Escape From Yangzhou
Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, China
– Chinese proverb
“Your bikes are ready!” Miss Jane shouted as she cornered Craig and me like frightened rats at the top of the stairs.
She, who had been our guide for last three days, was the most unappealing Chinese woman I had ever met–even Craig hated her. Her body, fat by Asian standards, was shaped like a lumpy pear. Her botched shag haircut and crooked tea-stained fangs were as equally disturbing. When she nodded her pumpkin head, her double chin giggled; her bug-eyes bulged behind her black, crudely built Chinese glasses.
It was 3:30 in afternoon in Yangzhou, a humid city in the Jiangsu province of eastern China. We had just dismissed our students for the day and were trying, unsuccessfully, to sneak out of the school. Our escape plan was simple: we were going to leave China without telling anyone and never come back.
“Your bikes are ready!” Jane clucked again, unaware of how close she came to being thrown down the three flights of stairs by either of the two undistinguished visiting “English experts.”
“Ready for what?” I asked, no longer trying to hide my irritation with her or anything Chinese.
“Uh, driver, he not come no more. Ride bikes from hotel now.”
Part of our tactic was to keep moving, but Jane simply followed us down the stairs. Her head never seemed to stop nodding: yes, yes, yes, yes. This constant movement, this relentless affirmation of nothing, was, I decided, an expression of Chinese willfulness and hope. It was the manifestation of the belief that pushiness alone could compensate for any lack of forethought or intelligent plan.
I imagined our bike ride in hell, through the crowded and polluted city, over the four-lane bridge spanning the great river, into the run-down suburbs, down the back-alley shortcut, past the muddy fields that stank of human feces, to the gated school that resembled a concentration camp. It would take at least forty-five minutes if we rode hard, avoided getting run over, and did not drop from heat stroke. A two-hour lunch break meant four trips per day, approximately three hours a day peddling crappy Chinese bikes for the next two weeks.
“Dude,” I whispered to Craig when we reached the bottom of the stairs, “we are so fucking out of here.”
We had traveled to China, volunteering to teach English for a month through an extended education program at school back home. The PRC needed modernize and we were there to help. I had talked Craig into coming by assuring him that the course load would be light, the food excellent, and the living easy. The Chinese would, in fact, treat us like kings. If we were lucky, we would find an Asian publisher for our writing workbooks and maybe we would meet some pretty Chinese girls.
Of course this was all fantasy, created by the program director, Sharon Zu, and me. The entire setup was a third-world boondoggle. Even before we left for China I had raised some concerns and was promptly labeled a troublemaker – which, I guess, in the end I turned out to be.
Once in Nanjing, our Chinese hosts were as equally inept as the extended education administrators back home. After the welcoming ceremony, they divided our team of four teachers into two without warning and to sent us to different towns. Getting whisked off to our assignment in the back seat of a black sedan felt like an abduction. Craig kept saying, “Shanghaied in Nanjing, bro! Shanghaied in Nanjing!”
That first hot night at the school in Yangzhou, a pack of administrators and teachers mobbed us like we were clever little monkeys on loan from an America zoo, sent there to delight and amuse. They smoked and spat and farted happily in the staff room while Craig and I struggled to come up with five hours of lesson plans for the following day’s classes. None of the equipment worked – not even the pencils. What should have taken two minutes took hours.
This did not stop our hosts from having high expectations for the state-of-the-art English language program we there to implement. The only problem was that no such program existed. To make things worse, instead of teaching a one forty-five minute class a day to four different classes, we found out were going to teach one class five hours a day. Sitting humidity, with the cruddy equipment, with the unrealistic expectations, and with so many eyes looking over my shoulder I became slightly hysterical. When I tried to get Jane to translate to whomever was in charge that they had created an unacceptable working situation, she did not bother relaying my message anyone. Instead she looked at me and with that dumb nod said, “You work harder now, yes?”
This reply, I realized, was the solution to every Chinese problem. Any poorly thought out plan could simply be compensated for with more effort and sacrifice on the part of the subordinates carrying out the plan. Jane was a doofus, but without words, she managed to convey the following warning: America monkey caught in trap now. The sooner monkey accept the Chinese way of doing thing, the better off monkey will be.
