Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

Every real trip has to involve something going wrong. It could be minor and it could be major, but unless something happens I always find myself in fear of a deadly crash on the way home. Fortunately, I got most of my difficulties out of the way on the first day of my trip to Beijing.

I would have preferred to take the fast train to Beijing, but my school was paying for the plane ticket; as it happened, the train probably would’ve been faster if not safer. You see, the night before I left Zhengzhou, it started to snow. By the time the taxi arrived in the morning to take me to the airport, I could hardly walk without falling over thanks to the ice on the sidewalk.

The highway was closed with lines of trucks in both directions, so he had to take the country road; this is the one that had random piles of construction materials in the middle of it this summer. This time, the taxi didn’t have to drive over any hills of dirt or debris, nor did it pass any roadkill. Instead, it passed three jackknifed trucks and one that had merely skidded off the road into a ditch. The driver of the latter was sitting calmly in the cab drinking tea from a thermos and waiting (I assume) for a tow. The car also spun out at one point.

Still, the driver got me to the airport (though he had to drop me off at arrivals as the ramp to departures was closed). I only had an hour before my flight by that point, but it wasn’t yet listed on any of the boards, as these were still full of the morning’s flight listed variously as delayed or canceled. In fact, at this point no one was even being checked in or allowed past security. Nor were there many airline personnel around to supply information.

Eventually an attendant told me that my flight might be leaving three hours after it was scheduled. After a couple hours, this departure time showed on the board as well. But by that point, they would’ve needed to start checking us in, and the screens over the counters were only showing the morning flight to Beijing; I tried anyway and was told to return later. About ten minutes before the flight was supposedly leaving, my flight flashed on the screens. I checked in and was told to hurry. Of course, this wasn’t exactly possible given that they had only started letting people through security less than an hour earlier. And, in fact, the flight didn’t begin boarding for another half hour.

We waited for another half hour after everyone was on board and went through the de-icer, but the rest of the trip to Beijing was smooth. Once I got into Beijing, pushed through the swarm of rickshaw drivers who met the airport bus, and figured out the subway, I had a little trouble. You see, when I got off at Qianmen, I found that construction had closed off most of the roads on my map, so I had to ask directions to the hutong where my hostel was located.

I did find it eventually. It was clean and offered cheap beer but had a major lack of insulation with weak electrical heaters in the rooms and bar. For this reason– and because it didn’t get above freezing outside the whole time I was there– I didn’t wash my hair once during the week.

(More about Beijing later when I defeat the Flickr demons and finish uploading the images.)

EDIT: Apparently it’s a good thing I left when I did.

While few figures are as worthy of remembrance as Martin Luther King Jr., I always worry about this sort of commemorative day.  When we go too far in idealizing a human being, it has the affect of discouraging people in the present day from striving to be as great.  It creates an image of perfection or near perfection that those who would wish to do good believe they cannot live up to.  It also creates an excuse for those who hesitate to do the right thing.

The other concern I have about such days is that the very institutionalization of the memory of a radical leader is often a form of silencing: the most threatening (to the status quo) portions of their messages are excised, made invisible.  (See Adam Howard’s article on going beyond the “I Have a Dream speech”.) It is the same thing that happens to many outside writers when they are brought into the canon.

I touched down at SeaTac with a terrible case of jetlag yesterday evening.  This was only somewhat mitigated by the fact that I had managed to get a little bit of sleep on the flight from Beijing despite the man behind me who insisted on tugging on my seat every time he got up to use the bathroom (and, given that every time the flight attendants passed by he asked for beer, this was rather often).

My first flight had landed at SFO, and I was immediately shocked by the blue sky (minus the pollution that often makes it safe to look at the sun with your naked eyes in China) and the warm air (it didn’t get above freezing the whole time I was in Beijing).  During my layover, I found that I had to remind myself that I didn’t need to crowd up right behind the person in front of me in line and that I did need to throw toilet paper into the bowl rather than into the trash beside it.  When I passed through the security checkpoint for the domestic terminal, I also found once again that US airport security seemed far more absurd and repressive than Chinese airport security.  In China, you don’t have to take off your shoes; domestic flights allow liquids of any size in your carry-on.  If you set off the metal detector, they quickly and unobtrusively wand you.  In San Francisco, I heard security guards demanding that baseball caps and sunglasses be sent through the X-ray machine.

Once I feel a bit more awake and manage to edit my photographs, I’ll provide more details about my experiences in Beijing and the most frightening taxi ride I have ever experienced.  In the meantime, you can read these three poems in the current issue of Philament.

The Ecstasy: I’ve completed my grades, turned them in to the department secretary, obtained the dean’s signature, and given the requisite paperwork to the foreign affairs office.

The Agony: I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to complete my grading only to find (after a much abbreviated sleep) that the department secretary would not be in his office until 4 PM. By the time 3:30 came around, a chilly misty morning had turned into an afternoon of freezing rain with especially slick curbs and steps. I even managed to fall once (fortunately, I landed on a well-padded portion of my behind).

What really worries me, however, is that the weather shows signs of continuing to worsen, and I have a flight tomorrow to Beijing. At least I didn’t give in to my usual need to start my travels as early as possible; an early-afternoon flight is much less likely to have trouble than an early-morning one.