Departures and Arrivals
Homelands and otherlands.
I just got back to Tokyo after two weeks in China—my first trip in nearly four years, due to pandemic-related travel restrictions—during which time I passed through Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuhan, and Huangshan (Tunxi). There’s still so much of the experience that I am digesting, converting into nourishment or creative energy. It would be impossible, even unwise, to try to dump it all out in one go. For now, I thought I could at least ruminate on the experience of travel.
We flew in and out of Narita and Pudong, unfortunately, necessitating extra transit time on both ends to get to and from the cities proper. On the outbound leg, C. and I dragged our suitcases from Ueno-Okachimachi to the Skyliner station on the last morning of September, muggy as all get out in spite of day just barely having broken. The stench and general disarray of Ueno around these hours might be the closest Tokyo gets, on the surface, to a street scene one might more typically associate with New York.
Apart from the bureaucratic rigamarole of a government-mandated health questionnaire, check-in was easy breezy. We got coffees in the concourse and bought some last-minute snack items to give as gifts. On our ANA flight was a team of Japanese athletes of an indeterminate sport headed to the Asian Games in Hangzhou. The plane was only about half-full or so; Japanese tourists used to be able to travel visa-free to China for fifteen days, but this preferential policy was shelved for pandemic-related reasons earlier this year, and then not reinstated due to more recent bilateral tensions. Sigh.
I thought about the first time I flew between Tokyo and Shanghai when I was twenty-one, after my first visit to Japan. It had also been on ANA, and I remember there was something novel and exciting about being able to reach my destination in mere hours, rather than the arduous half-day journey I’d grown accustomed to making from Los Angeles back then. Waves of history lapped gently on the shoreline of my mind. Some eighty years ago—the span of a single lifetime, give or take—flying to Shanghai on a Japanese plane would have meant something else entirely. Now here I was making the same journey in a wildly reconfigured world.
When I filled out my arrival card, I didn’t bother to write my Chinese name in the allotted section, figuring that it didn’t exist in any official capacity on my American passport, or in public record. The immigration officer in Pudong surprised me. “傅麦，对吗？” she asked after examining my documents. She had me write down my Chinese name after all.
On the return journey, I went to Pudong with my sister and brother-in-law, and we waved goodbye to our parents who had gathered in the airport to send us off in decidedly old-fashioned manner, clustered together and craning their necks until we’d passed through the first security check. We then parted ways to separate gates, me heading back to Tokyo, the two of them to San Francisco via Taipei.
Short-haul international flights often entail comically lengthy repetitions of the same information in multiple languages. On board ANA, the standard order of announcements was Japanese, English, then Mandarin. (At Pudong, of course, this order was reversed.) Among the multilingual flight attendants on such routes, I’ve noticed that the language dynamic is always tilted in one direction: the Chinese stewardess will speak Japanese; the French cabin attendant will have a command of English. You won’t find Japanese attendants who provide service in Mandarin, or American ones in French. Something about geopolitics or soft power, the stature of a global language, the state of language education?
I always feel inscrutable on a plane. What is a passport but a flimsy piece of paper? I can sense the hesitation when a flight attendant comes around with arrival documents, or makes a split-second calculation on what language to use to address me for my beverage order. What nationality do you hold? an American stewardess once asked me carefully on a flight from Shanghai to Chicago.
The immigration and customs employees at Narita seemed none too thrilled to receive me, a foreign encroacher, back in their homeland. But I was pleased to experience, for the first time since I’ve lived in Japan, how swift a journey it could be: from Shanghai to Tokyo, a city where I’ve never lived in a country that absolutely belongs to me, to a city and country where I do live, but to which I could never belong.