Let Me Know When

I’ll sit here and watch.  Let them all board the plane.  The line snakes off and around, beyond where I can see. I will charge my phone, and stay online for as long as I can until shortly after they announce last call and the final person has trotted past the gate. I’m well- aware that despite the young man’s flailing and the stewardess hairy-eyeball, we have a few more minutes and I’d only be forming the back of the queue on the boarding ramp into the plane were I to approach the counter now. 

I finished up my last class of the season yesterday.  Four days in a row, eight-thirty to four-thirty, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.  On paper, a few months earlier, when you consider the schedule it doesn’t seem overly arduous.  But in the middle of the marathon, it takes fortitude to keep up the pace.  The demands of family life and all the many other parts of your professional existence certainly don’t let up.  Go to bed late and get up early and remember to tuck in your shirt as you dash off to the campus. 

Last night, I invited the class of seventy, as I generally do with the grad students, to meet me around the corner at the Irish Bar after the final class is done.  If you’re there in the first fifteen minutes after five, the first round, is on me.  A good half of the class or more showed up.  I was glad to see that the young lady from Guangdong who tends bar there was still employed there.  She remembered me from when I did this last year.  “Let me know when the tab tops one-thousand yuan.”  And I was sad to see her as well, for she’s a smart young woman and this is most assuredly a dead-end job. 

In this setting, you can learn a bit more about who these students are.  And they want to know things like how you met your wife, that aren’t really, suitable for the class but are easy to share, as I was once new to China, like them.  Indeed, I was precisely their age when all that happened to me, on my first journey here.  Some of them have remarkable business ideas.  Some don’t know what to do next.  They’re all processing China in various measures and that is somehow forever stimulating. 

The guy beside me was one of the last holdouts.  He’s packed his things and left to board.  The red light is flashing.  The woman with dental-surgery-English is reminding everyone within earshot that this is the “final boarding call.”  The phone is nowhere near as fully charged as I’d hoped . . . Perhaps I’ll catch up with you from 34C.

Tuesday 6/12/18