Beijing 2015 | Rituals
There is a certain pleasure returning to this teeming foreign city year after year. Getting off the plane at Beijing's Capital Airport is like coming back to see an old friend. She has changed, and so have I.
And so it was when we push our luggage carts out of the customs area toward the sea of expectant faces in the public waiting terminal. We have two carts, each laden with heavy suitcases. My wife shops months in advance to make sure she arrives with the right gifts for the right people. This involves numerous trips to Costco and other places for candy, clothes, spices and vitamins. I feel like Marco Polo traveling the Silk Road, ready to trade. The gifts aren't all for family; many are for business contacts -- people who have bestowed free passes for massages or given her a leg up on some financial investment. In China, it's call guanxi, and it's as expected as picking up the check at an expensive restaurant in Los Angeles and New York.
We're tired this Friday evening when we arrive. Twelve hours confined to an economy-sized seat is wearying. And then there is the supersonic feat of being catapulted 15 hours ahead in time. The day Friday is gone, evaporated, leaving eyes bloodshot, a slight headache. It's 9 p.m. but my body is clueless of the hour; knowing only that it needs rest. There, waiting for us, as always, is my brother-in-law's girlfriend, Liu Ning, her face beaming, eyes so Asian. We hug, which is not Chinese custom. While most Chinese are warm and expressive, hugging is considering particularly American, as overzealous as squeezing too firmly in a handshake. But now, after years coming here, we hug. I hug Xie Yi, my brother-in-law, when I meet him outside. He is finishing a cigarette and anxious to get us home.
These are the rituals of coming to China. My mother in law has already made my favorite bread or Chinese edamame, aiming to please. I am her daughter's husband and through my stomach she makes her approval of me clear. We wait a bit until going up to the third floor to greet my father in law, the retired general, lost in his own monkish world of self-imposed isolation, seeing his body fail him, obsessed with the latest cure for maladies he has convinced himself he has. He has lost more weight. He looks like an underfed early teen. Lily says he is trying to gain weight. I pull open my T-shirt and grab a fistful of belly fat. "Here, Ba. Take some of this." He smiles. Maybe half.
The next evening, he takes us all out for dinner. Lily, Me. Yuyu and her daughter. Others. There are ten of us in all. My father in law pays. Another ritual for that first public meal. The food is good, rich and varied in a way that seems to have taken 5,000 years of culinary culture to achieve. I am trying to cut back on my beer intake this year, so I order tea instead, with the others. The conversation is in Mandarin, a language that despite 20 years of haphazard application I still cannot speak well enough not to sound like some babbling fool. Understanding is even harder. Occasionally, I will break in and ask Lily for a quick translation. But most often I observe. Like someone mute, the senses focused elsewhere. That family at the next table. The beautiful arc of the ceiling.
I impose myself into the conversation with humor. I tell my mother in law she looks elegant tonight, which she does. She is the source of my wife's style, I have come to learn. She seems ageless, with a hard-won grace for a woman in her mid 70s. When I first came to China, in 1995, my mother in law was the age that I am now. That fact amazes all of us, another milepost in the march of time. I tell my father in law that I like his pressed Oxford shirt, so Western on his small frame. People laugh, saying I always kiss up to my in-laws. I tell them that I always make a habit of complimenting the people who pay the dinner bill.
I tell Xie Yi that tomorrow, when he will most likely pay, that he too will be good looking.
Later in the meal my father in law turns to me. Lily translates, as always.
Both of us, he says, made a mistake when we met almost 20 years ago, and in the time we later spent together in Los Angeles when my in-laws came to live with us for nine months before our 2000 marriage.
"We should have taught each other one word each day," he says, leaning close. "One Chinese. One English. "We would have a language now in which to communicate."
But we didn't. And so I remain an outsider to this place, this culture, this language. An interloper returned for another glimpse at this foreign place.