Posts

The location was just outside the 5th ring road in the suburbs of Beijing which seems like a long ways away until you actually take a cab and go. Then you know it is a long ways away. The Beijing International Family Tennis tournament is sponsored by one of my wife’s closet friends. I hadn’t played tennis in months due to the way the game tortures both my ego and my back. But they needed someone to be the international and I was it. We arrived at 8:30am, plenty of time to loosen up for our 9:30am match. I warmed up a bit, played with our kids, and in general felt relaxed. There was a pretty young woman (a girl really but my conscience insists on calling her a woman) walking around in a tennis outfit practicing reading lines from a piece of paper. My guess was she didn’t really play tennis. Maybe it was the high heals that gave her away. At 9:30, I’m ready to play. But it seems there will be a little ceremony first. Four older men, well old men, make their way from a waiting room to one of the tennis courts. It’s maybe a 40 yard walk and they seem pretty relived to have found seats on the court. It’s the pretty young woman’s turn to talk and she reads from the text and smiles. I’m later told she flubbed many of the lines. I guess she isn’t going to make it as a spokesperson either. At least she looked good holding the mic. The crowd surrounds the court she speaks and there is occasional applause which to me seems random, and my son is flirting on a woman support staff holding a balloon. He’s successful and he has a shit eating grin on his face when he returns to me. As much as a three year old can have a shit eating grin. The speaking stops and two of the old men pair up with little girls for a game of doubles. The old men can somehow hit and return the ball. In fact they ain’t bad. Their lateral movement a bit slow. Maybe a walker would help. I get a little bored with the play, maybe I could go watch their dentures in water to liven things up. I see my wife has already left the court with our daughter, so I follow with our son. By 11:30am I’m pretty loosened up. This is when our 9:30am match starts. This is somewhat expected, the mistake would be to expect it to start on time. Having no expectations is a good way to get by in Beijing. Our opponent is a couple about our age, I want to say older, because they look older, but that’s simply because I haven’t yet adjusted to being the age that I am. They look pretty serious and focused. I feel not so serious and not so focused. I know my wife expects us to lose because she does not expect much of me. But that’s the funny thing about having no expectations, it makes it easy to exceed them, and I think I do. We start well and have the match in hand. It’s now after 12pm and our children have not ate or taken their nap yet. Our son decides to give us a hint that he’s tired and hungry. His hint consisted of screaming, pulling away from the Ayi, and running onto the court. My wife holds him, he then has to be physically separated from her so we can continue the match. Our daughter chimes in for a harmony of screaming and fussing. Rinse, repeat. We lose focus, we lose some games, and it seems we will lose the match. We ask the Ayi to take our son far away from the courts, at least far enough away so we can’t hear him screaming. Once quiet we regain our game. Like reaching the top of the hill on a bike. We win! That’s the good news, the bad news is we have to keep playing. We tell tournament organizer we are going for lunch, she says take your time. 30 minutes later she calls asking if we can play right away. Such is the level of organization. We finish our lunch and send the babies and Ayi to my father in law’s home for the rest of the afternoon. We go back to the courts and try to relax under a small canopy. For me I alternated between a Jonathan Kellerman novel (please, I never said I was “all that”) and my mp3 player. My wife talked and slept, mostly separately. Eventually it was out time to play. Our opponent: A middle age man and his 11 year old daughter. After we won the first game easily, my wife told me in all seriousness that we should hit for power for after all she is just a little girl and won’t be able to handle it. Ok, fine, I say. We play and we win the match easily. I figure we are done for the day and have to come back tomorrow, but no, the wonderful organizing committee (and it must be a committee at this point for no one person could create such a mess) decides we have an immediately following match. Ok, we say, why not, after two wins today we are feeling pretty good. My wife even giving me a sincere compliment or two. This third match starts out well and we win the first three games easily. The referee would later say he thought the other side would simply conceded, it was that easy. By some fluke we lost the fourth game. Weird. And then the next. And the next. And the next. Suddenly facing elimination we rose up and won two more games and then¡lost. Did I say our opponents were in their early 60s? And I’m not talking about those 60ish wonders with rock solid abs and a great shape. These two looked their age. And it was their 4th match of the day. No more compliments from the wife now. We took the bus back to town. I have my first ever pedicure. ...

