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

Four Letters That Look Like “n.”

A Beijing day then.  I’m not leaving or returning from anywhere this Tuesday.  Just a meeting down in Maizidianr.  After that I can head back home.  Wang Jing is up and over to my right.  The Sony name is up there, atop what must be the company skyscraper.   Brands, like countries, used to demand different engagement.  I don’t mean to but I begin thinking about what it would be like to live there in Wang Jing.  Different, not better.

Languages too, wax and wane in global significance.  For a few decades after Liberation, every Chinese intellectual necessarily learned Russian.  The Lonely Planet series has a book on learning the language, which was one of many I secured, when I was back home last week.  Chinese is daunting, surely to people who can’t read Chinese.  It’s daunting to me, as I try, year after year, to move beyond the comprehension of a mere few hundred characters.  It is always suggested that the Chinese, by comparison have it easy when they set out to learn English:  There are only twenty-four letters in the alphabet rather than ten thousand ideographs to remember.   By this reasoning, Cyrillic shouldn't be too hard either.

I’m not so sure.  This is my first ten minutes invested in the prospect on learning Russian.  The “letters”, when we saw Soviet space craft drift by or Moscow Olympics posters, had always seemed like nonsense runes.  On page thirteen of my book, I do the count:  A bit more daunting than the Romance alphabet, there appear to be thirty-three letters in the Russian alphabet.  What is immediately clear is that the unlearning will be half the challenge.  There are at least four letters that look like “n.”  None of them make the “n” sound.  Assigning new meaning to fundamental pillars of cognition, like “n” won’t be easy.  Keep telling yourself there a re only thirty-three of them. (In fact, further reading confirms, St. Cyril only came up with thirty-one letters and two signs: hard and soft.  I can write this down, but I have no idea what it means, practically.)

The one Russian word I remember, besides, “no” and “thank you,” comes from a case study I once taught.  It seems to typify what I imagine all Russian words sound like.    “Relations,” the corner stone lubricant in the Chinese world: 关系 guanxi, is pronounced as “blat” in Russian.  I consider how much work remains before me before I could ever possibly un-hear “blat” as a colorful word, rather than as an unfortunate rhyme word for “flat” and “splat.” 

Tuesday, 03/06/18

Driver Hates This Song

I went out to get in the car at 5:20AM and someone was in the driver’s seat, and another fellow was in the passenger’s seat. This made me sour.  Is someone joining us on this ride to South Station for the next hour?  As quickly as it rose, my frown had passed.  It was just the guard who’d rode in with this driver to direct him to our place on this frigid morning.  He asked, as I got in if it would be alright if he rode back out with us to the front gate.  With unnecessary enthusiasm, I told him, “of course, of course.”

Writing, drifting off, coming to, as we speed through a ride that would take twice as long, ninety minutes from now.  Is this the right way?  I don’t recognize the side of the road.  And I consider whether he hasn’t taken me on some long detour.  Later when I’m nodding off on a familiar ride into the city in Shanghai, I’ll have the same concern. 

The Shan Tian Feng my driver’s listening to gives way to cross talk and then an old anthemic, patriotic song.  He knows the words and sings along aloud for a moment.  Then a horrible pop song begins.  I think I know that my driver hates this song.  “It’s not like the old revolutionary songs” I imagine him saying.  Rather, he suddenly begins to sing along with this dentist-drill pop song as well.  Just thirty hours ago I was riding out of Noe Valley on my way to SFO and the guy had American dentistry music: “Jack and Dianne” on.  I was squirming there as well, wishing he’d make the John Mellencamp stop, until, pulling out my phone and pretending to make a call, I asked him to turn it down.

My meeting today was to be at the South African Consulate. I arrived and all the people I’d later lecture to were waiting outside for someone to escort them upstairs.  “If you don’t mind I’m going over to the Starbucks", that my mind’s eye remembered should be right around the corner, across the atrium.  Considering a Starbucks lunch as a vegetarian means you’ll be having a lot of muffins, really.  Every single sandwich, wrap or salad has meat in in.   I got a kiwi juice and a triple espresso. 

And now, it’s about seventeen hours later.  12:15AM the next day.  I managed to get my ass down to Shanghai, give my lecture and return home the same day.  Once again, I’ve sped home at a remarkable clip, on roads that are normally hopeless.  I’ve some Donald Byrd up in the ears and I’m not hearing what my driver is listening to this time.  And while I didn’t manage to sleep at all on the way down, I was off to nod, shortly after the Nanjing station stop, as we barreled back up north.

Monday, 03/05/18

I’ll See You Tonight

A twelve-hour flight with two men in economy, both trying to type, is a compromise.  Even if it is the emergency exit row.  He’d type, and rest.  I took to reading my book.  He’d type he’d move forward and unwittingly block my light.  I’d pull back to catch the light.  He pulled back after he typed the next line. I went forward.  And so it went, for an hour or so.  Once again, the arc of the flight had passed without any sleep.  I overheard one and then a third apology for the flight not having a working Wi-Fi in English and then in Chinese on the broadcast.  I was happy to simply type until my electricity ran out.  Then I read and read for hours and considered how to charge my computer.  The MacBook Air wouldn’t draw a charge from the outlet beneath my seat unless you held it just so.  More time to read.         