Standing there, dirty and dazed, yet understanding everything–the bogus teaching program, the hell that was China, and myself–I was overcome with emotion. Coming here, my intentions had been mostly innocent and mostly pure, and now I was going to fuck everything up. I actually felt sorry for my cloddish and bullying Chinese hosts, who seemed so pleased at the sight of their pet monkeys working so hard. They had no way of knowing that there could be no acceptance of their brutish and clumsy logic, only an inappropriate fight or flight response.
The VW Santana pulled up to the Hotel Zhichuang. Craig and I jumped out, relived to have finally escaped Jane and the school. The old high-rise in the center of town had been our home for the last two nights and now we were leaving forever. During our short stay here, I had been unable to eat any of the food they had tried to serve me, and I had changed my room three times: the shower hadn’t worked in the first room, the lights in the second, the air conditioning in the third. Of course, I was being unreasonable. This was China, after all. Nothing quite worked and thank you very much for your understanding.
As we ran up to the hotel lobby, shame and guilt overwhelmed me. I was willingly abandoning my students, who were mostly sweet, bright Chinese kids, hungry to learn. I was jumping ship like a Lord Jim in Levis, and it broke my heart.
But I knew I had to keep moving; I had to get the out of China. To stay was to die. I felt this. There would be time for emotion and sentiment later. I had the rest of my life to feel like an asshole.
The sight the school’s principal, Mr. Lim, waiting for us in the lobby stunned Craig and me like a kick to the face. Here we thought that were the clever monkeys, beating the Chinese at their own little game, but once again, they had outsmarted us. We looked at each other in sweaty, wide-eyed horror.
“Please sit down,” Mr. Lim said, pointing to a torn green vinyl couch.
“No, we’re fine,” Craig said, as we sidestepped our way toward the elevators.
“No, please.” Mr. Lim moved from the counter, toward us now.
“Really. We’re fine. But thanks!” We quickened our pace, but so did he, angling in on us like a linebacker about to make a tackle.
“Please!”
“Very tired! Gotta go!”
He was running now with an awkward side-to-side, waving his arms and hissing, his dark, tired Chinese eyes sparkling with fury. Spreading his arms wide like Jesus, he blocked the elevators and screamed, “YOU PREASE SITTING DOWN!”
I cringed and felt a stir of childhood emotions: the nervous fussiness that was my body’s response to the threat of violence. I knew, from many fights in the schoolyard, that when the blows started to fly all emotion would drop away. But in the meantime, I was thinking, Fuck, I’m going to get in a fight with the Chinese principal!
“Dude.” Craig looked at me. “I guess he wants us to sit down.”
I followed Craig to the couch, red-lining on adrenaline. Four chubby men in stained polo shirts were already sitting, smoking and spitting happily while shouting into their cell phones. We did not sit down with them.
As Mr. Lim began to yell at the receptionists in Mandarin, I realized he knew nothing about our planned escape. He was only here to address the complaints-about the food, the lodgings, and the working conditions–I had made to the coordinator, Peter Pu, earlier that day. He was just trying to fix a problem. But there was no fixing the problem; there was no fixing China.
“Please stop yelling at her,” I said. Since we were escaping in a few minutes, I didn’t think he needed to berate these young Chinese women, who, despite the poor service of the hotel, were really nice to us.
Mr. Lim dismissed me with judo chop through the air and kept on shouting. He was going to help us even if we didn’t want help. This, of course, was so Chinese – the act of helping someone was a chance to assert authority.
“This is not what we want,” I groaned, but Mr. Lim wasn’t listening.
Frustrated, I leaned closer to get his attention, a gesture that horrified the girls working behind the counter. I knew what they were thinking: Why was this big nose getting involved in Chinese business? Didn’t I realize that things were done a certain way in China? Mr. Lim needed to yell at them, they would promise to resolve the problem, and then nothing would be resolved. Why was that so hard to understand?
“You want KFC?” Mr. Lim asked us.
“No,” Craig said, cringing and shaking his head. “We want O-U-T.”
This request confounded Mr. Lim and receptionists: Was O-U-T some new brand of American fast food?
