16th
Airport Stories: Beijing
(for Jennie and Jenny)
I’m not a superstitious person, but I have certain travel traditions. Whenever I go to New York, for example, I always get my first cup of coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts—you know, to avoid offending the vengeful East Coast gods of coffee with a sacrilegious trip to Starbucks. Or any time I visit the South: I try to drink whisky exclusively—to honor my ancestors. And so when I visit Japan, I always make it a point to have a McFlurry.
Let me be clear: normally I wouldn’t go near a McFlurry because, I mean really, it will kill you. It’s an unholy 628-calorie union of milk, sugar and phenylalanine and one of the few products that can give you brain freeze, food coma, and diabetes in one serving. But you have to understand: none of that matters to Japanese people, who approach the McFlurry with the kind of reverence small-town Americans reserve for the Big Gulp at 7-11. It’s a big fucking deal over there, probably because McDonald’s runs some very effective advertisements. In one commercial the McFlurry is positioned, somehow, as a solution to global warming: penguins and polar bears frolic harmoniously on Oreo cookies instead of icebergs. In another, a quivering piece of cheesecake hitchhikes across Japan, braving all sorts of obstacles, to be delivered to the doorstep of these penguins, who—-actually, you know what, you should probably just watch it.
In any event, for me, the McFlurry has become a crucial part of experiencing Japan. Unfortunately, on my last trip I didn’t have a chance to get one, so when I had a four-hour layover in Beijing on the way to India, I thought I could still get one and say that—technically—I’d gotten it on my Japan trip.
So began my bleak and harrowing journey through the new Beijing Capital International Airport. I spent only a few hours in China, but it was enough to give me a sense of what Chinese people are into, including: smoking, shouting into cell phones, coughing things up, and building the most gigantic fucking airport you’ve ever seen in your life. Conveying the scale of this airport to other people has been a challenge for me, since Thesaurus.com has a limited number of synonyms for “colossal,” but here goes: Beijing Capital International Airport looks like what would happen if someone challenged God to an airport-building contest but stipulated that, in addition to serving as an airport, the structure also had to accomodate two big-top circuses, a collection of World War II-era fighter planes, and the city of Chicago. Shaped like one of those triangular polycomm speakerphones, the interior is actually one outrageously huge atrium so that—if you were Superman—you could throw a football from one end of it and rush over to catch it, a few days later and in another time zone, on the other end. Just walking from one end to another requires hiring a team of sherpas and if you’re foolish enough to go it alone they have a search-and-rescue squad, complete with bloodhounds, ready to come after you. It’s big. And throughout the whole cavernous monstrosity they play—on repeat—a slow, ethereal and vaguely menacing instrumental version of “Scarborough Fair.” No, I don’t know why.
The Chinese authorities clearly anticipate foreigners having a really hard time navigating the airport, so they’ve staffed it with a small army of young women in smart maroon uniforms to walk around helping bewildered white people. By the time I ran into one I’d been wandering the airport fruitlessly for an hour. (There are “Information” pamphlets throughout the terminal, but these are more like fold-out atlases and actually made me more disoriented.) As I wandered the terminal, listening dejectedly to my own footsteps, these girls could see me coming a mile away. I mean that very literally: there are stretches of this airport where your line-of-sight is unobstructed for miles. Parts of the airport are so desolate that I might have been the only person she’d seen in days. She came up to me eagerly and asked, “Can I help you find anything?”
I almost asked her about McDonald’s, but in that split second I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t confirm for her every terrible stereotype people harbored about Americans, couldn’t admit that here I was, thousands of miles from home in one of the most exciting and dynamic parts of the world, standing in a triumph of modern transportation engineering, visiting her country for the first time, and all I could think about was getting my snack on at the Golden Arches. I imagined the conversation she’d have later that day in the break room (the imaginary dialogue, of course, translated from the Mandarin):
CHINESE GIRL 1: Did you help anyone today?
CHINESE GIRL 2: Yeah, one of those humongous Americans.
CHINESE GIRL 1: Americans are preposterously fat.
CHINESE GIRL 2: We’ll have no trouble beating them in the upcoming Olympics.
CHINESE GIRL 1: Let me guess—he was looking for the McDonald’s.
CHINESE GIRL 2: Bingo.
So instead I heard myself ask: “Yes. Where is the men’s room?”
Instead of confirming for her that Americans are gluttons, then, I made her suspect that we’re either stupid or exceedingly bad at navigation, since the bathrooms are pretty much the only things that aren’t hard to find at Beijing Capital. She smiled and pointed, politely, to the men’s room we were standing next to.
“Oh,” I said. “Good!” And walked—like a complete ass—into the bathroom, where I stood for several minutes listening to the eerie rendition of “Scarborough Fair” because I didn’t have to pee but I did have to wait for her to leave so as to make my bathroom request plausible. By the time the coast was clear my flight was boarding, so I had to sprint through a good stretch of the airport. I probably hadn’t run that far in a few weeks and I felt close to death when I finally made it, panting, to the departure gate. So even though I didn’t get the McFlurry, maybe it was just as well.
