2016
Shanghai receded; the Yangtze glittering like a silver ribbon. Stiff in my seat, I wrapped myself in the airline blanket, glancing out of the window as we climbed above a bank of clouds. I hadn’t been able to look at Dizheng as we parted, scuttling through security without so much as a backwards glance. When - at last - I turned back, I saw his eyes fixed on me, his head raised above the shore line of other people. He immediately jumped up, waving, a broad smile breaking on his lips. I didn’t wave back. I couldn’t.
The fasten-seatbelt sign dinged off and a mellifluous stream of the captain’s English drifted from the speakers above, though I could only partially discern his words before they dissolved into the ambient hum of the cabin. One air hostess moved down the aisle, bearing a tray with glasses of champagne, sparkling water and orange juice, while another brandished crisp white tablecloths, ready to spread it on the retractable table, and collect our preferences from the menu.
There was an eruption of laughter a few rows ahead. A hostess, her hair a beehive of spun gold streaked with silver, laughed with a bald man as she handed him a pair of pyjamas. His scalp gleamed and her teeth flashed as she tipped her head back exposing her powdered throat.
Ah, there it was — the performative bonhomie of the business cabin. Over the years, I’d noticed how a hostess would latch onto a willing, good-humoured participant - perhaps someone revelling in the perks of their corporate status - for a bit of playful banter to smooth the ride. It was part of a show, setting the tone and curating the atmosphere for the journey ahead. A moment of levity and connection designed to elevate our collective experience. A ritual that infused the cabin with an air of geniality, an invitation to settle into the peculiar intimacy of air travel. We were all meant to hear.
Eventually, she moved on, pausing with the drinks trolley in front of a teenager slouched in his seat, his pristine trainers stretched out in front of him, his eyes glued to his phone. I’d seen these little emperors and empresses all over the cabin, sprawled in their pods, embossed logos on their oversized hoodies. Driven by their parents’ belief that a coveted degree from abroad would secure the best opportunities, they were on their way back to their boarding schools.
‘Orange juice,’ muttered the boy, slipping his Beats headphones down for a second but keeping his eyes fixed on his phone. I imagined him at home, where he was undoubtedly the centre of the universe, his every last whim catered for. A spoiled brat with no sense of courtesy, like his many wealthy contemporaries. But Chinese teenagers are unique beasts. They have the awkwardness of all adolescents but are never treated like incipient adults, as they might be in the West. Instead, every interaction with an adult carries an expectation of deference. The boy was quite possibly confused in the face of the air hostess – an imposing foreign woman old enough to be his mother, and so, automatically, worthy of respect, but in a servile role, so potentially worth dismissing as he would his ‘eryi’ back home, the nanny whom he’d almost certainly always treated with a mix of familiarity and contempt.
‘What can I get you?’ The stewardess had reached me. Although her gaze slid blankly away, her tone was measured as she gauged my level of English comprehension. She had obviously been in the job for a while: the newer stewardesses shone their indiscriminate smiles on everyone; the savvier veteran rationed her emotional energy. It was, after all, a long flight.
‘Just water,’ I replied, smoothly, before ordering my options from the menu.
The man in the pod to my left - creamy short-sleeved shirt, the chest pocket and collar picked out in a Burberry check - had no English at all, so the lone Chinese air hostess (there was always one) was summoned to find out what he wanted to eat. They spoke together in rapid-fire Mandarin. I overheard snatches of it - he was part of a tour group; the rest of his group were in economy, they were heading to…
The Chinese hostess addressed him a casual brusqueness shorn of the cultural niceties the man would have expected on a domestic Chinese carrier. On those airlines all the hostesses were young and strikingly similar in appearance - tall, milky skinned, with impossibly neat waists, as though created by some hidden, exacting formula. These fragrant nymphs would offer the most amiable smiles possible as they kneeled to speak with their business cabin passengers in quiet voices, offering slippers with the gentlest of gestures, while the businessmen they served would respond with little more than grunts, barely acknowledging their presence. Here, however, in an airline with attendants of varying ages and sizes, the man’s linguistic reliance on the Chinese hostess conferred authority upon her. He was just relieved to be understood, tilting the balance of the relationship in her favour.
