A few months after the divorce was final, in the early days of January, I spent a couple nights watching back-to-back auto industry unveilings on Youtube. Maserati’s Alfieri at the 2015 Geneva Auto Show. The Lexus RC F in Detroit. Not because I know anything about cars. Rather, the existence of life on alien worlds trivializes our ant colony intrigues here on earth. <\/p>\n
Somewhere in Tokyo the Director of Global Marketing at Aston Martin is pacing around his hotel room practicing a speech about performance engineering, and on the showroom floor, the design team at Chrysler is consumed with their own machinations and triumphs. Maybe they’re all just taking a quick break from stomping each other’s fingers off the corporate ladder. Maybe they’re a well-oiled band of long-time comrades, known throughout the industry as the SEAL Team 6 of family sedan craftsmanship. I’ll never know. And they’ll never know that in a bright little apartment in Beijing, one girl closed the lid on the last decade of her life, set that shoebox on the highest shelf, and went off to make banana bread.<\/p>\n