Her quiet feeling

In China a political/media machine profiles, controls and advertises - nudging feelings.

She arrived in Beijing with one suitcase, a sense of excitement and hope.

The train slid into the Beijing South railway terminus before dawn. Jing stared with some wonder at the great domed ceiling of the station. She was impressed by the sleek Fuxing Hao trains parked on many of the stations 24 platforms. Screens along the platform pulsed with slogans about rejuvenation and destiny, the characters crisp and red against the grey morning. She read them without really seeing them. She had learned long ago how to let words pass through her without lodging anywhere important.

She stepped down from the carriage clutching her bag and followed the crowd to the escalator at the center of the platform that would take her down to the B1 Transfer Hall. As she walked she took in the sights. The ceiling arched high above, metal and glass stretching farther than she could see, filled with light that did not flicker or dim. Screens hung everywhere, glowing with moving characters, arrows, numbers that changed as if the building itself were alive and thinking. Trains arrived and departed with a soft electric sigh, nothing like the coughing engines back home.

Everyone seemed purposeful. Men and women in clean clothes walked quickly, eyes on their phones, fingers moving with quiet confidence. She reached the Hall and followed the main mass of Chinese passengers to the glass automated gates where she swiped her Resident ID Card to pass out of the secure area of the station to the public sections. LED Billboards advertised lists of trains to and from everywhere, The smells from dining halls wafted in her direction. The people around her seemed to move with a purpose directed by the voices on the loud speakers and the prompts of the boards. People were richer here than in her home town and better dressed. She felt small and slightly ashamed of her worn shoes, but also thrilled, as if she had stepped into the future she had only seen in schoolbooks.

This, she thought, was what her parents had believed in. This movement, this brightness, this certainty that everything was going somewhere better. As she moved toward the station exit her heart beat faster, not from fear but from awe. The station did not notice her, and that somehow felt right. She was one tiny part of something enormous and powerful, and for the first time since leaving home, she felt that perhaps she, too, might be carried forward.

Her parents had died within six months of each other, first her mother, then her father and after that the hold of her village on her seemed to dissipate while the call of the city grew stronger. The paths she had walked since childhood grew quiet, then unfamiliar, and finally pointless. The fields were sold to cousins or strangers whose faces she did not recognize. Her home gone she had the money now to make a move. There was no single moment when she decided to leave. It was simply that there was nothing left that required her to stay.

Now, moving out of the vastness of the station, the loss returned to her in a new shape. Back home, grief had been heavy and slow, something she carried through the days like a basket filled with stones. Here it was sharper. Everyone around her had somewhere to go, someone waiting, a message already written on their phone. She had none of that. For the first time in her life, there was no adult whose name she could call out if she felt afraid and slightly unhinged. No voice to tell her what to do next.

The realization made her chest tighten. She was eighteen and already finished being a child, but she did not yet know how to be anything else. The city did not care. It surged and hummed, confident and indifferent, full of doors to places and people that did not know her and futures that did not yet include her. She moved with the crowd because standing still felt dangerous, because motion seemed the natural pace of the beast. She had arranged a small bedsit in a run down area of town and she made her way there. She'd memorized the route on the train. As she walked, she understood that this was what it meant to be alone as an adult, not abandoned, not even unhappy, but unanchored, carrying her past inside her while stepping into a world that did not recognize it.

The school where she had once ranked first in her year congratulated her on her grades but had nothing else to offer. Beijing, they said, rewarded ability.

Ability, she discovered, meant endurance.

At first she did not feel manipulated at all. She felt "behind". The billboards were not speaking to her; they were speaking to people who could afford what they advertised. Apartments glowing with warm light. Smart watches tracking calm heartbeats. Slogans about success paired with faces that looked nothing like hers. She passed beneath them with the mild shame of someone who had not yet earned the right to be addressed.

The factory job lasted three weeks. Twelve-hour shifts, the same motion repeated until her wrists burned and her thoughts thinned out. The machines were loud enough to drown out thinking but she was new enough in this place to understand what she had lost. At night she lay on a bunk in a room that smelled of sweat and detergent, scrolling because there was nothing else to do. Her wages bought a new phone and she was sucked in to a new world of possibility with all the things it could do. The feed of adverts and images seemed to adjust itself to her.

After long shifts, clips appeared about discipline and sacrifice. When she searched for cheaper food, stories followed about patriotic workers enduring hardship for the nation. When she paused on a video of soldiers marching, not because she felt pride, but because she liked the rhythm, more followed. Smiling young men, clean uniforms, promises of purpose. Sometimes she felt a tightness in her chest that she mistook for admiration, or guilt, or something she assumed must be belief.

She did not question it. Why would she? The feelings did not ask her to do anything she was not already doing.

She quit without another job lined up, telling herself she needed rest. The thought felt like her own. It arrived gently, accompanied by videos about burnout and recovery, about choosing the right path rather than the habitual one.

The café was not an accident it came as a suggestion on her phone while she studied the mapping app in her new city. So she ducked in one afternoon to escape the heat, smog and the noise of a street being torn open to lay new fiber optic cables. From the outside it looked ordinary enough; pealing paint and fading colors on the sign, a glimpse of smiling faces around wooden tables within, the faint smell of coffee beans. The prices were reasonable and the people inside were her age or slightly older and so she stayed. People here seemed different, more content, as if they had time to relax. No one seemed in a hurry to become anything.

The walls were covered with old posters: rock bands from the beginning of the century, fragments of poetry, a faded print of a film about Yue Fei the Song dynasty general, sword raised, a hero of the nation. Someone had drawn a question mark over his helmet.

