Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “See?” Claire whispered.

  I stood watching the cloud disintegrate. It was hard to tell what I’d just witnessed. Before we’d disembarked, Cynthia had pulled us aside and handed us a sheet of paper with the name and address of her hotel in Shanghai: not exactly the behavior of a kidnapper, a woman on the lam with her lover. “If you two need anything at all, promise you’ll contact me?” she’d said. “You can even travel with us, if you want.”

  Now the dock was deserted.

  Claire, Gunter, and I stood alone on the tamped plot of earth. We had no idea how far the wharf was from the actual city of Shanghai. The three of us walked to the end of the pier to assess our position. All we could see lining the muddy harbor were a couple of low-slung petroleum tanks, an outcropping of smokestacks, cargo cranes like monstrous high chairs.

  The morning was now almost eerily still, bathed in dust and the washed-out light of overexposed film.

  I looked at Claire. She was surveying the scene grimly, a cleft deepening in her brow. “Christ,” she said softly, slinging her pack down into the dirt. From somewhere a lone dog continued barking.

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked.

  Her eyes narrowed as if she was trying to thread a needle. It was a look she got whenever she was concentrating hard on something. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “We’re fine. We’re good. We’re excellent. Everything’s under control. Gunter.” She turned to him. “What’s going on?”

  To our great annoyance, Gunter just shrugged.

  “C’mon, Gunter,” Claire said, pointing to the makeshift terminal. “You speak Chinese. Can’t you go inside and maybe see if there’s some way to book a hotel or a taxi?”

  Gunter stood there like an office building whose lights were only just being turned on by the cleaning crew. “Yah, okay,” he said.

  We slung our packs over our shoulders again and lumbered back toward the quay.

  Just as we reached the terminal building, we heard a voice: “Sushi, Crair, Gunter, wait for me! It is Jonnie.”

  In a moment Jonnie caught up to us, breathless, an enormous camera bag slung across his chest. He smiled anxiously. “Where are you going? Why you not wait for me?”

  “Jonnie,” I cried happily. “We thought we had lost you!” And then I actually threw my arms around him and hugged him, a gesture that embarrassed just about everyone.

  “We are thinking we are booking the hotel, yah?” Gunter said.

  “No, no need to book a hotel,” Jonnie insisted, struggling to maintain his smile. “I told you. I have friends. They come. We take care of everything.” He glanced nervously back at the Jin Jiang. “I get my luggage. You wait here. Please. One moment.”

  “One moment” quickly turned into half an hour, but none of us seemed inclined to invent a Plan B.

  We stood watching a few people come and go on bicycles. One man pushed a rusty wheelbarrow with a slaughtered pig hanging out of it; another pedaled a cart piled with corrugated sheeting and onions. The air stank of fish oil, fermenting garbage.

  “Watch out,” Claire shouted. She pulled me out of the way of an oncoming van. The driver stopped abruptly and leaned on the horn. With the engine still running, he bounded out of the driver’s seat. I thought he was coming to yell at me, but instead he ran to Jonnie, who’d suddenly reappeared, and greeted him exuberantly.

  “This is my friend Harry,” Jonnie announced happily.

  Harry was a compact man with a receding hairline. Dressed in polyester pants and a tweed slouch cap, he looked older than Jonnie, more weather-beaten. His teeth were crooked. Sweat stains bled through the armpits of his plaid shirt. A small scar ran from his left ear neatly along his jaw, a shiny threadlike seam. “Nee how. Hello,” he said warmly, shaking our hands. “Hello” turned out to be one of the few words Harry knew in English. The others were “yes,” “thank you,” “have a nice day,” and “Ronald Reagan.”