Craig, obviously inspired by their confusion, smiled and put his hand on Mr. Lim’s narrow shoulders. “Mr. Lim, there has been a great misunderstanding. This morning we told our boss the food was not very good when we first got here, but the food is very good now.” Craig rubbed his own stomach. “Everything is fine now. Chinese food very good.” A twinkle had come into his eyes. He was pleased like a happy puppy excited to see its master.
While Mr. Lim tried to process Craig’s blatant but friendly lie, we started moving. When Lim was too far away to catch us, we ran for the elevator, which had just reached the first floor. We rushed past an old Chinese businessman and his young beautiful girlfriend as they stepped out. We waved and smiled through the closing doors. “Bye, see you tomorrow!”
It was Mr. Lim’s chance to look stunned and confused. A thousand questions surely must have raced through his mind. What was with these so-called English experts? How could country as strong as America create such weak and stupid people? And what brand of chicken was O-U-T?
The elevator was hot and stuffy. It smelled of old cigarettes and Chinese poop breath. Normally I might have pointed this out, but that afternoon we made the ride up in silence.
“Do you want to stay?” Craig asked when we reached our floor and the doors opened.
“Are you serious?”
“Of course not, you idiot.” He shook his head with disgust and left me in the elevator.
Ten minutes later, I was in his room watching him pack. Since my clothes were being laundered, I had decided to leave them, a gift to those I was letting down. That didn’t mean I was traveling light. When Craig noticed my empty suitcase, he loaded me up with his souvenirs, dirty clothes, and computer equipment. I took these things without a fight because I felt responsible for putting him in this situation. However, my eagerness to please only worsened his mood. “‘Come to China, have some drinks, meet some girls!'” he mocked me as paced around the room. He was, he informed me, never listening to anything I ever said again because I was full of shit.
Instead of my normal response, which would be to attack, I sat down on the edge of the bed and gazed out the window, at a grey alien world, at the filthy high rises with their tarred rooftops and broken tiles, the snaking bands of brown rivers, and the crowded traffic that moved like whitewater, a swirl of currents and eddies. The hot room started to spin and Craig’s insults sounded as if they were coming from the hallway. Craig must have realized I was going to faint because panic replaced his look of anger. Forcing a smile, he handed me some bottled water. “Come on, bro. It’s all right. We’re a team. We can do this together. We just got to get moving. Then you’ll be fine.”
It pleased me to see him panic, revived me like a tonic. I propped myself up and willed the spinning to stop. I didn’t think we’d be fine.
We decided not to check out because we knew the hotel would report this and our hosts would attempt to stop us-of this, I was certain. For if our Chinese friends had an aptitude for anything, it was making their monkeys dance if the situation call for it. They would have no problem putting the pressure on us when the fake smile and the veiled threats didn’t do the trick. I thought, we’re outlaws now. Then, stealth and deception were the fugitive’s friends.
As we rode the elevator down for the last time, I was breathing hard, trying to calm myself. I had no idea how the hotel management would react when they saw the us leaving with our luggage. Would they call Lim? Would they notify the police? Or would they heave a sigh of relief? I just didn’t know.
I told Craig, “We just need to stick together, man.” But when the elevator doors opened, I sprinted across the lobby and out of the hotel in seconds. Down the driveway to the busy street, I ran, dragging my bag on the filthy asphalt. The sun glared as I squinted at the traffic. One taxi passed, then another. It was still very hot and the honking was constant, but the heat and the sound had no effect on me now because I finally had a purpose.
When Craig finally made it to the street, he asked, “What happened to sticking together, bro?”
The third cab stopped and a young woman got out. She was thin and wore a yellow plastic visor. She refused my offer to help load Craig’s heavy luggage in the trunk. Seeing her struggle with heavy bag touched me; it made me help her more and give her all my money. Craig took the front seat; I jumped in the back and we were off.
It felt great to be moving, to be on the fly. “Nanjing, Nanjing,” we shouted with our retarded Chinese accents.
The driver hit the brakes and the taxi stopped. “No Nanjing! No Nanjing!” she shouted back, waving us out of the car. I was afraid of this happening. We were somewhere maybe two or three hours north Nanjing. I didn’t even know if it was legal to take a cab that far across China.
