A Familiar Face
At the Vancouver airport I found a clerk who could understand my feeble efforts at Poutonghua (standard Mandarin) and so I overstayed my welcome and nearly miss boarding the flight to Beijing. When we get on I am ready for some much-anticipated sleep. I settle into my seat and talk with one of the team members going to Heqing (a village of 100,000 in Yunan) and a student from the U of A that is returning to Chengdu for the summer. Sleep comes and goes – exhaustion and adrenaline do a dance for the first few hours of the flight as I fall into and out of sleep.
Brian comes to talk about some paperwork with me (and stretch his legs) and when he moves forward a voice calls out "Brian?" As Brian later notes when traveling in a country of 1.3 billion people you would expect to know somebody! The voice belongs to Ocean, a Chinese man who was among our very first conversation corner regulars. His wife and daughter are also on the flight and we spend a good amount of time catching up – there will be opportunities for sleeping later.
It is good to be reminded that we do not orchestrate this trip. It is also good to remember what we are doing now (teaching English in China) is a direct outgrowth of what we started doing in a corner of the Ladies' Parlour.