this is a postcard I wrote in-flight. Tip: DON'T take China Airlines. This is one of the ones owned by the government. I'm on a flight right now, and you wouldn't believe it. Halfway through customs in China I realized that they'd mis-tagged my luggage so I don't know if it will join me in California. It's an 11 hour flight from Shanghai to Vancouver, and there are precisely two English language periodicals on the entire plane: Beijing Review and China Daily, both state rags with warmed- over Maoist diatribes. The words they use are so old-fashioned it's like a parody. There are no English-language movies. In fact, they don't have any movies at all. They have, I swear to god, agricultural and nature shorts strung together for hours on end. I haven't seen so much footage of farm machinery and wild rodents in a number of years. The music is 4 blank channels, Chinese opera (if you've never heard it, you need to just to clean your ears out), classical music, Chinese pop (watered down technotronic), Chinese folk (goes nicely with the agrarian videos), and mid-70s American pop. They seem to have bought up all the 8-tracks that we got rid of in the west. The plane is a vintage 1970 747 with way too many hours on it. The landing gear croaked and clanked in a most distressing way as we were taxiing. The knobs in the lavatories that fell off were replaced with naked bolts. Makes for a real disconcerting feeling -- like are the engines going to stay on during the reverse-thrust on landing?