Mostly in Economy Class

By Jay Maclean

Mostly in Economy Class continues the ups and downs of flights and sights in Europe revealed in—and reveled in—Sometimes in Business Class, but this time in Asia—where adventure, surprise and wonder are around every corner, inincidents and events from the apparently trivial to the exotic to the erotic.

Mostly in Economy Class begins with an adventure in China in the early 1980s that may or may not have ended in a dangerous escape to the west; the reader must decide. After the secret world of China, the tales move on to Thailand before and after its temples were overrun by tourists; two faces of Japan in the 1980s; Angkor Wat, Cambodia at a time when Khmer Rouge guns could be heard in the distance, and later after the guns were silenced; South Korea before it emerged as an economic powerhouse, when the country seemed to be almost in a parallel universe; life and poverty in Bangladesh; footpath etiquette in the quaint French quarter of Hanoi; post-Mcdonald’s China; and more. Read on!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jan 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781537839523

Book preview

MOSTLY IN ECONOMY CLASS

Jay Maclean

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PRONOUN

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All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

Copyright © 2017 by Jay Maclean

Interior design by Pronoun

Distribution by Pronoun

ISBN: 9781537839523

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Introduction

China, 1982: A Comedy and Drama with Two Endings

How it all ended 1

How it all ended 2

The Journey, not the Destination (Thailand, 1987)

Tokyokay (Japan, 1989)

Pornography

Food Replicas and the Social Drink

Train to Iwate Province

Tokyokay

Bats and Bears in Kretek Country (Indonesia, 1990)

Sleepy Medan

Taxiing in Transit (Singapore, 1990)

A Cabbie’s Woes

The World’s Smallest Elevator (Hong Kong, 1990)

Life as a Long Bicycle Ride (China, 1990)

A Parallel Universe (Korea, 1991)

Pusan

A parallel Culture

Irish Connections

A Typhoon in Time (Hong Kong, 1991)

Snipers of Sentosa (Singapore, 1992)

A List of Bangladesh Scientists’ Hobbies (1990)

Searching for Peace (Thailand, 1993)

Bangkok’s Overrun Temples

Bangkok and the Sixth Singha (Thailand, 1994)

Guest of Honor at the Chateau

Jomtien

Arnold, a Mystery Revealed

Arnold’s Aquarium

Forty Five Minutes at Kai Tak (Hong Kong, 1994)

Dancing in Dalat (Indo-China, 1994)

Saigon

Nha Trang

Dalat

Phnom Penh

Udong

Tonle Sap

Angkor Wat

Prey Veng

Indo-Chinese Cuisine

Epilogue

Goobye for Error (China, 1994)

Hong Kong Airport, 2003

Siem Reap (Cambodia, 2006)

Angkor Wat Reprise

Phnom Penh (Cambodia, 2007)

A casual wedding for 1,000

Three Weeks in Bangladesh (2008)

Dhaka

Holey Highways

Club Nights

The War on Women

Teachers and Learners

Epilogue

Bia Hoi (Vietnam, 2015)

The French Quarter

Ha Long Bay

New Beijing (China, 2017)

Appendix: In Support of Egestion Stations

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~

Sometimes in Business Class, published 2017, short stories about the lighter side of flying and traveling in Europe, that spares neither flight attendants nor Roman motorists. You may never see the sights the same way again.

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Five stars: "Funny how familiar it sounds! A fun read that rings so true to a regular business traveller - also Sometimes in Business Class. Jay’s record of his travels sounds so familiar, but his light hearted language makes it sound so much more fun than it often is!"

Four stars: "I can vouch for 5 cities. An enjoyable travellers read. I especially enjoyed Edinburgh (my hometown), Oban, Paris, Venice, Rome as i revisited them while reading - charming while insightful and cutting - much like the Piano playing Author himself."

Found, Lost, Paved and sunk: Paradise, published 2017, an entertaining and different kind of history of, and outlook for paradises in this world through the eyes of administrators, adventurers, artists, authors, explorers, hermits, missionaries and native populations, not to mention other animals and flora.

