My Best Journey Ever
By Jenn Bennett.
I wasn’t always a
writer. In one past career, I used to travel to the Far East a lot, dealing
with factories. It was my job to come up with new products, and I’d take my
crazy new ideas to China, where they’d translate them into working prototypes.
On one trip, I was paired with a soft-spoken Chinese man named Larry from our Shenzhen
office, whose job was to be my guide and take me deeper into the mainland, far
away from the big cities, where the factories were smaller and specialized in
carving wood.
At that point in my
career, I’d spent most of my time in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Taipei—all big
cities, all fairly easy for English speakers to navigate. (Hong Kong
especially. To this day it remains one of my favorite places, and the people
there, some of the kindest I’ve ever met.) But Larry hired a driver who would
steer us away from my familiar anchors. When I asked him how long it would take
to get there, he said, “Not long.” I had no idea what to expect.
The first day’s
drive was fair. We spent the night in a decent-sized city that still held
traces of the West. Good: There was a McDonald’s outside our hotel. Bad: The
hotel’s mini-bar food was all expired and there were bugs in the bed. I didn’t
sleep. Day two, I spent in a restless state in the back of the car, staring at
the changing scenery as rain fell over lush green mountains. We stopped to eat
at a crumbling traditional house with a courtyard straight out of a historical
Kung Fu movie. They butchered a chicken in front in me with a large cleaver and
washed greens in a forest stream. There was no modern plumbing, so I was forced
to pee in a hole in the ground around the back of the house. I had a small mental
breakdown and cried, pulled myself together, and went back inside and ate that
chicken; it turned out to be one of the best meals of my life.
Day three: In the
middle of a rural town, both the sidewalks and the road just…ended. Like, actually abruptly ended. We were driving
along, and it was as if the workers ran out of material, packed up their
things, and stopped constructing the street. It was at this point that I turned
to Larry and started laughing. He laughed, too. It didn’t really matter anymore
where we were going. The whole thing was so absurd. “Is this the end of the world?”
I asked him. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Yes.
We’ve travelled to the end of the world. What do you think of it?”
In Night Owls, my character, Beatrix, takes
a journey on a midnight bus in San Francisco, where she runs into my hero,
Jack, an anonymous graffiti artist who’s been spray-painting giant gold words
across the city. She didn’t plan on taking that bus, and she certainly didn’t
plan to meet Jack. But sometimes unexpected journeys can have strange and wondrous
outcomes if you open yourself up to them.
Night owls
Feeling alive is always worth the risk.
Meeting Jack on the Owl—San Francisco's night bus—turns Beatrix's world upside down. Jack is charming, wildly attractive...and possibly one of San Francisco's most notorious graffiti artists.
But Jack is hiding a piece of himself. On midnight rides and city rooftops, Beatrix begins to see who this enigmatic boy really is.
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