As I prepare to go to China, I am James Bond—always comfortable
in any new culture. The first morning in
Istanbul he orders breakfast: research—I find the screenplay of From Russia With Love. I am getting
better at this—it takes less than a minute to find what I am looking for. “Breakfast
for one at nine please. Green figs, yoghurt, coffee, very black.” I seem to
remember that in the movie the coffee is ordered “double sweet.” That is how we drank it in the Arab section
of Jerusalem during the summer of ’69.
Unfortunately, mirrors interrupt. I am not James Bond, but an overweight,
over-the-hill adjunct professor of English without enough money to do Beijing
right.
China has been, for some time, on my reverse bucket list—things
I know I will never do before I die. The
first: be a member of the United States Olympic Soccer team—a dream that died
around 1971. Sleep with a Playboy Bunny—also
1971; become President of the United States—1980; Justice of the Supreme Court
of the United States—1991. In fairness to me, I have completed the New York City Marathon, and eaten croissants for
breakfast in Paris (although I did not think that at age 16 it would be the
last time).
I am approaching the age at which Ernest Hemingway
died. I am nearly two Charlie Parkers
and more than two James Deans.
The NorthPole! An unexpected, incidental reverse bucket list
item. I watch the flight tracker on the monitor
in front of my seat on the Boeing 777:
Due north from Detroit, across Hudson Bay and Greenland; the latitude
rising from 85 to 87 to 89; the heading still due north. There it is: 90 degrees north latitude,
heading north, and suddenly, heading south.
I move to the window. The midnight
sun is blinding. Nothing below but
clouds and pure white. I don't know what I was expecting-- a pole, maybe, like a one thousand foot flag pole. Yet –research again—Robert
Peary only knew he had reached the North Pole in 1909 by consulting his sextant
and other navigational instruments. Plus, I had never wanted to go to either
Pole anyway—too difficult—being here at 38,000 feet, sipping a Dewar’s White
Label (the flight attendants did not have Johnny Walker Black), is fine with
me.
Stirred, not shaken, I anticipate Siberia and then
Mongolia. Who am I kidding? This comfortable seat might as well be the
couch in my living room, where the view from the television set is better than
what can be seen for real from 38,000 feet.
* * * *
Continue with arriving alone in the
middle of the night in Beijing, trying to communicate with a taxi driver—thinking
I will be sleeping on the street—learning that "Oy" is the same in
all languages.
This is fun—but it is not me; not my
style. I am annoyed at Root’s
assumptions: that linear presentation creates “insidious" demands; that “in an
age of increasingly shorter attention spans” readers have “little patience for
leisurely development of plot and character and theme;” that “associations that
come so readily in the memory and in the imagination often defy simple
linearity.”
And there was a natural disaster
movie based on the movement of a glacier—it was called “Ethan Frome.”
* * * *
Free write in class: I know I am going to have to select vignettes
from China. I want to include getting
ripped off by the young woman who invited me to a tea ceremony; the Great Wall
was interesting, but maybe not for this piece, the theme of which is a middle
aged man pretending that he is still young enough for adventure. Meeting new
friends from France—a mathematics professor and his wife—not really, they are
not married—with whom I had breakfast every day. Certainly, I want to talk about traveling
every day by subway from Peking University where I was staying, to various
neighborhoods to walk by myself to explore. The issue is to select those incidents
that reflect upon my semi mid-life crisis.
Every time I write “midlife” or middle-aged” I am keenly aware that I am
past even that—I need a word for what I am—not exactly old but past mid-life.
The food—I do want to talk about how
surprising the food in Beijing was. The name
of the place—used to be Peking, then BayPing, now Beijing. How about the pronunciation of Chinese—four tones
create subtleties that change the meaning of the word. “Jie” is street if you pronounce it one way,
but something entirely different if you vary slightly. I kept asking for “Mao” and was met with puzzled
looks, but if I said MOWZEEDOONG quickly, I was immediately understood. I practiced and practiced to get “thank you”
right—initially it was like “shay shay” but it is really “tshayuh tshayuh.” Peking duck was served just as I know it in
New York, but most of the rest of the food was nothing like what we are used to
in Chinese restaurants.
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