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Five stars: "Great Read! Unique perspective of a Marine Biologist about tropical life, adventure and people. Written by someone who has been there, done that and continues to do so. Great to escape hammock reading."

Four stars: "A thinking man’s take on the elusive perfect destination. An insightful, amusing and very entertaining read, highly recommended for expats, nature lovers and armchair travelers."

Five stars: "Highly recommended!!! Informative and well written book! thumbs up, highly recommended!"

Crying Trees, Killer Fish, and Rental Corpses, published 2017, about life and death in the Philippines through the eyes of a visitor who arrived in 1980 and stayed through revolutions and attempted coups, traveling, climbing and diving.

Electric Angels and Pink Bikies, published 2017, a voyage of discovery about the Philippines, a country with one foot in the world of fairies and spirits, and where every event has an unusual twist, whether wedding or funeral, kidnapping or vasectomy, getting a driver’s license or even just getting a haircut.

Black Pearls and Red Tide, published 2017, the true story of a young scientist sent unknowingly as a spy into Papua New Guinea shortly before its independence; his research and its consequences in the present era of global climate change.

Customer review:

Five stars: "Enjoyed. Good read, full of action."

In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in the North Atlantic Ocean, published 2003, by Daniel Pauly and Jay Maclean, an unprecedented, whole ocean ecosystem view of the North Atlantic, showing the decline of its fisheries and what should be done to restore both ecosystems and fisheries.

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Five stars: "Very interesting reading. As a recreational angler, I have a great concern in the dramatic decline of our fisheries. A great read for any naturalist, environmentalist, fisheries biologist and anyone interested in the plight of ocean fisheries."

Five stars: "If Farley Mowat had been a scientist... ...he’d have written this book…‘In a Perfect Ocean’ is a great place to start if you want to understand fisheries and their problems, along with some likely solutions."

Five stars: "Five Stars. Good book."

Five stars: "Comprehensive Report on the Sad Condition of the No. Atlantic Fisheries. …There are many graphs, references, and notes for further research - in a nutshell, this is a bible for fisheries research…"

INTRODUCTION

THIS VOLUME OF SHORT STORIES continues the ups and downs of flights and sights in Europe of Sometimes in Business Class, this time in Asia.

Wherever one travels in Asia, adventure, surprise and wonder are around every corner. More cultures and civilizations with no written records have been lost to antiquity in Asia than have ever existed in the rest of the world. Fortunately, there is still plenty to experience beyond the modern physical trappings of Asian capitals, unlike western cities where what you see is pretty much all you get. Airline travel itself can equally be a source of adventure and wonder in Asia, sometimes the wonder being whether one will arrive or not.

The stories herein offer tastes of the flavor of different Asian countries through incidents and events from the apparently trivial to the exotic to the erotic. They begin with an adventure in China in the early 1980s that may or may not have ended in a dangerous escape to the west; the reader must decide.

After the secret world of China, the tales move on to Thailand before and after its temples were overrun by tourists; to the two faces of Japan in the 1980s; to Angkor Wat in Cambodia at a time when Khmer Rouge guns could be heard in the distance, and again later after the guns were silenced; to South Korea before it emerged as an economic powerhouse, when the country seemed to be almost in a parallel universe; life and poverty in Bangladesh; footpath etiquette in the quaint French quarter of Hanoi; and more.

CHINA, 1982: A COMEDY AND DRAMA WITH TWO ENDINGS

THIS IS A STORY OF events in secretive China in the early 1980s, events that grew more and more dangerous as a romance developed between a foreigner and a Chinese government official. Alas, it was not to continue; the foreigners left the country together after their brief stay. Or did one stay behind, to take part in a daring escape? Both endings are given. Which one is true? The choice is yours.

