Starless skies and Chinese Coca Cola – part one of a retrospective on Saddleback’s trip to China

There were three people I was close to before the trip. 

At LAX, after being waved forward to check our bags, I called across the booths of Air China employees to rendezvous with Grace for tickets next to each other, a process which really seemed like it should’ve been worked through at orientation, or at least made easier from Saddleback (the Chinese government?) by mass-buying a block of seats at the back of the plane.

Cooper was still in line behind us. Esmeralda hadn’t gotten to the airport yet. It was 10:37 a.m. Meeting time, as described by an email sent five hours prior, was 11 a.m.

Students fold themselves into a stupor at LAX before boarding. Nobody was quite awake, even though takeoff was at 3 p.m. William Stanley | Lariat

Our original plan, despite only two of us having tickets next to each other, was to spill ourselves out over the middle-four aisle and barter with whoever had jurisdiction over the missing pair next to Grace and me.

Confronted with two older women who only half-understood his neutered attempt at this, one wearing a blush pink cardigan and another a tealish blue sweater, collectively sporting ambivalent smiles that couldn’t figure much concern for us, Cooper, my roommate, took the seat in the row behind and sat next to the leader of Group B, T.J. 

I don’t know T.J.’s name other than T.J. I would later learn that in immediate response to the wheels unlatching and the brief spurt of turbulence before landing, Cooper clawed and clutched at T.J.’s leg in a primal attempt to ground himself in the plane and, in his words, in mortality. 

“I thought we were going to die, man,” Cooper said to the three of us with the kind of scatterbrained 1,000 yard stare they show puppies with in ASPCA commercials. 

“What’s the point?” he said. Call me when you figure it out, Cooper.

Cooper wears manhood in a way few other men who are as funny as him are able to pull off. He has enough charisma to draw in a pile of nails, and in an abundance that magnetizes the whole room, but also once described his confidence to me like this: if he’s not freaking out, then not even an ounce of the pressure reaches him, but the second he notices the cracks, the whole dam breaks. 

I think all four of us have a problem with gray areas, likely the invisible conduit for our eyebrow-raisingly quick connection as a group. He’s constantly compared to Timothee Chalamet, wears handcrafted Italian shoes every day, and has an air of understanding that gives you license to take that sigh you’ve been holding in. 

He is the most committed reader I’ve ever met, and will avoid starting books in public or holding them too high to escape the aesthetic baggage associated, but when he tells you that he’s a political science major, he makes it clear that half your assumptions are probably right.

During the shuffling of seats, Esmeralda sat across the aisle and next to Abdullah, someone I immediately recognized from elementary school at orientation and the only one out of all 80 of us who had been to China before. 

He mentioned how casual his last few trips had been, mainly spurred in cooperation with a neighbor of his same age, and he carried himself with an adamance to dissolve the iron-barred perceptions of authoritarian China people had picked up from their families before the trip. 

He told us that he was raw-dogging the flight and then showed us five seasons of a show he downloaded. I’m not sure what being prepared would’ve looked like.

I’d come to learn later that despite affectations of excitement, Esmeralda’s time removed was a constant fit of labor. She’s good at putting up veneers — across the plane you could almost believe how interested she was; you could almost envy Abdullah. 

She has hazel eyes that catch like molten gold in the sun and hair that curls like waves from a memory you admire yourself for having, a memory from a childhood beach that you can never find on your spontaneous midnight drives along PCH.  She projects this rugged individualism that only makes sense when you find glimmers of the compassion it blankets over, something so sincere it’d almost make you keel over.

I had the aisle seat and Grace the middle one. We didn’t talk much during the trip. My running theory is that we’re way too similar in some parts and way too different in others to latch on to each other in an unfamiliar environment like an internationally funded exchange program from your community college.

She’s the oldest of her siblings; I’m the youngest of mine; and yet, give us each a bottle of wine and we’re spilling how we’ve torn ourselves away from everyone we’ve ever loved in perfectly identical ways. She has chilling green eyes and in her face, this dual soft and hardness that pulls you in immediately. 

She’s kind and really funny — probably the most naturally social out of the four of us, in a way that doesn’t feel like a performance and enabled by this thing that’s perfectly within reach when you meet her, but with time finds its way to trail off with an alluring and repelling force. 

