AIAI-assisted translation·Read the source version
Today I am flying back to China alone. I have probably not returned for two or three years. The country in my mind has been assembled entirely from fragments found online, like a church window made from coloured shards of glass: dazzling in places, obscure in others. From a distance it seems clear; approached closely, it becomes blurred and impossible to see through.
I remember Mishima writing in an autobiography—or perhaps someone wrote it in a biography of him—that he disliked going abroad. When a writer leaves the land and is separated from the mother tongue, it becomes difficult to produce decent prose. Perhaps this is because artistic inspiration is drawn from life. To leave a shared cultural memory and enter a completely different place is to become a fish out of water.
Yet I have lived abroad for so long that Naples itself has acquired something of the feeling of home. I spent most of my youth looking towards Mount Vesuvius. Even when a journey elsewhere goes well, I already feel that I belong to this land. At the same time, I do not belong here: my language, habits of thought and culture remain Chinese. The contradiction produces confusion, leaving me uncertain which side can be called mine.
I dislike flying. As a child, even a bus journey made me vomit and feel miserable. Whenever we travelled, an older relative would give me a mint to hold in my mouth. Its sweet, cooling taste mixed with the nausea of motion sickness. It restrained the urge to vomit, yet somehow made the experience still more unpleasant.
Aeroplanes are worse. Naples has no direct flight to China, so I must first spend three hours travelling to Rome and then, without pause, experience every security procedure the airport has devised.
Not long after take-off, noise, nausea and headache arrive together. It is tormenting. My greatest wish at such moments is to close my eyes and immediately fall asleep, hoping that when I wake the aircraft will already have landed safely. In reality, things seldom go as wished: I remain awake throughout the flight.
Meal times on board are strange. I cannot tell which time zone determines them; on this flight, dinner arrived at ten in the morning by Rome time. To be honest, the food was good—certainly better than the expensive and unpleasant meals sold at the airport—but I could not swallow it. As soon as an oily taste entered my mouth, my stomach began to move and nausea followed. I scraped tiny portions from a solid dessert with a spoon and ate them in small bites for a little energy. After a few tastes, my appetite vanished. I admired the passengers around me, who somehow continued eating normally in great mouthfuls.
I was fortunate today: both seats beside me were empty, giving me three seats on which to rest. The chance to lie down on an aeroplane is rare, but I still could not sleep. Curling my body across the seats never felt comfortable.
To pass the time I had downloaded the whole of K-On!. When I opened it, I discovered that I had forgotten to download the Chinese subtitles. What should have been easy viewing immediately became a Japanese listening examination, and all interest disappeared.
Some successful person—I no longer remember who—once said that he works most efficiently on aeroplanes. First, no outside information can interrupt him: there is no need to worry about a sudden phone call, and after landing one can simply tell anyone who sent a message, “I was on a flight,” which everyone understands. Second, there is nothing else to do. Confined to a narrow seat for more than ten hours, with a computer in front of you and no internet, work becomes the only possible focus.
That may be true for others. Before departing, I too imagined that if I devoted the whole flight to study, I might advance remarkably quickly. But after opening an electronic book and forcing myself to read for half an hour, I abandoned the attempt in disappointment. I cannot study in such an environment.
Still, beyond my dislike of being aboard, aeroplanes produce another feeling in me.
A vehicle carries a person from one place to another. Two feet are also a means of transport, though in daily life they usually follow roads walked countless times before. Once after school, I suddenly found the courage and interest to walk all the way home from the hill. I entered my address, glanced at the route and stepped onto a road I had never taken. A strange road felt fresh: the surrounding streets, the people I might meet and the small curious details were all beyond prediction.
Likewise, when I once boarded a bus I had never taken and was carried to a place I did not know, I felt both frightened and intensely expectant. The memories formed along that route remain vivid in my mind.
This flight too carries me towards an unfamiliar place, farther away and still less predictable. I know the destination in advance, yet the scenes I will encounter cannot be reached by my weak imagination. I am like a pebble lifted from an ordinary shore and thrown with force in one direction, landing somewhere entirely strange, somewhere bearing no trace I have left before. For a moment I am pulled out of an unchanging life: my feet touch unknown ground and my eyes meet new scenery. Faced with the unforeseen, thought loses some of its stale rigidity, and the spirit gains a little life.