Date: Sept. 13 & 14, 2015
Status: Flying to Shanghai
Totally unprepared and perfectly destined, before sunrise I step out of the
minivan of my poor, worried mother. She somehow finds more advice to give me
before I leave, even though the past two weeks have been nothing but planning
and advice. But Lord knows I need every word of my mother’s advice—if not for
the information, for the comfort of knowing she cares.
I
have to get going. I’ve never flown alone before. I think if you’re flying
alone, you’ve got to be extra nice and ask a lot of questions of a lot of
people using your best plaster smile. And eventually to get to all the right
places in Milwaukee and you make your connecting flight in Chicago even though
you waited in the wrong lines twice at the gate—and those signs were in
English! And pretty soon you’re on a flight to Shanghai where you’ll be picked
up by a man, who doesn’t speak any English, called Mr. Chi. And you’ll have to
trust him to take you on a two to three hour drive to the “small” Chinese city
of Yangzhou, home to approximately 700,000 people, most of whom know less of
your language than you do of theirs (you assume).