~

In May 1982, I went to China. That sounds unremarkable now, but in 1982, China was hardly a friendly country. My visit was at a time when the country was just opening up to the west and everyone in Beijing, of both sexes, from the president of the academy of agricultural sciences, whom we met, to the laborers sweeping the streets, some of whom we may also have met, wore the same tired Mao suits, grey, black or navy button-up suits with black slipper-like shoes. Even Mao Tse Tung, whom we met in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, was dressed the same. Beijing had the air of a prison of immense size, which in a way it was.

Four of us were in a group that flew into China to display agricultural research books from a number of international research centers. Somehow, Pongase (pronounced ponggarzy he insists), a self-confessed philosopher of sorts, had joined us. We had no idea how he managed to persuade our directors to send him with us as a kind of cultural officer. He went into China fully bearded, with what felt like a boil inside his nose. It made him grouchy and rather formidable looking to the Chinese for whom beards anyway were as improbable as families with more than one child. Particularly terrified was our translator, a round-faced girl whose name translated as Pearl and who was seemingly devoid of humor. But I am getting ahead myself.

We were flying in one of the last Boeing 707s, arriving late at night because the flight was delayed because there was no delay. China Airline officials said there would be a three-hour delay and some of the passengers went home before the officials changed their minds. One supposes the officials were weighing up the risks of flying on three engines, broken rudder and two flat tires against paying for snacks for...well how many passengers were there? They made several head and body counts to work this out. The numbers must have kept changing as passengers wandered back in from Manila suburbia or drifted off to the toilets. Rather than take an average, they offloaded all the luggage into a random collection of mounds on the tarmac so that we all had to trundle down under the wheezing jet and identify our various dusty and dented bags. Our group had ten heavy pieces containing backup copies of the 500 publications we were exhibiting concurrently in three Chinese cities; the ground crew really loved us for that.

On the leg from Manila to Canton, passengers were treated to a carton of biscuits and a few pieces of candy, washed down with 7-up or coke. My notes on the second leg, to Beijing, simply say Turbulence was horrible; the food only slightly better. And they served a brittle chewing gum. Still, one was a pioneer going to China in those days. The pilots must have felt the same; one of the China Airways planes, a Trident, was downed while we were there.

And books, especially foreign books, especially foreign agricultural books, were a precious commodity in China then. It was less than six years since the decade of the Cultural Revolution when books of all types were not just put in the back of the closet for a rainy day; they were virtually ALL destroyed. Imagine: billions of books burnt. Forests full. Managers of presses in the various cities told us that practically the only books being published during that incredible decade were the thoughts of Mao, his little red book, which was printed by the hundreds of millions. By 1982, it had disappeared from the bookstores but their shelves still looked like supermarkets in a B movie about the end of the world. The presses were trying to replace all that lost knowledge. Print runs of scientific books ranged from 100,000 to 28 million copies. We could only drool (we were told this toward the end of a 30-course banquet) at these enormous numbers; the colossal scale of enterprise. We were jealous as hell. On the other side of the coin, we had McDonalds in those days and they didn’t.

The Chinese thirst for knowledge was not entirely without hazard. We learned soon after our arrival that 50 of our titles had been banned from display. Somehow it was a nice feeling, a quiet thrill, to be a publisher of banned books, particularly from such a large, a quarter of the planet, audience. We had long discussions with representatives of the CNPIEC, the China National Publications Import and Export Corporation, about the ban. The main problem, they said, was incorrect references to political boundaries. It was the two-China issue. The banned books had neglected to mention that as far as the Chinese are concerned Taiwan was a province of China. In some of the offending material that I had published, such reference occurred in only one line of one table of many in lengthy technical reports. The CNPIEC had scanned every word of our 540 books. It was one of many symptoms of the paranoia remaining from the Cultural Revolution that we came across during our two-week stay.

