Thirty Feet and Waves

My daughter was off to Hong Kong for the Labor Day vacation.  She would get some visa matters done and see her old friend who still lives there in the Bagio Villa where we once resided back in 2005, back when my daughters were small enough to carry in my arms. 

Having learned the hard way when I last left for the airport, I told her we’d need to budget plenty of time. The Beijing Auto Show locust are still there at the convention center, acting like an advanced coagulant on all neighborhood traffic, so that nothing works and everything is slow.  This time, instead of heading down, out of our way to the express way, I take the drivers advice and go left, from Gao Bai Lu back on to Jing Mi.  This is a turn, straight into the hardening concrete and I am rather suspicious that this may prove a disaster, and indeed it would have been were we have been planning on turning left.  But as it was, the right lane make progress and soon, we’d made the light and surmounted the pivotal turn left on Tian Bei Lu. 

Now the fish tank was aerated and soon we were speeding along across the familiar path till I was telling the river to drop us off at the number six entrance.  Inside I took my daughter over to the gold partner check in and only later when the lady asked if my daughter was platinum or gold and I told her silver that she pointed out that was in fact wanting for any sort of metallurgical distinction. Oh, right.  It’s her.  Admonition transmitted to me, she finished the check in without a blink and we made our way over to the bank.

I couldn’t resist the urge to remind my daughter that it would all be rather different when she was traveling on her own.  She acknowledged this and I think we both felt we’d tapped this theme’s utility for just now.  On to the ATM, then.  “Here, don’t use all of this.  It’s for emergencies.”  I know she’ll be conservative with it.   Much more so than I ever would have been at the same age. “Oh, we forgot to get the yellow departure card.  Shall we go back to the check in lady?”  “I can just get one out at immigration.”  “You sure you’re OK with that?  We could go back over?”  “Nah, I’m good.”  “Do you have a pen?”  “Let me check.  Yep.  This should work.”  “OK.  Well.  Shoot me a note when you get through immigration, OK?”  “Sure.”  “OK.  I love you.  I’ll miss you.” “I’ll miss you too.”  “Be a good guest.”  “OK”.  We wave.  She walks thirty feet and waves.  Another few seconds and she waves again.  And again.  And then the escalator carriers her downward.  And it occurs to me that she never used to be that way when I dropped her off at middle school.

Monday 4/30/18

Time to Be a Fang

My paternal name is a reasonably rare one.  People in France pronounce it correctly.   Some Fargis hail from Exideuil, in south western part of the country.   I was fortunate enough to meet two of my distant relatives who live in St. Germain de Salabre, not far from Bordeaux.  This was two summers back.  They have an idyllic farm and hosted us all for a remarkable dinner even though we arrived rather late.  Americans have always pronounced it with grating hard “g.” 

But one name’s enough.  I’m quite happy with the one I was born with.  Never thought of needing another one until, like most people who make plans to be in China for more than a few weeks, you get a Chinese name.  My teacher back in 1993 took my given name, and embellished the traditional Chinese way of Sinosizing “John”, yue han and suggested that I be yue hai, or ‘across the ocean.’  Like most foreigners who near such things but have next to no context this sounded just fine to me at the time.  I was about to cross the ocean.  Let’s do that then. 

And, as I’ve suggested to many, many people over the years, nearly every Chinese person I met thought this was an outstanding name.    The woman who would be come my wife, laid it out for me clearly: “You sound like you sell fruit on the street.  It’s a dumb name.  Drop the ‘ocean.’  You . . . across, is just fine.  That’s all you need.”  Well, who was I to argue with unvarnished candor.  Me, across, is what it’ll be then.  And so, it has been.  To this day, only my brother-in-law persists in calling me yue-hai.  I used to take exception, but now I kinda love it.

This teacher there in Middlebury Vermont, also afforded me a family name:  Fang.  This is not pronounced like the incisor on a puff adder but rather more like the Cantonese spelling “Fong.” While not as rare as Fargis, Fang is certainly one of the less well represented of the old-hundred-surnames.  And it was with great pleasure today that I met another Fang. 

Mr. Fang and I met at Starbucks with the mutual friend who introduced us and we spent most of the time talking business.  But I couldn’t’ help but point out to him that we “shared” a surname, which is ceremonially significant in China, were it to actually be really my own.  Mr. Fang shared with me the story of the name which I was very glad to learn about. 

Apparently the most famous of the Fang’s was Fang Xiaoru, an imperial scholar who was aghast that the Ming Emperor Yongle had usurped the throne and the proper filial line from the prince, his brother’s son.  Fang Xiaoru made it clear to the Yongle Emperor that this was a Confucian sacrilege.  As we might expect, the thin-skinned usurper, had Fang, his family and his friends and relatives and neighbors all killed.  It was, as my new friend suggested, a tough time to be a Fang and many people dropped the character “square” as a result. 