  For a few minutes Harry and Jonnie walked over to the other side of the van and conferred. Claire, Gunter, and I stood there dumbly like babies waiting to be diapered, fed, burped. Being a tourist, I was beginning to see, meant being infantilized much of the time. All power is contextual. Take a brain surgeon in Uzbekistan and stick him in Manhattan; take the toughest homeboy from Compton and leave him in Tuscany. Drop any of us, anywhere, in an alien environment, and you’ll see our IQ plummet. “IS THIS THE BUS STOP?” we’ll holler at strangers, while dementedly pointing to the bus stop. To buy a sandwich, we’ll pantomime chewing. This is why, I suspect, so many otherwise decent people back home behave like assholes abroad: There’s nothing quite like feeling helpless to turn you into a world-class control freak, to make you forget your manners and throw a tantrum if your room isn’t ready and there’s no ice in your drink. In a strange environment you feel like a baby, and you’re often treated like a baby, and so you act like one. Claire, Gunter, and I were no exception. We stood there stupefied, fretting.

  Finally, Harry waved us over to his van. Ignoring two decades of warnings to never get into cars with strange men, Claire and I squeezed in. The van didn’t actually belong to Harry, but to the company he worked for. In China, Jonnie explained, almost no one owned a car. If you needed a vehicle, you had to lease one from your employer ahead of time. “It is not like in America,” Jonnie said. “In America, people sing songs about their cars. Everyone, they have a Cadillac, yes?”

  “Not really,” Claire said vaguely, staring out the window. “The best cars now are all foreign.” Harry eased the van out of the quay down into the street. Soot-darkened tenements appeared on either side of us garlanded with laundry.

  “It’s true, though,” I laughed. “About the songs. Let’s see, there’s ‘Pink Cadillac.’ ‘Little Red Corvette’—”

  “Except Stevie Wonder,” Jonnie said happily. “I never hear Stevie Wonder sing about cars.”

  “That’s because he’s blind,” Claire said. “Blind people don’t drive cars.”

  “Stevie Wonder is blind?” said Jonnie.

  Our van turned right, then left, then left again for a few hundred yards, then stopped.

  “Here we are,” Jonnie announced. For an instant I thought he was kidding. We were no more than eight minutes from the pier. “This is a very good, very nice hotel.”

  He pointed to a hulking sheet cake of a building that looked like a Victorian sanitarium.

  Gunter leafed through his guidebook, trying to figure out where we were. “Puijang Hotel,” Jonnie said, motioning us out of the car. “Harry know the manager. Please, come.”

  He ushered us over to a bench and instructed us to wait while he and Harry approached the woman behind a reception desk. The lobby was high-ceilinged and pillared. Back in the 1920s, it had probably had Persian carpets and elaborate chandeliers. Now it had the drafty, utilitarian feel of a high school gymnasium.

  A moment later, Jonnie returned. “Okay, Harry book you three beds. Now you give us passports and change your money. Okay?”

  Claire and I exchanged uneasy glances: hand over our passports and traveler’s checks? It occurred to us that we didn’t really know Jonnie or Harry at all—we didn’t even know their real Chinese names. For all we knew, they could be in cahoots with the hotel staff, getting kickbacks for every Westerner they brought in off the boat. For all we knew, they would cut and run with our stuff. All the smiling, all that you be my guest could be a con. Certainly it would be back in New York.

  “Wait a sec. I’m sorry,” I said. “But how do we know this is legit?”

  Claire cleared her throat and ran a hand through her hair. “Jonnie, is it possible for us to see the rooms first, before we book them?”

  Jonnie continued smiling at us. “Yes, okay. Harry book you three beds. Now you give your passports and pay.”

  Claire looked at Gunter. He had pulled a granola bar out of his tiny rucksack and was struggling to rip open the wrapper with his teeth.

  “Gunter!” she shouted. “Can you help us here
, please? How do you say ‘We want to we see the rooms first’ ”

  Gunter looked confused. Suddenly neither Claire nor I had the energy to deal with him. It was clear: Either we trusted Jonnie and Harry or we didn’t. We were in a Communist country halfway around the globe, amputated from everything we knew and understood. Before I’d left home, a boyfriend of mine, Jake, who’d backpacked through India, had told me, “Remember, when you’re traveling, you’re in their sandbox. Either play by their rules or go home.”

