It's hard to determine the exact point at the airport when one enters China, but things start seeming more and more Chinese very fast. The check-in line already has the men in ill-fitting suits and young women with LV bags. They seem to have a fragile cockiness. These young nouveau-riche disappear into the crowd of plastic-clad middle aged and elderly peasants by the line for passport control. They are still a thin group at that point - their mass is only fifty percent of the crowd. The Duty Free shops really do feel like Chinese soil. The Chinese are buying up all of these high status gifts that will bring them points on the guanxi front when they have really made it back home.
Up till this point, the Chinese have usually only made me feel a certain happiness of homecoming. I feel an odd kinship mixed with amusement at how provincial the people from the place I live feel. There is a certain embarassment that I've chosen to live in a place with people so charmingly peasent-like, but at the same time I feel a bit protective. Of course concurrently I realize that no matter how long I live in their country, they will never feel much of a familial feeling toward me.
At the gate any kind of kindness in my heart quickly transforms to disgust with the Chinese and with myself for having condemned myself, mainly through laziness, to life with them. Returned are the old feelings of bafflement with my self for allowing my life to be wasted in a country that fits me so badly. Also returned is the feeling that I am facing a wall of identical people all with the most base and uncomplicated worldviews. Around me are conversations of so practical and boring a nature that using the word "bourgeois" would be adding a respectability and heritage that does not exist. There is just this low buzz of competitiveness and boringness. People really don't have anything to do but compare the schools where their kids are studying in the West or the salaries they are making. I can't tell if middle aged Chinese people are more boring or more competitive. There are plenty of charitable readings on this but they all take the form of excuses for the tedious behavior. The other thing they always talk about is food. If they aren't talking about food, they are probably eating some kind of cheap snack or feeding their children. Stop eating and start doing drugs!
Anyway, loaded down with perfumes and made-in-China clothing that is less expensive abroad, this mass of proud plebians is on its way back to the mother land. On this last flight, I was especially cursed. The triumph of getting an exit row seat was immediately canceled out by the two crying babies to my left. The parents and grandparents - all along - were tiresomely loath to do anything to discipline the little kids. This was too our detriment. Of course airlines should have a special cabin for families with babies. But there is no expense put into making the experience of people in economy class any better.
Reaching the airport in Beijing, I feel a short repreive mixed with intensified confusion. The moderness of the airport is comforting. It feels that I belong there more than the peasants with whom I just traversed the Pacific. The trendy people start appearing again, though they appear to be a very shoddy immitation of the ones in the West.
Once I am out on the streets and on the way back home, the fact that China is largely in black in white becomes very apparent.
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