We made page two of the English-language China Daily. Books for this exhibition are presented from more than 10 international agricultural research organizations... (‘more than’ meant 11, actually). Page one in those days reflected a somewhat different reporting bias to the western press. The headlines that day were British destroyer sunk, two planes shot down. The Anglo-Argentine war was in its brief but full swing and the report noted that Ireland wanted economic sanctions by the EEC against Argentina lifted, while Panama was rallying Latin American support for the Argentinean cause. There was a central photo: Premier Zhao Ziyang tries his hand at a gadget at the college scientific exhibition, and a small item on the lower right: US vice-president George Bush, his wife and party arrived in China from New Zealand and were met by a few vice-ministers." Well, we know where the premier was, don’t we. And there was a gruesome photo of China Airways downed Trident plane and contents.

Beijing was in a perpetual dust haze even in those days. In my faulty memory, each scene seemed to be constantly approaching out of a dreamy mist. The city was as quiet as a dream too. Hundreds of thousands of mute cyclist-commuters looming silently by, all in the grey, navy or black; black canvas shoes, black bicycles. Silence broken only by the occasional cacophonies of bicycle bells during foul ups, and the quiet rattling of loose mudguards and shopping baskets.

The vistas seemed to go on forever if only because the streets forming the Beijing grid are maybe 10 kilometers long and there are literally millions of bicycles (and riders) in this city. The main roads were 2-3 lanes in either direction plus wide bicycle avenues, separated often from the car lanes by concrete strips. Where they converged there was always excessive honking from the few buses and trucks and very few cars (mostly Russian) weaving among the cyclists at too fast a speed. It was a low-rise city. Mao’s mausoleum and the nearby Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square were pretty much as tall as things went.

Given the secretive nature of China, we could not understand their motives in taking us on an astounding trip beneath Beijing. During the cold war between the USA and Russia in the 1950s and 1960s, the Chinese were quietly preparing for a nuclear winter. Not far from Tiananmen Square, we were ushered into a drapery store, full of rolls of material—grey, navy, and black. We walked behind the counter. The shop assistants moved aside silently and our guide opened a trapdoor in the floor. Below us was a long flight of steps, in a sloping tunnel feebly lit by occasional globes. We looked at each other; this was like something from an old detective movie.

Pongase’s blithe attitude did not help either. Maybe this is how they deal with the worst enemies of the people, those who use the word TAIWAN in their publications about China, he half whispered. We all heard it though and stopped in our tracks because there was a long list of people in China who had simply disappeared (something that continues to the present time). A one-way trip downstairs would be the perfect solution for dissidents in those days—and even today; no cell phone signals could penetrate the ground down there.

Pongase’s laugh broke the spell and we followed the guide down; there was room for only one or sometimes two abreast, and came to a landing where a wall map showed that it was the confluence of several subterranean passageways leading to open areas for eating and hospitals. Many areas were designated as hospitals. The complex was several kilometers long, running under a part of the city; there were several similar complexes elsewhere. Beijing was sitting on top of a honeycomb of tunnels and underground caverns, ready for evacuation. We emerged up the same stairs behind the counter of the store. People looked at us disinterestedly and we merged, incredulous, into the crowded street with our guide.

The books were exhibited in three cities, Beijing, Xian and Changsha. We arrived for the opening ceremony in each city, spent a few days hovering around the exhibit and sightseeing, and moved on, leaving the books for local libraries. The exhibits did not exactly cause a stampede among the population. Few people spoke or read English. The audience was primarily senior scientists who did speak English and book publishers who might translate some titles and reprint them for distribution within China.

Thus, there were side trips to the Great Wall of China, and various underground tombs and mummies of emperors and empresses. The pottery army in Xian had already been partly excavated and we toured the area, which was inside a cavernous aircraft-type hangar, in awe. Discovered accidentally only in 1974, the time needed to painstaking unearth so many life-size soldiers and horses, meant that their exhibition was very new; few outside even Xian had seen the pottery army before us.

