There’s not much for me to say about the week leading up to the trip. The expectation of the conference overshadowed the whole week and made it impossible for me to focus at work. I packed meticulously and got my one good suit dry-cleaned. The morning of, I woke up early and took BART to the airport.
The business class cabin was like another rarefied world, and I did my best to act like it wasn’t my first time here. When the flight attendant came over, I ordered a “sparkling white wine” because I was too shy to ask for champagne. I was browsing the bilingual movie selection when I noticed a slim, attractively dressed woman struggling to fit her suitcase into the overhead compartment. I got up to help her and saw that it was Vivian.
“That’s a heavy suitcase—how long are you staying in Beijing for?” I asked innocuously.
Vivian chose to ignore the question. “I heard you chatted with Bo. He said he thought you were really impressive.”
“He did? Yeah, I’m glad I met him. He probably told you already, but I’m going to this AV tech conference that he’s hosting. You said he’s your uncle, right?”
“Yes, distant uncle,” she said. “Anyway, what should we watch? This is my favorite part about flying.”
We scrolled through the movie options together and selected a Chinese fantasy-drama set during the Ming dynasty. The movie was about an anemic young scholar who fails the civil service examination twice and disappoints his family by deciding to dedicate his life to art instead and write an epic poem. One night while composing his masterpiece by moonlight, he is visited by a fox spirit disguised as a beautiful woman and quickly falls in love with her. Aided by his new muse, he progresses quickly on the epic poem but becomes afflicted by a mysterious blood-coughing illness. His concerned parents bring him to the village shaman, who diagnoses him with “possession by a fox demon”—the only cure is to capture the fox and destroy its earthly body. The parents, the doctor, and the rest of the village implore him to reveal the location of the fox spirit, but the scholar refuses and dies with his poem unfinished.
Vivian and I watched with rapt attention. The movie was typical of Chinese period films in its overly dramatic camerawork and stilted, humorless dialogue. Dinner arrived right after the movie ended and we had a lively discussion over a couple glasses of red wine. Vivian proposed that the fox was sincere in her feelings about the human in spite of the disastrous outcome, while for me, the fact that the fox needed to feed on the human’s life energy to survive made me call her sincerity into question. In a way, it was like a reverse American vampire movie, where the male vampire proves his love for the female human by subduing his natural desire to feed on her. It was not a very good movie, made worse by a convoluted side plot concerning the backstory of the fox spirit’s home world, but even these days I often find myself searching for its title on the tip of my tongue. After dinner, the lights in the cabin were dimmed, and Vivian fell asleep on my shoulder. From where she lay her scar was palely visible under the light blue glow of the flight-tracker screen, which showed our plane inching over the Pacific Ocean.
Several hours later, we landed in Beijing, and Vivian and I sleepily filed out through the Jetway together. A faint trace of morning-after intimacy seemed to hang in the air between us. We stepped into the arrivals terminal and I paused for a moment to take it all in. The cavernous space evoked what the International Space Station might have looked like if China, not America, had planted the first flag on the moon: a ruby-red ceiling 147 feet high veiled by a pale lattice of thin steel sheets, supported by looming, colorless pillars the circumference of California redwoods. A futuristic female voice announced boardings and imminent departures in a sonorous tone over the loudspeaker. In the middle of the common shopping area was a miniature of the Summer Palace, cool water trickling through its many fountains. From the second floor we could see thousands of travelers flowing through the terminals with even coordination, like red blood cells moving through the cardiovascular system.
Vivian and I took the interterminal train from arrivals together and split between the Chinese national and foreigner queues at customs. I was about to suggest meeting up after the checkpoint and sharing a cab into the city when, to my disappointment, she bid me a hasty goodbye and disappeared into the other line.
At the arrivals area, I found a serious-looking man in a black suit and dark sunglasses holding up a sign with my name on it.
“Mr. Michael Wang?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I am your driver. Please follow me,” he said. He took my bags and led me to a black Audi in the parking garage with the license plate JING-A738DH, then wordlessly handed me a manila envelope containing a SIM card and 10,000 RMB in cash. There was no note in the envelope explaining what the money was for. With a sense of unease, I folded the thick stack of bills into my wallet and installed the new Chinese SIM into my phone. After a minute or so, it connected to the network and a few messages popped up.
Jessica: Hey Michael! Just wanted to see if you’re available for dinner with me and Nick on the 29th! We know a great bistro in Hayes Valley! I’ve got a cute friend dying to meet you ;)
Sanjay: Hey, noticed you’re not in the office today and feel we haven’t checked in in a while. Generally OK to work from home as long as you let me know in advance. Can you update me on the status of the request log?
Lawrence: Hey chap! How about a beer next week?
It was too bad none of the messages were from Vivian.
