The Jitters Onboard the Flight to Beijing

The Jitters Onboard the Flight to Beijing

The six-hour flight to Beijing filled me with a type of jitteriness I had never known.

Ten to fifteen minutes prior to boarding the plane, Mother, a Bruneian, had spent a protracted time in a long queue, waiting to have her passport scrutinised at the customs checkpoint for foreigners. As locals, the passport scrutiny was easy for my brother, Dominic, and I because it was done through self-service. Had we not rushed to the departure lounge after her passport was stamped, we would have missed the flight. The plane took off from KLIA2 at 7.10 p.m., and the passengers spent the first two hours dining and chatting. Mother and Dominic found a row of unoccupied seats at the back and moved over there to enjoy the luxury of more space and privacy. I was left with a Beijing girl who, sitting towards the front, had borne my nervousness-induced trips to the toilet well with her good-natured patience. The moment I said “Excuse me” in an undertone, she would smile knowingly and rise to let me pass. 

When dinnertime was over, a spell of drowsiness came over me. Under the fitfulness of my semi-consciousness, I could hear the hum of chatter and the monotonous drone of the flight engines, which added the sweetness of languor to the air with their lulling power. I seemed to sink deeper and deeper into darkness and, all of a sudden, found myself in the middle of an unknown road, where poker-faced pedestrians swirled past me on both sides. I was in rags, and my bones ached due to the onslaught of cold wind. A girl came up to me and aimed the lens of her white camera at me. “What’re you doing?” I asked, covering my face as a flash of orange light shot from her camera shutter. She had taken my picture! I tried to snatch the camera away from her, but she kept drifting backwards like the wind.

 I awoke to find the Beijing girl chatting with a lady sitting across the aisle from her. Their bell-like, rapid-fire Chinese dispelled the fog of sleepiness in me, and I took out Norman Lewis’s The Golden Earth to continue reading where I had left off. This choice of action was downright incongruent, as it was about travels in Burma during the 1970s. Despite the huge worlds of difference, certain descriptions in the book gave me some food for thought regarding how to deal with my blog-writing throughout my stay in Beijing.

By 10 p.m., my patience had reached its limit. I peeled my eyes away from the book, whose words had become increasingly blurred and painful to read. The lights dimmed slowly, leaving only the seatbelt-fastening signs on, forming illuminated rows of short lines from one end to another. To release my suppressed feelings of impatience, I stretched my arms over my head and interlaced my fingers into a clasp. Holding my breath as I counted to ten, I gradually loosened my fingers and emitted a big sigh at the last number. Boredom, be gone! 

During the last two hours, I must have dozed off again. When I awoke, I could hear the announcement that the plane would be landing shortly. The plane banked eastwards, and I quickly put on my jacket at the first hint of chilliness. I asked the Beijing girl if it could keep me warm during my ten-day stay, and she shook her head cheekily, declaring that it would do little to shield me from the bitter cold in Beijing.

“But yours is of the same thinness as mine,” I remonstrated.

“Of course, but wearing it isn’t enough,” said the girl. “Have you put on your long johns?”

I said that I had not. She replied in a teasing tone that I should brace myself for the coldness. Just then, the lights dimmed again. When the plane touched down, all sorts of worries abandoned my highly imaginative mind. The sense of being mind and body in Beijing made me smile from ear to ear.

Due to some congestion on the runways, it took us quite a long time to disembark through the terminal. What followed was breezily smooth. We got through the scrutiny of customs and were met by Zhu Ran, Aunt Magdalene’s driver, after collecting our luggage. While en route to his car, the extremely cold air greeted us, and white vapour rose from our mouths when we exclaimed how cold it was. The city was soundly asleep at two in the morning as Zhu Ran whisked us off to Aunt Magdalene’s residence. Through my sleepy eyes, the streetlights seemed to bob in the air.