In that way, I think I’m a side character in her life. She’ll be published in the next edition of WALL; check in on her in 20 years and she’ll be a columnist for the New Yorker. Check in on me, I’ll be reading her with a stifled reverie from my basement in Indiana.

Right now, I’m writing this from the most American place I could find. River Street Marketplace in San Juan Capistrano —10:08 a.m. on the Sunday after the Friday night we got back. 

This is the kind of place where a homeless person gets dronestriked; the kind of third-wave neoliberal sinkhole where everything is trapped under the gossamer of class: look however you want, love however you want, talk however you want; as long as your bank account pulses with the right strength, the teenage shift lead, card reader, male divorcé behind you, the whole fucking beating red heart of our 2004-developmentally arrested conservative stronghold will feel you as right as you pass through its ventricles. 

And if it doesn’t, you’ll be shipped up the 5 to L.A. or San Francisco and immortalized on the national stage as some emblem of irrelevant American failure. 

There’s much more profound failures jutting out around here if you do a little scouting. I’ve been up for 15 hours after sleeping 17. I’m three Chinese cigarettes and four energy drinks into America.

The lights fade a couple hours into the flight; how considerate? I drank a Sprite, and had the fish because they ran out of beef. It wasn’t bad. It didn’t taste like anything. William Stanley | Lariat

The actual head-counting of the trip was done by student volunteers that were chosen at orientation, around 72 hours before our departure. Angela Yang, head of the International Student Program, operated from a basis of lottery choice in selecting from the 10-or-so uninformed and eager prospects (or maybe decisions were by height? Two-thirds of leaders were cleanly over 6 ‘5). 

Orientations were divided by group, and Group A’s had around 30 kids in attendance. It was catered by Corner Bakery and had the spread that you’ve seen 1,000 times at events where you find yourself strolling to the bathroom every 15 minutes, checking your hair, mapping the halls, and peaking through the blinds before your reentrance

There were presentations from international students who’ve lived in China, quick introductions from the 10 vaguely cerebral humanities and arts professors who were accompanying our STEM-focused trip, a lay-down of the law from Angela on our strict forbiddance from drinking or sneaking out, and the aforementioned rushed volunteering of two student leaders. 

This process was mimicked for the two other orientations, but for every group, there was one leader who took their candidacy seriously and another who evaporated into the tepid river of Saddlebackean apathy; our serious leader was Noah. He was our tall candidate. 

Starting during the presentations and persisting into and after the brief mingling period where we exchanged WeChats and constructed cool-tongued aphorisms on how great the next week would be, an at-first meek spattering of clouds accumulated into a pattering drizzle and eventually a downpour smacking at the windows of the room.

WeChat is the Chinese messaging service we’d use to consistently communicate with each other and our families back in the States. I exchanged WeChats with somebody so singularly committed to finding a Chinese girlfriend on our trip that he excitedly showed me a Chinese dating app that he downloaded, started scrolling, and pierced me with an affirmation-seeking stare as he asked what I thought (he will not be mentioned again; I’m not sure how his quest ended).

Exiting from the back of Student Services, the four of us paused for a moment and let our legs circle into a pace to temper our excitement; I held my head under the cracking water and over the small ledge overlooking Lot 6. By then, I hadn’t been home during the day in around two weeks. I’d spoken five words to my mother in that same time. 

I wouldn’t be telling her my flight number, Cooper was driving Grace and me to the airport and I never accepted her’s, or for that matter anyone else’s, WeChat requests. With the flippance China was just attributed, as we mutedly stared at a powerpoint on night markets and amusement parks while eating stale blueberry muffins, everything about the trip felt strangely plastic. 

We’d foster relationships we’d cherish forever; opportunities like this, in a world-travel sense, come once in a lifetime; so on. I felt lucky to be going; I was lucky to know people who were going, too. 

On the plane, T.J. swerved in and out of sleep; Noah was stone cold dead the whole thirteen hours; Stirling, Group C’s leader, was spotted once while I was avoiding sleep and getting tea. She seemed awake and in good spirits. 

No one clapped when the plane landed. It was 7 p.m. Beijing time. Everyone was out of the plane within five minutes, and the difference in country hardly registered as people stumbled through the gate and into the airport, settling into disheveled walks with carry-ons thrown around their shoulders. 

