32
The long flight to Beijing was unforeseen hell, with two panic attacks brought on by sudden confusion. A flight attendant had to calm her down the second time. Ming-Mei still felt jittery an hour later as she retrieved her luggage from the carousel. A taikonaut panicking on a commercial jetliner! It was a damn good thing it was a non-stop flight—if there’d been a change of planes, she might well have gotten lost. She almost forgot to speak English to the officer at the customs booth, forgot that to him she was a blond, one-hundred-percent Caucasian Dylan Knox. A stream of fluent Putonghua would raise eyebrows, and drawing attention to herself while entering the country was not a good idea.
As the hazy sunshine made her blink, disorientation swallowed her into a well of greyness again.
