Dear Customs Officer
Nine ways of saying goodbye.
written in December 2021 • printed in January 2023
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1.
I used to spend my summer & winter vacations in Beijing every year.
I was four years old when I had Pizza Hut for the first time. The pie was deep-dish style: it came in a cast-iron pan. It was here where my mother developed an excitement for Hong Kong-style borscht. There was also a self-serve salad bar; sorry, no refills.
It was also my first time on a double decker bus! There was no way I was going to miss out on the view as the bus rumbled down Chang’an Avenue. I sat to an old man sitting on the first row of the second level. He was wearing a deep blue work jacket, blue trousers, and a blue flat cap. Nainai took a seat on the opposite row.
I asked him where he was going. He turned to me with a grin. “Changsha,” he replied.
“Then let’s take this bus all the way to Changsha!” I said, completely unaware that Changsha was nearly a thousand miles away.
That asshole was fucking with me!
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2.
On the weekdays, I spent three hours a day taking violin lessons from a man in his twenties. He was a part of the People’s Liberation Army. I practiced in the concrete stairwell of his dormitory until my violin gave me a hickey. He gave me a military pin as a parting gift. I didn’t think much about it as he joked about an American customs officer finding the pin on my way home.
By the end of that trip, dayi and yifu had purchased a luxury condo in Changying. It was situated in a brand new neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Out there, sprawling boulevards terminate at ancient dirt paths; villages crumble to ruin beneath the encroaching apartment towers; and fields give way to golf courses and Sam’s Club parking lots.
My mother had bought one too. “When we visit in the future, we can be practically neighbors,” she said to her sister. Looking back, it makes sense that the bank was nowhere to take a restless child.
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3.
“Here, have this!”
Dayi passes my mother and me a giant bottle of iced tea as we said our goodbyes in a crowded departure hall. Fitting, having escaped the thick August air into the respite of an air conditioned terminal.
“In case you get thirsty on the flight.”
While my mother and I slowly snaked through a labyrinth of stanchion posts, we came across a sign.
Effective yesterday, passengers were no longer allowed to carry more than 100 milliliters of liquid per bottle. That bottle of iced tea that dayi gave us was a hundred and fifty times over the limit.
Seeing a long line ahead of us, I began to drink.
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4.
Nine years later, I returned to Changying. My cousins and I were walking around the neighborhood on a hot summer’s night. We stopped at the McDonald’s for a cold drink and took a seat by the indoor skating rink to watch the boys shoot hockey on one side and the girls figure skate on the other. I said that if I somehow woke up from a nap in this new megamall, I would have thought I was back in the states.
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5.
The plane finally took off after an hour-long trudge through Capital Airport’s crowded taxiways. Within moments, yifu started to ask me for the nth time if it was okay to light one up in the bathroom. That was the loudest night flight I’ve ever witnessed.
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6.
I walked with yeye and nainai around Nanhu Lake. We were visiting nainai’s family in a city that’s an hour’s ride on the bullet train outside of Shanghai. To me, we didn’t seem to be walking anywhere in particular in the park until yeye pointed at this extremely old yet quite ordinary boat that was docked by the lake.
He sat on a bench in front of it.
“Hey, use those photography skills and take a picture for me!”
“Get my whole body in the picture. Get the boat too.”
I took a good look at the sign next to the bench yeye was sitting on.
It said: Site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China.
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7.
I handed the customs officer my arrival card and passport. She looked at me, then my papers, then back at me again, and gestured at the thermal flask on my backpack.
“What’s inside?”
“Water.”
“Drink.”
“Mmm?”
“All of it.”
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8.
“I know some friends who visited China before COVID, and one of them—she told me that when she arrived at Pudong Airport, the customs officer greeted her with, ‘How’d it feel to sell your country abroad?’”
In that moment my mother and I shared a genuine but tenuous chuckle.
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9.
Yifu lit another cigarette. The late afternoon sun shone diffusely through the wildfire smoke. He told me back in Beijing, he kept a notebook under his seat in his taxicab. He said he would write stories about the people he drove at the end of a shift.
“Where’s it now?” I asked with youthful innocence. “We could turn it into a screenplay.”
“I burned it,” he said, without hesitating, taking a deep, unaffected drag.
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