Craig started waving hundred Yuen bills like he was at his favorite strip club trying to buy an expensive lap dance. Just like in the strip club, the wad of cash had the desired effect on the woman. She saw the flutter of currency and the car raced away from the curb, down the busy street.
“Nanjing, Nanjing,” she agreed, her eyes moving, trying to count the bills.
“Money no problem! More money! Money, money, money!” Craig gave her his friendliest smile and patted her shoulder. She smiled back, and everyone in the cab seemed very happy.
“Well,” I said from the back seat. “You two seem to be getting along pretty good.”
“We’re like Jews escaping Nazi Germany!”
“Monkeys breaking out of the zoo!” I shot back happily.
When we passed the turn off for the school, I felt another cramp of guilt, but this feeling could not blot out the exhilaration of flight. We rode through old suburbs and came into a newer part of the city. Construction was going on everywhere. You could feel China’s rush to progress in the air, and it didn’t feel good. It made me think of a big hungry gorilla that wanted to eat all its bananas now, and when those bananas were gone, he was going to come looking for yours and mine.
Later, we were racing through tree-lined countryside, the orange sun sinking toward the dirt-brown plains in the west. To the east there were small green fields set between rows old gray brick buildings, which, I thought, had a pleasing rustic classical Asiatic style. These buildings were a far improvement over the new construction going on everywhere, the unconvincing mimicry of the west. In fact this was nicest part of China I had seen so far. Where this was, I have no idea.
“Nanjing, zy nar?” I asked pointing south.
She said yes in Chinese and a bunch of other stuff that we didn’t understand. After that everyone was quiet for a while.
It was getting dark when we rolled up to the huge complex that was the Nanjing Hilton. Flags of the world flew; spotlights beamed into the purple sky. Walking into the lobby, burnt out from escape, the air conditioning knocked us back like a cool wave at the beach. We were two deadbeat white devils stumbling into heaven. It didn’t even smell like China in there. Standing at the front desk of the pleasant American hotel, I felt like a fragile flower returned from a hell to the safety of its greenhouse. We asked about booking a flight and were told the travel agent would return at nine the next morning, exactly 13 hours from now.
After checking in, we ate cheeseburgers and drank Heinekens in the hotel restaurant. It was the first time in three days I had eaten without wanting to vomit. We weren’t free yet, but we’d had put a respectable distance those who would stop us. Craig revived enough to flirt with the waitress. Soon another hostess came over to practice her English.
“China is better country than America because we respect family and are not selfish like United State. It good, however, for exchange between two countries for help economy. I would like car, CD player, apartment, and many nice clothes…” She droned on in bad English, spouting the latest party propaganda, starved for first world material luxuries, and completely unaware of any contradictions in her thinking.
I could see Craig undressing her with his x-ray eyes, sizing her up, wondering if he could he get into her panties. Her youth made her attractive – her black hair was thick and her white skin was supple and new. And yet she seemed oblivious to her sexuality. For some reason, this sexual innocence annoyed me, for I knew it was the product of an oppressive culture. The current trend back home of young women dressing like sluts and whores in a desperate cry for attention had left me more irritated than titillated. But this young materilistic Chinese girl’s denial of her sexuality was even more disturbing. She wouldn’t shut up either. When our waitress saw we had had enough, she waved off the young hostess.
If Craig were really horny there was always the bar downstairs with its fifty money-hungry karaoke girls (the slut fashion had come to China, too, with commerce in mind). I however was no mood for a night of shakedown tactics, the overpriced Chinese perversion of prostitution that amounted to cash for cuddles: “You give me money! More money. Please! Please! More money! More! More! More!” In these desperate and nagging imperatives, did I hear the collective desire of an entire nation?
We headed upstairs but I did not sleep. The high of our initial success wore off quickly in the dark. Even in the nice American hotel the air-conditioner did not work. The shower I took at midnight made me shiver, and then I was overheated and breathing hard again. Craig tried yelling at me to still my restlessness; he threw Ambien and dog tranquilizers at me, but medication was no match for a maniacal mind set on self-cannibalization.
