Lots of Reasonable Questions

Over on the west side on Beijing.  We’ve come across from the Financial district and are driving now up the west, third ring road. “What’s that?” “Why, that is the Beijing Central Radio and Television Tower.  It’s been there as long as I can recall.”  (A quick look confirms it was completed in 1992, the year before I ever came to China).  I explain that further up the road is the Purple Bamboo Garden area that I used to work at when I was at Motorola in the latter part of that decade.  Unwittingly I quietly recall the apartment nearby that my wife and I looked at back then and enter the familiar merry-go-round of thinking that admonishes my younger self for not somehow finding a way to buy that apartment, as it would be worth so much more today.  I was laid off from Moto not long after that juncture.  I would have been terrified if I’d just committed to a mortgage and would have made one hundred subsequent choices differently had I done so. 

  

In meetings, one after another.  All day meetings.  Meetings where I listened a lot and offered some and when I had down-time tried to look up words in real time that I could make out the pronunciation of but didn’t recognize.  And as 5:00PM turned to 6:00PM my energy drained, rather precipitously, like an iPhone battery going from forty-percent to powered-off, in the time it takes to pull it out of your pocket to take a call to find it has died.

Dinner’s part of the plan.  I’ve a restaurant I’m to take my clients to this evening, all picked out, not far from their hotel.  I’ve imagined them there, commenting on the atmosphere and the food, but now they’re melting as well.  We’re all jet lagged.   We’re all backed up on emails.  We’ve all had duck before.  “Shall we rendezvous tomorrow morning then?”  Quickly concurred to by all.   

Out in the cold on Dong Si Shi Tiao, till the driver arrives.  My Didi driver is from somewhere in Henan that I haven’t heard of.  “I see.  South of Zhengzhou?”  He’s friendly and chatty and has lots of reasonable questions but I don’t want to talk right now.  My will to engage has melted like a stick of butter tossed out on a summer’s highway, oozing aimlessly.  I beg his pardon and make a phone call to someone I don’t really need to speak to, just to orchestrate the end of our exchange.

Wednesday, 03/07/18