She sat near the back and watched.

They talked quietly, but not cautiously. There was laughter, but it carried an edge. She heard words like 'freedom', 'authenticity', 'truth'. No one mentioned politics directly. They didn’t have to.

The owner was a man called Yue Fei, hence the poster. He sat at the center table, leaning back in his chair, a laptop on the table in front of him next to a cup of coffee. He listened more than spoke. He was not handsome in any obvious way. His hair was too long for a programmer, his glasses slightly crooked. When he spoke, people leaned forward. He was the man in charge and she realized this was not just a coffee house but a place from where he coordinated his workers. It seemed he owned another business also.

She returned the next day. And the day after that. Eventually he spoke to her.

“You’re not from here,” he said, not as a question.

“Right.”

“You still think this place is choosing you,” he said gently.

She blinked. “You mean the city or the party?”

He smiled, not unkindly. “It’s testing you, checking where you fit, probing you to see what it can get from you.”

She laughed softly. “Who is doing this?”

“Oh giving personal names to the invisible people who pull the puppet strings is always difficult,” he said. “Maybe it is more useful to understand how the puppet strings work.”

They talked for hours. He asked her about school, about the factory, about the village she came from. She told him she felt ashamed for quitting, proud for lasting as long as she did, confused about what she wanted next.

“I think I should find something more meaningful,” she said. “Something that contributes. My education seems wasted on a factory job.”

“Whose words are those?” he asked.

She hesitated. “Mine?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Try again.”

She flushed. “They sound like the videos on my phone.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Notice how they give you emotions before they give you reasons.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

He took her phone, asked permission with his eyes, and when she nodded he scrolled. He showed her patterns she had never noticed: how clips about endurance followed nights of exhaustion, how pride appeared when she felt small, how stories about national destiny clustered around moments when she searched for escape. He showed her how to shut down prying eyes and encrypt conversations.

“You thought you were choosing,” he said. “But the choices were being pre-warmed for you. They do not command they nudge you in the direction they want you to go. They don’t tell you what to think,” he continued. “They tell you what to 'feel', and then let you build the thought yourself. That way you’ll defend it.”

She swallowed. “So none of what I feel is real? I am being manipulated.”

“Some of it is,” he said gently. “Your exhaustion is real. Your love for your parents is real. Your fear is real. But the direction those feelings point in, that’s adjustable.”

They used VPNs at the café. Not openly. Nothing was openly anything. She read about wars that were not glorious, about cities emptied by grief, about soldiers who never returned whole. She felt embarrassed at how familiar the emotional rhythms were. The coming war over Taiwan, she realized, had already been rehearsed in her, not with facts, but with moods.

After a time Yue Fei gave her a job at his computer hardware company. It was small, deliberately unambitious, its focus on the smaller businesses that littered downtown Beijing. Hardware services, local networks, boring things.

“Boring is safe,” he said. “And safety buys time.”

She fell in love with Yue Fei slowly, like a lens coming into focus. They became a couple and the cafe filled with their laughter. He did not tell her what to think. He asked her where her thoughts came from. When she felt fear, he asked whose agenda it served. When she felt pride, he asked who would benefit from the strengths she celebrated. When she felt hope, he let it stand, untouched. He showed her love in his kisses, in his compassion for others and in his love for His God.

She moved in with Yue Fei into his flat above the café. They were married soon after. Other workers from the company were also in the same building. A small unregistered house-church, led by Yue Fei met in the cafe some evenings of the week, and she would go along - loving the worship music shared via ear pods but never broadcast out loud. For the first time since her parents died, she slept without dreaming of alarms and she felt like she was home.

Then one night the café door exploded inward during a bible study which Yue Fei was leading.

Men in dark jackets or windbreakers wearing casual trousers or jeans with earpieces broke into the cafe. They had no visible insignia and a badge was quickly flashed and then put away. They did not shout but they efficiently picked out all the managers in Yue Fei's company, tying their hands and leading them away. Someone dropped a cup; it shattered, impossibly loud.

As he was led away Yue Fei only looked at her, eyes calm.

She grabbed him and then tried to hug him to her but the men pushed her away.

“Remember,” he said softly, with a smile. “The feeling you have right now, this one is ours.”

As they led him away, She screamed then, once, sharply, before a hand covered her mouth. It was a friend who silenced her. The room emptied in minutes. The café returned to its neutral silence, as if it had never been anything else.

That night she walked the city until her feet ached. Screens still glowed. The slogans were unchanged. Her phone buzzed with notifications, sympathy disguised as distraction, comfort shaped like entertainment.

But as she thought about what had happened she remembered the prompt that led her to the cafe in the first place. Her new phone. The first she had bought in Beijing had led her to Yue Fei and the others. Her breath caught...No it could not be true!!! Was she the instrument for her friends capture. She started to cry, her whole body sobbed with shame and then fear and anger.

She turned her phone off and was tempted to throw it in the trash but did not. Freedom, she realized, might not mean escape. It might not mean safety. It might only mean this: that once you see the strings, you feel the pull and know it is not you pulling. Why must the most profound lessons come with so much pain she wondered.

She sat on the curb as dawn came again, holding her new insight like a fragile light, unsure how long it would last, but certain now that it existed.

She thought about Yue Fei kissing her, she remembered bible verses about Gods love and she knew deep in her heart that this was a quiet feeling no one could never take away from her. In that moment she felt free inside even if she was not free. The warmth of a holy peace filled her like a comforting presence. It was as though Yue Fei whispered into her ear telling her she was not alone. "I love you too..." she whispered back.