Hunter felt like he'd awoken from the dead. The plane banked steeply on its final approach into Shanghai, framing the sun, dead-center in the window where he'd been resting his head. He was surprised to have slept, especially seeing as how anxious he'd been about the trip. Before takeoff, Hunter hyperventilated til he nearly passed out: his mind let loose with wild thoughts that bounced back and forth uncontrollably inside his head like in a high-Q resonator. He had to take deep breaths to calm himself, blowing the air out slowly through pursed lips while clenching his jaw to force blood to his head to prevent the lights from going completely out. His heart raced when he took his seat. He anticipated fourteen more nervous hours just like this so he proactively reached for the airsick-bag in the seat pocket and inconspicuously grasped the corner to slide the edge over so it poked out from behind the in-flight magazine for later instant emergency access. He did so nonchalantly, pretending he was merely storing a novel, ever conscientious as he was not to alarm, or in any way worry the passenger next to him. Hunter's pre-flight panic was highly-probable if not inevitable. He'd bottled-up everything inside. Finally onboard the plane, unfettered by distractions and free from the logistics of getting to LAX on time and running the gauntlet through TSA and making it to his gate, only then, buckled tightly into his seat, with nowhere else to go, did the desperation of the journey fully sink in.

​

Hunter's the first to admit that he'll likely be disappointed, but that's not going to deter him. He doesn't have a clue if he'll even find Professor Ting, let alone get a chance to talk to him. And what if he does? - what then? That's why he kept this trip a mystery from his siblings and daughters  -  saying only that he had unexpected business in Shanghai. He didn't need their condescending free-advice, well-intentioned though it may have been. First of all, he'd have to explain his half-baked plan, knowing his words would sound just as ridiculous to him as they would to them: saying them out-loud would unmask his trip as a pipe-dream. And it wouldn't take much detective intuition for them to know the real reason. That was a reality he wasn't yet prepared to think about, let alone a conversation he was ready to have.
 
As the plane made its final approach, Hunter looked down at the well-groomed farm fields arrayed across the Yangzhe River Delta, laid out like a chess-board of various shades of green and dotted by tiny red-and-brown chess-piece houses. Hunter's gaze fixated on a singular distant figure: a thin old man, bending over, tending to his fields, motioning his arms as if orchestrating a flock of birds. Faint images began to appear behind Hunter's eyelids. He saw himself, as a boy in Iowa in his first job, walking-beans, traipsing for miles up and down the rows of soybeans while whacking weeds with a hoe he kept razor sharp. The deep-green fields of corn and soybeans of his youth looked nothing like the rice-paddies of the landscape sliding beneath him, but in so many ways they were identical. When the wheels of the airbus touched down and the plane slowed on the tarmac and turned towards the gate Hunter exhaled and felt a comforting, albeit fleeting sense of relief and belonging.