Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [49]
Instead of Muzak, there was American Christian Country Music. I am, frankly, not very familiar with American Christian Country Music, and as the plane taxied down the runway, it felt just a little funny listening to a deep, drawl-y, baritone voice strumming a guitar, sharing his musings on the Lord and what He means for the good ole U.S. of A. Cool, I thought. I’m in China. I’m on an airplane listening to the red-blooded, God-fearing songs of the Confederacy. But soon, as we reached our cruising altitude, my attention turned to the bathroom, which was apparently the smoking lounge. Did the pilots just ignore the alarm? Or had the passengers disabled it, and would this tinkering with wires affect the plane’s hydraulic system? Was it possible to reach into the No Smoking in Bathrooms alarm system and very accidentally disable the rudder on an Airbus? At that moment, the pilot turned on the seat-belt sign. The flight attendants urged everyone to take their seats right now. The aircraft began to shake. Was it the rudder? Were we rudderless 27,000 feet above Jiangsu Province? The flight attendant spotted me, the lone laowai. “If turbulence causes feelings of airsickness, please vomit in bag.” And I clutched the bag, and I held it tight.
I am quite likely the only member of my generation who still watches the evening news on national television. Our culture is committed to satisfying the needs of the old and the young, and those in between are often forced to choose. I once considered Facebook, but after spending a few minutes idling through its pages (they are called pages, yes?), I could never get beyond the Why of it. Scrolling through the walls of pithy comments, I’d wonder who, exactly, are these “friends” and why don’t they just call? And so I’d tossed my lot with the old, and begun to watch the Nightly News with Brian Williams on NBC. In between the pressing news items of the day—the quest for female Viagra, the perils of missing the annual colonoscopy—Mr. Williams would inform us of the day’s events in Iraq, a country where, apparently, we were fighting a war. Invariably, there would be footage of the grim results of a car bomb, and as the sirens wailed across the screen, my eldest son would scamper over, because nothing quite interests four-year-old boys like vehicles with sirens.
“What happened, Daddy?” he’d inquire.
“Well, it’s like this,” I’d say, assuming the measured gravitas of Mr. Williams. “In a place far, far away, there was a car accident, a little fender bender. And Mr. Frumple—you remember Mr. Frumple?—hurt his knee, so the ambulance is taking him to the Busytown Hospital, where Dr. Lion is going to make him feel better. Meanwhile, Bob the Builder is going to come over with his heavy equipment and clean up the scene of the accident.”
Lukas would scrunch his nose and ask: “Is that true? Or is that another fairy tale?”
“It’s true. Just ask your mother.”
It’s what we do, cosset the kids behind thick barricades where they can enjoy the wonder of childhood without being disturbed by anything so troublesome as reality. When I sensed Lukas was troubled by the ladybug he’d just squished with his bike, I’d take the time to explain the phenomenon known as the Great Reincarnation of Ladybugs, and that right now, at this very moment, the ladybug was being reborn as a horse, and soon this ladybug would be galloping across a broad, golden meadow, so grateful to have been squished