Adventures in the US - Spring 08

Yes, I have not blogged about my USA adventures since my return. One of the reasons is that I thought that I would quit blogging, which is a fairly good one. But now I am working at an extremely laid back and comfortable pace of one per week, and I see that our friend Shingot has gone to Colorado like I have.

As most of you know, security at the airports has gotten a little bit more hellish ever since 911. They have some stunts like asking everybody to remove their shoes for inspection. Queues for people waiting to board airlines have backed up like a choked sewer.

If you are lucky you will bump into some customs officer with a sense of humour. The person asked for my passport and ticket, which I had in a money belt tucked in my pants. When I reached for it, he said, “no no no, there’s no need to take it all off too.” So that was the more OK encounters.

The not so OK encounters were at the customs check in counter. It was tense because I was smuggling some food in for my sis but of course he didn’t know that. Kept on peppering me with questions, like what I was doing, who I was visiting, and what my sister was doing. He asked me “Are you going to San Francisco?” I stifled the urge to say “no, and neither am I going to wear flowers in my hair.” Giving me suspicious looks and all that, and in the end a look of exasperation, like “I give up, I haven’t gotten you today but I’ll get you one day.”

I was entirely thumbprinted, of course. All aliens are, regardless of their criminal records. I remember visiting New York City and the Ellis island, seeing all the crap that all the immigrants had to go through before they were allowed into the country. Americans had a funny relationship with the Chinese, of course. On one hand they fought a world war as allies against the hated enemy, the Japs. On the other hand they treated the German POWs better than the Chinese immigrants that they turned away at the doorstep. If the US had given the Chinese a fraction of the help that they gave the Europeans, they wouldn’t have to suffer so much. More importantly the US wouldn’t have had to deal with Mao Zedong.

One incident about the US customs took place when I was enquiring about a student visa application on my sister’s behalf. This was 4 years ago, and the US had become more paranoid about aliens, and required that she apply for a visa on an embassy outside of US soil. So I called up the embassy and asked how this could be done. Halfway during the telephone conversation I muttered something about how those guys have nothing better to do than to force my sister to buy a plane ticket all the way to Singapore for that. Then he said, “Well you could try to do it in Singapore where it’s nice, clean and spacious, or you could do it in Jakarta where everywhere’s crowded and dirty, tempers are flying and you might not get it because the office might suddenly decide to close early.”

I wish I had thought of something to blast him back with because that comment made me very angry. It was not so much that it was impolite, but he was twisting the thrust of the argument. Nobody would have to go to anybody’s embassy if you didn't make that stupid rule that people have to get out of your country. Of course the idea is that it saves you the problem of having to deport people if their visas reapplications are not successful but this is a lot like "we're assholes and we're big and strong and can afford it and fuck you if you don't like it".

The other thing that happened was in a domestic flight. They got people to board in different tranches, which makes sense because it’s orderly: people seating at the back go in first, people in the front or in the aisles go in last. My sister went in first, I went in last. I saw that my sister had not stowed her bag in the overhead compartments, and I asked her why. Then she pointed at some motherfucking ang moh on the other side, and said, “he told me to shove off and he planted his luggage there instead.” Well being the good big brother I was, I was wondering if I should grab his bag out of the bin and plonk it on his lap and tell him to fuck off. And he was looking at me kinda worried maybe because he probably hadn’t counted on there being a big brother as tall (but not as fat) as he was. (I’m tall for an Asian but average for an angmoh.)

My options were: chew him out in public? But there were angmohs everywhere, so that was a bit risky. Eventually I thought, wait till we disembark, and we’re walking out at the other airport, then I trip him, make him fall on his face, and laugh at him.

Later on, the plane was taking quite some time to queue up for the runway. I noticed him trying to look out our window to check out the queue, so I helpfully went over and closed the window on him.

Eventually, though, my grand plans for revenge were foiled, because when we went out, we saw that his bag had the name of the same medical school that my sister went to, and that his speciality was the same as my sister’s. I’m not kidding. So I ran the risk of tripping over and laughing at somebody who could be a superior of my sister’s. So no revenge. What a bummer.