I hadn’t yet decided if I was going to puke when the filthy, one-eyed dog poked its head under the bathroom door and started yapping at me.
It wasn’t really a one-eyed pekingese, to be honest.
The right eye was there, it was just completely white. So it was a one-functioning-eyed dog. I was leaning against the wall, feeling the beads of sweat on my back. There was no mirror, but didn’t need to look to know my face, still wet from splashing water on it, was white as tofu with circles around my eyes darker than the stack of honeycomb charcoal bricks stacked in the corner of the tiny bathroom.
You’re confused. I’ll back up.
This was summer 2004 in Beijing. Maybe my sixth trip to China since October 2003.
My executive producer and her husband had arrived a few days before I did. I landed, dumped my things at the hotel and headed straight to Tiananmen Gate to meet them. The weather was warm and clammy, just enough to make a person sweat, and keep the sweat from evaporating. The sky was overcast. As the car pulled up to drop me off, a light rain started to fall.
They had already done a lot of pre-work, so my role was to walk around with them and one of our government contacts to make some final decisions on what sites we wanted to request for the Fortune Global Forum.
We were in good spirits. Every time the contact told us a site or portion of a site was forbidden as an event venue, I asked to write it down for approval. We walked Tiananmen Gate, looked through many corners of the Great Hall of the People, walked the length of the Temple of Heaven complex a few times, drove to the Diaoyutai State Guest House to walk the grounds and look at the various buildings. All throughout laughing as the executive producer and the government contact stopped asking and just wrote down the toughest gets for venues.
While we were exiting the Diaoyutai, I could feel my energy flagging. Jet lag was settling in. I don’t get sick much on the road. Can really only think of four times that’s happened. But I was starting to get that chill, and the tingling in my skull warning me it was time to either go for a run to fight the jet lag or give in and take a nap.
The next stop was the Summer Palace. We were treated to a tall tale (relayed as true) about a boat of the most beautiful children in China, who were sent on a mission, only to be lost at sea, eventually landing in Korea and becoming the first Koreans (99.65743% of the history shared in these little tours is beyond fictional).
We were ushered into a golden room where a table was set. We had already eaten. I still had some tiny plane morsels in my stomach as well. We had also been fed various pork snacks at a few of the places we visited, as the hosts offered hospitality over our chats with them. But the Summer Palace meal was a full-on Imperial Cuisine dinner. It was greasy. It was gross. As was the theme for the day, everything seemed to have pork in it.
My manners told me to eat some of everything. Which I did. The tingling in my head had advanced to ringing ears. My stomach was starting to feel a bit weak. It was time for a nap.
But we weren’t done. We said our goodbyes and walked out into the light rain, taking our seats in rusty old pedal-driven rickshaws. The government contact sat with me, and in an act of hospitality handed me a soggy, dirty blanket to put over my lap. It smelled of dirt. I put my head back and chatted with my eyes closed as the rickshaw bounced and bumped over the stone streets.
We were heading into the Hutongs. My head had added a dull throb to the ringing, tingling and stomach rumbling. It was like listening to a slide whistle, a harmonica, a bass drum and a tuba playing polka music in a tunnel.
We pulled up to a Hutong and got out. The resident invited us in for a chat. Our guide kept forgetting to translate, so the confusion of hearing Chinese spoken at me by a smiling, nodding woman of about 70 added to my psychedelic dream. She was proud of the curtain she had installed to separate the rooms. She was extremely proud of her new refrigerator and window-mounted air conditioner.
She invited us to sit in plastic chairs at a card table. Then she brought food. Pork dumplings, pork meatballs, more pork. I stared at a giant, outdated map of the world she had posted on the wall, thinking how great it would be to be anywhere else on that wall-hanging at that moment.
Then it hit. I couldn’t take it any more. I asked for the restroom. She pointed to a swinging door next to the entrance of the Hutong. I walked into the bathroom, the door had no latch. There was a space of about a foot between the floor and the bottom of the door. The same at the top.
I didn’t care. I splashed cold water on my face. Took a few deep breaths and leaned against the wall. It was unclear if my stomach was going to hold all of that pork much longer.
That was when the dog showed up.
And it reminded me, that even in complete misery, thousands of miles from home in a place where I don’t speak the language, with a filthy, one-functioning eyed-dog yapping at me under a bathroom door in a stranger’s house while I was deciding whether or not to puke, there’s one absolute truth:
Surviving misery always makes for a better story later than the times when everything goes right.
