Detour to Bun Town

The forms were, indeed, intimidating, and stories of Beijing airport martinets only enhanced the peril of it all. The tale goes that when Mr. Gabriel Hauge, the formidable chairman of Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company, made his first trip to China in the seventies as part of a high profile delegation, he was asked to lift his eye patch for inspection by a customs officer.

When I took up residence just a few years later—inconceivable when Mr. Hauge had first visited during the Cultural Revolution—I came to know that those forms had to be done according to Chinese Hoyle, with specific goods being brought into the country and presented for inspection in a specific fashion. As a rare holder of a residency visa, I enjoyed being rather nonchalant about what others found traumatic. That being said, I was more than happy to assist the terrified.

Being six feet five inches tall, I always sat on the aisle, leaving the window seat to little folks. With a Trollope novel in hand, I immediately lost myself in nineteenth century English parish intrigues, an imaginary environment that I came to value all the more as the claustrophobia of life in Beijing grew more intense. Suddenly, though, I became aware of a rather compact fellow standing over me. Sporting a pinched and striped three-piece suit with a heavy peppering of dandruff, he could only have been an Englishman. That Hong Kong was still a colony might have minimized the contrast on the Peak, but on board a brand new and already dog-eared CAAC plane, with stewardesses sporting pigtails and the seats bedecked in socialist antimacassars, he could not have been a more striking innocent abroad, embodying arrogance and uncertainty rolled into one.

Clearly, he was anxious. Downing the novel in aid of my distressed companion, I began customary assurances. I was used to this routine as a somewhat smug China hand. As usual though, it was the Chinese themselves, the very source of the discomfort, who began to transform the situation into a comedy. To be sure, the meager gray cold cuts summarily served were no laughing matter, but a stewardess busily handing out nail clippers or kitsch picture frames as though these souvenirs made perfect sense was initially more surprising than amusing to the traveler, hinting at the new world about to be entered.

The trip was going well. The English gentleman had been a Gurkha and spoke Nepalese. After leaving the army, he joined a medical supply company, and this was to be its first foray into China, flogging anesthetics well outside the comfort of the Raj. He had some pals in the British