I needed the time, because I still didn’t have my passport! I’d given it to a visa service and there’d been a delay getting the one I needed for India. The Chinese ‘Z’ visa (for ‘Foreign Experts’ like myself) had gone through like clockwork. For some reason, however, the Indian Consulate in NYC was taking its own sweet time. That would have been OK, if they’d let me have my passport back without the visa—I could get that later in China—but they wouldn’t. So the visa service had to wait until Monday evening to pick up the passport and then deliver it to me at JFK. I got it (with my Indian visa) at 1:00 pm before boarding at 4:00 pm—too close for my comfort.
If you ever go to China, you want to take a flight like the one I booked. It was Air China which runs a direct flight between JFK and Beijing. I really appreciated the fact that it leaves JFK at 4:30 pm and, after only 13 hours in the air, arrives in Beijing at 6:00 pm the next day (you cross the International Date Line somewhere along the way). So as soon as you arrive in China you can go to bed, sleep 8 hours or more and get onto Chinese time. A flight like this should minimize jetlag I thought.
The Boeing 747-400 they use is a huge double decker. You have to be a wealthy capitalist—Chinese or American—to afford a first class ticket with access to the upper deck, however. The plane was almost full with an interesting mix of Chinese nationals, Chinese Americans and Americans like myself. I sat across the aisle from a recent Ohio State graduate who was going to Wuhan in central China to teach English in a business institute. She spoke good Chinese, having majored in Chinese studies, a fact that was appreciated by the Chinese passengers, especially the men who flirted with her. As we neared Beijing, the plane’s flat panel screen displayed a map showing our progress in Chinese characters and Pinyin (the system for representing them in the Roman alphabet). There was Tianjin just to the southeast of Beijing. I thought that Tian probably meant heaven, but what, I asked, did ‘jin’ mean. After consulting with her Chinese seat mates, she told me they said it meant ‘spit.’ Apparently, I was flying 6,000 miles to spend 5 months in a city called heavenly spit.
A little later the huge plane landed smoothly on Chinese soil. We were in Beijing. The airport is large, modern and very elegant in an industrial style. There was a long line for immigration, but once through I soon grabbed my bags from the carousel and walked toward the exit where I was to be met by Peter from Tianjin Normal University. Sure enough, there was a young man with a sign displaying my name. By now it was 9:30 pm so we walked rapidly toward the parking lot where a university van and driver waited.
Tainjin is about 2 hours drive from Beijing—if you drive the way the Chinese drive; it would probably take a sane and sensible driver at least 3. I had forgotten how command of a vehicle could transform a normally polite and deferential Chinese man or woman into an insane, speed driven demon. We drove fast down well-lit expressways, using the right and left lanes and the road’s shoulder to pass large trucks with only inches separating us (and me) from them. As soon as we were past, the driver cut back into the lane, taking advantage of not much more than one van length’s space between the truck we’d just passed and the truck ahead—which he was already planning to pass with equal daring as soon as the opportunity arose. There were no seatbelts where I was sitting. I began to think I would die in a spectacular crash before I ever saw the city of heavenly spit.
But I didn’t. We reached Tianjin Normal University’s old campus by 1:00 pm and by 1:30 I was settled in my suite of two rooms.