Like a scratched CD I kept going over what I had done, what I was doing. Leaving this way, escaping, was all wrong, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make it right in my head. To fool yourself into doing something bad was one thing, but to be completely aware of your misdeeds and still do them was a monkey trick of a much more disturbing kind. I was not a good person. Any attempt to view myself as such was lame exercise in self-deception. Still, I tried to rationalize: it was just a canceled class; my abandoned students would probably be happy to have the two weeks off. I did not go to sleep again.
When morning finally came, Craig, to my surprise and relief, agreed to call extended education to tell them we quit. Since he had conned them all into thinking he was such a great guy, “Mr. Fun,” and I had only proved my self to be the trouble maker they had suspected me to be, I reasoned that the bad new might elicit a less hostile response coming from him.
At breakfast I had lost my appetite again. Just looking at the thin Chinese people, and smelling them, and the fat ugly Europeans eat runny eggs and duck embryos made me want to dry heave. I didn’t like staying in one place; we were begging capture. Yet there was nothing to do except wait for the travel agent to arrive. We went back to our room to pack and the phone rang.
“Don’t answer it!” I shrieked. We both stared at the phone like it was a bomb about to blow up. “Walter must have used caller ID! Dude, they knew where we are!” The ringing, ringing, ringing were knife slashes at my gut. “Goddamn it! Whose stupid idea was it to call?”
“Yours!” Craig said, looking sick again. “Idiot!”
I laughed, the way someone about to die some absurd, violent death might laugh. “This is like a haunted house movies where the house won’t let the people leave. You keep saying, ‘Get out now, while you can!’ but people don’t do it, and then the house gets their soul in the end–except the house is China!”
Craig was pacing like a penned up primate, his lips pursed. “You and your goddamn metaphors!” He threw up his arms.
“You mean me and my goddamn similes?”
“Fuck you! English people are such fags! I’m waiting downstairs!”
I found Craig hiding like a spaced-out Marine sniper in the corner of the lobby behind some fake plants, his paranoid eyes scanning the wide hotel drive. It would take our hosts at least two and a half hours to get down from Yangzhou; however there might have been someone from the program in Nanjing, maybe an program coordinator, maybe a perhaps a police officer with a dislike of Westerners, to pick us up. The hotel shuttle was leaving at eleven. Our plan, if we evaded capture until then, was to take the bus to the Shanghai airport and wait there for the next flight out.
Passing time this way was a painful exercise in endurance. My heart pounded irregularly, painfully; my vision blurred; my hands itched and ached. Craig kept telling me how shitty I looked, how much grayer my black hair had become in the last four days, and how angry, Sharon Zu, the Teach in China program director, was going to be with me.
I imagined Sharon, my mortal enemy, up in Beijing, in her five-star hotel, getting out of her big soft bed, yawning sleepily, the A/C on high. Slightly hung over after a night of partying with the Chinese elite, she would be happy because, using good old Chinese willpower, she had forced the new and profitable teaching program into being. I could hear her phone ring, see her taking the call. In my mind she was wearing a white robe and nothing else. Unlike Miss Jane, she was not an unattractive woman for her age. She would listen to Walter in disbelief. They did what? Her chest would tighten and then this tightening would spread through her entire body. There would be anger and then the inevitable flush tears. Her body would tremble with hatred and rage for me, Gary Pollitt, Asshole of the World. The receiver would shake against her ear. Then, in a moment, should would rise above these emotions; she was, after all, a leader, a Chinese leader, for that matter: iron-fisted action was the order of the day.
The key was to solve problem without emotion. In her native Mandarin tongue, for she would be thinking in Chinese now, she would tell Walter that the renegades needed to be captured and returned to their assignment. She, herself would deal with us, specifically me, once and for all. Yes, yes, Walter would agree, trying to calm his ambitious boss, before hanging up.
With the task completed some of the hardness would go out of her, and she would shift from tough leader to woman again. The last image I created, which I can see clearly now, was of her in her robe, on the floor, the phone slipping from her hand, her chest heaving deeps sobs, the tears streaming down her face.
“Dude,” Craig elbowed me into the planter I was hiding behind.
“Huh?”
“What’s wrong with you? You gonna faint again?”
“Poor Sharon,” I said.
“Poor Sharon? Poor me! You know, you really fucked up my summer, you dumbass.”
