the mysteries of the world
come to you in a living light
that breathes as you breathe
infused with your own thoughts
yet outlined as some distant place
or thing

-- the Tao Te Ching, Ch.47

>>><<<

I subsequently found myself six hours early for my reserved flight – the bus trip not having been quite the overhaul of a trip I thought it would be. I read though a dozen chapters of the Tao Te Ching and brushed up on Chinese greetings. Finally, two hours before the flight, the line opened up to accept departures. Baggage check and currency exchange, and I was ready for take-off…on a plane that would not board for another hour and a half…a little more Tao Te Ching and some new Chinese phrases.

Once aboard the plane and in my seat, I felt my head begin to spin from the foreigness, in a few brief encounters with Chinese people on the way to the gate and on the plane. I had almost forgotten what it was like to step into a new world, where gestures, facial expressions, words – in short, language and custom – is back in the unfamiliar; it’s a feeling like having all that you have finally grown comfortable with in your ‘adult’ world taken away from you, sending you back to a time of confusion, curiosity and mimicry. I began immediately to curl up into a safe ball of Japanese and overt formality, but these would be useless now outside of their cultural domain. At least some English broke the unfamiliarity every now and then – and when all else failed, Japanese kanji (former Chinese characters) look just enough like Chinese for me to convince myself that I got a gist of what I was looking at. But the waves of auditory speech were invasive, and I had to remind myself a couple of times that Japanese had once been the same to me only a few years before.

In any case, I quickly relaxed into the mere joy of the act of travel, as nomads do, and that was about when I met the man who had been sitting behind me. He said he was originally German (although his English was impeccably British) and that he had been living in Shanghai for three years now, spending another year somewhere in there to conduct sociological research for Tokyo University. He was a lawyer, on business now in returning from Kyoto to attend a meeting in Beijing the following day. He spoke as though he were forty (thought I had assumed a decade younger) in mentioning his French wife and two children living back in Shanghai. We happily admitted the complexity of second (now beginning third) language acquisition – he kept wanting to use Chinese in Japan, and I had an obvious counter tendency. He gave me his name as we parted ways at the arrivals exit, I having caught sight of a sign with my name on it held by a naturally pretty Chinese girl, who smiled as I nodded to her. I cannot for the life of me recall his name now.

The girl was named Rosa. It is common for many Chinese who work in international realtions to have an English name that perhaps most people are able to remember (and say) with greater ease than their original. Rosa had chosen a Spanish name, however, and sure enough she spoke seemingly fluent Spanish. Her first smile, and every one that folowed, was highly contagious, and I quickly relieved myself of my tensions into her care. She asked a couple dozen or so questions throughout the private taxi trip to the international hotel, simultaneously revealing a good deal of her own background in the process. She had never been outside the country, despite her apparent mastery of Spanish and decently conversational grasp of English. She had been working as of nowtour guide / interpreter, and was sure to point out some of the interesting details of the places she had ssumed I (and the group I had yet to meet) would visit tomorrow.

All the while, I peered out my window into the Beijing nighttime setting. I was taken back by a familiarity to my American home -- it was as though someone had instead flown me into Nashville, Tennessee, just after changing the highway signs and building titles into Chinese characters and measurements. Sizes, shapes, all felt familiar in this way. The driver side, even, was loacted on the left side, forcing me to mentally switch from an alreadly accustomed prior switch to the right, remaining all the same a switch to a sort of familiarity.
Having said goodbye to Rosa and found my hotel room, I stared outside over the almost city outskirts of Chicago. The hotel room resembled the middle-class suburban interior I once knew in the houses of Shreveport, Louisiana. Am I just seeking surface, or am I projecting surface to cover up the phenomenon of homogenized difference, I thought to myself. Probably both. I wondered what I would see by tomrrow to warp my mind yet again.

>>><<<

when his heart and mind are uplifted
he feels
that dreams are far more tangible
than waking truths

-- ibid, Ch.49