On the high-speed train, a woman holding a child asked me to give my seat to her mother.

I told her I had bought a ticket.
She stared at me and said something that quieted the entire carriage:
“You’ll get old someday too. When you’re too old to stand, others won’t let you.”
Next to me sat a boy about seventeen or eighteen, who had just been accepted to university.
He stood up and said, “Auntie, sit here.”
She didn’t sit.
She took her mother a step back and looked at me, saying:
“You see, that kid is more sensible than you.”
The boy awkwardly stayed in place, still holding his backpack.
I stood up, guided him back to his seat, then turned to the woman holding the child.
I said, “He’s more sensible than you, so he doesn’t deserve to give you his seat.
Since you said that just now, you don’t deserve to teach anyone anything.”
She stared at me, her mouth opening twice but not speaking.
Her mother tugged her arm beside her.
I put on my headphones and didn’t look back.
The boy whispered, “Sis, I could actually stand.”
I said, “You can stand, but not because her mother has leg pain, it’s because you want to stand.”
Later, he still stood up.
But not to give his seat to the woman holding the child, but to an elderly man who got on the train from Baoding.
The old man also stood for a while and then got off, but he kept sharing the torn-up dried squid strips until the attendant came to clean up.
The boy sat in his seat, chewing the last piece, and asked me what she was unworthy of.
I said she wasn’t worthy of the step you just took to stand up.
She didn’t let you be yourself.