While the English stewardess and the customers she interacted with followed a social script that had been honed for centuries and hailed from the complex ecosystem constructed around a service culture, it was different for the Chinese.
Not so long ago we’d belonged to the world of the iron rice bowl and cadre control. We were better versed in queues and coupons than in exaggerated manners and the finer gradations of consumer behaviour.
But now, confusingly, the customer was God and - in lieu of a complex appreciation of capitalist nuance all we could fall back upon were the old traditions, a template shaped from a world of rigid hierarchies, awkwardly stapled onto the new consumerism.
Old rules that didn’t work for this fresh kind of collectivism. Everything was still up in the air, as new categories and encounters continually shifted the rules of engagement.
I imagined him at his final destination - doubtless a luxurious five-star hotel set in breathtaking European scenery, somewhere with marble floors and gourmet meals, but however much it had cost him, he’d still be shut out of the subtler exchanges of high-end service.
The Chinese-speaking hostess moved on, plastering on a bright smile and refining her gestures for the next person she attended to - a westerner. Across the aisle, the laughing hostess was at it again, sharing another loud cackle with a British couple as she handed them each a liquid of dubious colour.
I sat in my seat, outside the bubble of selective mirth, a passive witness to all the orchestrated joviality. Clutching our water and orange juice, the Chinese contingent lay behind an invisible membrane.
As the cabin settled, grew quiet, I heard a sob - a kitten’s whimper - from a Chinese girl barely out of her teens hunched in her seat, her misery accessorised with Dior trainers and a Chanel handbag. Another young person weighed down by parental ambition. Material wealth didn’t lessen the strain of departing. She was another miserable soul kissing her home goodbye.
A couple of hours into the journey and the lights in the cabin were dimmed, the onset of our artificial night. The plane felt perfectly still. Only the real-time map of our route illuminated on the screen in front showed how it sliced through the air with no resistance.
We’d flown north from Shanghai to Beijing, passing China’s eastern plains and deltas, before making a leftward turn to the west, where the span of Gobi Desert stretched out before us. To the north of our route were the steppes of Inner Mongolia, while the Yellow River wound its way to the south. Further ahead lay Xi’an and the familiar Yellow Plateau.
In a couple of hours, we would reach Yumen Guan, or the Jade Gate Pass, an important gateway on the ancient Silk Road, and the westernmost frontier of Chinese civilisation. In the eighth century, during the height of the Tang Dynasty, a poet called Wang Wei wrote a farewell poem to a friend who was leaving home and journeying to the west. It said that once you go beyond the Jade Gate Pass there are no more familiar faces. Crossing the Jade Gate Pass meant reaching the outermost limits of one’s world, leaving behind all that was familiar, the comforts and connections of home, in order to enter the unknown expanse beyond, where companionship and recognition were non-existent and a potentially endless isolation beckoned. Reading the poem, I’d always imagined a lone traveller on a horse in a swirl of sandy wind crossing a desert littered with shards of broken porcelain left by passing caravans.
In the cabins twilight, I opened and closed the book on my lap but only managed a few pages of the English text. I was trying to immerse myself in it, to refamiliarize myself with the squiggles, but somehow I couldn’t summon the concentration. There was a bar area in the middle of the cabin, claimed by a few westerners nursing their drinks. On the counter sat a bowl of tempting, glossy green apples, and I got up to take one - a simple, almost perfect orb. The beam from my reading light bounced off its skin as I admired its flawless constancy. The apple was untroubled by the journey and would move, unchanged, from one world to another. An apple called by any other name is equally crisp. A piece of silk called by any other name is just as smooth and slippery. But when I was called something else, what part of me was mislaid in the process?
