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The Mobile Age: Part 3
I end my visit the next day with an afternoon drink with Kwan and some of her work colleagues at the famous expat bar Malone’s. Here the post-place experience is given a North American pop-cultural sheen. Musical Youth on the stereo. Tip-conscious Filipino wait staff. Coors Light. Most of Kwan’s colleagues are much less seasoned. And the mood is effusive, full of the excitement of the fresh experience. But even among these newest expats, a recognizable current flows. “After three years, you lose your professional contacts,” says one knowing younger man, resigned to the sacrifices his stay here will represent. “After six years, you lose your friends.” Kwan will not be deflated today, however. She shares her latest good news in private. A request for a transfer to Chile has been granted. Off to Santiago. Better air quality, better snowboarding. And… tango! “First thing we’re doing is finding a house,” she tells me, breathless. “Then a Latin dance club. Oh, I should have been born Latina.” Which may well be true, I think, heading west again on Yanan Dong Lu in a cab. Homeward bound myself and intensely grateful too. I’m just over my jetlag. Freed of my biorhythmic connection to home. My inner nomad is busting out all over and yet, and yet... I look up into the towering, competing architectural objects that fly past my window. I wonder whether I am envious of those I’ve met or truly relieved not to be one of them. And then I realize that, of course, I am both. And as we inch to a standstill in gridlock traffic, imprisoned as we head down the off-ramp toward the tunnel, I look back and up. And I see the most improbable thing. A kite. Flying way up there. At about the 60-floor level. Someone on a rooftop somewhere, I think, smiling now. Someone feeling the enormous tug of invisible gusts, enormous forces. Someone pulled upward by complicated post-global forces and straining toward the sky. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