At nine-fifteen, the travel agent came to work. And we found out that we could get a plane out from Nanjing airport. I didn’t even know there was Nanjing Airport. The manager would have to pick up the tickets from the airline office and would be back at eleven, which gave us plenty of time to catch our plane.
Plenty of time for monkeys to get caught! I thought.
When we got to our room to grab our bags, a red message light was blinking outside our door. It was Walter; we knew it. The pulsing red bulb suggested urgency, a painful thrombosed vein; the pulsing light seemed to be sending me a message in code: Runaway American monkeys, we are looking for you, and we are going find you!
It wasn’t enough to tell them you quit in China. You were found and reeducated, convinced that you really wanted to keep working. Suddenly, I understood Tiananmen Square and the Cultural Revolution; I saw them for what they were: coping strategies of dumb thugs, designed to deal with people like me. I had a bad feeling and wanted out of the room now. As I grabbed my bag, there was a knock at the door.
For the forth time in two days, my heart stopped and I was made sick with dread and fear. They had found us. I couldn’t believe it. Craig and I just looked at each other. Then one of us, I don’t remember who, said, “Jesus Christ!”
“Your friends down stair,” the bellhop said when Craig answered the door.
“Wah?” Craig replied.
“Your friends down stair.”
“Okay, tank you. We right down,” he said and closed the door.
Though momentarily stunned, I noticed how quickly we shifted back into flight mode. Form was following function; I could see it. We were adapting; we were getting good at running. We would not to stop until all our money was gone and were physically incapable of running. Despite my fear, this thought thrilled me for some reason. My hair stood up on end. We made our plans in the elevator: we would sneak into the mall; Craig would stay with the luggage, and I would try to grab the tickets without being spotted.
I crept back to the lobby and did not see any familiar faces. When I saw the bellhop, I asked him where our friends were. He put his hand up to his ear as if he were taking a call and pointed to the front desk. Our friends weren’t here; they had called us and we were to call them right away. Once he made himself understood, I found Craig and gave him the news. We were safe for the moment. Still skittish, like wild animals that had learned to fear man, we waited in a coffee shop across from the travel agent counter and watch the door. We were not going to let our guard down until we were airborne over the Pacific.
The tickets came an hour later than they were supposed to, but we still got to the airport with plenty of time to sit around. The final obstacle was getting through airport customs. After the all incompetence I had seen in the last few days, after all this pushiness without a plan, I doubted we would have any trouble. But one never knew, especially with China. An ambitious, willful person who didn’t operate with a strategy was an unpredictable and dangerous foe. Though we were volunteers, the Chinese government had paid extended education for our services, and I just didn’t know how much effort they would make to recover their losses. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they snagged us at the last minute. Wasn’t that the inevitable ending to any good haunted house story? I was tense in line, sweating like a smuggler with a big bag of coke stuffed up his ass, yet the young men in customs, in their green and red uniforms, were very polite, saying please and thank you in heavily accented English, as they waved us to our gate.
While we waited to board our plane, we each took a Vicodin and drank a sugary cup of coffee. On the plane to Hong Kong, Craig got the aisle seat, and I got the middle. This arrangement made Craig very happy, because my suffering was his pleasure now. Even with the synthetic opiate working as a stimulus barrier, I was just too tall for economy class. In Hong Kong, Craig’s mood continued to sour. The fact that we were safe, that we no longer needed to depend on each other to escape, allowed his suppressed fear and anger to spill out. I knew the best thing to do was to leave him alone, so I went off to wander around the huge airport. I noticed all the pretty Asian women running around, was moved by the sight of their wide angular cheeks set in round faces, the dark brown Chinese eyes, the bob of straight black hair, and took the awakening of my sexual desire as hopeful sign: I was going to live to tell the tale. I began to think that all my worrying was paranoia, but when I checked my e-mail, I found this message from Walter: “Gary and Craig, please call me. Your students are waiting for you. Mr. Lim is coming to the Hilton to pick you up and take you back to Yangzhou. Sharon is very concerned about you.”
Ha! So they had tried to get us back, but the American monkeys were just a little too clever. I wrote back that we were in Shanghai (no point in giving our real location away) and were leaving for American in a few hours. Then I got something to eat.
