Everyone around me looked dead. Their heads were resting on their knees, shoulders, or pillows that were on the backs of their seats. Once in a while, I saw someone reposition their body so that their head faced the opposite way. One girl to the left was not dead, but obviously alive. She had her head up. Her face, illuminated by the compartment light, intrigued me. The bones of her face seemed to protrude through her skin; her cheeks, two dark, hollow pits, contrasted starkly with her complexion, which resembled a vampire. Her nose was a bird’s beak, her hair, bright red and fashioned in sloppily made braids that resembled tangled tree roots. She was reading a book – the name of which I could not determine. In that moment, her eyes shifted from her book to my face. I hastily averted my gaze, hoping she wouldn’t realize that I had been staring at her.
Peering out the window, I tried to see what was outside of the plane, but I saw nothing but a vast gray mist. After some time, I concluded that my pursuit was futile and placed my head against my pillow, listening. I was listening for something, anything, but I could only hear the engine’s constant roar.
Just then, a woman’s voice announced in Portuguese-accented English, “We head into turbulence severe.”
I fastened my seat belt, thinking of how weird flying is. One moment all is tranquil and the next minute, chaos.
Interrupting my thinking, my sister gently tapped me on the shoulder. At first, I tried to ignore her. She continued to tap exponentially harder and, eventually, I turned. She only wanted my headphones. So I unzipped my bag and handed them to her. Sometime after that, I fell asleep.
I awoke to my sister tapping my shoulder again, hard. My eyelids phlegmatically opened. I was faced with a flight attendant with raven’s hair and eyes as dark as the night.
She lazily queried, “Chá o café?”
I wearily lifted my hand to signal that I did not want either. So she pushed her cart on down the narrow aisle, like a ship ominously sailing through a tight channel between two cliffs.
My eyes focused on the steam wafting from a freshly poured cup of tea. Staring at the dry-bamboo-colored liquid, I recalled a waitress I had met at a Chinese restaurant years before, when I was 12. I remembered how as my mother ordered our food, my eyes focused on the waitress’s name tag, secured in a shiny plastic laminate. It read, “Cha.” She had caught me staring at her, and I’d hastily explained that in Portuguese her name meant “tea.”
In a surprised voice she replied, “My family comes from Hong Kong, and in Cantonese my name also means tea.”
I was perplexed. China and Portugal are on opposite sides of the world, different continents. They have disparate linguistic and writing systems. How can they have the same word for tea?
I spent the entire ride home from the restaurant pondering how the Portuguese and Chinese could have the same word for tea. At home, I rushed to the computer. After half an hour of research, this is what I discovered: first, the Portugal set up a colonial outpost in modern-day Macau in China in 1557; second, the Portuguese were introduced to tea by the Chinese; and third, the Portuguese brought the first tea to Europe through Asiatic trade routes, naming it “Chá” after the Chinese word for tea. Everything was now clear. I marveled at how connections between histories of peoples of antithetical cultures could be contained in one simple word.
The hue of light inside the plane was becoming brighter. I placed my head on the cool windowpane and stared out the window. A concentrated ball of fire burned on the horizon. From it shot hundreds of rays of light that lit up the endless Atlantic, turning what was once a dark void into an aesthetic nirvana. Each wave sparkled as it reached its apex. For miles upon miles, this continued uninterrupted.
The pilot spoke over the intercom: “We will now begin our descent to Ponta Delgada. The ground temperature is fifteen degrees Celsius and the time is six o’clock.”
I sat back in my seat and prepared for landing.