Here Comes the Big Pwane

As a kid I was tongue-tied. My tongue lolled around in my mouth like it hadn’t woken up yet and could never quite make the turn, so by the time the word “plane” got out of me, it always came out “pwane.”

“Here comes the big pwane!”—that was the line I yelled most at home, more often than “Mom, I’m hungry.” I had never laid eyes on a single real plane, but on mouth power alone, the sky over our place was so packed with squadrons you’d think a war was coming.

Then again, what little boy doesn’t carry around a dream of going up in the sky? I was no exception, and I had mine clutched good and tight.

But back then, getting a look at a real plane was harder than getting up there yourself. Forget TV. Planes showed up maybe a few times a year, and even then I wasn’t guaranteed to catch them. So “see a real plane, just once” became the biggest wish of those years. How big? Whoever took me to see a plane, I’d have happily called Dad. Naturally, the man who finally took me was my dad.

In ’80s Beijing, the streets were full of trolleybuses, two “pigtails” sticking up off their heads, wobbling along (come to think of it, they still are). The one outside our door was the 114, which swayed its way from Zizhuyuan, by Purple Bamboo Park, all the way into town.

One time my mom, probably worn down to nothing by my nonstop “pwane, pwane,” pointed at the wires above the trolleybus and told me, “See? Up there are two parallel cables, and every meter or so there’s a little I-shaped piece holding them together—that little I is a plane.”

As fibs go, that one had real engineering behind it.

From then on, kindergarten-age me was hooked on trolleybuses. I’d get on, grab a window seat, press my face to the glass and follow the wires overhead with my eyeballs, counting under my breath: one plane, two planes, three planes… By the end of a single ride, I had reviewed more “planes” than an entire air force division owns.

When I got a bit older, I often got to ride in a car to the airport to pick up my dad. In those days, just riding in a car was enough to brag to my friends about for days. Every time Dad came back from a business trip, he brought the exact same Danish butter cookies—didn’t matter whether he’d been to Singapore or South Korea.

Naive little me concluded that the whole world sold exactly one kind of cookie, and that it was delicious everywhere. Only later did it click: he bought them all at the airport. So my dad crisscrossed the globe and did all his shopping in exactly one place: the airport.

Anyway, back to the story. Over time, I chewed my way to a question:

If those things on top of the trolleybus really were planes, why did we haul all the way out to the airport to get Dad? Couldn’t he just take the 114 home?

Dad saw the kid had started using logic and figured the fibbing couldn’t go on. He decided to step in personally and cure me of this “childish misconception”—by taking me to see a real plane.

Back then we lived in Beijing’s Western Suburbs. “Suburbs” meaning the Zizhuyuan area on the West Third Ring Road, which these days counts as the city proper. Out there was the Western Suburbs Airport, a military airfield where passenger planes rarely took off or landed. Dad had picked up a tip from who knows where, so he got on his bicycle, put me on the back and pedaled straight for the airport.

At the gate stood sentries with loaded rifles, backs ramrod straight, eyes front. The two of us had no ID and no tickets. If they had let us in, that would have been the real security breach.

But Dad had a plan. The airfield was big, ringed by a brick wall that wasn’t very high. With me on the back, he rode a long, long way around it until he found a stretch with no barbed wire on top, which he reckoned wasn’t far from the runway. This was the spot. Here I would meet a real big pwane, face to face.

We parked the bike and crept, hunched over, to the foot of the wall. I was only four or five, nowhere near the payload I am today, but I was born a scaredy-cat, and afraid of heights to boot. Dad had to boost me up several times before I managed, trembling, to hook both hands over the top. Then I summoned a lifetime’s supply of courage and inched my head over the edge.

Full of hope, I stuck my head out, ready to greet the big pwane of my dreams.

What met my eyes was not a plane—

It was the black hole of a gun barrel, pointed right at me.

Right behind it, I saw a ruddy face, a military greatcoat and a pair of big, sharp, watchful eyes locked on me. That stare was scarier than the kindergarten teacher’s when she was hunting for whoever skipped nap time.

What happened next, I can’t remember for the life of me.

How I got down off the wall, no idea. How we got home, no idea either. I guess when you’re scared stupid, the brain shuts itself off, like somebody pulled the plug.

All these years later, every time I bring it up with Dad, he says I’ve got it mixed up. He swears up and down that I was sitting on his shoulders, watched a big pwane take off with my own eyes and clapped like crazy.

Which version is true? I don’t think it matters anymore. Dad likes to believe his son got his wish that day. I like to believe I once locked eyes with a soldier of the People’s Liberation Army. Both versions are fine. Everybody takes the one they need.

Anyway, that was probably the closest, and the scariest, I came as a kid to my dream of flying: the dream never took off, but my soul very nearly did.