14,000 km Back Home: A Woman's Silk Road Journey
By Min Hsieh
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Part 1: The Plan
Chapter 2: Toward the Alps
"Let go of the extras you want, and you'll find you can carry everything you need."
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The Weight of Loneliness – Austria, DAY 3
After dinner, I returned to the attic, took a long, hot shower, and slipped under the covers. There was no heating here, but compared to the freezing air outside, it still felt much warmer.
I picked up my phone, wanting to send a message to my boyfriend, Kamil, in Beijing— Something I had promised him before I started: to check in every day. From the beginning, this journey had been planned as a ride from Germany to Beijing—to reach him. But now, there wasn't even a single bar of signal.
With no other choice, I set my phone on the nightstand to charge and picked up my journal instead, jotting down the events of the day.
For the first time in two days, my tense nerves finally relaxed—only to be immediately replaced by a deep sense of emptiness.
Loneliness crept in.
Here, in this foreign country, I had no one to rely on.
Downstairs, the old woman still wanted me out of this house.
Would it even matter if I simply disappeared?
It felt like no one would notice.
In that moment, I felt like the loneliest person in the world.
Maybe, I realized, what I feared about the night wasn't just the darkness—but the fear of being unseen.
For some reason, a memory from when I was four or five surfaced in my mind.
“Min, do you want to go for a ride?”
My father called out to me from the doorway.
Whenever my dad wanted to sneak out, he would ask if I wanted to come along—giving him an excuse to leave the house.
And every time, I said yes.
Every time, I would happily climb onto his motorbike, thinking it was a rare chance to go out with him.
Every time, he would take me to the same park, tell me to play on my own, and promise to pick me up later.
And every time, I would wait until dusk, then walk home alone, feeling heartbroken.
Sometimes, when I was too tired to walk, I would look for an adult who seemed trustworthy, someone with a motorbike, and pretend to be lost, asking them to take me home.
My father would disappear for two or three days at a time, then return as if nothing had happened.
And every time he asked if I wanted to go for a ride, I would still say yes.
Then I would walk home alone again.
To this day, I still don't know where he went.
But the most vivid memory he left me with was the sensation of riding on the back of his motorbike, the wind rushing past us.
I remember feeling so happy.
People often asked me, “How did your parents let you take this journey alone?”
The truth was, my father never spent much effort trying to control me.
He passed away when I was eighteen.
My mother, on the other hand, had long been exhausted. She had spent years caring for four children and my chronically ill father.
When I tried to convince her, I gave her a reason I knew she would accept.
“Sixteen hundred years ago, the Buddhist monk Xuanzang traveled to India to bring back sacred scriptures. The route he took will be part of my journey when I reach China.”
Upon hearing that Xuanzang had once walked this path, my mother's face lit up. “I don't really understand where that is,” she said, “but as long as you know what you’re doing.”
But the truth was, I didn't know exactly what I was doing.
I just knew I had to do it.
There were a hundred thousand reasons pushing me forward, but I couldn't find a single one that I could clearly explain to my mother.
So, I chose the one she could accept the most.
I framed my journey in a way that made it impossible for her to stop me.
The strongest opposition, however, came from Kamil and his mother, Maria.
Kamil’s family had immigrated from Poland to Germany when he was five.
When I first arrived in Germany, Kamil was working in Beijing, so I had spent three months winter living with Maria.
Kamil’s parents had taken great care of me, but Maria strongly opposed my plan to cycle across Eurasia.
A few weeks before my departure, Maria called me, pleading with me to give up the trip. Her voice grew more and more urgent, until, in the end, she broke down in tears.
She told me she had been so worried she couldn’t sleep.
At first, Kamil didn’t take my journey seriously. “If you can even get visas for Iran and the Central Asian countries, then go ahead,” he had said dismissively.
But when I actually managed to secure those visas, he began to panic.
Every time we talked about my trip, he would say, “This is basically a suicide mission. You really want to go to Iran and get yourself killed?”
Thinking about this, I closed my journal, set it on the nightstand, and glanced at my phone as it charged.
Actually, if I were to disappear, my mother, Maria, Kamil, and the friends who had tried to stop me would notice—because they were waiting for my call or message to make sure I was safe.
That thought lifted the darkness that had settled over me, replacing it with a gentle warmth.
I turned over, amazed at how a simple shift in perspective could change everything. Human connections are truly reciprocal—if I stayed trapped in self-pity, unwilling to open my heart and step beyond the protective wall I had built, I would never be able to let others' care and love in.
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Closing Remarks
✨ Your Turn: Have you ever found that when you bravely let down your guard, the world outside is much warmer and kinder than you expected? I’d love to hear your experience—please share it with me!
📅 Time Frame: This story chronicles my journey across two continents between November 2013 and October 2014. Published independently in Taiwan in 2021, it is now shared as an English serialized novel through AI translation, connecting with friends worldwide to share this journey of personal growth.
