Sea To Shining
Just the perfect reintroduction to the America, grace shed’t America.
The setup: 12 hour China Eastern flight across the Pacific to the Los Angeles International Airport. Haw-Wen and I sit aisle-side.
A beefy guy in a light blue tank top speaks with a deep voice one that suggests wisdom, but is instead spiked with sarcasm. He’s sitting in the central row of seats. The plane hasn’t even taken off yet when it starts. The flight attendant, a cute albeit heavily made-up Chinese girl (they all are), stops by and reminds beefman to buckle-up his son, warbling toddler, in preparation for takeoff.
“He doesn’t want to,” beefbuster replies. The attendant thinks that perhaps he has misunderstood and reiterates her request, but beefmutha does not capitulate. “If he doesn’t want to, I can’t force him. He’ll scream and cry.” The attendant is polite but firm: as a rule all passengers must buckle their safety belts at this time, for their own safety. (Especially young children, for crying out loud!)
Beefbrotha heaves an exaggerated sigh of resignation. “Okay, well then don’t come looking for me when he starts screaming and hollering. Everybody will look at you, it was your fault.” Then he proceeds to call her stupid to her face. Stupid for forcing him to consider the safety of his son, for bringing about the imminent ire of passengers near and far. For controlling his son. She does not pick up on the daggers veiled in his ironic inflection, moves on.
He’s apologizing to the kid even before the seatbelt goes click.
The screams begin. The child skips the whimpering stage outright, proceeding directly to open-throated wails thick with hysteria-inducing tremors, they reverberate in my ears, everyone’s ears, although for the moment we are all being civil, polite, patient, pretenders. Do you hear anything? No, nothing, you? The prima donna climbs octaves heavenward despite the grounded plane, I swear the shrill cries have pierced the roof of our tin can, making a beeline for the ISS miles above, already taking evasive maneuvers. Sheeeeow! Tense faces convulsed in horror plastered against its triple-paned window on earth watch the siren’s missile blow past; a banshee shriek stings the tympanic membranes of the poor folk monitoring at mission control.
The child is no baby. Just moments ago he was prancing around on his seat on his own two feet. I estimate he is around two years old. Beefbuddy says something to him in a muted speech which only causes the disturbance to escalate. Something to the effect of, “Sorry buddy, they said I had to do this. Don’t worry, everything’s gonna be okay.” Words voiced merely to ease his own conscience, ease out of responsibility for the scene. The subtext: It’s Not My Fault. More afraid of being honest to his son than abusing the rest of the world. The child himself does not understand the words, but the tone of the message is clear: his father does not stand in his way, a mandate to continue the screeching sideshow.
Those fleeting, manipulative glances … are you watching? At least I have you by your ears. These are not real cries. It is decided: he will not be consoled.
Yet nobody dares interfere. Nobody complains, offers a sharp word of criticism, even exchanges disapproval with neighbors. Even though the earsplitting screams are hammering our mental states into psychoses it seems we are helpless, utterly powerless, unarmed, unable to defend, turtles flipped and flailing while pecked away alive. Why? What is this pact of nonintervention, silent suffering? Pacifism? What, you want me to say something? Everyone must be imagining the hot retort: “Don’t you tell me how to raise my son!” And how to reply to this assertion of parental prerogative? “I wouldn’t presume to, seeing that you’re doing such a good job of it!” Everyone looks like they are going to snap, but nobody does, dares to. This is precisely the problem-solving approach that gets us in deep shit every time: ignore the problem, and it will go away. Ignorance - not rejection - is the antithesis of acceptance, for to reject something we must at least face it, acknowledge its existence, while to ignore it never requires such acknowledgment. And active ignorance is just another kind of repression, repression being the source of all manners of mental imbalance, including obsession. As Osho would say, comma.
Finally, I turn around, lock eyes with the kid, and shovel out an unblinking eyeful of reproval while I’ve got his attention. Quite quickly the little creature pipes down, looking a little self-conscious; he knows what he’s doing is wrong, he knows it. He knows censure when he sees it, and is willing to appease the wronged. In fact, it must seem intensely strange to him that it took so long for anyone to notice his cries; how odd that I have to wail for an hour before anyone hears me! Guided by some unverbalized principle, we suppressed our natural responses to the cries: concern, irritation, anger. The child does not understand our behavior; when others around him cry he does not pretend not to care, because it is instinctive for him to care, and because he is a fearlessly curious being. Why, then, is it that the adults he finds himself surrounded by today provide no indication at all that they hear his own cries? Are they all deaf? Is he invisible, trapped in another dimension of reality?
But we are all trapped in our own dimensions, here.
Later on, Beefjerky is fooling around with the headphone cable. The same flight attendant passes by and asks if he needs some assistance. He indicates that the sound isn’t working. She bends over to try the audio jack herself, finds that it is as the he says. She suggests that he use his the connection on his son’s seat. He says he’s already tried that. She offers to find him a new seat.
His voice dripping with sarcasm, “Oh great, let’s wake up my son so I can watch a movie.”
Chinese really have a hard time understanding sarcasm. Perhaps they have always considered attacks through sarcasm as immature, too insubstantial to constitute critique worthy of rebuttal. At any rate, it is wasted on her; she wants to know if the seat change really is okay.
“Yeah, sure, sure, just great.”
I think to myself, nobody is forcing you to watch the movie. If you really cared about the sound sleep of your peacefully dozing son, you could sacrifice watching the movie. It’s probably a piece of shite anyway.
The woman says something, then indicates that the man should move to the front. “Well you said it was in the back. Are you speaking English, or … Chinglish?”
To which the reply could only be, “That depends, are you speaking English, or … American?”
How Ptolemaic is this country I am returning to, my home? Are we just a bunch of whiners? As globalization causes the bubble to shrink, do we retreat further into the depths of familiarity, away from the light of engagement? Are we cursed to remain in fear of each other and of ourselves for being what we are? I ride home on the wings of these questions.