The character for Meng encompasses the sun, the moon and a shoot of grass: it carried a multivalent power. But once I landed my name would become an inert sequence of the Roman alphabet: M-E-N-G. A phonetic arrangement that could easily be muddled in London to become Mange, Ming, Megan or Mong. I envied the apple. It bore no burden of assimilation. It simply was, whereas I had to get off the plane and emerge as a different person, viewed through that other cultural lens. The physical crossing from Shanghai to London could be counted in hours but the psychological crossing, that lengthy journey of heart and identity, was something else entirely.
We passed over Kazakhstan's pale grasslands, then the shore of the shrunken Aral Sea - its salt flats fanning out hazily where once there had been water. At some point I fell asleep and was still in a world of dreams as we soared over the Black Sea and above the enchanted city of Istanbul. I awoke as we passed the Alps, their white-topped furrows spanning seven countries. And then - after another short announcement from our mellifluous captain - we began our descent towards the lowlands of England. Barriers, once impossible to cross, or crossed only by the most intrepid, had been surpassed in hours. From one end of the world to the other.
As we made our approach into Heathrow I glanced at the girl in the nearby seat. She had whimpered for the entire flight but her eyes were finally dry. Had she reconciled herself to her fate? Below us, London appeared in dense constellations of fiercely bright, tempting lights. It was 2am Shanghai time. Through a miasma of exhaustion, I walked with the other passengers, following the route along a bare corridor, bright with the clinical white of fluorescent tubes. Though jangly with adrenaline, my body was limp. I was a baby passing down the birth canal, an old soul gliding towards yet another rebirth.
Most of the people around me were already on their phones, informing loved ones of their arrival. I walked alongside them in the same haste, but with no one to call. A message flashed on my phone: “Welcome to London”. My phone’s battery was low, the reception patchy. I slipped it back into my bag.
Then, oddly, as we entered the immigration hall, I heard a Chinese classic playing over the speaker system. For the uninitiated, the tune might suggest the mysterious tinkling of wind chimes; for me it was ‘A Moonlit Night on the Spring River’ – a duet for the Chinese zither and lute. I slowed my pace. For a second, it was as though Dizheng had followed me all the way to London to surprise me with one of his bear hugs. There were no accompanying vocals to the background music, but the original lyrics came back to me: ‘She sees the moon, but her beloved is out of sight. / It’s a long way between southern rivers and eastern seas. / How many can go home by moonlight who are missed?’
Some Chinese passengers from my flight rushed past me, keen to get ahead in the long queue for non-EU arrivals. I arrived at the formidable line that snaked, with countless bends, across half of the immigration hall. My bag was heavy on my shoulder as I shuffled along. A baby began to cry. The Burberry-checked man in front of me wiped his face using his palms. A two-hour crawl loomed. The EU arrivals queue was almost empty; we watched as the bald businessman and his compatriots swiftly passed through the electronic gates.
On the way in from the airport, the taxi driver tried to strike up a conversation, but my tongue rebelled. Mutinous or stubborn, it tripped over every consonant and vowel of the few words I tried to say. I could only produce disjointed syllables, and the driver’s own words only registered as fragmented sounds, competing with the inane chatter of his radio. The streets outside zipped past, blurring bright and dark sections. Each blink a shard to piece together, to assemble.
Dragging my suitcase up the stairs, I unlocked the door to my flat. There was no home coming, just the opening and shutting of a door. The heating was off and the flat was icy, eerily quiet except for the jangle of my keys. Without furniture, the hollow space echoed with its own emptiness. The night air was coming in through the bare windows. The facing windows were lit, casting a glow onto my 5 am world - 9pm London time. It was so bitterly cold that I couldn’t bear to remove any of my clothes except my coat. I climbed into bed. Without another body to warm it the duvet was a freezing cocoon. I curled myself into a ball. When I woke, my phone insisted it was only 2am. Odd hours and out of tune. The windows were dark now, glacial and lifeless. I rose and went into the kitchen. There were only a couple of puckered tomatoes and a spring onion frozen to the back of the fridge. I poured a glass of water from the tap and burrowed in my suitcase for the packet of buns I’d brought from Shanghai. I took a bite and stood in the half-light of the kitchen, chewing and swallowing. The scraps of home that I’d brought with me would be gone in a couple of days.