                                                

Back in Beijing after a week away.  The immigration officer was pleasant.  I got my bags quickly enough and shuffled through the long line.  Two Indian businessmen were being questioned by the customs official at the far end of the inspection machine.  What a hassle that must be.  I wonder if the Indian customs return the favor when Chinese salesmen arrive.  I proceeded through, unmolested and passed out into the familiar gallery of strangers waiting for someone besides me. It got my shuangfenr out at the Starbucks, to assist with the rest of this afternoon I now had before me.

Everyone was home, when I arrived.  So glad to see each member of my family.  I unpack all the books and the dirty laundry I have in my bags.  My younger one had wanted fake eyelashes.  “Here you go.”  The girls were starting an art class this evening in the living room, with a new instructor.  He explained that he’d be able to help them prepare a portfolio for the older one’s college applications.  Art as cram school?  What do I know?  My older one had suddenly decided she was considering an art program. Presumably a portfolio would be required.

I’m tired, but hunger has the upper hand.  The fridge is pretty barren.  A bite of cheese.  A few raisons.  Upstairs, I say: “good night” to the girls.  They all want to go to the gym in the morning.  Me too.  But I explain that I’ll be leaving at 5:15AM for a day-trip down to Shanghai before they’re up.  “Yes.  I’m coming right back.  I’ll see you tonight, before you go to bed.”  A training on China.  Visiting students from South Africa.  I can do that.  I haven’t recovered from the training I just had in the U.S.  That’s alright.  We’ll sleep on the train.  That’s what I always tell myself. 

Sunday, 03/04/18

Only Because I Have To

Friday night we were up late filming vignettes till all the energy was gone and we resigned ourselves to round-robin viewing of Youtube videos we each took turns to share.  Reluctantly we retired at midnight.  I’d be up early in the morning the next day.  Everything was packed, everything laid out, ready for departure.  Good boy.  Host with the coffee in the kitchen the next morning.  Another good lad.  Supping it up there above fifty foot trees viewing out to a steep, green, glen below that I’ve seen from here for so many, many years now. 

Cross the Bay Bridge, one last time.  My only chance to see a pal in Noe Valley was left until this morning.  That’s why I must leave now.  A true friend he agreed to meet me Saturday morning at 7:30AM.  I sat in the Boulangerie and waiting for him, texting him, eating through my sweet- tooth cream tart with a purple Bartlett pear on top.  Yogurt with oats.  Orange juice.  This is real orange juice.  I’ve consumed it all and bussed it over before my chum arrives.

I’d gotten books.  I showed him one or two.  He wanted to talk about Edmund Burke.  I wanted to show him “The Prophet.”  "No.  At that time the Whigs were effectively liberals, they insisted on trade, albeit mercantilist trade."  And as it begins to get good, as it always does, I’ve got to go though, and announce I’ll call an Uber in five minutes, so please let me know the best fiction you’ve read on the French Revolution, if you would.  He's quite happy to reflect upon this and I type out his suggestions in a chat to him, so I have them down contextually and head off finally, only because I have to.    

Friendly Bay Area Uber driver out to the airport.  His son had studied Chinese as a minor.  He had lived in China and liked it.  But I sense he may not have loved it.  Now he had work with a company that didn’t have anything to do with China.  He said his son would sometimes go to speak to the Chinese engineers there at work and it made him feel nostalgic. I felt sorry for this kid I’d never met.  I wonder what was still inside him, mid-gestation. 

Swift enough through security and up on to the plane.  A friend wrote to ask if I was traveling in business with a smiley emotocon.  “I am not” I wrote back, letting him know that I was sitting next to a large gentleman in economy.  Sometimes things work out and sometimes . . . your left without an upgrade. 

Presently, I’m in that emergency exit area where I can stretch out my legs.  But there is a cost.  Other people get the same idea and come here to stretch and do little dances and walk around in circles with their crying babies and generally treat your space as their space.  Two people in a row now have come to this little mini window, popped it open, flooding the space before me with blistering light considering the north pole down below.  The woman who caught the view before is back now, considering my window anew.  She has her iPhone out to capture the bright arctic scene.   

A little part of me is rather jittery every time someone arrives and stands next to that enormous door with a safety lock.  It wouldn’t be all that hard to figure out and throw open in a moment of excitement.  No one would really do that.  But who knows?  The stewardesses ought to tell people to stay the hell away from that area.  Where's a foreful United Airlines Battle-axe when you need her?  Another woman has come up to snap a photo.  A guy has taken his place behind her in line.  Step right up. 

Saturday, 03/03/18