Hours later, close to midnight, I was sleeping by our gate when a slap woke me. At first I thought it was Chinese security, but I opened my eyes to see Craig standing above me, looking bitter and tired, his hair sticking up on his head.
“Don’t sleep on my stuff!”
I’d been using his computer projector as a pillow to make sure no one stole it. “The little monkey is tired,” I said, trying to de-escalate a potential fistfight in the Hong Kong airport. But instead of backing off, which would have been Craig’s normal response, he started to tell me again what a stupid fucking asshole I was.
“Okay,” I said, sitting up, “that’s enough. I understand that you are pissed off at me. And you have the right to give me some shit for this mess. But I’m done. Nobody forced you to come here. So go fuck yourself!”
He looked at me, dazed and hurt. Perhaps he had been waiting for me to fight back, for it would mean we were finally safe. He frowned and walked away mumbling. We didn’t see each other until the plane landed in LA, thirteen-hours later. The flight home was a blur, a drug cocktail made up of dog tranquilizer, Vicodin, Ambian and beer. More than once during the long flight, I woke up thinking that misadventures like were what kill friendships, but I was so relived to be out of China that I didn’t care about ruined friendships.
We landed in LA at midnight and waited two hours for my bag with all of Craig’s stuff in it, but it never arrived. To come back to America with literally nothing seemed a fitting end of my trip. Like so many of the great explorers, I had left with such high hopes and ambitions, only to return disillusioned and broken.
I got home at 3:00 in the morning, gulped the rest of my pills and went to bed. Sleeping late into the next afternoon, I was finally awoken by a strange nightmare. In the dream, I was home from China in my bed. However, outside my window in the backyard and in the hallway were a team hooded Chinese ninjas dressed in black pajamas coming to kill me. Sharon, the program director, had sent them. She was coming too. She was a giant gorilla coming to get my bananas and me. She had walked across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and now she was stepping onto the beach in Newport.
I jumped out of bed, trying to breathe, ready to fight, my heart aching from beating so hard. It was hot like China that afternoon in Pomona. I turned the air-conditioned on and stumbled into the backyard. The old city didn’t seem so dingy and run down. The San Gabriel Mountains rising up from the Pomona Valley didn’t seem so hazy. The sound of the freeway traffic on the 71 and the quality of August light were familiar, yet I still felt like an alien, an orphan rejected by the earth, or a man discarded by his wife. I wondered if China would cost me my job at the university – Sharon, in typical heavy handed Chinese fashion, would seek retribution for our transgressions. And I was also pretty sure China had killed my friendship with Craig, which was unfortunate because I only had like two friends.
I went inside and took my last dog tranquilizer. Looking in the mirror, I saw that I had aged ten years in the last week. Craig was right: I did look like shit. My nervous system was fried like burnt up electrical wiring, singed to ashes. Staring at the ghost in the mirror, I thought, if travel was about self-discovery, what the hell did you do when you discovered things about yourself didn’t like? I called my father and told him I was home safe. When I bitterly expressed my opinion that China was a big dumb, willful spitting beast; a horrible, fat, ugly, hungry child that aspired to be the bully the world, he countered, like parents do, that my experience said more about me than it did about China. “China’s modernizing,” he explained. “The twenty-first century is China’s time.”
“Oh please! Saying China is modernizing is like saying a monkey dressed in a tuxedo is a gentleman!” My voice sounded strained on the line, like the shriek of an agitated chimp. “I was there, dad, and I saw what I saw. If China’s time is coming, we’re all fucked. I’m not kidding.”
There was silence on the line until my dad said he had to go. Shaken, I hung up and sat on the couch. Soon the powerful pill began to take effect. The room tilted; I sank and floated at the same time. I disconnected from my senses; and was all the better for it. I thought, If the end was near, fuck it, I didn’t care. Let the death ninjas and hungry gorilla come for me. At last my consciousness began disintegrate. Thoughts slipped from my minde like trash blow by the wind out of a can.
I curled up on the couch, sleeping long and deeply into that summer night, the way little monkeys often do, having returned home from a very big adventure.
The author has given up travel and travel writing.