An American in Beijing

The Long Road to China

The long trip to China deserves a long post to describe it, especially since classes haven't started yet and I have lots of time to post! My father said to me before I left: “What a long, strange journey it’s going to be.” He was absolutely right! The travel was strange at many points, and most definitely long, but on the whole was safe, fun, and could hardly have gone more smoothly.

Pre-departure

My mom, dad, sister, and I arrived at JFK Airport a little after 12:30, about four hours before my plane was due to depart. After checking my luggage, I was informed that the plane was delayed by three hours. Ouch. With seven hours to kill before take-off, my family and I got some lunch, roamed about the airport, went on a quest for raisins (special request for Sara, my amazing hostess), played dots, and generally enjoyed our remaining time together. All good things must come to an end, however, and this did too: before I knew it, I was heading through the security area and luggage check. With one last wave at my family, I set off down the corridor to find Gate 7.

I found it pretty easily, and settled down to wait with a bag of soy crisps and my book of survival travel phrases. I had my first experience with what Kevin and others have described as the pushy desperation that often characterizes large masses of Chinese people in official situations. As soon as the flight attendants began boarding the plane, the waiting passengers mobbed the entry area, lined up even as the staff tried to cordon off the area to hold them back. There were a number of announcements made asking people to please resume their seats – in Chinese, of course, so it took me a while to figure out what was going on – but my confusion was not helped by the fact that most of the people clearly ignored the requests and continued to crowd the entrance area. Even when it was clearly announced that we would be boarding by row number – not by who managed to shove their way to the front first – people continued to crowd, and I had to shove and “laojia” (excuse me) my way up to finally stumble on to the airplane.

The flight

I found my seat (35K) towards the back of the plane: a window seat, which I’d requested. I had a lot of time to ruminate upon the pros and cons of window seats during the 13 ½ hour flight, so here is what I came up with:

Pros:

• You get to look out the window (duh). This is fun for take-off and landing, and, in my opinion, even for those parts of the flight during which you are above the clouds. Let’s face it, clouds are pretty sweet-looking, especially from a new perspective (above).

• You get to control when the window is opened or closed. This is awesome for those times during the flight that you want to adjust the amount of light by you in a more gradual way. Now, circumstances might be different for different airlines, but on my Air China flight, we all had to put the windows down for “nighttime” (even though it was totally bright outside the plane), which made things nice and dark for the people who were trying to sleep. People like me who don’t sleep well in strange and uncomfortable situations (like being wedged between a plane window with sticky stuff on it and a middle-aged Chinese man with bad breath and a cough) benefit by being able to adjust the light in their little cubbyhole of space, because, at least on Air China planes, the overhead lights are really bright and shine on everybody in the row, and it would have been pretty rude to drench everyone in such bright light.

• This one is important: you have a place to lean up against that isn’t the person next to you. As you may have guessed from the above bullet point, I pretty much spent minimal time sleeping, but I was far more comfortable being able to lean on the wall of the plane and curl up to sleep (or sit there with my eyes closed until an appendage fell asleep) than to lean on the Chinese guy next to me, which would have been my only option had I been sitting anywhere else.

Cons:

• Okay, this one is huge: you can’t get up without stepping over everyone else in your row. My flight was non-stop, 13 ½ hours, and I was only able to get up to walk around and whatnot twice. The other times I just had to stand up where I was (which is difficult, because on my plane the seats were so close together that standing up was more of a diagonal than strictly vertical task) and sort of stretch unobtrusively. At various points during the journey I really had to go to the bathroom and was so desperately thirsty that my throat was all dry, but could do nothing about it without literally climbing over the two slumbering Chinese men next to me, which, far from being awkward and rude, was just impossible given the way the seats were. During the “night,” when all the windows were closed (except mine, heh heh) and the movies were turned off, the flight attendants also stopped coming around to give people water, so I just had to sit next to my sleeping, coughing neighbor alternately looking out the window wondering if we were over the North Pole, trying to read my list of traditional to simplified character radicals, and peering over the sea of sleeping people, hoping against hope that some nice stewardess would come by and rescue me from my dehydrated misery. (One did, eventually.Yay!)

• It’s also a little bit harder to talk to the stewardesses or tell when one is coming by when you are so far from the aisle. Especially if some clarification would be nice (i.e., could I have a glass of water and a Sprite? [no idea; I just had one at a time], does the fried rice have meat in it? [yes, and shrimp too; but I ate it anyway]), and no one speaks English to you, being in closer proximity is a huge, huge plus. Not only can you ask more questions, but you can point to things to help get your point across (i.e., I’d like some of that [that being, for instance, a bottle of something looked like V8 that the guy next to me was drinking. It smelled pretty good, but I have no idea how to say V8 in Mandarin (hong xi shi …?) so settled for Sprite, which I at least knew how to say, although it’s probably not the healthiest choice of breakfast beverage]).

