuses the political imagination of the “modern” as perpetually moving “forward” and “outward.”

Mr. Zhong, a retired railway worker who returned to his rural hometown in Bishan. Several road-construction projects are underway just outside his front door. Bishan, Chongqing, Rui Lanxin, 2024.

Rui’s work is also a return to the larger industrialization project of the Third Front Movement (Chinese: sanxian jianshe). A then-secret national-defense project during the 1960s–1970s, the Third Front Movement relocated strategic industries from China’s coast to the country’s interior, far from the sea and borders. Workers and engineers arrived from elsewhere, settling in the mountains to build military infrastructure that was never meant to be seen. Our families inherited both its promises of mobility and work, and its forms of desperation and displacement.

In the 1990s, my parents took the busy and dangerous train from their hometown to Chengdu to attend university. Steep black cliffs rose along the river, beneath a sky that was always grey. Not far away, the chimneys of the Panzhihua steelworks stood among the mountains, where my uncle Tao once labored as a steelworker. My father told me that when he was a college student, he had to get to Panzhihua to catch the train. He would run along the Jinsha River, keep running, and then climb onto the train car bound for Chengdu. His words became an image—my dad as a boy, running alongside the train, with the vast depth of the Jinsha River beside him, and the unbearable heat—that stayed with me.

Panzhihua, named after the red kapok flowers of the Jinsha River valley, is an industrial city built around steel and mineral wealth. The Chengdu–Kunming Railway was designed in part to mobilize these resources, including the region’s abundant vanadium-titanium magnetite. Until 1987, Panzhihua was only known as the Ferry Crossing (Chinese: Dukou), a name used for secrecy. It was one of many planned industrial towns built in the mountains of southwest China during the Third Front Movement. Factories were often stripped of names and assigned numbers instead.

Puxiong, Sichuan Province, Rui Lanxin, 2022.

Around Lunar New Year, driving past the calm blue waters of the Jinsha River, it was impossible not to notice the brilliant red kapok flowers along its banks. Their red has long been used to signify revolutionary fervor. One gradually became familiar with these rhetorical gestures that rely on the sensations of sacrifice and devotion: “To build the Chengdu–Kunming Railway is to race against imperialism…Every day the railway is completed sooner, one more soldier can be saved!” Over time, political language spread like creeping plants, taking the shape of memory until everything else became unrecognizable. Rui notices the power of internalizing this rhetoric, as she encounters the same language over and over in her conversations with workers:

“These words appeared again and again without a subject of the sentence and gradually became tangled waveforms until repetitions turned into emptiness. I am afraid of a complete ending, which seems to be precisely this emptiness. A few months before my grandfather died, I began recording his oral testimony with a camera. I remember, clearly, that while he was still there, on the other side of the camera, I was already experiencing the ending’s approach in a very real way. After his departure, I walked along roads leading to different places. Perhaps as long as the workers can still speak, it has not yet come to a complete end. Repeating these acts of collecting and archiving, however, I found myself once again surrounded by a familiar fear. Perhaps the inevitable loss is what I have to accept.”What does it mean if this sterile language is all that remains of these lived experiences? While writing “The Endless Road,” Rui also felt a sense of obstruction to expression, a withholding. She had to swallow the words her hands refused to write until her throat ached.

A “wild graveyard” of railway workers from sixty years ago, swallowed by vegetation, Puxiong, Sichuan Province, Rui Lanxin, 2023.

Rui’s writing flickers like a firefly passing through those dark years. It does not “fill in” an emaciated history left difficult to tell. As Rui puts it: “The state of being aphasic, and the state of wanting to remember yet failing to, are more important than ‘language representing memory’ as oral history practice. Perhaps only by first acknowledging the part where language is bound to fail can we begin to hear history.”

In One-way Street Journal, Rui’s title was translated as “The Unfinished Road.” To me, however, “unfinished” suggests that the road might one day reach its end. As the essay’s translator, I chose “The Endless Road”: This is a road without an end, the road of writing, the road of walking.

A 1960s convalescent hospital for silicosis, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, Rui Lanxin, 2023.

Postscript: The images are stills from video footage by Rui Lanxin, Courtesy of Rui Lanxin. “The Endless Road” (Chinese: weijing de lu) was published in One-way Street Journal, Issue 41, edited by Wu Qi, 2025. This is the first time her work appears in English; all quotations are translated by the writer.