oh china...

I had to write about a critical moment for class, so I figured I’d share it here. I tweaked it a bunch, but this is what I have the energy to post for now. This one moment basically sums up my experience in China:

Most people that I had encountered in Hong Kong spoke English. By the last day, my anticipation of language barriers almost completely left my range of automatic reflexes. When the moment came, I hailed a cab outside of the train station with a single burning desire: after five days of over stimulation, sleep deprivation and sensory overload, my adrenaline depleted- I just had get back to the ship. That was all I wanted. But of course, nothing in China was ever that simple.

I stepped into the taxi and stuffed my luggage onto the floor while my friend Elizabeth climbed in and did the same. “Kai Tak Cruise Terminal,” I said. The Chinese, middle-aged cab driver shrugged his shoulders with a blank face. Elizabeth then pulled out our green sheet from SAS that included addresses and necessary information for traveling through China and Hong Kong. What the green sheet lacked were the Chinese translations… so when she pointed to the English address of the terminal, the man again shrugged his shoulders, this time raising his hands with his palms facing upward in confusion. I took out my map. After the three minutes it took to locate the teeny tiny terminal on the enormous map of Hong Kong that stuck out both windows on either side of the cab, I tapped the driver on the shoulder, squished the map in the tiny hole between the front and back seats, and pointed to it- yet even with the Chinese translation of the terminal, again, he shrugged his shoulders, raised his hands and laughed.

Then came big moves: I turned on my data. Hoping I wouldn’t exhaust my 100 megabytes from Verizon, I opened the Maps app, plugged in the address, and showed him the route to the terminal. He looked at the iPhone, pressed it a few times, and handed it back uttering something in some Chinese-sounding language.

I realized that almost 15 minutes had passed since we got inside the cab, so I knew I had to get down to basics if I wanted to see the ship within the next year. So I opened Safari on my phone and got to Google to search for a simple picture of a cruise ship. In mid-search, a light bulb went off in Elizabeth’s head when she said, “Google the terminal!” I quickly typed in Kai Tak Cruise Terminal. It opened after a full minute. I scrolled through some images with the cab driver, until he finally said “ah ok” and mumbled something in this other language. I replied, “YES!”-basically in assumption that he reached Eureka. It turned out that after one wrong turn, I still needed to watch where he was going and look for the ‘Cruise Terminal’ signs. By the fifth sign, he laughed and nodded, seemingly in understanding of the destination we had spent 20 minutes trying to locate for him.

If I had only turned on my brain in that moment and remembered that the cab driver might not necessarily have known English like most others in Hong Kong, I might have saved the 20 minutes it took to locate the damn ship. But there is also another lesson I learned- while technology is an invasive, distracting, idealizing medium of obtaining information, I can’t say we would have been able to use that taxi to get to the terminal without Google-ing images of the Kai Tak Cruise Terminal. We probably would have wasted those 20 minutes, and had to repeat them in a different taxi. So you see, Ma, I didn't just ask you to look into that international data plan for shits, gigs and Facebook...

All in all, China was a confusing, difficult, aggressive experience. But I could move to Hong Kong and be a very happy camper.