The in-flight movies were interestingly mixed. There was a good deal of news coverage in Mandarin, some information about the World Cup, then The Chronicles of Narnia (in English with Chinese subtitles). Then they turned all the movies off, which was sad, and the screen was blank for many hours in the darkened cabin where I sat, hemmed in by my sleeping neighbors, and thought longingly of water. With about 2 ½ hours left in the flight, the lights came back on and we were treated to a video of an Air China stewardess showing in-seat stretches and exercises we could do to stay limber, followed inexplicably by a Discovery Channel documentary about the wildlife of the Victoria Nile (again, in English with Chinese subtitles).

Arrival

Finally getting to Beijing was exciting. Naturally, it was only during the last hour of the flight that I really became tired enough to sleep, but I definitely didn’t want to miss a second of my first landing in a foreign country! There was a bit of turbulence before touchdown, and I think I saw some lightning, which was really cool. Aside from a large number of crying babies, a lady in the cabin being noisily and almost continuously sick into her airsickness bag, and the increasingly pungent bad breath of my neighbor, the last twenty minutes of the flight were pure magic. The lights of Beijing sprawled out beneath us, moving and flickering like a circuit board, with channels and lines of lights reminiscent of some giant silicon chip. White, yellow, green, red; circles and bends; grids of little pinpricks; the slow sweep of headlights along tiny highways below us – it was breathtaking. I popped a piece of gum for the descent (my neighbor requested one as well – why hadn’t I thought of this, like, 13 hours earlier?) and stared out the window. The landing was smooth as silk, and I joked along with a Chinese couple eager to try out their accented English on a foreigner as we disembarked.

Beijing Airport

The airport was fairly simple – as Kevin had told me, it was neither so large nor so confusing as JFK, despite being the international airport in China’s capital city. All tiredness forgotten, I charged up the stairs and down the hallways that led to the Health and Quarantine area, Customs, and finally, Baggage Claim. The line for customs was long, and although I exchanged a few words with the girl in a pink Yankees sweatshirt on line with me in the “Foreigners” queue, I found her, as I sadly find many New Yorkers I meet outside of New York, somewhat rude and pushy. She complained about the length slowness of the queue, the inefficiency of Chinese bureaucracy and China in general, and then tried to cut me in line. (I didn't let her. Ha!) The couple from Oberlin a few people ahead of me seemed much nicer, although too far away to engage in conversation. None of this really mattered, though, because about 40 minutes later I had claimed my luggage and was heading out into the great exit area where I found Sara at last!! I felt terrible because my flight had been so delayed – after working all day, she had come to the airport and had to spend three extra hours waiting – what a good friend! We quickly hailed a taxi with Sara’s expert Chinese skills, and soon found ourselves at her apartment.

Sara’s Apartment

Sara’s apartment complex is really, really nice – not much furniture, but a kitchen, two bathrooms, and three bedrooms, where she hosts China Care volunteers (including a friendly 16-year-old Virginian named Brentan) and has both lunch and dinner cooked for her by a friendly Chinese lady! (Bean: her name is Ping! No joke!!) Sara and I hung out for a while before I took a shower in the beautiful red-tiled bathroom and finally, mercifully, fell asleep. I’m still pretty jet-lagged (and woke up at 6 this morning to bright, beautiful sunlight) but was really lucky to be able to sleep at relatively normal hours according to this time zone, which is, as I think I’ve mentioned somewhere else on this page, exactly opposite from EST – 12 pm here is 12 am back home. Sara got up around seven, and after a leisurely breakfast we went to a grocery store near her apartment, and to the bank, where I exchanged cash for some brightly colored Chinese yuan.

The walk to and from the store and bank is along a beautiful, tree-lined highway. The traffic is relatively light out here on the Sixth Ring Road, which is basically “the suburbs” of Beijing. The street also has separate lanes on either side for bicycle traffic, and sidewalks for foot traffic (like us). Sara was telling me about how she has really gotten to see a lot of different types of Chinese life in her three trips to this country: in 2004 she got a taste of rural life working in an orphanage, while the summer of 2005 gave her some idea of student life in Beijing (albeit foreign student life). This summer in the suburbs gives still another picture of the daily life of Chinese people of all ages – walks in the park, trips to the grocery store and fruit market (which we visited this afternoon and acquired one cucumber, one mango, two bananas, and some kind of small green melon), visits to the post office, and so on.

Tonight

Tonight, Sara, Brentan, and I are heading to the Gold Street Market, a 30 kuai taxi ride away, to pick up some DVDs and to see what a real market (not just a produce one) is all about in China. It should be really fun – Brentan doesn’t speak a word of Chinese (well, except for ni hao and xie xie), and while I can usually think of a way to get my point across I have a lot of trouble understanding what people are saying to me. Sara can obviously both understand a ton and speak perfect Mandarin (as well as bargain like nobody’s business), so Brentan and I are in good hands. Actually, Sara and I are in good hands with Brentan as well, since he is 6’2 and muscular-looking. (Sara and I are both decidedly on the diminutive side.) Come to think of it, I don’t really bring anything to the group except additional people power, making us a group of three rather than two, which, let’s face it, doesn’t take a whole lot of skill. Oh well.

posted by Kelly @ 8:13 下午