Day two found us awake and me drinking instant coffee in our hotel room. Packing was easy, as we did not unpack. Finding the check in counter for our flight to Phuket, however, was far from easy. Well, it started easy enough. We recrossed the walkway into the Bangkok Airport and followed the signs for domestic departures. After about a five minute walk we finally found some check in lines, but none for Thai Airlines. So we asked and were pointed back in the same direction we came. 46 minutes to takeoff. We found the counter, showed our passports and ticket and after an impressive display of indifference the clerk told us we had to go to the domestic terminal as this was the international check in. Being that we thought we were already in the domestic terminal, we asked for directions feeling a bit like the universe through haley’s lens. Turns out we have to take a shuttle bus and we get to the shuttle stop just as the bus leaves. The next one arrives in 15 minutes meaning we will be at serious risk of missing our flight so we call a taxi. How much, my wife asks. 300 baht. We bargain to 100 and get in for the two minute drive. We ask to be dropped off at the check in counters and driver nods but drops us off at the beginning of the terminal so he has a better chance to hook new passengers. And he informs us as we leave that it is 100 baht per person. Nice try, we pay him just the original 100. Flight to Phuket is quick with a quick meal. I read, wife sleeps. We touchdown around 11am and in the arrivals area we find a woman holding a sign with my name on it, plus three other names. Eventually us and another never to be seen again couple hop into a minivan and are driven to our respective hotels. Our hotel is awesome, if you like that mega-complex luxury resort thing. If you prefer a hut and eating what you can catch, well, more power to you. We will enjoy the pool, the overpriced food, the air conditioning, the water buckets to clean our sandy feet. We head to Patong for the nightlife of Phuket hoping it will be kind of like Bangkot but maybe less seedy but still fun. It also turns out to be family style pretty much, except for 50ish white men wearing too tight jeans walking around with young thai women. Not the best look. We find a restaurant overlooking the ocean and chow down. My wife says she’s saving room for some snacks later so she “only” orders three dishes. I get this tiger prawn contraption that was scrumptious if not too filling. We stroll around looking for something we can’t find and if we could find wouldn’t know what to do with, so we head back to the hotel at 10:30pm, exhausted. Sleep comes¡eventually. ...

