I’d rather see a Jesus freak than a heroin addict any day of the week.
I could hardly believe all my fines were paid off and I still had money towards my ticket. I left the beach with the intention of going to the casino again, telling myself, “I’m gonna win a $1000 this time.” I prepared myself mentally on the ride down. I knew I would win. I played another $20 in the same dollar slot and about 15 minutes into it, I hit the $1000 jackpot. The luck of Jesus must have rubbed off that junkie and on to me. Really, I hit it. It felt so surreal…I knew it was because I’d decided to go to China. I got back to Seattle and called a discount travel agency. Crazy. I had enough to get my ticket the next day and put away $500 towards the trip. I bought a 6-month round trip open ended ticket to Beijing and a cassette and textbook to help me learn Mandarin Chinese.
I went to the library and used the internet to apply for jobs teaching English in China. I found four and applied to them all. Wednesday I had a response from the New Bridge Language School in Beijing. I was hired. I studied up on China and felt completely whacked on the side of the head. Was this really happening?
Books were beginning to pile in every corner of the bus. I knew that I was leaving for China in three weeks, but five or ten dollars for books seemed much cheaper than thirty or forty dollars in a bar or casino. I had woke up that morning with nearly a ¼” of ice on top of the blankets I’d put over my sleeping bag. The coldest morning of the 2001 so far. Jammed into my shoulder blades was a book I’d picked up the day before Yankee Hobo in the Orient.
Something intrigued me about John Patric, the author of the book. I thought he might even be the elusive J.R. Bob Dobbs who founded the farcical Church of the SubGenius. I needed to take my bus to my mothers house in Redding and figured I would drive through Florence, Oregon where Patric had made his home. The combination of the cold and the book prodded me into action.
I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get my visa in time to go to China. Weird ideas of having brownish babies and starting my own race of bums, tramps, and hobos had been going through my head for days.
Why not? I had to think of the fact that I might fuck up in China and get executed…so what…?
In my mind, I was a super hero waiting for the right moment to spring upon the unsuspecting world. I was stressed out like a crackhead in a squad car and I had virtually no time to look for Bob Dobbs and Frying Pan Creek. I quested after a warm dry place to keep my books.
I wanted to be a Hobo Joe with a place to go when the road grew too weary. I wanted to be a Vagabond Errant with a space that wasn’t invading the space of someone else. I wanted to gain some control over my existence again rather than letting letters, visa’s, and money determine my course of action.
Hopalong Tom kept saying he was glad to know me cause when the Chinese cut my head off he’d have a great story to tell.
It was strange to suddenly look at my backpack and realize that that would be hold all of my possessions for the next who knew how long. I laughed when I realized I had timed my departure perfectly to coincide with the end of my unemployment compensation in Washington State.
I got a hold of the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. The woman and I had big communication problems from the get go. Finally I found out my visa had been sent out to me the day before. All it took was her hanging up on me three times, spelling my name slowly fifteen times, giving her the same information over and over and persistence.
As my grandfather used to say so charmingly “Sweet oil and persistence will get you in a snakes ass.” I don’t know why you’d want to go there…but if you did…
The drive down the coast was great. I stopped at my Aunt and Uncle’s for a day. . My Uncle was proud of his latest achievement. He had been getting liver spots on his head but didn’t want to go to a dermatologist. Instead he used sandpaper to sand the spots right off his noggin. His wife told me he appeared at the top of the stairs near the kitchen asking her to help him with one more spot, meanwhile blood was pouring from his head. His eyes swelled in reaction to the cuts or the Neosporin he had smeared on his head. By the time I got there, he had the smooth bald skull I remembered as a child. He was talking about opening a clinic in Mexico.
Breakfast was a weird hodgepodge of dirty jokes, banter, and huevos rancheros. My aunt gave me a sweater before I realized it was my uncles and she hadn’t asked. I was putting it on when I saw the look on his face.
“Is this your sweater?” I asked.
“Is that your sweater?” He asked back.
Neither of us wanted to answer so we nodded sadly. We knew from experience there was no going back. She always did this. He told me about a picture my cousin once painted for him. He treasured it and a neighbor came by and admired it. As he got home from work, the neighbor was walking out with it and thanked him.
I spent one day in Florence looking for John Patric or his place on Frying Pan Creek, but no one had heard of either of them. A woman in a bar suggested I go to the museum, but it didn’t open until the day after the next. I didn’t have time to wait. I would have to find out more about Florence, Oregon when and if I returned.
After that it was onward to Redding and back to Seattle. As my plane took off from Seattle, a 7.3 magnitude quake struck the Puget Sound. It shut down the airport for days. I found out about it as I ran past a television to catch my connecting flight from Vancouver, B.C to Beijing, China. I had left just in time and had no idea what the future held.
Culture Shock Upon Arriving in Peking
Eight weeks before I’d had no money, been living in my car, and had no idea what the future held. Now here I was, Beijing or Peking, as the middle-aged travel agent had informed me it was called within China.
I stepped off the plane and nervously went through customs where I expected to be strip-searched, pulled aside, and cross examined as to my motives for coming here in the first place. It never happened, I was a bit disappointed but I couldn’t really explain why I was here anyway. It just sort of happened.
I walked through the airport noting that it wasn’t that different from the airport in Seattle and then stepped outside to light up a smoke. It hit me then. An overwhelming feeling that I was lost. A feeling that everything was different. The cars, the money, the people, the language. Everything was so incredibly different.
I remained outwardly calm as I powered through the internal hurricane that swelled within me. I nonchalantly took drags from my cigarette and then walked back inside to the exchange booth where I changed $200 US for about 2000 Yuan.
The taxi drivers were bee lining for me. They sensed my confusion and like hungry wolves circled the exit closest to wherever I stood. I could feel them watching me. Waiting to charge me too much to go someplace I didn’t want to go. Maybe that was the problem.
I’d won nearly $2000 in the casino eight weeks before. I’d been riding a cloud and the jackpot hit, triple double diamond on a two-dollar slot machine. I found a round trip, 6-month, open-ended ticket for $575. I bought it on the spot.
Over the time before my plane left I arranged a visa, located a job teaching English that I wasn’t sure I wanted, and wrapped up all my possessions and personal affairs. I’d never really bothered thinking about what to do once I arrived. I had a Lonely Planet guidebook I’d meant to look at on the plane, but the earthquake that rocked Seattle two minutes after my plane left had sort of shocked me as I ran to my connecting flight in Vancouver, BC. I’d only had long enough to see massive damage on the television screen as I ran to catch the plane.