I hit DELETE on Sanjay’s message immediately. That was a problem for me to sort out later; I was in way too deep on this established pattern of truancy to make more empty excuses worthwhile. With Jessica I didn’t even bother—not sure why she thought the idea of going on a double date with my ex-girlfriend would be appealing to me. To Lawrence I just typed back “sure.”
On our way into the city, I decided to start practicing my Mandarin skills by striking up a conversation with the driver and asking him to explain the layout of Beijing. Occasionally glancing at me through his dark sunglasses in the rearview mirror, he explained that Beijing was organized as a set of concentric rings, each of which corresponded to a ring road that once defined the outer bound of the city, like the growth rings of a tree. Much of the old city was enclosed inside the second ring. Rings three and four demarcated the business and technology districts. As you got further out, the city sprawled into suburbs, and past that, mountains. Listening to his improvised lecture, of which I understood about sixty percent, I thought, in English, of the translation of Dante’s Inferno I had read during my freshman year, and what my professor had said in lecture that week about the ringed structure of hell. As we drove deeper into the heart of the metropolis, these two streams of information—physical and literary, Chinese and English, present and past—began to conflate in my mind, and I felt the fog of my jet lag dissipate as I awoke to the significance of entering.
Nearing the city center, we passed a subway stop where the escalator at the throat of the station swallowed a dense throng of identically white-shirted, narrow-shouldered young men. I got the sense that many of these men, like me, had come from somewhere else; from other cities, or remote towns, or the countryside, on planes, trains, and automobiles to fracture their past identities in order to be refitted as widgets in the bustling economic machine.
The driver stopped the car in front of the Park Hyatt and let me out. “I meet you in lobby tomorrow morning, 8:00 A.M.,” he said, in English again. I nodded.
An attendant waiting in the hotel’s narrow street-level entrance ushered me into the elevator and pressed L: the lift accelerated powerfully and the doors opened again to an airy lobby on the sixty-fourth floor, where the melancholy indigo of the Beijing dusk seeped in through floor-to-ceiling windows. My room was on the fifty-eighth floor, a small suite that looked out directly at the cluster of oddly shaped, Tetris-like skyscrapers in the Central Business District. On the desk I found a glossy purple folder inscribed with a line of golden Chinese characters, and below that, in English, TERRA COTTA PRESENTS: AUTONOMOUS-DRIVING SINOVISION CONFERENCE. I opened it up and found an introductory letter for the conference on Tsinghua University stationery, a glossy itinerary, and multiple wristbands. The itinerary detailed a 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. schedule of keynote addresses, panel discussions, and individual academic presentations. I moved onto the letter, which included half a page of acknowledgments recognizing a number of professors for their work in bringing together “the foremost global thinkers in interdisciplinary applied sciences united in the human struggle for autonomous driving.” The rest of the letter was also written in the same stilted voice, as if machine-translated from some official document in Chinese, except for a handful of conspicuous typos that appeared throughout.
In the back flap of the folder, I found a handwritten note from Bo, which read:
Michael, welcome to Beijing!
We are excited to welcome you for what will surely be stimulating and unforgettable intellectual exchange. I trust that your driver, Xiaowen, has by now provided you with your Chinese SIM card and humble academic honorarium of 10,000 RMB, which you will kindly accept for your travel-related inconvenience. I encourage you to visit the Xiu Bar on the 65th floor, where the firm has opened a tab for you.
I look forward to welcoming you in person tomorrow.
All the best,
Bo
I checked my phone to see if Vivian had tried to get in touch during the last couple hours; she hadn’t. To kill some time before bed, I splashed some water on my face and took the elevator back up to the sixty-fifth floor.
I found a seat near the window at Xiu Bar and ordered a Negroni. The lounge was mostly empty and the only sound was coming from a tuxedo-clad pianist playing a soft jazz ballad. By now the sun had set, and the lights from the city far below glowed faintly through the smog like embers in an ashtray. My eyes swept over the city grid and I wondered where Vivian was: which ring of the vast city, which capillary of an alleyway was she passing through right now?
To distract myself, I thought about the conference tomorrow and how I would make a good impression. I pictured myself packed into crowded lecture halls, standing awkwardly in the corner during “mingling” time, and began to sweat. I felt like a fraud for being there and was still confused about what led Bo to invite me in the first place. At what point during the weekend would Vivian decide to return to me? Roughly three quarters of the way through my drink, I started to feel rather self-consciously alone.
My sense of solitude was interrupted when I noticed that a man seated by himself to my ten o’clock, on the other side of the lounge, had been glancing over in my direction for the past half hour. A man about my age with perfectly parted hair, who turned away when I looked at him. A bit alarmed, I left the remainder of my drink unfinished and went back downstairs.