I, FOB
I leave for Beijing on Friday and lately I’ve been thinking about the first time I was in China, some nine years ago, several months before the half year I did in Beijing through ACC. This first visit was a student trip (Japan, China) that Lawrence U arranged with a big parcel of cash (I imagine, as I always do, delivered in a scuffed leather briefcase full of loose bills) given to us by the noble bureaucrats at the Freeman Foundation. We spent our first evening in a hotel near Narita, having missed our intended connection, then flew into Shanghai Pudong the next day. Those were the days when I used a pocket watch (wristwatches messed up my viola bowing, or so I felt) and I quite vividly recall the customs fellow in his ill-fitting official uniform running one long fingernail (the pinkie) over the watch as though it were some small creature –– possibly poisonous –– that might attack if provoked. First thing we did was go the Shanghai Museum, where we spent the afternoon, then back to the airport for a flight to Xi’an that evening. As we rode our bus through the city I observed to my seatmate that the endless string of industrial cranes leaning angularly over the Yangtze look like metal version of water birds waiting for passing ships to gobble up.
The flight was enough to make you want to give up flying, at least for a few days, to allow the contents of your stomach to vacate your sinuses and trickle back down your throat. Nasty weather (turbulence, lightning) troubled us the whole way there. We arrived without incident, of course, and there wasn’t an air-bridge so we deplaned using a stair car and walked across the wide, flat tarmac to the terminal. It was after dark by then and the whole vista was illuminated with huge flood lights that painted the ground, the plane, and every one of us a kind of sickly, desiccated yellow, like sand and old bones. I looked around me, at a scene that resembled a moon landing, and asked myself a question that, I’ve since discovered, almost every foreigner asks him or her self upon washing up somewhere in China for the first time: “Boy, oh boy –– what have I gotten myself into?”
The flight was enough to make you want to give up flying, at least for a few days, to allow the contents of your stomach to vacate your sinuses and trickle back down your throat. Nasty weather (turbulence, lightning) troubled us the whole way there. We arrived without incident, of course, and there wasn’t an air-bridge so we deplaned using a stair car and walked across the wide, flat tarmac to the terminal. It was after dark by then and the whole vista was illuminated with huge flood lights that painted the ground, the plane, and every one of us a kind of sickly, desiccated yellow, like sand and old bones. I looked around me, at a scene that resembled a moon landing, and asked myself a question that, I’ve since discovered, almost every foreigner asks him or her self upon washing up somewhere in China for the first time: “Boy, oh boy –– what have I gotten myself into?”