Summer in the City of To-morrow

Past midnight on a weekday, almost nothing happens in the arrival terminal of Beijing International. Since there's no crowd, you pass through customs right away; the guy doesn't even make you fill out the form where you check the box saying you've got nothing unusual to declare. All the convenience stores are closed and the currency exchange went cash-only hours ago. The only commotion comes from the other people coming off your flight, and an army of janitors scrubbing down the luggage conveyors. The janitors might outnumber the travelers, a fact that, as we'll later explore, is more than likely to do with the BEIJING OLYMPICS logo stenciled every few feet along into the staggered rubber slats of the conveyor belts.

You'll find more janitors standing at attention in the bathrooms, the weirdly immaculate cleanliness of which is pretty surreal when you're coming off of 24 solid hours of transit. You can see your face off the floor tiles and urinals. But there's a generically septic whiff in the air that somehow sticks around, in spite of the gleam of all the surfaces. I wonder if the janitors in the bathroom can smell it, after all the time they've spent in there.

As the guy points out right away in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, very little about modern-day travel actually registers in the brain as moving through space. Sitting in a car is more like watching TV than actual motion, etc. The conduit of international travel takes this to the logical extreme; you are essentially waiting in a long series of box-shaped spaces with five-minute walks between them. It's your house to the shuttle to the flyaway to the bus to the airport to plane to the transfer terminal to the next plane to the luggage claim to the taxi to wherever you're sleeping while you're away, and it seems as though the world may as well be moving around you rather than the other way around.

As usual I am intimidated as hell by the taxi driver. In fact, Chinese cabbies have non-exclusive residence in the central intersection of this Venn diagram I keep in my head of people that intimidate the hell out of me. Let's say for the sake of the metaphor that this includes rustics, people whose speech I can't understand, poor people, strangers I encounter out in the public and especially those who are selling me stuff, aggressive drivers I'm sitting shotgun with, and ethnic Chinese that I encounter in their own milieu (like e.g. China itself). These all make the list for reasons each complex and distinct, and it's the last one that constitutes the chief source of unpleasantness during my recent stints abroad. I'll be here for six weeks, so we have ample time to mull over the origins and implications of this.

"Heybuddywhereareyougoing whynotgotoWangfujing Icantakeyousomeplacecool no? whynotcomeonfuck helpaguymakeabuck whatswrongwithyou dontyouunderstandwhatImsaying comeoncomeon" is what I think the taxi driver said to me when I first sat down in the car, although this takes literally minutes for me to process and I am caught dumb when he first says it. "Uh uh I'm going to a place near the Tuanjiehu subway station" is what I stutter when the guy stops talking. It works as a response, although it just happens to be a statement that survives being inserted into this particular conversation apropos of nothing. Then the taxi driver sighs heavily and starts to grumble. I'm still thinking about his original sentence when he pauses again, seemingly for my response. "I'm going to a place near the Tuanjiehu subway station," I say. At this point it is literally the only thing I can say in Chinese. As is usual in these situations I consider explaining to him that although I look Chinese, I'm actually American, well that is to say that one might consider me Chinese but I grew up in America and thus English and not Chinese is not my native language, and besides you spoke quickly, so could you repeat that? I project the corresponding dialogue tree in my head about three or four moves into the future, which is more than I can handle, and then I elect to remain silent for the rest of the night.

Eventually it occurs to me that the taxi driver wanted to drive me around the spicy parts of town at 2AM and maybe take me to some choice venues for various edibles/potables/entertainments, a service meriting some sort of commission transferred directly to himself. I am extremely tired. We get off the 3rd Ring at Changhong Bridge and I read him instructions that take us into a dark alley. After we stop, I give the driver a huge tip. Indeed he was rude and possibly confrontational; it is also possible that during the drive down the freeway he was talking shit about me with his buddy over CB or whatever it is cabbies use to communicate with one another. You could say that I was at least somewhat Intimidated as Hell, and the 50% gratuity seems after the fact to stink of a minor case of Stockholm syndrome. But 2AM is late for anyone to be working and it was safe to guess that he'd been working since dawn the previous day. I've decided he got what he deserved, and it was an effective enough bribe for him to let me use his cellphone to call for directions from where I left the cab.