It started out as an innocent enough trip and it ended as an innocent enough trip. What lies in between is the story that shall be unfolded now, necessary details enhanced and obliterated. We arrived at the Beijing Airport at 2pm, our flight to Bangkok not scheduled to depart for another 3.5 hours but our travel agent said the plane was overbooked and we better get there early to make sure we secure our tickets. Maybe we find a new travel agent. Maybe we should thank her. This being China, I never know. To get to the check-in counters at Beijing International you first have to fill out a customs form declaring that you are not taking stuff out of the country you shouldn’t be taking or at least declare. It is mostly obvious that you need to fill something out as people are lined up with identical sheets of paper dangling from their hand. As I’ve left Beijing many times (always to return, now why is that?) I know the drill. As my wife has left Beijing many times (always to return, why with me?) she knows the drill. We fill out the paper and get in the so-called line which, despite this being the first day of a weeklong holiday is short and disorganized. In fact it’s hard to tell if there is a line or people just idling by the entrance, but then you see someone walk straight past everyone and hand his form to the customs agent and you know it’s a line. You know it’s a line because this is Beijing and without someone cutting in line it’s hard to tell the difference between a line and a gathering. We amble our way up to the customs agent. Well, there’s actually two. The first just checks your passport; maybe this isn’t officially and agent. The agent sits behind a blue walled desk and from the markings on the ground I believe you are supposed to stand in front of the desk while he inspects your form and you. But everyone just walks by, as we do, barely breaking stride and hand him the form. He puts it onto a stack with all the other forms. Which go where I wonder? We follow the signs for our Thai Airlines flight and get to the counter to find it filled with JAL staff. They tell us to come back at 3pm. So much for getting there early. We have 50 minutes to kill before we wait in line and then have two hours to kill. We walk out of the counter area, past the same guard who took our forms, and I am tempted to ask for them back but do not. We walk around the mezzanine level of the airport, past overpriced restaurants and cafes and a massage place. My wife would like to get a massage but thinks it’s too expensive. Justification comes easy. âIt’s not that badâ I say. Plus âwe are officially on vacationâ and with that she’s gone and I’m done to Starbucks for a decaf. Starbucks is full so I end up drinking it next to locals waiting for relatives to arrive. 3pm arrives and we refill out the forms and end up back at the JAL now Thai Airway counters. Quite a line. Wife slightly worried. Line moves slowly. Like a snake with legs. But we get tickets, ask for aisle seats, and get them. It would actually be hard for two people not to get an aisle seat with the way the plan is configured but this doesn’t dawn on me right away. We sit on the runway for an hour waiting for our turn to takeoff. Not the first time this has happened to me at Beijing International. Well, it’s the second time, so I do overstate a little. We are in the air, wife asleep, me reading King of Torts. They serve a Thai style meal that is reduced to usual airplane heated mess. I had chicken and rice. Halfway through the flight I use the restroom and notice it seems to be falling apart. The metal shelf behind the toilet (as a man I notice such things) was curled on the edges. Made me wonder about the rest of the plane. Touchdown in Bangkok was smooth, a bit late. We somehow manage to find our hotel which is connected to the Airport by a covered walkway. This after I struggle to no avail with the ATM machine. We check in, it’s 11pm. To go into town, or not? We change some dollars for baht and go with a warning from the hotel staff to have the taxi driver turn on the meter and the cost should be 300-400 baht. We exit the main door of the hotel, the bellhop (or whatever the person who greets you is called) disappears and we make our way to the street for a cab. We get approached by someone without a car asking if we need a cab, think that won’t work very well, and wait for an actual moving vehicle. It arrives in like two seconds. We give him a note written in Thai with where we want to go. We ask him to turn on the meter. He ignores us and starts driving. We ask him to stop. He slows down. A little. We ask how much. 500 baht, he says. I say 300, he grunts 350, we repeat 300, he grunts affirmation or perhaps it was 350 again. I’ll never know. It takes sometime to get to the night market, the cab driver flying though the light traffic without a care in the world. He should have none, for I carry them all. âHe’s on the wrong side of the road!â my mind screams every time I see a car coming the other direction. After the 30-minute drive, he stops the car in front of a dimly lit one-story warehouse looking building. There is nothing else around really, but other closed looking buildings. Then I notice half a dozen men sitting in front of the building. One walks up as I open the cab door and invites us in for a ping-pong show. I close the door as my wife asks him to go to where all the people are. He does, we pay our 300, and are out. Lots of people, lots more offers for a ping-pong show. Now how appealing is that? My lifelong fantasy, no doubt, is to see a ping-pong show. Hey, what about marbles? Let me guess, wrong texture. So we stroll around and walk past a baby elephant. Excuse me, nobody told me there are elephants here. What the #$@# is this. I guess I should have got that guidebook after all. But the elephant is cool, it’s working (no, not as a ping-pong artist) but as a prop to sell overpriced bananas to feed it. We don’t buy any and just stroll along. To a restaurant were the pad thai is awesome but thai iced tea is not to be found. Then more strolling, finally to a bar for a drink, live music, and people watching. End up watching a few hookers, but just watching. Not that I’m a saint but all I want to do to get clean is take a shower. Back to the hotel for another 300 baht, this driver more sane, less out to take us. Probably the going rate was 150. It’s 3am, our plane for Phuket leaves in six hours. ...

He awakes from dreams of simba and dinosaurs and is unsure if he is still in the jungle. As he slides off his bed he remembers falling asleep in the warm arms of his mother. He moves across the floor without sound except for the piddle patter of his little feet on the wood floor. Dreaming a colorless dream his father awakes in the next room to the sound of the pitter-patter feet on the wood floor. The father sits up awaiting arrival of the son. The son reaches two hands onto the bed and pulls himself up like a little gymnast. Once on the bed he crawls towards his father’s outstretched arms, then past said arms, and fits himself snuggly against the sleeping mother. The father debates whether to turn the TV on. She stands against the couch looking at her wiggles book. Her brother runs up and pushers her. She cries. The next day she takes her wiggles book to the corner and reads. The next day she takes her brother’s dinosaur just to see him scream. He’s on the subway car, towards the back. The stop arrives; he fights his way thru the crowd, making a path for the door. As he reaches the door, people are streaming onto the car so he just surges a head people bumping off his sides like a pinball machine before it goes tilt. She sees hes not moving. Hasn’t moved in years. She waits. She moves, slightly. She waits some more. She moves some more. ...

