| Jetlag, Affliction of Our Age |
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By Russell Working
Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2001.
I'm sitting in the kitchen of Nonna's Moscow relatives. A mahogany African mask leers from the wall. Ashtrays clutter the counter. The stove is a fancy German model with a top that looks like it's made of glass -- unlike our Russian stove with burners so warped that that kettles of boiling potatoes wobble and walk off the stovetop. The clock ticks. Should I set it back? No, that would be too painful, chronologically speaking. Instead, I set my watch ahead seven hours, to Vladivostok time. Jetlag is one of the afflictions of our age. When Marco Polo traveled from Venice to China, time changed incrementally, day by day, over the two-year journey. He never gazed out a kitchen window at the scattered lights in a neighboring 17-story of apartment block, wondering "Is anybody out there awake? Or did they forget to turn off the lights when they went to bed?" He never spent the night dosing in short stretches, tormented by restless dreams: slogging up a muddy street that turns into a hog wallow, arguing with a Greek who thinks he lives in your apartment.
She dissuaded me. It's a big city. It's dangerous. You'll be killed. Or we'll never find each other. So I went back to bed and lay staring at the orange light through the tulle curtains. My work as a freelance writer allows me a lot of travel. But excluding trips to Central Asia and Mongolia, most of it has been within the Far East -- Japan, China, the Philippines, South Korea -- so that jetlag isn't a problem. Most local times from Vladivostok to Saigon to Sydney vary by no more than an hour or two. China is the odd man out. The border is 60 kilometers west of Vladivostok, yet there is a three-hour time difference -- the same as that between Los Angeles and New York. Even stranger, the clocks throughout the country all run on central time. Foreign reporters visiting Urumqi, thousands of kilometers west of Beijing, like to note this. The implication is that the heavy hand of Beijing interferes with something as basic as what Urumqi residents call morning or afternoon. But from Vladivostok's perspective, it's Beijing residents who accommodate Urumqi in the interests of chronological patriotism. Urumqi is only an hour later than Almaty, Kazakhstan -- a reasonable difference given that Urumqi lies a little to the east. In Beijing, on the other hand, the sun rises at 4 a.m. in summer. That's why jetlag is never a problem for me in eastern China. If you wake at 4 a.m., you can stroll in the parks and city squares in the company of thousands of people practicing tai chi before work. They have to find some way to use the extra hours of morning light. When I first visited the Chinese border town of Suifenhe in 1998, I took a walk at 4:30 a.m. and found myself fighting off the Russian-speaking hustlers who try to lure tourists into their restaurants. When I finally followed one man inside, he yelled into an adjoining room. Six groggy young waitresses stumbled out of their sleeping quarters wearing matching red tracksuits. They were understandably grumpy -- until they learned that I was an American (I was only the third American ever to have registered in a Suifenhe hotel). So three waitresses joined me at the table and asked me in halting Russian about my homeland. Tonight promises no such company. Even the dog's asleep. In a lighted window across the courtyard, an insomniac drifts about her apartment, hanging laundry. It's comforting that I'm not alone. But that still won't help me sleep. Russell Working is a freelance journalist based in Vladivostok.
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It's 3 a.m. Sunday in Moscow, the city that never sleeps. Except that it's actually 2 o'clock, my laptop cheerfully informs me when I turn it on. Daylight savings time ended today, and any pretense I have of getting up at something approaching a normal hour (at least for a baker or a fisherman) is shattered.
