“Shall we buy some duck for the flight?”
Feng burst out laughing. “Oh my God, the duck, the stupid duck!”
“We can be these people too. Come on, let’s do it.”
In 2014, Feng and I flew from Shanghai to Shenyang with toddler Mark, who was still travelling on my lap. We were seated at the back of the plane, in a row of three with another passenger by the window.
The passenger, a woman, was travelling with a friend sitting in the row behind. One of those flight mysteries—they should have been sitting together, but somehow weren’t.
They started handing each other food right before the plane took off. They each had big shopping bags filled to the brim with what I assumed were Shanghai specialties.
A box of xiǎolóngbāo (小笼包) was passed from the back, above Feng’s head.
A couple of mooncakes were passed from the front, above my head.
They’d filled cup noodles with hot water before boarding and ate them during takeoff.
And the minute the seatbelt sign was turned off, both women opened vacuum-packed bags of duck and various parts started being passed back and forth above my head, and by extension, Mark’s.
“Yā bó (鸭脖)!”
Two duck necks were passed to the back.
“Yā zhǎng (鸭掌)!”
A handful of duck feet made their way to the back.
Feng is usually very easygoing with strangers—whatever floats your boat, I don’t care. But he clenched his jaw at yā jià (鸭架). Mind you, it was hard enough to keep toddler Mark on my lap, and putting him to sleep with a duck carcass being passed over his head didn’t help.
“Can you… possibly… stop sharing duck?” he eventually asked in Chinese.
I remember bursting out laughing because it was the strangest sentence ever uttered somewhere above ground between Shanghai and Shenyang, but also completely appropriate.
We refer to this as “the duck incident”.
We showed up at Nanjing airport without duck, and we swore and signed that we weren’t carrying anything flammable. Chinese airport security is obsessed with flammable products, from batteries to lighters. The latter are invariably confiscated or abandoned just outside the airport.
Inside the airport, a lighter socket is provided in designated areas—or occasionally, there’s just a dumb lighter tightly tied to the ashtray.
We checked in, got flagged for inspection (red flags are okay in communist China, so my backpack joined the other luggage). Our China Southern flight was delayed—I wanted to sleep on the plane but ended up sleeping on Feng’s shoulder at the gate instead. We landed to find booze ads and a free lighter vending machine—welcome to Shenyang!
The subway was empty when we boarded at the airport but completely packed by the time we got to Qingnianyuan. It took careful planning and various hand signals between the three of us to extract ourselves at the right station.
Phew.
“How far is the apartment from the subway station?”
“Not far. A block or so.”
Yes, exactly a block, actually. Except there was a night market in full swing on our street, with carts packed so tightly along the sidewalk that we couldn’t even cross over to our building.
“DID YOU KNOW ABOUT THE NIGHT MARKET?” I shouted.
“OBVIOUSLY NOT!”
Eventually, we found an opening and reached our building. Then we found the host, the elevator, the key, the codes, the light…
And there was still so much to do.
“Let’s go grab some food.”
Neither Feng nor I knew where to go. The last two times, we had stayed close to the train station; this was a new district to us, and we had to plunge into the night market crowd again…
The streets were a blur of neon signs and silhouettes, cars and motorbikes, everybody shouting and half of the people carrying long pointy sticks with squid or other animals impaled on them, none of them on my dinner wish list.
“I want to go back to our old hood. At least, I know where to go.”
“It’s far! Let me find something for me and Mark. Buy noodles, or whatever you can find, and we’ll go there afterward.”
The sun set, the streets became more chaotic, and I got more tired.
And then, eventually, after a few trips back and forth to the apartment, a subway trip to “the old hood”, a few milk teas, and a bit of time, the streets around us started to make sense and I started finding what I was looking for.
It’s going to take a few days to find my bearings in the Northeast, though.
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