"Look for International Departures..."
"Yes, I know, International Departures, but there is only US and International Arrivals!" I jerked my chin at the signage overhead for Elaine to see. Elaine had always insisted that pointing at things was as bad as pointing at people, so I used my chin nowadays to point.
We were seeing Jimmy off at the YVR International Airport the second time since last October. Back then he was leaving for Shanghai to begin his undergraduate studies at Fudan University, two months late due to Covid protocols. Now that virtually all restrictions were gone we expected some change at the airport. Sure enough, the volume of passenger traffic had returned to pre-pandemic levels.There was extra cheer in the air, too: a musician was providing live singing and guitar music in front of the famous Haida Jade Boat sculpture. Life had quietly returned to normal.
"They probably have changed the signages; it is getting really confusing." I eventually gave up making sense of it all and stopped an airport employee.
"International Departures? Go back to the concourse over there. You will see it right there," she pointed.
"Aha, now we are in business," I heaved a big sigh of relief when I finally spotted an image of world atlas -- no words "International Departures" -- just a small stylized world atlas in an overhead sign a short distance away.
Then we passed a long row of Korean Air counters -- it was a wonder how many check-in counters Korean Air had at YVR, mostly empty and desolate. After we arrived at the Cathy Pacific section Jimmy, who had been tapping his phone screen all the while, took over matters: scanning his travel document on the machine, selecting seat number, printing baggage stub, taking his bag to the counter and having it weighed...
While Jimmy was going through all this with mom watching, I looked around the place and was struck by something for the first time: all the Cathy Pacific ground agents were old people, men and women in their fifties, or maybe sixties. I recalled a time when the airlines' flight attendants and ground crew were all young, mostly attractive women. But then I had mostly travelled on its European and Southeast Asian routes, and it was in the 90's and early 2000's.
Back in those days, I would begin my journey from Hong Kong or Shanghai, but invariably outbound, to whatever destinations my business took me around the world. Today I was sending Jimmy on a homebound trip -- from Vancouver to Shanghai via Hong Kong -- as he headed back to Fudan after spending a month with us in the first half of this year's summer break. How times had changed!
There was a time when going to school in the UK or the US was all the rage. In fact, my family had been driven by the craze unknowingly, first in 2008 when we came to live in Canada, then in 2012 when Kevin, Jimmy's elder brother, went to study material science in the US, and finally in 2015 when I completed my teacher certificate program at UBC en route to becoming a licensed teacher in this country.
Today, Kevin is working in Shenzhen, our home city 30 years ago, and Jimmy is studying software engineering in Shanghai, our second home city in the late 90's and the first eight years of the 2000's. Jimmy will be stopping over in Shenzhen for a few days before continuing his journey back to Shanghai. And Elaine and I will be holding the fort in Canada, counting the days as soon as seeing him off. It seems things have come full circle.
The boys had their reasons to go back to China. For Kevin, romance was the gravitational pull, in addition to the cosmopolitan appeal of Shenzhen. For Jimmy, the opportunity to step out of his comfort zone underlied his decision to choose Fudan over UT, UBC, and Simon Fraser. As for us parents, Elaine and I had our own reasons to endorse their choices, but ours took a backseat in their decision making process.
It had not been easy for Jimmy, though. Unlike Kevin, who already had a good grounding in Chinese when he came to Canada, Jimmy had had no prior literacy training in his mother tongue. Going back to China meant he had to upgrade his rudimentary reading and writing skills through a one-year crash course and re-learn his high school math, physics, and chemistry in Chinese.
"The crash course only got you so far. The real learning began with your major-specific courses. I had to spend twice as much time to understand coursework, lecture notes, and assigned readings before I could do any lab or homework. I could not even make out the professors' beautiful free-flowing handwriting on the board in the first few weeks," Jimmy sounded as though he were protesting when he shared his story with us. "My debut on the Fudan scene was anything but pretty, yet I kept on kicking and survived."
That reminds me of my own days as a foreign student in the UK in the mid-90's, but I had Joe, also a scholarship student from China, at the time and we were in an arts program. Jimmy, however, is the only foreign student in his software engineering class, a kiddo amidst Titans, and there are no special accommodations.
Which is exactly how things should be. Jimmy decided to enroll in a Chinese institution of higher learning because he believed China will be the locale of future major breakthroughs in technology, but getting into the thick of things does not necessarily mean it would be easy, nor does it mean he should expect any privileges or special treatment. He had to earn his place amongst his formidable Chinese peers.
Working side by side with those Xueba on their home turf allowed Jimmy to gauge his past learning and benchmark his current work against a different set of standards. So far, he has found himself sufficient in coding but lacking in foundational math and physics. A good student in Canada who scored 5 in AP Calculus BC (much harder than the AP Calculus AB version) and AP Computer Science in grade 11, Jimmy was surprised that he was woefully inadequate in math skills compared to his Chinese counterparts.
"I'm using this summer to play catch-up in math," declared Jimmy soon after he came home. Though he did spend the first few weekends reconnecting with friends and hiking in picturesque Sea-to-Sky mountains, he pored over his math work most of the remaining time with us, a sight that put my worries to temporary rest.
"Get up and take a break outside, Jimmy." To help him learn work-life balance, I got him to play catch with me in the backyard. We also went to explore a beach close by home. Last Sunday, we watched in Langley Christopher Nolan's new movie Oppenheimer and together unpacked it in some depth -- key characters, plot, possible themes, flimmaking techniques, quantum physics, the extent to which the story mirrors historical facts, lessons we can learn from the choices characters make and their impact on their own lives as well as the lives of those around them and on distant shores. It was not all work and no play. Oh, we also barbecued a few times.
Believe it or not, Jimmy even found time to finish designing and installing a hobbyist home security system that features remote controlled, 24-hour surveillance camera monitoring and recording functions and a burglar alarm mechanism.
"Now you can check the home security status wherever you are and whenever you want, plus you can sleep with perfect peace of mind in this forested hideaway of yours," Jimmy assured mom and dad after he had got everything up and running. I clicked on the app on my phone and sure enough I could see the front of our lot right there and all the doors and windows securely locked -- pretty cool indeed.
Jimmy was hugging mom good-bye before heading into security check. It had always been a misty-eyed moment. I usually gave him a pat on the shoulder or a half hug, but today I gave him a brisk full hug to distract mom.
"Chat us when you land in Hong Kong," Elaine was saying when I caught her on the verge of tears. "There, there," I squeezed her shoulder to steady her.
"Oh, mom's baby is leaving home," an airport employee of African descent crooned good-naturedly, witnessing the moment in passing. He gave us a broad smile, revealing his full set of sparkling white teeth. He reminded me of Louis Armstrong, the original African American singer of the song What a Wonderful World. And it so happened that the musician performing in front of the Haida Jade Boat was just coming to the last few lines of its lyrics.
I hear babies crying,
I watch them grow.
They learn much more than I ever know.
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world.
Yes, my son was leaving home and embarking on a journey of his own. Despite all the worries parents feel and the changes in the big wide world, what I saw in Jimmy this summer was enough for me to believe that it is still a wonderful world out there, awaiting us all...
