Our plane leaves tomorrow for San Francisco; wheels up at 1:20 p.m. Following a brief stop in Seoul, we’ll recross the wide, deep and turbulent Pacific for the second time in a month; in upright seats encased in an air-tight supersonic tube.
Slowly, once again, we will regretfully trade east for west, yuan for dollar, free-spirited adventure for work-a-day routine. And by the crazy physics of international travel, we’ll arrive in the Bay Area at noon local time, nearly two hours before we left China. By then, we’ll be both thoroughly weary and bewildered, hardly ready for the rude awakening of coming home.
Such short trips, spanning thousands of miles and 15 time zones, can play tricks with the mind no amount of Melatonin or 18-hour make-up sleeps can fix. Because just as the brain finally attunes to a new locale and time-of-day, just as the body clock stubbornly resets, the mental computer reboots, it’s time to go again.
For me, the rogue outsider fighting a losing war of comprehension, it means a return to my own culture and language. No longer must I sit inside a crowded van or restaurant table amid lively yet fathomless conversation, often denied translation or updates, hearing the laughter but never getting the joke, lulled by the melodic tones of my wife’s ancient mother tongue.
In Chinese, the name John is pronounced “Yue-han.” For weeks now, I’ve played the loyal family pet who only knows it’s been addressed only when it hears its name being called.
“Blah, blah, blah, blah, Yue-han. Blah, blah, blah.”
Within days, I’ll be back to my job in a desert gambling resort with his own manic spin-of-the-wheel pulse, with American greenbacks once again in my pocket. I’ll be able to reconnect to social media like Facebook and Twitter that are denied me in China; the ever-suspicious central government scrambling the signals that would allow more democratic exchanges of ideas.
Yet there will be things I will miss — in fact, I have already begun to feel their loss — about my adopted family here. And about this still often-exotic nation. The so-called Middle Kingdom.
I will miss hearing my wife’s morning talks with her mother at the kitchen table, content to sit among two generations of a family I have come to cherish. My mother-in-law is proud of her eldest daughter, who has bridged two worlds to find professional and financial success. But there are still things she can teach her; old ways of looking at things, traditional cures. And I will miss the quiet presence of my father-in-law, the retired general in the People’s army, now so fearful of death that he grasps for cures for maladies he may not even have.
After six operations, he now walks with a slight limp, but his mind is sharp. He sends regards for my own father, whom he met in 2001; the two men sitting in a darkened living room, talking about soldiering in two different armies in two different wars — WWII and Korea — the Chinese officer still impressed by father served under the infamous General George S. Patton.
I will miss the generosity of my brother-in-law’s girlfriend, Liu Ning, her shrewd insights into Chinese culture and ability to cut through human traffic jams and bureaucratic red tape. And then there’s Xie Yi, my wife’s brother and youngest sibling. I’ll always think of him driving at night in his black Mercedes S600, wandering a city he has come to despise for its sprawl and traffic the place he cannot bring himself to leave.
There are things about China that still drive me mad.
