Lost on Planet China - J. Maarten Troost [8]
“You might need this,” she said, holding a small backpack.
“Right,” I said, considering it contained my passport, plane tickets, and traveler’s checks.
“I’m trying to envision you in China,” Sylvia said, “and I can’t decide whether to laugh or weep.”
I empathized. It’s a thin line that separates tragedy from farce.
It was an awfully long flight. From San Francisco, we flew parallel to the Inside Passage along the western coast of Canada, up and over the Aleutian Islands in the northern Pacific, following the curve of the Arctic over sheets of glistening ice not yet melted by spring. I endured three movies of sufficient banality that I can now recall nothing more than the passage of time. I read. I dozed fitfully. Now and then, I chatted with the man next to me, a manager with Boeing who was relocating to central China. I asked him what, precisely, Boeing was planning on doing in central China.
“We’ll be building wings.”
Wings? The one part of an airplane that cannot be made redundant?
Super.
It was somewhere in the vicinity of Siberia, just off the Kamchatka Peninsula, that I began to ponder the implications of this. It was, of course, informative to learn that even the manufacturing of Boeing airplanes was now being outsourced to China. Apparently, America has a surplus of well-paying manufacturing jobs and is now helpfully sprinkling them elsewhere. But this wasn’t what I was musing about as we hit a brick wall of an air pocket. As the aircraft shuddered and swooned, and the wings fluttered like a bird’s, I hoped, really hoped, that I would like China, that I would be reassured by it, that one day I would feel secure and confident flying upon a Chinese wing.
Finally, below, there was land, a hard land, brown but not quite dead, studded with lonesome villages, surrounded by barren fields. And then we descended, hurtling through a gray-brown swirl of what? Clouds? Pollution? I had never before seen air like this. It was otherworldly in its strangeness. We landed and I felt that quiet elation I always feel when arriving someplace utterly foreign to my experience. I was in China.
I didn’t know what to expect, and without expectations, I followed the other passengers through the terminal in a state of absorption. I handed my passport to the immigration officer, half expecting to be denied entry. I had, of course, lied on my visa application. I had known enough about China to realize that one profession that must never be listed on a visa application is Writer. Instead, I had professed to be a real estate investor, an answer that made me chuckle, which I acknowledge is a little sad. Moreover, I was concerned because I had once written about Chinese spies in Kiribati, and I suspected that my name may have been entered into some secret government database used to identify Undesirable Elements. I tried to look bored as the immigration officer pondered my passport. Since I had written about the spies in Kiribati, the Chinese had been kicked out of the country. Their satellite-tracking station had been dismantled and, even more disturbing for the Chinese, the government of Kiribati now affirmed that Taiwan is the true China, while the People’s Republic was merely an usurper. Did they think I had anything to do with that? Were Chinese intelligence agents now being alerted to my presence? Mr. Troost. We have been waiting for you. Come with us. And I’d be taken to a cell room aglow in the faint glare of a single lightbulb.
Fortunately, my skills at parrying an interrogation remained untested, and I emerged into the arrivals hall, which had an interesting odor, like a thousand people who had all just stepped in from a smoke break. Through the tumult, I could see the familiar storefronts of a Starbucks and a KFC Express, which left me befuddled, since I was in the turbid throes of jet lag and I had assumed that after traveling such a vast distance, I would have made it somewhere