While songs could be, and have been written about anything, a common topic for many songs in the United States is trains. Cutting across a broad spectrum of musical genres from rock to soul to folk to country to jazz or pop to gospel and even protest songs, songs about trains are everywhere. Going on to look for "songs about trains," you can find lists ranging from dozens to well over 100 titles of such songs. That is for American songs, in a country where traveling by train is not very popular.

In China, things are different: A train travel is very popular and since my arrival in 2005 has been much more comfortable and convenient. So obviously, some of my approximately 80 "musical stories from my Chinese journey" are about trains.

In a 2017 interview with China Central Television aired at the time of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), I sang two of my train songs. When asked to talk about changes that had taken place since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, I felt it only natural to turn to the subject of trains. You cannot talk about the transformation of China or China's relationship with the world without mentioning trains.

The earliest of my train songs, "A 24-hour Train Ride from Songzi to Guangzhou," was written in 2009 during a Spring Festival train ride, right after my first visit to my friend and music partner Fu Han's hometown in Hubei Province. At that time, purchasing train tickets did not require ID, which allowed ticket scalpers to buy up highly sought-after holiday tickets as soon as they were available. With hundreds of millions of people traveling for the world's largest annual migration to reunite with families back home, ticket prices soared. Back then, there were five levels of tickets, listed in order of most-to-least comfortable and most-to-least expensive: soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat, hard seat and standing ticket. Due to overwhelming demand, I was only able to get a hard seat on this 24-hour trip which cost many times the face-value.