In many such places, photographs were forbidden and big signs in English and Chinese were constant reminders. There seemed no point to this except that you could buy terribly expensive, poor quality photo collections outside the attractions. The Xian pottery army was too much for our Texan leader Tom, who surreptitiously aimed his Pentax holding his coat forward to disguise it and ‘CLICK.’ The SLR Pentax in those pre-digital days had a really loud shutter and the hangar over us was a perfect auditorium. Within seconds, Tom was surrounded by several men, one of whom summarily grabbed the camera, opened it to expose the film (remember what happens then? For millennials: the film is ruined irreversibly), and gave it back, all without a word.

Although Beijing was strictly Maoish in dress code, cities to the south were shedding the severity of the capital. In Wuhan and Xian for instance, infants were colorfully dressed and adults seemed to be experimenting too, for there were splashes of color to be seen here and there. A bright blue jacket, a red sweater. Always the dull Mao trousers though. Yet, one had the feeling that there was a spring behind these early flowers. And in Canton, which seemed a more legitimate word still than Peking (Beijing), spring had truly arrived. Western styles were more common than Mao fashion, although the two coexisted with no distinction as to age or sex. Let there be no more winter.

My infatuation was not so much with the transformation but with its manifestation in one woman, our interpreter who accompanied us throughout the two weeks in 1982 from Beijing down to Canton. She reflected the changing seasons as we traveled south and from a severe swept-back official of Beijing she metamorphosed into a charming fashionable woman of Canton. And she fell, it seemed, for Pongase.

We suffered many banquets during the trip; usually two each day for two weeks. After a strenuous day of touring the Ming Tombs or the pottery army excavations and having our trivial English exclamations translated into serious Chinese, the conversation would end something like this:

What a day. I’m so hungry I could eat a dozen bullfrogs. Where shall we go for dinner?

Let’s go Chinese.

We went Chinese every night, morning and noon. And the meetings were interspersed with interminable tall, covered mugs of tea. A large spoonful of ulong leaves in the bottom to be spat back not so discreetly when they swim up to the unsuspecting mouth. Lines of old fashioned thermos flasks against the wall, from which a flask is grabbed at random; remove the cloth-covered cork; pour in the steaming water; place the lid on the mug. A few minutes later, remove the lid to drink. Condensed water inside the lid drains off onto one’s clothes and books; a system as silly as chopsticks I thought.

After a few days, Pongase brightened up (his boil had subsided) and I noticed him snatch a flower from the tiny but formal garden in front of the Beijing Hotel and present it to Pearl. From her expression you would have thought he had handed her a hand grenade. Apparently, flower theft was close to a capital offence. She said, Imagine if all one billion Chinese did that; there would be no flowers left (bees would starve, etc.). Also, the Chinese were evidently still watching each other like hawks to ensure that there was no mass flower pilfering, among other things (alright, like using the politically incorrect finger to clean the nose). Pongase was lucky he was not summarily executed on the steps of the Beijing Hotel.

Nevertheless, the flower was a turning point in Pearl’s relationship with Pongase and indeed with all of us. She began to smile now and then, although at first she found the jokes we shared with her completely incomprehensible. Pearl would sit there puzzled while tall Tom hovered over her patiently explaining what was so funny, and of course, the explanation of a joke is not a joke any more. Jokes are not part of the Chinese culture, she said. The Chinese equivalents are stories with a moral, the kind of yarn in which the baddie, i.e., the landlord, the evil magistrate, gets his/her just desserts, guaranteed definitely not to have one rolling around the floor though. I found a book on a later visit called Traditional Comic Tales, full of such stories. At best you could call them shaggy panda stories.

Pearl also confided some of her experiences with the political system still pervading the country. A few years back she applied for permission to visit her parents near Shanghai. Even now travel in China is terribly restricted because it is harder for the officials to keep tabs on people who move beyond their hometowns. The practice of spying on one’s neighbor, a feature of the Cultural Revolution, remains ingrained. There is a positive side to this as well, doubtless considered by the government: if all the Chinese began to migrate to greener pastures, agriculture and industry would grind to a halt; a billion people would gather at the coast looking east and the continent would simply tip over.

