China Entry the Fourth: Meet Frank

Even though I have every intention of staying up and talking to Ho on the plane, I fall asleep 30 minutes into the flight. I wake up, you know, hours and days later and look at the mini-screen monitor on the seatback in front of me. We're right over Tokyo. In the time I slept, we crossed the entire Pacific Ocean. That feels significant. And strange. I'm 32 years old, and I've actually never crossed the Pacific before.

But by now, Ho has fallen asleep. The movie selection pretty much sucks, which is one of the only poor things I'll say about Cathay Pacific. But the person sitting on the other side of me, Frank, is wide awake and more than ready to talk.

I always consider it a good omen for a trip when you start the trip off by meeting somebody hugely interesting. Entrance Frank! Unfortunately, I don't think that I can actually do justice to the three-hour narrative of Frank's life story here, but I can bullet point the highlights.

• Frank left home at the age of 17 and, I kid you not, went to work on a railroad gang.
• From there, Frank ended up working on oil rigging drills and lived for years in Asia and Brazil.
• At some point, Frank invested his own money in oil rigs. He made a lot of money, but when the oil bust hit, he lost everything.
• Then Frank became a general contractor and made lots of money again.
• At some point in there, Frank marries a Phillipina, has a son and builds a house in Spokane.
• Frank decides to go to cullinary school in Vancouver, BC with a misplaced dream about starting a restaurant. Though he graduates cullinary school at the top of his class, he realizes that he doesn't want to start a restaurant. As he puts it, "If you love mindless, repetitive tasks and going into a business where there's a 90% chance that you'll lose all of your money, then the restaurant business is for you."
• Now, Frank does contracting work 4 to 6 months out of the year and spends most of the rest of the year traveling. He also freakin' imports pearls.

In his pearl importing business, Frank pays high neighbor's daughter fifty cents for each pair of pearl earrings she posts and closes for him. The only rule is that she's not allowed to tell her parents about the money because they would spend it before she could use it to pay for college. Frank's going to match her total savings when she graduates. Frank's a good type of dude.

Frank spent the last month in India getting dental implants. He also chased religion around and became enamored with the concept of Ganesh. Says Frank, "When I look at religions, my theory is that the religion where the people in the religion are smiling the largest part of the day is the religion that's got it right. My brother is a Promise Keeper. Those conservative American right wing religions, they don't smile very much."

Frank as a lot of theories...theories on national debt, refinancing, unions, beurocracy, family, cultures, pearls. He claims to be a guy who likes silence, but he talks non-stop from Taipei to Hong Kong.

Did you know that the way to create pearls with a rose coloration to them is to culture those pearls in Oysters closer to the surface of the water so that the pearls get exposure to diluted sunrays? I did not know that. Frank explains that to me and then, as we begin to descend into Hong Kong, he gives me a tiny jewelery box with a pair of perfect blush colored pearl earrings in it. "They'll look good with your skin tone," he says. Maybe he's right. I've never had a pair of pearl earrings before. Also new for me at 32. Ho will later say those earrings are the price I charged to listen to Fred for three hours. Yeah, maybe, but this stuff is interesting, too. But also, yeah, Ho's right.

Frank is on his way to the Phillipines to meet up with some buddies and some Asian hookers. We talk about that for a long time. I guess when you've lived Frank's life, staying still and settled in Spokane is hard ... even though Frank has me sold on moving to Spokan and its affordable cost of living and full symphony orchestra.

I love jewelry because I love the things it makes me think of when I put it on ... the trip I was on when I bought the piece of jewelry or the person who gave it to me. Whenever I put on Frank's pearl earrings, I'm going to think about how he had a life so full that 14 hours on a plane wouldn't have been enough to tell all of his stories, and I'm going to want to live like that.

Yeah, Frank's a good dude, but now we descend into Hong Kong.