10:35 pm. En route to Taiwan. Flippin' my shit in SFO, passing the time watching HBO's In Treatment, trying to cry discreetly into my sweatshirt over a kid asking Gabriel Byrne to take him in, away from his divorcing parents, puzzling over my anxiety, nay, tremulous guilt, about leaving my two...
cats.
"Paging for passenger...Lee Lee...Lee?" As in, full name. Full stop. Li-li Li.
Seriously.
...
It's a double-decker flight, and I'm stuck in the back, and in the middle of the row. Where is the justice? It only occurs to me later, in the waiting area, that I should have insisted that I had a UTI or claustrophobia or something.
Whooping cough. Ebola. Cat scratch fever. A yeast infection.
And the inevitable tropes: a journey to a distant land, a long-awaited homecoming, an overbearing mother, tinny, incessant Christmas music ("Walking in a Winter Wonderland), the panting misery of a grinchy anti-hero(ine).
One of my ex-students, now a sophomore in college, had dismissed China Airlines as "ghetto." And...it is. A lavender nightmare, the pale purple...purple on purple, purple blankets and periwinkle pillows.
My brain's already starting to scramble with the constant, disorienting input of Chinese over the P.A. system. I think maybe this partial fluency is worse than incompetence. I'm unable to let the words wash like sounds, and my ear's constantly searching for meaning between the words and phrases I don't know.
Then there's the anticipatory fear of the blowout with my mother--the battle royal inevitable like the tide, like death and taxes--compounded with anxiety about meeting relatives and their expectations.
And did you know that, according to Peter Jon Lindberg, only 28% of Americans possess passports? This seems to me an absurdly small number.
...
My mom sent me an email earlier, making the following request: "Could you buy only one bottle of 'XO' liquid for me on THE DUTY FREE SHOP ON THE PLANE if possible."
And I don't know if this is particular to East Asian travel, and I believe it can be linked to Chinese/Korean/Japanese traditions of gift-giving and hospitality gifts, but there are the trolleys of duty-free wares, one for cosmetics (化妝品 = hua4 zuang1 ping3) and perfumes (香水 = xiang1 sui3), another for cigarettes, and a third for various liquors.
The Taiwanese etiquette is not quite as rigorous as they are for other cultures, I think--my friend's sister got a chastising call to her mom when she left her wallet in the cab to her aunt's house in Korea and was thus unable to bring a gift--but I've got to make a good impression, and so XO it is. I flag down the flight attendant; alas, the XO "liquid" has sold out, and I settle for Matisse whisky because it's somewhat comparable in price.
And we all know that's the most important thing--its monetary value.
***
Disembark, and scurry to the labyrinthine, winding lines to get past immigration. Luck of the draw, I get to stand in front of two douchey Taiwanese boys who are attending college in New York, and I'm serendipitously regaled with one DB's loud assertions of how many black friends he has and the other DB's cautioning him against dropping the soap in the shower.
What?
I did not know that black men and anal rape was a cultural convention, and far be it for me to disabuse these two experts.
And I dunno what it is, my massive hiking bag, a change in elevation, extreme jet-lag, or a panic attack, but I'm shuffling along, light-headed and in a cold sweat, about to pass out as I stumble up to Ho Hsin's long-haul bus counter. I purchase a ticket, the agent gracious in his response to my rusty Mandarin, and I gratefully accept his offer of water...
then deposit my stuff in the waiting area to make a phone call to my aunt and uncle to tell them I've arrived in Taipei.
But it doesn't work.
Why?
Because, in an unforeseen turn of events, the Jamaican J is not accepted in public pay phones in the Republic of China.
This is fucking untenable.
