Michael wasn’t halfway across the pedestrian bridge before the automatic doors on the other side of it opened, revealing a shopping arcade filled with everything China had to offer. Electric dusters competed for space with scooters and robots and gift-boxed chopsticks. As he strode through the arcade, the sheer mass of product threatening to overwhelm his senses, Michael kept his eyes on a second set of deeply tinted automatic doors at the far end of the corridor. Those doors were his goal. The reason he was there. Five paces out, the deeply tinted panes slid smoothly open revealing the largest outdoor square that Michael had ever seen. It was then that it hit him. The border he had just crossed was much more than a simple line on a map. It was a line in the sand. A division between East and West, and as Michael contemplated that fact, he realized that here, alone in this vast square, far from home, the search for his father was about to truly begin. And so, Michael crossed not only his fingers, but the threshold of everything he had ever known, and entered the East.
Chapter 6
Li Tung didn’t like to travel. If you were to ask him why, he would probably say that he was old now and preferred the comforts of home, but the truth was, he had never much liked it. It was a fact he had, out of necessity, gone many places in his youth, but now, in his golden years, his once thick black hair a mottled snow gray, Li preferred to stay close to the quiet home he had created for himself atop Hong Kong’s Victoria Peak. He still had to go down the hill occasionally, if only to let his underlings know that he was still very much in charge, but he rarely ventured farther afield than Kowloon, and never beyond the borders of Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region. Life was, after all, short and Li intended to employ what few years he had left, the way he liked, at home, in his garden, having the world come to him.
Today, however, was different. Li was preparing for, of all things, a trip. The very thought of it made him anxious, so anxious in fact that if there had been any other way, he would not have entertained the idea of going. But sometimes life’s circumstances dictated even to powerful men like Li and in this case they dictated that he must leave the comfort of his home. As such, his items of a personal nature already packed by his loyal staff, Li made his way down the marble hallway of his elegant home toward his waiting limousine.
The car was a stretch S-Class Mercedes, the second of three he kept in his fleet, and much more suitable for a long journey than the damaged vehicle from the evening before. Many months of planning and negotiation had led up to this day, but as Li walked, his attention turned not to the details of what he was about to do, but to the reason he was about to do it — his only son. It was for his boy, now a grown man in his own right, that Li was setting off on this journey today, and it was for his boy that Li would do much more should the situation demand. He hoped that it would not come to that, but if it did, he would be ready. For the present, though, Li was pleased to see that his car was warm and waiting. He only hoped that the rest of his journey would go as planned.
Chapter 7
The bus looked normal enough. It was the ride that felt like something out of a sick video game. The madness was apparent even before Michael had stepped aboard. The bus didn’t stop on the busy street, it simply slowed, disgorging its passengers as others ran breathlessly on. But getting on, Michael came to realize, wasn’t the problem. The problem was staying there once he was aboard, because the driver, as near as he could tell, was insane. He drove with one pedal, the accelerator, seemingly believing that the mere presence of his giant battered vehicle was enough to scare anything and everything else out of his way. And in this case everything ran the gamut from three wheel tractor trucks to water buffalo pulling motorless truck cabs to bicycles hauling loads twenty times their size.
The weirdness wasn’t limited to the traffic. Shenzhen’s downtown core safely behind them, it wasn’t long before Michael saw what appeared to be the Eiffel Tower poking its head out of a field. Moments later they passed under a near life-size replica of the Golden Gate Bridge, before motoring past a pyramid, and then a whole swath of unfinished skyscrapers, soaring skyward, still covered in their flimsy bamboo scaffolding.
Michael didn’t know if he was passing theme parks or office parks, but whatever the explanation he knew that he had only been to one other place remotely like it in his life, and it wasn’t in China. It was in Nevada, Las Vegas to be precise, and as far as Michael could tell, China’s glittering economic miracle of Shenzhen was like Las Vegas on speed. For a town that had been little more than a fishing village not many years before, it was hard not to marvel at how far the city had come. Where it was going, of course, was anybody’s guess, but Michael had more pressing concerns. The bus was scheduled to pass his father’s waypoint near the end of its route, and eyeing his GPS, Michael knew he was close. He raised his hand and, after some frantic waving, the bus driver cruised to a rolling stop alongside the highway.
After Michael fought his way forward through the packed aisle, the driver left him in a cloud of diesel and dust in what was a fair approximation of farmland. The ludicrous spires of development now far behind him, Michael continued up the highway a few paces before hitting a crossroads where a blacktop road wound up a grassy hill. This was not what Michael had expected of China. Kansas maybe, but not the busiest manufacturing center on the planet. And yet, here it was, a golden field with a lonely road winding through it like something right out of middle America. If not for the salty ocean air, Michael could have sworn he was in the heartland. He imagined that the sea breeze had to be blowing in from the Pearl River Estuary, which was represented by a wide bay on his wrist top LCD. Feeling that there might be another set of eyes watching, Michael scanned the periphery to see if he was being followed. Except for the trickle of traffic on the highway, however, the rolling hills appeared largely deserted. Hiking a few paces up the road, he found a hidden spot behind a knoll and took a quick moment to do some housekeeping.
Michael pulled his backpack off his shoulders and opened the drawstring to its main compartment. The pack itself was relatively low volume, small enough for him to always carry with him, yet big enough for the essentials. And though Michael had little experience with the Backpacker Circuit, he had spent enough time traipsing through the Cascades to know what those essentials were. He carried a change of clothes: a fleece jersey and a pair of cargo pants, underwear and socks; nothing fancy but warm enough for a cool night. Next up was a space blanket, the kind with a reflective coating on one side designed to preserve body heat in emergency situations. Michael had spent the night under just such a blanket, caught on the north face of Mount Rainer in a blizzard, and as far as he was concerned he would never go anywhere without one again. In fact, as he fished through his pack, he took the moment to slip the space blanket into the pocket of his cargo shorts. In the unlikely event that he got separated from his pack, it would be there.