I’d always thought of the Yongle emperor as the grand guy in the yellow robes from the famous painting that hangs in Taipei and once toured the Met, in New York.  He was the man who had sent Zheng He out on his great many voyages to announce to the world that the Middle Kingdom ruled by Han Chinese, was back.  The barbarian Mongols had been overthrown.  I had no idea he’d been so despicable to my adopted ancestors. 

Sunday 4/29/18

Avoiding An Intersection

My man has waited four hours.  That’s a long time. “I just waited four hours to pick you up and now we’re heading to the next neighborhood over . . . do you believe that?”  Is what my man said.  Indeed, I expected he would say something like that.  And with nearly robotic precision, I reply, “hey, the service is good, I’ll definitely tip ya’.”  And then it’s hard to tell just what the response will be.  Some guys keep quiet.  Some guys go on grumbling.  This gent decided to broadcast the news to all his chums, still waiting in line.  “I have a foreign friend, who is only going to the New Convention Center.  But he says he will tip me, so I am very happy.”  If only it was always this easy to flip the switch from sour to sweet.

It’s five thirty in the morning so who knows how indicative either of us are of anything.  I check my wallet which is still full of yen, to make sure I have enough renminbi to follow through on my generous offer.  I do.  I broke off from a dinner to head to the Haneda airport at midnight last night.  Like Lennon my mind was on the blink, but I managed to hear the broadcast with my name suggesting it was last call.  I don’t usually fly Hainan Airlines but these certainly weren’t four hours I was going to savour.  I dutifully opened my book and woke up as we landed. 

Riding along now down the airport service road.  We landed at Terminal Two which means we’ll be taking a different way home than usual.  Off to my right are the warehouses of logistics companies like SF Express, who must have inherited that building from someone else, whom Schumpeter hasn’t been so kind to.  Has EMS had a hard time of late?  They were always a major player, right?  Their building over there looks shuttered.  Perhaps they’ve moved.

“Well turn right here and avoid the intersection.”  “Fine with me.” I confirm.  But even in Chinese that phrase makes me think of my maternal grandma.  We were driving along Route 9 one time and went right through the Ulster Savings Bank to avoid the intersection where the light was red and the traffic was backed up.  A cop pulled my own sweet grandmother over and gave her a ticket for “avoiding an intersection.”  She was furious, all the more so, I suppose, as I was standing there wide-eyed.  I suppose we should be glad he didn’t cuff her and throw her up against the car.  The cops may send tickets in the mail here for violations, but I’m certain that unless we collide with someone or ghost-ride-the-whip in Tiananmen, no one in a Beijing cruiser is going to stop this guy for anything.

It’s too early for the Auto Show traffic that cost me dearly on my way out.  I and everyone else that lives in this neighborhood dearly wishes the circus would move on from our town.

Saturday 4/28/18

Long Fast on Fermented

It was Japan’s fault.  I’ll blame it on Japan.  I’d made it four months or so without any meat.  Last night I had steak tartar.  Tonight, I had sushi.  As I recall I was with precisely the same friend whom I’d broke a long fast on fermented beverages, a few years back, here in town, as well. 

Something about the thought of apres work in Tokyo makes routines like tea-tolling and vegetarianism particularly challenging.  Indeed it isn’t so much the reality of sitting down to dine, but rather the anticipation of what that process will be like.  There will be dimly lit, wooden environments with notably tasteful hard-bop playing just so, up above. And someone else will order and they will suggest something they are giddy about trying. 

And so, it was.  We made our way upstairs to a window seat at Severo.  A CEO we were to meet had chosen the place.  He was running late.  My friend drew my attention to the refinement of the tight little environment that couldn’t have seated more than ten people. He needn’t have.  The waiters seemed more like guilded artisans as one and then another traded seemingly weighty ideas with my colleague.  “I’ve ordered Champaign.” He mentioned.  We toasted and considered our decades of shared history as the beef-ologist wheeled over a tray with five remarkable cuts of beef on a mirrored tray. “I’ll follow your lead.”  Tartar in Japan sounds as safe as it does delicious.  Raw tends to work just fine in Tokyo. 

Any country has tastes you can only sample there. But Japan may well have more than most.  Certainly, sushi and sashimi and ramen and even tongkatsu just don’t taste the same anywhere else.  But it’s not just the local flavors that are dreamy but the local environments, and the local rituals that all reinforce a culinary pattern.  And during the day in Tokyo, my routine is almost always to do meeting after meeting after meeting.  These meetings are unsurprisingly, mostly in Japanese.  And I down a double shot of espresso before just about every appointment so that I don’t impolitely zone off into oblivion as others discuss and I follow, childlike.  After the last meeting, the body is craving an antidote to the caffeinated propulsion that’s seen you, jet lagged, this far.  I’m sure it’s different if you live here.  But visiting it tends to be, as Elliot Smith used to say, the ‘last stop for a resolution.’

Friday, 4/27/18