Some thoughts after spending 24 hours in darkness — which you can do too if you take an 11pm flight to Kowloon in the winter.

First correction: my western chauvinist mindset has always assumed that Asia (and Hong Kong and all those places so far west of me they are known as “The Far East”) is in the past somehow.* In fact, China is in the future. This realization becomes weirdly obvious when one moves geographically closer to China (in my case, from Indiana [EST] to California [PST]) only to find that I’ve temporally moved farther from China. In the Eastern Standard Time Zone, the time difference between the two zones is 13 hours (China is 13 hours in the future) when the US is observing Daylight Savings Time (otherwise it is 12 hours). However, once you move to CA, you’d think you’d only have a 10 hour time difference — oh ho ho! not so! — now the interval is sixteen hours difference. San Diego is only ~7300 miles from Hong Kong, New York is ~8,000 miles to Hong Kong, and yet New York is temporally closer by three hours.

This begins to make more sense when one accounts for two basic concepts that are still difficult to grasp despite their surficial simplicity: 1) the international dateline is in the middle of the Pacific — Cross it going east, and you move one day into the future; 2) the earth spins to the east (counterclockwise) relative to the sun.

So when you fly west, you are flying into the sunset, essentially chasing the sun, thus stretching the day (or night) longer and longer, until you breach (geographically) the international dateline, that artificial invisible line (see: equator) that resets the clock and catapults you (without any announcement) a day into the future. One could theoretically exasperate the legal definition of two days by jumping back and forth over the international line. It’s a little bit like the Daylight Savings 2 a.m. “fall back” that causes all sorts of car accidents, simply with the one hour skew of the 24-hour time table.

All of this is to say: Asia has never been in the past, it has always been in my future. And I am jetlagged.

*To be clear: I mean “in the past” in terms of time zones, not in terms of some colonialist notion, despite my use of the phrase “western chauvinist,” which I meant to signify my ignorance.