#75. Flights to Shanghai (Wednesday, August 7, 2002)

What was your best day…of being forced to overcome a fear?

All of us have our own fears. Some of them you can just accept as common (or less common) phobias, and move on with your life with relative normalcy. But some of them, you kind of have to deal with at one point or another…

Though I was born in Toronto, my parents both came from Shanghai, China, one of the largest¹ cities in world. Pretty much all of my extended family, i.e. everyone except my parents and brother, lived there. But before now, I had only been there once – when I was three and didn’t remember anything.

Eight years later, my parents decided that we needed to take a month-long August family trip back to Shanghai. Which was all fine and good, except for one thing: I was deathly afraid of taking airplanes. Mainly because my full frame of reference at the time had been the two or three plane crashes that I had seen on the news…plus 9/11 a year earlier.

Well, eventually they do convince me to go, and I do sit through all three flights – Ottawa to Chicago, Chicago to Tokyo, Tokyo to Shanghai – with minimal resistance. Except I get exactly zero hours of sleep through the whole thing², the two main fears keeping me up being: (1) the plane just randomly crashing into the ocean; (2) one of the 500 people in the plane breaking their window, thus letting in the -80 degree air from the stratosphere and freezing us all to death.

But, no lie, there actually was near-incident right before we landed in Tokyo. For some reason, when we entered the Tokyo airspace the pilot couldn’t land yet so he was just circling around waiting; then he starts descending (while still circling, seemingly aimlessly), and it’s getting dangerously close to some of the rooftops in the city, like inches away it seems…and then finally the pilot suddenly lurches down onto the runway – following which is the roughest, most uneven landing I would ever experience³.

Finally, we do arrive in Shanghai. After over twenty hours in the air, I am now safely on the ground in one piece. Phew.

And there, waiting for us at the airport, are several people from my mom’s side of the family – my grandmother, my uncle, my aunt, my older cousin⁴. And I, in my completely sleep-deprived state, am just fully taken in by the newness of this experience.

And thus began one of the most exciting, eye-opening months of my childhood.

(NB on the sleep: I do fall asleep easily that night, but in the middle of the night I just wake up and start crying and yelling at my dad absolutely no reason, then go back to sleeping…must have been some kind of sleep shock.)

And, depending on what measure you use, the largest.
At one point, I’m so sleep-deprived that I reach out behind me to pull out the pillow I thought I dropped…turns out it’s some guy’s foot cast.
It only took a few more flights for me to realize that all this was not a normal occurrence.
With the exception of my grandmother, I’m seeing them all for the first (conscious) time.