I grew up near Boston and studied in Nanjing before working in Beijing from 2010 to 2012. The experience of traveling by train without a seat from Xi'an to Beijing for 14 hours during last year's Spring Festival still feels as if it happened yesterday.

As I rocked from foot to foot in the crowded departure lounge, an uncomfortable knot of trepidation was churning in my stomach. At least, I assumed, it was trepidation, though there was something off about the dumplings I'd picked up at the convenience store an hour earlier.

Travel during Spring Festival in China is not for the faint of heart. The number of passenger journeys, miraculously, exceeds even the Chinese population itself, reaching 2 billion as far back as 2008. I had been lucky so far as I jaunted from Shanghai to Wuhan to Xi'an, but my travel luck was about to run out.

It was February 2012, and I was nearing the end of a one-week cross-China tour. My trip had started inauspiciously, when a bold plan to hitchhike from Beijing to Shanghai had left me hugging myself for warmth under a streetlight somewhere out on Beijing's Sixth Ring Road. I finally caved in and found a roaming taxi to take me to Beijing South Station. After that, I had been hopping from Jiangsu to Hunan to Shaanxi, via trains, buses and more trains.

The Spring Festival travel rush was only an obstacle at the beginning and end of the holiday week, so all my mid-week travel had been easily secured. My trip back to Beijing, which I would be making on the final Sunday of the holiday week, would not go so smoothly.

By the time I bought my return ticket, Xi'an to Beijing, the woman at the counter sold me one of the very last tickets on any train to Beijing. We would be departing at 6:30 pm from Xi'an, and pulling into Beijing at a heartbreakingly late 10 am the next day. I would be late to work, but that was the least of my concerns. I would be on that train for 14 hours. Without a seat.

I have friends who have been on longer train journeys. One of my bolder classmates had once made the voyage from Harbin to Nanjing, a 30-hour epic. But he had a seat. I had gone seatless myself, for three, four, even six hours, but this would be something new.

I tried to travel light, so all I had with me was the internal-frame hiking bag. Within a nanosecond of the station clerk withdrawing her ticket puncher, the hoard of prospective passengers surged toward the gate.

The attendant punched my ticket with a practised flourish, and I was immediately dashing down the corridor to the train platform, desperate to secure some prime real estate for me and my oversized backpack. I followed the other no-seaters for a few cars, then darted into one that looked promising.

Once inside the car, anyone who has traveled no-seat knows that you must choose your space carefully. The conductor and food carts will be traveling car to car on a regular basis. The nooks by the external doors are a much safer bet, as they only open once per stop. I was overjoyed to discover just such a nook still unoccupied. I flung my backpack to the ground and, victorious, sat on it as the car quickly filled with travelers less dedicated to the cause than I.

In hindsight, it's quite possible that my securing the corner may have been a product of myopia rather than dedication. My fellow travelers remembered what I had not. Spring Festival in China means two things: the entire country is mobilized in travel, and the entire country is very, very cold.

My seat immediately next to the train door became a cell of sorts once the other passengers filled every unoccupied square centimeter of the nook, vestibule and passageway near me. Soon I realized I was a front-row witness to every single particle of frigid air that found its way through, under or around the balefully porous metal door of the train.

For four hours, I ignored the cold by means of salty snacks, pitiful text messages to friends and Russian novels - a terrible choice given the setting, as most Russian novels are also about long, cold train rides.

For the next six hours I fell in and out of a tortured sleep, roused every 20 minutes or so by the next gust of cold country air.

As the first hint of light began to creep in through the train windows, I abandoned my attempts at sleep and did what I probably should have done 10 hours earlier - chatted with my neighbors. The best thing about no-seat travel in China is that you are never alone. Your plight is never private, and your sorrows are always shared. And better yet, no one hunkered down with you on the cold, discolored floor of the train wants to remind you of your shared struggle.

After the perfunctory "China is too populous", conversation always turns to strange and wonderful things. US celebrities. The Chinese cosmetics industry. Eggs. How seeds are sold.

We swapped stories, snacks, even phone numbers, and by the time the train grumbled into Beijing, I found myself thinking that if I'd been stuck on that train for an hour more, it wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world.

(China Daily European Weekly 10/04/2013 page15)