Something Regrettable Happened

Flying over the eastern seaboard.  Certainly, it’s not as interesting as training it down.  The guy next to me has moved into the four-person center area I’m located in and put on a movie, set during the Chinese Civil War, starring a guy who must have been central-casting's boy for the Zhou En Lai parts.  He’s angry at everyone and has collapsed a few times.

Later, speeding over across the highway from the Shenzhen Airport down into town.  I’m typing but three or four times now I’ve seen an image off the road that I’ve wanted to capture.  I reach for my phone, which has gone into sleep mode, click a button, enter a code and bring the cartoon photo app back up.  The image is gone.  The highway walls are all I can see.

Heading to a building I’ve been to many times before.  I don’t know the name.  I can only tell this guy what else it is near.  This building has a terrible residue about it.  Something regrettable happened there, waiting for a meeting, not so long ago.  I was in a building nearby and was surprised by bad news, which only grew much, much worse as I reached the building I am heading to today.  The sour taste will always remain. 

Last November had two morning meetings that I did not want to attend.  During the first I barely concentrated as I merely wanted to go back to the news.  Back in the U.S. the country was voting and I wanted to watch the blowhard’s comeuppance at the end of an interminable campaign.  Waiting for the morning’s second meeting to begin, it became clear:  Wisconsin?  Michigan?  I was watching a terrible upset.  Numb, completely numb, pondering all the ways this was awful, I entered that second meeting.   Leaving I just wanted to get out of Shenzhen, out of what the world had become. 

It was a very different Shenzhen I can remember walking across the Low Wu border to a meeting there at the border front Shangrila.  That morning was back in 2008 and Barack Obama had just won his first presidential election.  That morning seemed benighted.  It was just as hard to fathom that he had managed to win and that so many truisms of what power in America necessarily meant (white, for one) had suddenly been challenged, effectively disrupted. 

This cab drops me off and I go to meet my colleague, who is sitting in the lobby, oblivious to my complicated Shenzhen memories, as I am to his.   

Thursday, 09/07/17