The air in the terminal had an awkward crispness to it, and looking out the windows into the runways, I could feel my internal clock clashing with the stark darkness; everything was still. The sound of our feet on the tile, slowing as we got onto the flat escalator tracks towards customs, proved with a rumbling set of clacks that noise could echo even in a vacuum. 

Cooper did not take the flight well, as mentioned earlier.

Grace carried her tiredness the way a familiar aunt does at an extended family gathering, gliding with an approachable languidness across the terminal. Out of anyone on the trip, she looked the most comfortable on the plane, somehow using her bent knees on the seat in front of her to build enough legroom for a basketball player in our dystopian Airbus seats.

Esmeralda took naps at LAX, and entering the plane with that prerequisite, didn’t successfully sleep any longer than an hour or two once we took off. She had the shaken and quietly humming energy of an exhausted Rottweiler to counterpart Cooper’s puppyhood.

Leaving the terminal, the emptiness was as immediately haunting as it was uncomfortably perfect. 

Beijing Capital International Airport is structured like a toy city inside a cardboard box, the ceiling unreachably far away from the floor and made up of an aluminum lattice lacing itself to shield a glass dome leaking out what was then the pitch black Chinese sky. The shops, checkpoints and terminals inside are all anchored at the same level and only reach maybe an eighth of the way up to the ceiling.  

The precursor to customs were three booths around 30 feet apart, each with three separate areas themselves with small forms for us to fill out. Most crowded around them immediately, and I waited near the back of the furthest one down for my turn with a provided pen and a sheet. I worked up a sterile attempt to slip from the conversation and watch. 

The sheets had blue text like a passport, and asked questions vague enough to panic everyone there: do we know anybody in China? Do we put Angela there? Do we put our address or Saddleback’s? This was the moment everyone was waiting for: was China going to feel different? 

The customs workers hardly even looked at the sheets given to them as we passed through. They had the obscure and blank stare of LAX employees that lived in a 3,500 dollar a month two bedroom with five roommates in Inglewood. They didn’t try to talk to any of us, only pointing flippantly down towards the fingerprint and facial scanners. 

They took every single one of my fingerprints — I work at Saddleback, and by extension (like a cousin twice removed), for the government, and they don’t even have all my prints. I’ve never been arrested either, so the only authority in the global marketplace of identity with this specific aspect of mine is the People’s Republic of China. 

Someone mentioned to me before leaving that they take facial scans, which they might have, but it looked like they just took a picture; they didn’t ask me to spin or shift my face like a Face ID scan.

If China ever acquires the files of the Blackstone group, and by extension my Ancestry profile, they would probably be able to successfully clone me, something my father’s mother pointed out with concerned and concerted certainty just a few hours ago.

We descended onto the ground level and took a train to reach baggage claim. There was a muddled mischief that you’d expect from a school trip with 80 kids, but everyone stayed pretty packed together. People were laughing. After picking it up, I sat on my suitcase for a while before it rolled out behind me, causing me to trip forward and break into a ruckus laughter that had already lost its ability to command the attention of our group. 

There were ads every 20 feet on humongous Time Square-type screens and coffee shops with English names like “Manner Coffee.” The bathrooms were clean and exceedingly bright, and I swear to God the hand dryers prompted before you even put your hands in them. 

Noah took roll while we waited for the stragglers out of the rubber conveyor belt behind us. He looked like he’d been hit by a train despite sleeping 13 of the last 14 hours. 

Students meander, ogling at similarities and preparing for the bus to the hotel. William Stanley | Lariat

Nearing the final door and daunting exit to the outside, in the part of the airport where people without tickets have their “Love Actually” moments, a group consisting of three women leading three smaller subsects greeted us with signs that read “Welcome to China Saddleback College US students!” 

To them, we were America, a pressure which registered with a collective apathy, hardly bearing itself on our shoulders as we moped towards consolidation with our recieving party.

Outside, that familiar brim of light pollution from Orange County was missing, but there weren’t any visible stars either. The scene conjured images of your annoying cousin talking about the moon landing — the sky over Beijing looked like Kubrick directed it for a 100 million dollar check from the CIA. 

There were three buses. They were red. It was cold enough to see your breath, and past the phantoms of our lungs were the three brightly smiling Chinese women, each holding a separate sign designating which group was assigned which bus. 

