Traveling Light

Back on the high-speed train . . .  I’ll be hard pressed not to keep staring at the television screen up over my head.  They have a loop that will run for the next five hours till we reach Hong Qiao Station.  Every hour or so the same wide-eyed twenty-something foreign guy will nod knowingly and as he tastes something new or considers something old.  Later we’ll have the stewardess feel-good loop and the track workers feel-good loop.  It reminds me of a book I had when I first came to China that served the same purpose more crudely when it described national minorities in the photo handling their lathe with love and care. 

It’s pouring rain out and there is some faint satisfaction in this.  I made the call a few days back to stay terrestrial the next few down and back journeys to Shanghai, with so many planes cancelled on account of rain.  Seven times bitten eventually mauled. Any flight tonight would necessarily be very late, if it left at all.

I’m ‘traveling light’ as the song says.  I have the same amount of luggage as I always do, but I’m missing something weighty.  I rolled in to the Beijing South Station with plenty of time.  I’d already picked up the ticket and I was uncharacteristically ahead of time so I strolled around deciding eventually on a small place to get a bottle of water.  Ahh yes, I’ve no cash.   It’s been this way most of the day.  I reach for the card in the wallet fold, the little red one, which . . . my wife had helped herself to earlier in the day, I recall and I now realize that she failed to return it.

A particular feeling I had then, walking about in the cavernous train station to begin a week’s worth of time in another city without a penny on me nor any obvious way to secure one.  Friends, colleagues come to mind, of course.  The Mrs. introduces me WeChat Pay.  Now I apparently can pay other people with We Chat up to 300 kuai.  I’m suspicious about test-driving it at 12:30AM in a cab with no other means to settle.  Let’s see if I can get an Uber first.