A Small Car and an Ordinary Family

Late last December, a link arrived via Microsoft Teams from a colleague. The accompanying message read: I’m sending this because I stumbled upon a post by a Ford owner on Xiaohongshu that really struck a chord. She writes with such sincerity about her thirteen-year history with a Ford Fiesta. It is genuinely moving.

July, a young woman from Nanjing, had shared this farewell chronicle online to commemorate the family car—a Ford Fiesta driven for thirteen years, now on the verge of being traded in. Her initial impulse was merely archival; she feared that, in time, her own memories might fade.

She hadn’t expected the post to resonate so widely...

She found herself wondering: Why do we develop such profound attachments to inanimate objects?

We reached out privately to talk to her. “I think I made the poor girl cry,” our interviewer later admitted.

To July, that Fiesta had long since ceased to be a machine; it was a family member. And to tell the story of this family member is, naturally, to pull at the thread of an ordinary, yet deeply warm, domestic history.

I. The Little Car and the Little Home

In 2012, when July was ten years old, the news that the family was buying a car sent her into a state of pure exhilaration. In the innocent calculus of a child, a car meant the family’s fortunes were improving; it was a tangible sign that her parents’ efforts to plant roots in Nanjing were taking hold.

To prepare for this major arrival, the whole family rallied. “For the sake of our little household,” July recalled, “my mother steeled herself and worked incredibly hard to get her driver’s license.”

July remembers the day they ordered the car with cinematic clarity. It was a gloomily overcast day. They transferred buses several times to reach a car show in the Jianye District.

At the Ford booth, the ten-year-old was immediately arrested by the logo—white script on a blue oval. To her, it looked “like a square of silky chocolate.” Within their budget, a Fiesta in Royal Blue stood out, piercing the grey weather. They test-drove it; they paid the deposit. July left with her heart set on that flash of brilliant blue. 

So, when her parents eventually drove home a grey Fiesta, she was initially crushed. “At first, I looked at you with disdain,” she wrote to the car. “I had never looked forward to your arrival.”

But the grey grew on her. It was practical. The disdain quickly dissolved into dependence.

The time the family of three spent inside that cabin mostly revolved around July’s education. A single thirty-minute DJ mix CD was enough to soundtrack the drive from home to her parents' workplace and back—three round trips, exactly.

For the next thirteen years, the little car ferried this trio through the flat terrain of daily life: the roar of her father stepping on the gas, the ceaseless stream of her mother’s maternal fretting, the faint scent of interior leather, the familiar streetscapes sliding past the window thousands of times. These fragments of memory now play in July’s mind like frames of film, quietly looping. 

II. A Witness to Growing Up

After her college entrance exams—the Gaokao—July set her sights on a police academy, which required passing a physical fitness test. On that day, the little car carried the family to the school. Inside the academy gates, July was filled with hope: “If I could go here, that would be truly amazing.”

Athletics were not her strong suit. Dragging a body that had been sedentary throughout the intense exam prep period, she barely scraped through the test. When she finished, she looked up to see her parents standing by the little car, waiting.

“They were my spiritual anchor, just standing there, waiting for me to come back and tell them everything.” Although she ultimately missed the cut for the police academy, that summer day—filled as it was with presence and support—remains complete in her mind, devoid of regret.

In the years that followed, the car carried her to university registration, to civil service exams, and through the many milestones, momentous or mundane, that constitute a young life. 

By 2025, July had secured a new job seventeen kilometers from home. Within a week, she had achieved that state of driving nirvana where "man and car are one." This swift mastery was due in no small part to her old companion: the Fiesta was steady off the line, nimble in body, and exceptionally forgiving to a novice.

Whenever she drove the compact Fiesta surrounded by the roar of heavy trucks, July would whisper encouragement to herself and the machine: “Come on, let’s pass them. Keep your distance. It’s dangerous out there.”

III. The Anatomy of a Goodbye

The farewell had been brewing in July’s mind for a long time. She had long ago assigned the car the status of "family." Its character was silent and reliable; for over a decade, it had served without complaint. Every trip was safe. It never broke down. It never left them stranded.

There were, of course, minor scrapes over thirteen years, but nothing that mattered—mere ripples in the calm surface of an ordinary life.

As the trade-in date approached, the reluctance and the sour ache of parting grew heavier. On the second-to-last night, as July drove home from work, the melody of “See You Again” filled the cabin. The dam broke. Waiting at a red light, she could no longer suppress it; she sat inside the little car and wept uncontrollably.

By the final night, however, a calm had settled over her. When she arrived home, her favorite parking spot happened to be empty. July sat in the car for a while longer than necessary. The fuzzy texture of the roof liner, the familiar embrace of the seat, the grip of the steering wheel—she wanted to catalogue these sensations one last time. 

Her gaze fell on the odometer. The numbers had settled into a beautifully symmetrical “71717.” It felt like a deliberate detail, a sign that the car was quietly saying its own goodbye.

With her story now resonating across the internet, July feels as though her humble Fiesta has become a “celebrity car.” In the future, the memory will carry a tinge of pride.

Scrolling through the comments from strangers, she has come to a realization: the people who feel this specific frequency of resonance are those who have tightly bound a chapter of their lives to an object they saw every day.

“For me, and for many of the commenters,” she says, “what we can’t bear to let go of isn’t just the car itself. It is the time that is slipping away with it, and the younger version of ourselves who sat in that passenger seat.” 

Our thanks to July, to all the netizens who shared their stories, and to @S, Jessica for recommending this post to us.