Jackson Browne, in a song to his son, wrote that of all those thoughts thought crowd your head only a few will really matter. I would maybe add, that for all those thoughts that crowd your head, you’ll only remember a few, and they won’t really matter. I feel this way a lot; that my memory is bad to awful but the things I can remember are really insignificant. Some days, insignificant and inaccurate. I remember that the CCTV sports highlight show comes on at noon but it is in Chinese and I can’t make sense of it. They show NBA game highlights and the highlights don’t really have anything to do with the result, kind of like those still pictures HBO puts out for heavyweight title fights. And after the series of random highlights comes the part I’m waiting for, who won. For this is one thing I remember from childhood. Winning is important. They flash the score, the numbers readable but the team names are in Chinese, so I’m am left with useless highlights and a score I cant understand. More crowded useless thoughts for my overworked one cylinder brain. Then there are those thoughts that fly into my brain from nowhere and without meaning. The distracters. I’ll be on the phone and people will ask me if Im still there. “Why, yes” I want to say “I’m here, I was just thinking if I have five kuai for the subway or if I will need to break a 100.” Some such nonsense like this. These flying thoughts know not prejudice, they will interrupt me whether I am having the most important conversation of my career or squatting to pee. Then there are those thoughts that wake me up at night. Or is it that I wake up first and then the thoughts come. I’ll have to think about it. But either way, the nighttime thoughts are the worst. They have no focus and circle around and around. When I try to focus on another thought such as my son’s running or my daughter’s laugh or the ones who left too soon I find myself more awake so I turn the TV on to distract me. Thank goodness for CNN, always boring enough to put me to sleep. Until the next thought. ...

She sits on her knees in front of the stereo, headphones on, and her body rocks to Guns N Rosess Paradise _ City_. She play it loud, very loud, she knows sound is escaping from the headphones. She hopes it doesn’t wake him up. He’s sleeping on the sofa right next to her. It’s 7:30am. The pressure has been building these days and it grows through the day like a sun that only rises. Only in sleep and in the covers the pressure abates. But today is worse than the day before. And yesterday, worse than the day before yesterday. She knows this will end up with scratched knuckles that she will blame on dry skin. But for today, with this loud music, and in this corner of this small run down apartment, the music is powerful enough. If he doesnt wake. God, don’t let him wake up now. ...

Its 3pm and Im feeling down so I bail on work and head for the cafe. I buy myself a Beijing latte and some snack. I see her just then and I think, why not. I sit down across from her and say hi. Just having a conversation, I tell myself. Whats the harm? And it goes well, my stumbling over basic Chinese like “my name is…” and her stumbling over basic English like “are you married”. But the conversation goes well, she laughs and smiles easily and this is all I’m really looking for. She tells me shes 33. I ask her how old she thinks I am. Something like “wo ji suela ma?” in my awful Chinese. She says wu shi wu. Excuse me, guess again, maybe I misunderstood. wu shi wu is 55. She guesses again. wu shi qi. 57. This is getting bad. I say guess lower. She says 54. I leave, now feeling down and depressed. I get to the subway, which in Beijing is considered for the common people. I take it everyday. It is crowded as I step onboard. It looks like I will have to stand all the way home. Then someone says yeye and offers me his seat. Yeye means grandpa. This is not making me feel any better. I get home feeling about an inch tall with shit on my shoes. As I enter my wife is changing a stinky, smelly diaper. She asks how my day was. I ignore her and ask her how old I look. She says, you know, you look your age. She sees I’m not finding a lot of comfort in this. She then adds but you know, for you whities we normally subtract 15 from how old we really think you look. She then moves toward the trash bin, stinky diaper in hand when the look of insight flashes across her face. And meimeis don’t do math, she says. ...