Rick Simonson

To Beijing: I Think There Was an Ocean Down There
January 9, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO to BEIJING, Friday, January 4/Saturday, January 5

Before being in Beijing, there is getting there. Getting there should be part of the fun, a twelve-hour flight notwithstanding.

While I had never been to China, I had also not been to San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore in nearly four years. Don't ask me ... it's a very favorite place, too seldom gotten to. Once it was clear that someone thought it wise - even after we'd been part of a panel together in Miami - that Paul and I be entrusted to do quasi-public things together again, we decided to make a trip of it that way. In planning this all out, it seemed a nice thing, to fly down the day before going over, perhaps to land, park things at Paul's house, see the store, maybe a little Italian dinner in North Beach. Such was the plan.

It also was a sort of byproduct of all this, that I had this odd anticipation of seeing the Pacific Ocean. Seattle sits on an inland arm - Puget Sound - and is a two-hour drive away from open water. While I had seen the Atlantic four different times in 2007 - feeling it figured in some fateful way with each of those journeys - I hadn't seen the Pacific in almost exactly a year-and-a-half, since flying out of Los Angeles on a beautiful July Saturday midday, after a memorably nice, somewhat surprising visit there.

The plan to see ocean ... to see City Lights, North Beach, and any of San Francisco, save a nice little house in the south part of the city was all blown away by the first wave of the big storm that people everywhere would know hit California - and much of the rest of the west coast. The Thursday flight to San Francisco was three hours late in arriving - longer than the flight itself generally takes. It was dark, too dark to see water below, even as I knew we were in one of those circle patterns waiting to land at SFO. At least, in the landing, the wind and storm had abated.

And it was still good and wonderful to be there, once there. Some good home-cooked food kept warm, a little champagne, some travel checklists reviewed, new heavy coats compared, the improbability of all this contemplated. Paul's wife, the writer Sara Chin, seemed bemused by it all, and was certainly supportive. She is a very seasoned, worldwide traveler. This was Paul's first trip anywhere outside the US, not counting back in toddler times. Part of his scramble was getting a passport.

Sometime in the night, one could hear the wind pick up - it howled. Once we were all up, readying for morning departure, there was no word anywhere on possible flight delays. You knew it would be so, but couldn't take the chance. Out through driving, blowing rain we rode - water standing in places on the freeway. At the terminal, it was a long, long line for check-in. Those bound for Beijing were hustled through, as if departure might be imminent. It made for a bit of breathlessness (Lance Fensterman of Book Expo called in the middle of it all, himself in LA, hoping we were excited ... we were, but, we had to get checked in first.

Because of high winds, planes couldn't open supply or luggage doors. It looked like almost total shutdown. 11 am departure became an eventual 3 pm takeoff. Once airborne, we tracked back north, working to get out of this ferocious storm. Smooth flying it was not. Going by the map occasionally shown on the screen I think we were soon back where I started (over Seattle), before wending west and over water. By that time, however, it was all darkness out.

A twelve-hour plane ride is a twelve-hour plane ride. Paul had never had anything longer than about a six-hour flight, and I maybe one or two around 8 hours. Time passed. We both had novels (different ones) by Yu Hua going. I kept trying to figure out the phrasebooks, wrapped my mind around a few basic Chinese characters. And we both, being the type, kept perusing maps. It was less of one kind of a reading than usual on a flight, but a lot more of another.

Hours along and up for a walk, there was a moment of looking down and seeing the twinkling lights of some cluster of community below, a common enough site from years of doing red-eye cross-country flights across the US. It hit me after a time, though ... this was not Bismarck, ND, or Des Moines, or even a Chicago we might be flying over ... this had to be somewhere in Manchuria.

In time, about three hours late, our plane landed. Entry was not a whole lot different than any other flight. A clerk or two stamped paperwork, luggage was retrieved, more stamping was done, money was obtained, and like that, we were out into the very brisk Beijing night.

A remarkable young woman, Huang Xinping, was watiing for us. A reporter at China Publishing Today, she had done most of the corraling and organizing of us waywardly, independent types, making sure we'd all gotten flights and visas done, trying to get December-distracted ones such as we focused enough to get the 6,000+ miles to Beijing, and then to have some coherent things to say.

Paul and I were the first ones in, by almost two whole days. Little did Xinping know ... She got a cab and joined us for the ride to our hotel.

It was dark, it was cold, I seemed to be missing a day (Friday morning had somehow become Saturday night), and I hadn't seen any ocean to save me, but it was becoming more and more apparent that we were Somewhere Else.

Posted by Rick Simonson on January 9, 2008 | Comments (1)