Everything looked foreign: the passengers wearing colorful cotton jackets and clutching chickens in cages; the workers in fields outside who wore conical hats. These were her mother’s compatriots. Val had only the vaguest memory of her mom’s appearance: a rope of thick black hair coiled on her head, creamy skin, and a pretty face that lit up when she was happy. Looking around the railway carriage, she wasn’t convinced she could have identified her mother were she there. Would she know her on sight? She felt a bubbling of excitement at the thought of introducing her to her granddaughter. Everyone loved Nicole.

An hour later, the train pulled into Peking’s main station and all her confidence evaporated. It was a vast hangar, with hundreds of people bustling around beneath a giant noticeboard where all the destinations were written in Chinese characters. She couldn’t see a word that looked like “Harbin” and nothing that resembled an information desk. Panic rose like a flutter of moths, but Nicole was unfazed as she peered around.

“Why are they all hurrying, Mommy?”

“Just trying to catch their trains,” Val replied, staring at the prebooked tickets she had been given by the Sydney travel agent as if inspiration might lie there.

Suddenly a young Chinese man stopped beside them. “Are you English?” he asked in a halting voice. “May I help you?”

Val showed him their tickets and he nodded and said, “Come with me.” She had no option but to trust him as he led them to a platform some distance down the concourse, explaining that he was studying English at university and it was good to have some practice.

“Harbin,” he said, indicating that they should board the train. “Have a safe journey.”

Val wanted to kiss him. Instead she clasped her hands and bowed her head in thanks, and he bowed too.

The Harbin train set off at exactly the time it said on the tickets, as the big station clock ticked around to the minute. An inspector came by and punched a hole in them, then Val and Nicole sat playing I Spy as they peered out the window: cloud, tree, motorbike, temple, cow. Val was surprised when the first station they stopped at, after an hour of travel, was the exact same one in Tianjin that they had set off from earlier. They could have boarded the Harbin train there; clearly the travel agent back in Sydney had not realized that.

It got darker and Nicole’s head sank onto Val’s shoulder, then her lap. Val stayed awake peering out at the lights flashing past, followed by long periods of complete blackness. This vast country didn’t feel real; was she truly here or was it a complex dream? I’m coming, Mom, she whispered in her head, but her eagerness was tinged with nerves. Something might still go wrong.