#79. 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 largest cities in the 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 it was time to take a month-long family trip back to Shanghai. Which was all fine and good, except for one thing: I was deathly afraid of flying. Mainly because my entire frame of reference at the time consisted of the two or three plane crashes that I had seen on the news…plus 9/11 a year earlier.
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 the entire way. (At one point, I’m so sleep-deprived that I reach out behind me to grab the pillow I think I dropped…turns out it’s some guy’s foot cast.) The two main fears keeping me up were: (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 a 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 experience1.
At this point I’m near hallucinating. While walking along the moving platforms at the airport, I keep hearing on the intercom: “At the end of the wool is a head. Please watch your step.” Like, what the hell?2
Finally, after one more flight, 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 cousin; the latter three I’m seeing for the first time. 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 for absolutely no reason, then go back to sleeping…must have been some kind of sleep shock.)