Wu, 47, who is a Guangzhou resident, is employed by a Cantonese restaurant in Yueyang of Hunan Province, more than 300 miles to the north of Guangzhou.

He claimed that his boss offered to give him as much as 30,000 yuan as a festival bonus if he stayed on the job during the week-long national holiday.

"I had wanted to stay in Yueyang during the Spring Festival because the festival bonus equals two months of my salary," he said.

But Wu finally decided to go home for the family reunion.

"I made the decision when I called long distance home and when I was told that my daughter was waiting for me to come home," Wu said, who arrived home on January 12 by train.

He said his wife and daughter had planned to go back to Zhaoqing, Wu's home town in the western part of Guangdong Province, to spend the coming Lunar New Year together with his parents.

"My daughter will hate me if I do not go home for the festival because of money," Wu added.

"It is always my wish to fulfil my duty to my parents during the Lunar New Year celebration because I have to leave home to work during the rest of the year."

He said that his daughter likes to enjoy the special glutinous rice cakes in Zhaoqing, a tourist city known for its Dinghu Mountains.

The glutinous cake, which is made of sesame seeds, mung beans, sausages, peanuts and chestnuts, is the special food in Zhaoqing during the Lunar New Year celebration.

Of course, Wu and his daughter will play lion dance during the festival and set off firecrackers and fireworks, which are banned in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Foshan, Zhuhai and many other big cities in Guangdong Province.

Wu said he will return to work in Yueyang on the eighth day of the Lunar New Year, February 8.

Cheng Qing, who also arrived in Guangzhou two weeks before the festival, shared similar ideas for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Cheng, 27, said the coming new year is of great importance for him.

He will visit his girlfriend's parents for the first time. His girlfriend's parents, who are working abroad, will return to Guangzhou for the Spring Festival this year.

"If I don't go home during the festival, I might be abandoned by my girlfriend," Cheng said.

When he graduated from Guangzhou University five years ago, Cheng, who failed to find a good job in Guangzhou, got an offer to work in a Hong Kong-funded company in Shanghai.

He met his girlfriend on the plane when he returned home for the Lunar New Year last year.

"Money is important, but home is even more so," Cheng said.

Cheng said he was not surprised that a large number of passengers queued up to try to board a train to go home at railway stations across the country.

Xu Xiaolan, 21, a native of Southwest China's Guizhou Province, is working in an electronic factory in the city of Dongguan in Guangdong. She said she had to wait for more than two hours in the square of Guangzhou Railway Station for her train to arrive before boarding to go home.

The train journey will hardly be a pleasure for her because of the crowd of people. "But it is worth taking," said Xu, who has been working in Guangdong Province for more than two years.

"When I arrive home, all the difficulties and grievances I met at work and during the journey will disappear," said Xu, who was travelling home with a dozen or so of her fellow villagers on January 11.

Xu said all her fellow villagers would like to go home for the Lunar New Year despite the fact that those who stay on the job will have festival bonuses, doubling their monthly income.

According to officials from Guangzhou Railway Station, one of the three biggest railway stations in China, they are handling more than 50,000 passengers who leave Guangzhou every day.

The peak period of the Spring Festival rush will hit between January 27 and 29 - more than 180,000 passengers are expected to go home via train from Guangzhou each day.

And the station has been urged to take measures to ensure safety and good social order for the large number of passengers.

Railway officials have predicted that more than 1.8 million passengers will use Guangzhou station in January.

(China Daily January 20, 2003)