Back in the States

So I’ve arrived in the United States. As if there was no turning back earlier, I’m pretty much back now. I forgot that winds work so that it takes much less time to go west to east over the Pacific than the other way around. To get to Hong Kong to San Francisco, it took thirteen-and-a-half hours. Going back, it took just under eleven hours, and here I am now, sitting in the domestic terminal of United Airlines.

It’s currently around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, and I’ve just gone through immigration and customs and went back through security in about an hour and a half, having arrived here just before 8:00 a.m. Though it’s still early in the day, my all-nighter that I pulled yesterday may have just paid off. I’m not tired, though it is around 1:30 a.m. in Hong Kong (at which point I would be snoring).

The flight was on par with other standard long-haul flights. There were two meals serves and a few meals in between. Unlike many other airlines (probably most), United though doesn’t have individual entertainment screens for economy class. It was fine, because I slept about half the flight, and the other half I watched the movie Julie and Julia as well as the beginning of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I had already seen many times previously.

I arrived better than other long flights. With this being my sixth such flight (a number that pales in comparison to some of my friends), I guess practice makes perfect. I went through immigration first, where lines are divided between United States Residents (including non-residents) and Visitors. In line, this one duddy young adult behind me kept asking his father if they should move over to the citizens’ line, which, if he had taken a quick glance, would have realized that he was in it.

I went through without a hitch and asked the officer to stamp my passport. He did, but it was funny how he decided to skip my extra pages added mid-November by the United States Consulate-General in Hong Kong and went straight to the back, to the very last stampable page. He was nice though, so I thanked him.

He asked me if I had anything to declare, so I said that I have to pay customs tax but nothing outright to declare. He asked me what the purpose of my trip was, and I told him study abroad, and then said education, followed by some sightseeing. He’d already marked my Customs and Border Protection Sheet though with a circled numeral one. He waved me on without delay.

What was weird though happened to be what I did. Having gone through tons of Chinese immigration and airport security on this trip (Mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan), I was so used to just blurting out something in Cantonese and or Mandarin, once a disastrous and erroneous combination of both (that led me to say “I want” in Cantonese followed by “computer” in Mandarin to mean that I have a computer). Arriving in San Francisco, I caught my tongue and had to remind myself for a split second to speak English. Feel free to suggest what this means, since in Hong Kong I used English 70% of the time and Cantonese at about 25% of the time, with the other 5% consisting of Mandarin between newly-arrived service workers and French between the off-chance need to communicate something secretive in nature.

After that, I waited for luggage at carousel six along with most of the rest of the 747’s passengers. The bags took forever to come, and as expected I had to wait for them to take through customs then recheck them into the system. Waiting, I saw this unkempt guy in the army-veteran style as opposed to the hippy style who kept whining to anyone who would listen about how slow the bags took to come through. He was particularly poking at the various security checks he was told they send the bags through, which although annoying, also increase national security. This guy seemed to be one to argue in the realist sense for high national security and preemptive attacks upon foreign sovereigns yet he couldn’t see that his waiting was making the country safer in a more micro sense.

I got my bags after waiting for a long time, and remembered just how heavy they were. I was allowed two bags each under fifty pounds or twenty-three kilograms depending on where you checked in. I had my two bags that I managed to fit everything into except my pillow, which I’d have liked to keep, and though I had a hunch that it would go over weight, it was too late to mail stuff back. I resolved to just bring them along and see how things went.

So after calling home, telling them that I was leaving for the airport and that I would see them the next day, I dragged my bags up to the airport bus stop and waited for that bus to come. When it came, I had to toss my bags onto the bus, pay with my Ziploc bag of change pulled (with permission) of my roommate’s desk, and then heave my bags onto the luggage racks. With $48 HKD in the form of mostly ten- and twenty-cent pieces, the driver seemed oddly accepting of my method of payment. To me, that either meant that he didn’t care, didn’t care to show that he cared, or his coin collector had a counting mechanism in it. Whatever the case, I got on the bus and went on my hour-long journey to the airport, during which I accidentally took a nap.

Back to San Francisco, I picked up my bags off the carousel and onto my cart and from there I proceeded onto customs. I wrote down that I bought $1300 USD-worth of merchandise, after the $800 exemption, $500 of which was liable to a 3% tax, or $15 USD. Instead of directing me to some sort of cashier to pay my customs taxes, the woman looking at my ticket said “Thousand Oaks” (reading my United States address), and pointed me past the various luggage inspectors (or luggage unpackers) to find all the Cuban cigars and the like they could find to discard.

I’m glad that I didn’t get unpacked, because my bag was stuffed to the brim. Opening it put you in danger of not being able to close it. I found this out at I dragged my two bulky bags (as well as my carry-on backpack and camera case) to the check-in counter. One weighed seventeen kilograms and the other weighed a whopping forty kilograms (something just under ninety pounds). I was informed that I could pay an extra $150 USD to check in a bag under thirty-two kilograms, and that I couldn’t check in anything heavier (for the carriers’ contracts I suppose).

To that effect, I had to rearrange my two bags to even out the weight. I was directed several meters away to do it, substituting heavy books from the heavier bag with lighter clothes from the lighter bag. For a minute, it looked like I was going to have to abandon my two full-sized umbrellas, but in the end, everything fit back in. The whole thing took around fifteen minutes, the whole time in paranoia that someone was going to take my other bags (each with contents worth a very pretty penny).

Going back up to the check-in counter, I still had a little bit of adjusting to do, but my bags after moving two books into my carry-on luggage came in at about thirty-four kilograms and twenty-four kilograms, which to the checker was over the weight limit but acceptably so (probably as per her guidelines). With those two suckers off my back, I had a lot less to worry about (a main factor in choosing to travel in groups or at least with one other person so as not to leave luggage unattended).

Before packing these bags full though, I removed all the price tags I could find because while I planned to properly declare what I bought, I didn’t want the customs officers to be counting pennies on me.

One of my last friends who hadn’t yet left told me that I shouldn’t declare in excess of what’s tax-exempt, because no one pays customs taxes, implying that I was overly law-abiding and silly in doing so. I told him that it’s not that much, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t pay it. I had the money to and knew that it would come down to whether or not they believed me when I said that though I’m bringing the box back, I solemnly swear that I bought it in the United States.

I guess when it comes down to it, I follow Socratic philosophy regarding civics. When he was sentenced to death, Crito came to free him, seeing that no one was going to stop him. However, Socrates chose to take his punishment seeing that the society that he lived in decided against him. I suppose I feel that the overwhelming majority of laws are there for a reason, and if not for the sake of the law itself, for something secondary in the least. In my case, paying customs tax (which happens to be much lower than Los Angeles County sales tax) helps my country protect our national security interests.

On the other hand, my roommate, in addition to bring six People’s Liberation Army hats (with a red star square center) and quite a few Quotes of Chairman Mao pocket books for cheap thrills, along with a defiling depiction of President Obama for his right-wing father, bought a small pack of Cuban cigars to bring back. Now if Communist souvenirs provide cheap thrills for Americans, bringing Cuban cigars over to the United States provides just downright ridiculously cheap thrills for Americans.

It’s not like the cigars are particularly good that makes them so fun to bring over, nor is it being bad for your health to smoke the reason why they’re illegal to import. It’s because of our long-running trade embargo upon Cuba set during the Kennedy years that first Cuban cigars are illegal to bring it and second that people like my roommate find it deviantly fun to sneak in. * Snicker, snicker.

Well I’m back in the States now, definitively so, having come in without having been asked to pay customs tax, yet following the law to the T. It just goes to show that people get by perfectly well by doing things the proper ways as well—just saying.