“I feel relaxed,” Yuan Bin is quoted as saying in a 1998 Nation article. “I shall have no regrets whatever happens to me.”1 Surprisingly, the words are spoken shortly after “police officers in helmets and bulletproof vests”2 arrest Yuan for hijacking “an Air China jet with 104 people aboard.”3 Twenty minutes subsequent to take off on the overcast morning of October 28, Yuan, a trained pilot, abruptly stole command of the plane, resting it forcefully from the hands of...himself? Yes, though “it was not immediately clear what Yuan hoped to accomplish,”4 it is clear, astonishingly, that Yuan had “hijacked his own flight.”5 Indeed, the illegal transfer of power happened so quickly that, if a passenger blinked, they could easily have missed it -- in a nightmare scenario, the captain had taken control of the plane.
Who controlled it before? Consider this: diverting “flight CA905 from its first scheduled stop, the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming”6required Yuan not only to seize authority over the cockpit, but also over his own person. Yet, being both himself and captain of the plane, how had Yuan previously not been in command? A cogent explanation is required. Are there in fact two Yuan Bins -- one a hapless victim and the other a dexterous criminal? One bumbling along and the other silently plotting, having emerged -- from the darkness “as tensions lowered and contacts expanded between the sides” -- to enact its dastardly plan on October 28? Though tempting, this logic is unsatisfactory; it leaves us wondering where the second Yuan, Yuan-Prime, might have gotten off to -- and if he’ll ever be returned safely. This line of questioning (Where’s the body?) is an infinite regress that leads ultimately to charges of kidnapping and homicide -- or is it suicide? In any case, it’s a mess. Rather, we might be wise to admit, finally, that captains and pilots are not in control of planes. We must acknowledge that flights are never manipulated by people at all. We must cede the fact that pilots have no business flying -- and that they should know their place. They are mere figureheads, effectual in name and title only, so that when Yuan took command of the aircraft, he stole power not from himself or the plane, but from something else entirely.
But what exactly?
The answer? Nothing. The bold claim is corroborated by the Tao, wherein we read, “We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”7 The ancient reasoning holds true not only for clay pots and relics, but for modern machinery as well. Washing machines, fans. For example, flight is achieved not by means of solid mass, but by the imbalance of nothingness that surrounds the wings. The negative space of an airplane, that dearth of solid material, that emptiness forming the plane both within and without, is simultaneously the manner in which it moves and the path on which it travels. Nothing drives the engine and opens the way. In this manner, the airplane becomes “seamless, unnamable,” a “form that includes all forms, image without an image, subtle, beyond all conception.”8 More important, however, is the inevitable conclusion that this is how Yuan functions as well, both from day to day and as impotent captain and pilot, urged onward by an empty interior that mirrors his shape. His stupid life has nothing to do with him. Or, more importantly, his life has everything to do with nothing, stupidly. It’s how he flies planes -- and how he gets up in the morning. “Void, separation and waiting, that’s what we are. And such we remain even on the day when the past inside us rediscovers its original forms.”9
But, on October 28, Yuan revolted against this system, almost inconceivably. Think: if the man Yuan, like his plane, is only the superficial layer of some nothingness within him -- that is, if he is only the cheap lipstick and blush on the skin of the abyss -- then his hijacking is heroic, for it is an original example of the makeup finally attacking the face. Yuan served less than a year in prison because prosecutors claim that the crime is “relatively harmless,”10 but they gravely underestimate the gravity. It is a fable killing its lesson, a symbol killing its myth, an iconography destroying its definition, a will interrupting its destiny, a captain his charted trajectory.
What lingers is this: why did Yuan insist on being “accompanied on the bizarre flight by his wife, Xu Mei”?What did he want to show her? And did she recognize her husband as he turned inside out? Did they hold hands, did they kiss, was it cold, was it nice? Did she wear makeup -- and did it enjoy her face? We might imagine, as well, what would happen if an airplane took control of the void that envelops it, of the body which it ornaments -- namely the sky and everything. “I feel relaxed,” the airplane might say, before diverting the course, and -- though no one can truly hold its hand -- “I shall have no regrets whatever happens to me.”
Who controlled it before? Consider this: diverting “flight CA905 from its first scheduled stop, the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming”6required Yuan not only to seize authority over the cockpit, but also over his own person. Yet, being both himself and captain of the plane, how had Yuan previously not been in command? A cogent explanation is required. Are there in fact two Yuan Bins -- one a hapless victim and the other a dexterous criminal? One bumbling along and the other silently plotting, having emerged -- from the darkness “as tensions lowered and contacts expanded between the sides” -- to enact its dastardly plan on October 28? Though tempting, this logic is unsatisfactory; it leaves us wondering where the second Yuan, Yuan-Prime, might have gotten off to -- and if he’ll ever be returned safely. This line of questioning (Where’s the body?) is an infinite regress that leads ultimately to charges of kidnapping and homicide -- or is it suicide? In any case, it’s a mess. Rather, we might be wise to admit, finally, that captains and pilots are not in control of planes. We must acknowledge that flights are never manipulated by people at all. We must cede the fact that pilots have no business flying -- and that they should know their place. They are mere figureheads, effectual in name and title only, so that when Yuan took command of the aircraft, he stole power not from himself or the plane, but from something else entirely.
But what exactly?
The answer? Nothing. The bold claim is corroborated by the Tao, wherein we read, “We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”7 The ancient reasoning holds true not only for clay pots and relics, but for modern machinery as well. Washing machines, fans. For example, flight is achieved not by means of solid mass, but by the imbalance of nothingness that surrounds the wings. The negative space of an airplane, that dearth of solid material, that emptiness forming the plane both within and without, is simultaneously the manner in which it moves and the path on which it travels. Nothing drives the engine and opens the way. In this manner, the airplane becomes “seamless, unnamable,” a “form that includes all forms, image without an image, subtle, beyond all conception.”8 More important, however, is the inevitable conclusion that this is how Yuan functions as well, both from day to day and as impotent captain and pilot, urged onward by an empty interior that mirrors his shape. His stupid life has nothing to do with him. Or, more importantly, his life has everything to do with nothing, stupidly. It’s how he flies planes -- and how he gets up in the morning. “Void, separation and waiting, that’s what we are. And such we remain even on the day when the past inside us rediscovers its original forms.”9
But, on October 28, Yuan revolted against this system, almost inconceivably. Think: if the man Yuan, like his plane, is only the superficial layer of some nothingness within him -- that is, if he is only the cheap lipstick and blush on the skin of the abyss -- then his hijacking is heroic, for it is an original example of the makeup finally attacking the face. Yuan served less than a year in prison because prosecutors claim that the crime is “relatively harmless,”10 but they gravely underestimate the gravity. It is a fable killing its lesson, a symbol killing its myth, an iconography destroying its definition, a will interrupting its destiny, a captain his charted trajectory.
What lingers is this: why did Yuan insist on being “accompanied on the bizarre flight by his wife, Xu Mei”?What did he want to show her? And did she recognize her husband as he turned inside out? Did they hold hands, did they kiss, was it cold, was it nice? Did she wear makeup -- and did it enjoy her face? We might imagine, as well, what would happen if an airplane took control of the void that envelops it, of the body which it ornaments -- namely the sky and everything. “I feel relaxed,” the airplane might say, before diverting the course, and -- though no one can truly hold its hand -- “I shall have no regrets whatever happens to me.”
***
Dolan Morgan is a writer whose fiction and poetry can be found in venues such as Armchair/Shotgun and The Believer (upcoming). For previous pieces in Dolan's series on the mythology of hijacking, see: Myth One; Myth Two; Myth Three; Myth Four.