High School Reunion1. The Great Suburban Showdown

Flying east on a plane
Drinking all that free champagne
I guess I saw this coming down the line
And I know it should be fun
But I think I should've packed my gun
Got that old suburban showdown in my mind

Sit around with the folks
Tell the same old tired jokes
Bored to death on Sunday afternoon
Mom and Dad, me and you
And the outdoor barbecue
Think I'm gonna hide out in my room

I've been gone for a while
Made some changes in my style
And they say you can't go home anymore
Well the streets all look the same
And I'll have to play the game
We'll all sit around in the kitchen chairs
With the TV on with the neighbors there

Out in the yard
Where my Daddy worked so hard
He never lets the crab grass grow too high
Oh, the place hasn't changed
And that's why I'm gonna feel so strange
But I'll have to face the music by and by

I've been gone for a while
Made some changes in my style
And they say you can't go home anymore
Well the streets all look the same
And I'll have to play the game
We'll all sit around in the kitchen chairs
With the TV on with the neighbors there

We'll drive into town
When this big bird touches down
I'm only coming home to say goodbye
Then I'm gone with the wind
And I won't be seen again
Till that great suburban showdown in the sky

© 1974 Billy Joel


I was thinking about that Billy Joel song a lot before I left for Minnesota. The details are different in my situation, but the spirit is the same.

I flew east, but flying west would have only been a couple thousand more miles. There was no free champagne. I think they only do that in first class, and first class from Hong Kong to Minneapolis is beyond my budget. But I splurged a little and flew business class on the Hong Kong to Chicago leg. My last flight before this trip was on a private plane, so 15 hours in economy would have been unbearable. I flew the Chicago to Minneapolis leg in economy because it is only an hour and a half, and since it was on an American airline, the business class price was absurd.

Naturally, dealing with two different flight classes on the same trip made it more complicated than it should have been. Ordinarily, I probably would have flown on Delta from Tokyo to Minneapolis. Minneapolis-Saint Paul International is one of Delta's largest hubs and they have flights spreading out all over the place, just not to Hong Kong. But Delta's business class rate was too high. Cathay Pacific was far more reasonable, but a different airline handled the Chicago-Minneapolis leg. I'm the one who wanted to do things a little differently, so I guess all the unnecessary complications were my fault. I need to learn how to just do what the giant corporations tell me to do.

I did not pack a gun on the flight, obviously, but I did bring my international driver's permit, just in case the opportunity to borrow someone's car presented itself, and my Hong Kong driver's license, because the international permit is only valid with a home license. On the flight from Hong Kong to Chicago, no one cared what kind of documents I had with me, as long as I had my passport. At O'Hare, they searched my bags like it was going out of style. All the Chinese must have confused them.

My Hong Kong driver's license looks like a library card. It would be ridiculously easy to counterfeit. Since we have a separate ID card, no one uses their driver's license as ID, so all that matters are that the names and numbers match. My international driver's permit looks harder to fake, but it has a lot of Chinese writing, as well as English. My Hong Kong ID is more high tech, and probably difficult to counterfeit, but it also has Chinese writing all over the place. The reason that confused the undertrained TSA agents in Chicago was because I do not look the least bit Chinese. Telling them that I live in China meant nothing. The first agent asked me if I was there on business. Apparently, that is the only way an American would ever live in China. The fact that I was taking a domestic flight from Chicago to Minneapolis probably did not help. Maybe it would have been easier with the international terminal TSA agents. I only dealt with them on the flight home, and they were not at all confused that I was going to China. They probably assumed it was for business. Of course, it would have been easier if they simply kept their dirty mitts out of my purse, but you know how dangerous ID cards are.

I suppose I should be happy that I was not strip searched or got to do one of those fancy full body cavity searches. “Better safe than sorry”, Americans say to rationalize their loss of liberty. But it is not safer. Getting x-rayed six ways to Sunday does not make you safe. Throwing away your $1 bottle of water so you can buy a $10 bottle of water inside the airport is not about safety. Four ounces of shampoo is not more dangerous than 3.4 ounces. Taking off your shoes does not make you safe. Profiling little old ladies so you can pretend you do not profile certain ethnic groups does absolutely nothing to make anyone safe. Making mothers drink bottled breast milk to prove it is not a super spy potion is not better safe than sorry. It is stupid. An argument can be made that wasting time on people who are highly unlikely to be terrorists takes time away from people who might need more scrutiny. It is not racist to realize that a 20-year-old man flying alone is more likely to do damage than an 80-year-old woman with her family.

Since moving to Hong Kong, I have flown to a few countries in Europe, East Asia, Canada, Israel, Mainland China and the United States. None of those flights presented any particular security challenge. Even the flights into the United States went relatively smoothly, probably because they all left from Hong Kong. It was always the airports within the United States that caused the most trouble. The Roman Empire was also unusually paranoid right before it fell.