In the book by Nien Cheng Life and Death in Shanghai (Harper-Collins, 1993), the author sums up, from the safety of the west to which she escaped in 1980, nearly seven years of incarceration and the murder of her daughter during the Cultural Revolution: In Washington, I am free to do whatever I like with each day. I can travel anywhere without having to ask anyone for permission. Goods and services in abundance are available to me. Back doors in America lead only into people’s kitchens. When I am with others, I can speak candidly on any subject without having to consider whether my remarks are ideologically correct or to worry that someone might misinterpret what I have said. Her biography exemplifies the life (and death) of millions of Chinese who disappeared during that incredible decade. We met many scientists who, Pearl translated, had spent much of the ten years working in the fields to correct their ways. They looked defeated somehow, even their Mao suits crushed; the party officials looking confident, prosperous and polished beside them.

Pearl was granted a travel permit to her family home in Shanghai sometime in the mid-1970s, with the condition that she return to Beijing within a week. She described her parents’ house as a two-storey affair around three sides of a large courtyard. When the Cultural Revolution began, other families were made to occupy parts of the house and to spy on each other. She squeezed into her parents’ remaining room and despite the conditions stayed on for several days after the expiry date of the permit; it had been years since she was last allowed to visit them. She said she did not venture out but was nevertheless reported by their enforced neighbors and arrested. She spent the next month in a correction school, where the curriculum was continual self-criticism and laboring in the fields.

By the end of our first week in China 1982, Pearl had caught on to western jokes and was even cracking a few of her own. You could almost see the layers of fear and suspicion peeling away from her in our company. I remember the climax of this joking fetish that we were developing (we were really flaky). We traveled in two cars throughout China, with Pearl, who remained our translator for the whole visit, in one car with a guide, invariably a senior party official, while we foreigners followed in the other. Both cars came with chauffeurs. I am sure that Pearl had to report our conversations to the various party officials during these excursions. She told Pongase in Xian that it was also against the rules for her to travel with the group—we should have picked up new translators in each city—but that the expected reprisals had not happened to her so far. She must have spun an interesting yarn to have come that far.

One night in Xian, we were driven to a cultural evening: troupes of acrobats doing absolutely impossible feats to the toneless, rhythmless banging and crashing of drums and cymbals. It must have been hell trying to concentrate with all that noise. Beats me why the acrobats did not leap en masse into the orchestra pit and do a bit of banging and crashing of their own—on the heads of their accompanists. There were children so lithe they must have had fewer bones than an octopus; and adults with more muscles than King Kong. Their obvious insensitivity to pain and their chalk-like faces suggested that they all had their nerve chords and veins tugged out at an early age.

There were balancing acts in which all of someone’s mother-in-law’s crockery was wobbling about on chopsticks; tightrope walkers, whose splits onto the wire defied not only gravity but also the principles of reproduction; knife swallowers who made Deep Throat seem like mild tonsillitis; and a bicycle rider who made small circuits around the stage taking on a passenger with each circuit until there were 14 people hanging off the bicycle. All the acrobats looked incredibly bored which, I they no doubt were.

Pongase, by this time, emboldened perhaps by his flirt with death over the forbidden flower, had taken to traveling in the lead car with Pearl—he admitted that he had been smitten and that he and Pearl were furtively holding hands in the back seat by then—and the party official. As we were being driven back to our guesthouse, Pongase apparently asked Pearl why there were so many people on the bicycle; weren’t there enough bicycles in China? Well, Pearl saw the funny side of this and they decided to try it on the official. She leant forward and repeated the question in Mandarin. Let me say at the outset that he was a mean looking character with a puffy, square, flushed face on which his eyes sat like a pair of dried currants. There was a pause after Pearl had finished. Then he turned around and unleashed a monologue that verged on a tirade and which Pongase swears continued all the remaining 20 minutes of the drive. As they alighted, Pearl translated it in masterful simplicity:

"He says that the show we saw was a high art form. It did not mean there are too few bicycles. There are enough bicycles in