Splitting us in a binary, there were the calloused light-hearts who clawed with immaterial national identity at the air, batting out the foreignness into a familiar blank slate, and the unconcerned slouchers who treated their tiredness with a lack of tact slipping into pride that seemed unique to a culture like America’s. 

Only a group of 20-or-so year olds from a country like ours could carry themselves like that — said from deep inside the bubble.

The outside of the airport under the faked-the-moon-landing sky. William Stanley | Lariat

On the bus, they had a small gift bag for us; it had an apple, a Chinese Coke — noted such by the lettering on the can —, and other assorted sweets. I ate the apple and kept the core in the bag. Grace and Cooper sat in front of Esmeralda and me. 

Esmeralda fell asleep fast, and into an ambivalent REM which nodded her down into her lap every 15 minutes before allowing her to pick herself up again haphazardly, building the tower in explicit preparation for another fall. I held a vehement tension in my right shoulder, noting every movement I made to keep her from lulling forward, but some things are designed to be knocked over. 

It didn’t take long to get out of Beijing, and there was a notable lack of suburbia, the freeway instead spitting us straight into rural areas with a striking semblance to the Southwest US: there was enough dry brush for some real beautiful sunsets, hills like curves from a love that would’ve soured had it come closer, dried up creeks for disenfranchised wildlife, and fake trees on jagged mountains like Colorado military bases. 

It was horrifically dark outside. That part can’t be stressed enough.

There were checkpoints tracing what could only be guessed as county lines. We drove straight through most of them, like you would a toll road in the States — a real over-the-hump into Newport Beach energy — , the freeway mostly empty and projecting a mirrored likeness to the 5, except for consistent four-foot concrete borders running along the sides and bridges even more reinforced than the post-retrofitted ones in Socal (think La Paz and the 5 right now).

Soon after passing the checkpoint into Tangshan, Grace and Cooper looked behind them and found me staring blankly like a hazard about to stop the bus. 

Grace laughed; “What are you doing Will?” 

“I wasn’t eavesdropping per se.”

“Per se” — they repeated, laughing; they asked me a question they were discussing together. I sincerely and inadvertently mimicked Cooper’s answer, took a deep breath, and then actually responded.

Grace and Cooper are the kind of people, when together, that you could actually see finding life outside of the decaying host of Saddleback — they seem like friends that will still be calling in a few decades. 

I’m not sure if that’s because one of them is mirroring the other, but something about the way he walks with his shoulder nearly touching hers, the way they both laugh in such perfect cooperation, everything about it feels like a dance they’ve been rehearsing for a long time. 

And they’ve only really known each other for like a month. He has a girlfriend and she’s gay so it’s definitely not that, which makes the whole thing prettier and more comforting.

Esmeralda woke up around the time we got to downtown Tangshan, a city which really didn’t have any people, yet had the typical and nauseating rows of cars in line with any US urban environment. The architectural planning was reminiscent of a twelve-year-old’s Rollercoaster Tycoon world, with identical buildings spammed sporadically and asymmetrically alongside the streets. 

The only people I saw were outside of a liquor store, and they looked cool and young and free and effortless. One woman, probably a few years older than us, got out of her white Mazda, and wearing a cream overblouse and charcoal baseball hat, laughed her way to the group of men holding down the dimly lit 24-hour business and took a bum off one of their cigarettes. 

It was a lot like home, just with a little more emphasis on the space between: architecturally, emotionally, etc. For the whole trip, most people I saw after 9 p.m. were smoking. 

An aside: the transportation culture of China is what maybe best emphasizes the country’s mirrored-but-upside-down relationship to the states. Teslas carve out a large presence in the road’s population, and many of them in that candy-apple red which conjures the image of an American flag standing proud, stoic, and alone on Mars.

Chinese EVs were common, both in the city and rurally, and are much cheaper and nicer than their counterparts in the states, but at any odd glance of the road, most of what you’d find was familiar. There were a significant number of scooters, too. 

At night, they would sit out unlocked like a group of teenagers’ e-bikes in San Clemente, but with these cute puff-jacket handlebar covers to protect drivers’ hands from the cold, of course included with an emblem from Pokémon, Sanrio, or some culturally proprietary children’s franchise all-over printed.

