Part Four: Your In-Flight Service

Typhoon in Shanghai. It made me laugh. I pulled Harry Potter out of my monstrous bags and accepted the food coupon from the check-in desk and then went off to sit in a restaurant with a feeling of relief. At least I had made the flight. My bags were off my hands and I had a real ticket this time and seemed to be going somewhere.

At the bar of the restaurant I chatted with a South African guy who seemed at first pleasant and then annoyingly racist and sexist. At least I had Harry Potter for company.

To my surprise, the flight boarded only a few hours late. Sure, the flight would take eleven hours, but surely the typhoon and resulting weather disturbances wouldn't have cleared away completely by then, I thought.

I thought correctly. After ten hours, the captain announced that we would be landing in Tokyo. Surely, I thought, the typhoon won't clear up in a few hours.

I thought correctly. We sat on the tarmac for a few hours until the airport closed. Then we were told because the airport was closed, there was no ground crew to unload us so we could neither take-off nor get off the plane. We stayed there for a further nine hours.

Finally, we were on our way to Shanghai. "I don't even want to go to Shanghai!" I kept thinking. I had missed my flight to Bangkok and didn't relish the madness I imagined would be going on in Shanghai with all the flights rescheduled and people stuck and bags most likely lost. But onwards to Shanghai we went and there we arrived in due course, after being on the same airplane for more than THIRTY hours.

But, I thought, I am nearing the end of my saga. And, as I had had that thought many a time in the previous two weeks, this time also, I was wrong. There was more to come.

We tottered off the plane, a smelly, zombie-like crew, ecstatic for clean air and a place to stretch our legs. We were herded towards Chinese immigration. In the long, long line before I reached the counter, I struck up conversations with some people from India and a guy from China.

"Why is this taking so long?" I asked, noticing that each immigration official seemed to be taking a very long time with each passport.

"They are like that here," my Chinese-Canadian friend said. "They don't care. They are looking for anti-Communist infiltrators. Mostly it is people with Taiwanese passports. They take them away for interrogation."

"Oh," I said.

I had been away from work for two weeks. In Canada, I had put all thoughts of Burma and Mae Sot from my mind, fully enjoying my vacation and my time with my family. I had forgotten all the politics of immigration and deportation and interrogation. I had forgotten how often I lie to immigration and government officials about my work. I had forgotten that I once worked in Taiwan and am currently engaged in work which is considered subversive to the government of Myanmar, who is a good friend with the government of China, which is the country in which I currently found myself. All those stamps in my passport were going to get me in trouble again, I thought.

I stepped up to the counter when my turn came with the cheeriest, ditziest, most non-subversive smile I could think of. But the official never looked at me. He looked at my passport and he looked at my ticket and then he said, "Wait over there."

He kept my ticket and passport behind the counter. What choice did I have?