It was what somebody who’s never left SoCal thinks that getting around in Seattle is like, but there were dirty parts, too. There was traffic and rush hour, and a sprinkling of lawlessness and honking, too. Some things can’t be optimized away.

We arrived at the Tangshan Intercontinental Hotel at a nondescript and purgatorial hour; there were two stuffed and large anatomically ambiguous fursuits waiting for us, waving and jostling back and forth in a fumbling daze. I didn’t see them when we walked in, and only noticed them as I turned to my left and they were within six feet to my side. 

They scared the absolute shit out of me. The ceilings were extremely high. Everything in the entryway was far apart, the check-in desk comically small and the central fixture defined immediately by a faux opulence familiar to capital cities in midwestern states. 

But this was China — don’t forget.

At an angle indicative of my shell shock: the subtly gendered anthropomorphs greet us at the hotel. William Stanley | Lariat

It should be mentioned here that Cooper, Grace, and I were all wearing “I <3 Tangshan” T-shirts, purchased from Amazon in a giggling fit that would’ve been less embarrassing if we were drunk (you know the font; I promise you’re picturing exactly what they look like). Esmeralda’s had probably arrived a couple hours after we landed in Beijing. 

I was wearing pants with a carpeted texture and mushroom embroidery down the front of the legs; they were purchased at Mission Viejo Mall the day of the orientation from a fast fashion store. They didn’t have pockets but they did have a fringe on the cuff that commanded the room. 

Every 10 minutes, this entire day, someone would point to one of us and tell us with a pungent sincerity how awesome and cool they were — there are many pictures of us in the shirts. Angela loved the shirts.

As they called us to the back of the room for a group picture, prompting everyone in the trip to meet in a cooperatively panicked gaze (many “no way”s were mouthed), Grace’s veneer of calm finally broke into her manifestation as a deer, though firm-legged, still staring down a pair of flashing headlights, Cooper’s outward buzzing collapsed into a final state of insular referendum towards moody silence, and Esmeralda’s tired shakenness cascaded down into a pointedness driven at anything to get the room key; she shuffled near the middle with a self-assumed resignation. 

I felt the air in my throat. This is one of the moments I actually remember, and in the tingling that started at the tips of my fingers before rushing to my chest, recollection took hold preceding any stifled or conditional acceptance.

The central lamp and wall decorations bewilder with labored effort; this picture feels completely foreign to me. Grace Roby | Guest

Acceptances for the trip came out on Monday, February 11th, the day after I had broken up with my girlfriend of four years. It seemed like the right time for them to come out. Cooper, Esmeralda, and I were included on the first wave of emails. 

Grace got accepted around a week later when the second wave was sent, and she was beyond ecstatic, being the person probably most committed to going out of the whole 80, despite being a humanities major with no background or context for China. 

She was the one who convinced me to visit Angela’s office during the application period, settling into my comfortable lower register, folding my hands together with applicable resolve, and introducing myself as a tutor and staff member for the Lariat. I would love to go, Angela. (And I did.) 

Sitting over my phone, texting Cooper and Esmeralda, I pulled down a mask of blanketed excitement; I couldn’t put into words the way I really felt when I got the acceptance, but now I can:

I will leave everything behind. Stepping into the plane, out of the states, I’ll tear a part of me away that I will never let back in. Two weeks later I stopped coming home, stopped talking to my mother, stopped doing everything I used to do. 

This was going to be new.

We took the group picture. We were given our keycards, Cooper’s and mine marked 1609 and Grace and Esmeralda’s 1507. We went to our rooms. They looked like a nicer Marriott that you would book in somewhere like Oakland: electric curtains for the bathroom, “no smoking” signs, towels folded under the sink, and two twin beds with chairs bordering the window at the far end of the room. 

Cooper went to sleep almost immediately, only laughing once in a quick anchoring to reality during a discussion on what we were sleeping in, and as he solidified further into the bed, I scuffled around the room with the lights off, putting all of my clothes into the closet, brushing my teeth, putting in my retainer, doing everything with perfect carefulness that I’d been avoiding in Orange County. 

I’d probably slept three hours in the last 36 — I could feel myself slipping away just how I hoped. This was China — this wasn’t home.

But turning off the bathroom lights, ready for bed, I caught myself in the mirror. Not anybody else, not a stranger, not a new face — even here: it was familiar; I caught myself.

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