  Reluctantly we surrendered our passports. We wrote our names on a form where Jonnie told us to. We cashed our traveler’s checks at one counter, then counted out several hundred yuan in special foreigners’ FEC money and handed them over to Harry. He returned to the receptionist. We watched her take out an abacus and slide several beads around on it. A moment later, Harry handed us each a key, as well as our passports and three receipts written in longhand on slips of rice paper. The total cost of our lodging was $3.50 per person per night.

  “Dormitory is on fifth floor,” Jonnie said. “Very nice beds. Okay?” Exhaling, he wiped his hands on the thighs of his pants. “Okay. Now Harry and I, we must return to the pier for the refrigerator for my family, yes? We come back for you later. We take you to lunch. We have friends who have a very good restaurant. We give you special tour of Shanghai. We take care of everything for you. You understand? You stay right here, okay?”

  ———

  As soon as Claire and I were stuffed into the tiny elevator with our backpacks, she said, “Wow. Was that ever weird or what?”

  “What should we do?” I said. “He’s going to bend over backwards for us.”

  She frowned. “I know. I mean, I really want to go around China with him, but there’s just no way we can waltz him into the American embassy.”

  “Should we even have lunch with him?”

  “I’m not sure.” After a moment she said cryptically, “It’s actually not Jonnie I’m worried about. It’s Gunter.”

  “Him? Why?” I forced a little laugh. “What’d he do now?”

  Claire gave me a peculiar, guarded look. “I can’t say. It might upset you too much. But, Suze. You might be right about those Germans.”

  The elevator stopped abruptly. “I actually don’t think we can trust them,” she said.

  Before I could press her to elaborate, she strode out onto the landing.

  ———

  The women’s dormitory was in a big, drafty hall with narrow iron beds arrayed in rows beneath a ceiling fan. At the far end, a pair of French doors opened onto a small wrought-iron balcony. We could smell the exhaust and hear the traffic from the street below.

  It was only 6:45 a.m. The other travelers were still asleep, tangles of russet, blond, and chocolaty hair splayed across the pillows—maps, guidebooks, bags of cough drops, flashlights piled on the floor near their beds.

  Down the hallway was a communal bathroom with a row of sinks and four poorly concealed toilets. A small sign taped to the mirror informed guests that the showers were on the second floor next to the hotel kitchen. Clutching our towels, flip-flops, and peppermint soap, Claire and I made our way downstairs to what turned out to be one large concrete cell with a bent pipe jutting out of the wall.

  “Wow. Plumbing—as brought to you by Charles Dickens,” I said.

  Claire didn’t laugh. She glanced around worriedly. “There’s no curtain?”

  Cowering in the corner, she removed her bra from underneath her shirt and waited until the last possible minute to take off her chinos. “Don’t look,” she begged. “Please. My thighs are a nightmare.”

  Her embarrassment was painful to me; I wondered how she’d survived as a school athlete all those years. From what I could glimpse, she didn’t have an ounce of fat on her. The keys of her spine pressed through her back. Her legs were so narrow, the space between them was concave. Why were the girls with the best bodies always the most self-hating?

  As we rode upstairs in the elevator afterward, she looked despondent. “It’s bad enough the showers are freezing,” she said bitterly. “But just how am I supposed to function here with everybody watching me?”

  “Well, we wanted to go hard core,” I said. “I guess this is budget traveling.”

  Claire looked at me darkly. “I’m sorry. This has nothing to do with budgeting.”

  ———

  Although it had been our plan to ignore Jonnie’s instructions and go outside, it hadn’t been our plan to go outside with Gunter. But Gunter, being Gunter, was waiting for us in the lobby. What’s more, he’d thoughtfully procured a set of maps for us from CITS printed in pinyin, the Chinese system of writing out characters phonetically using the Roman alphabet. These proved to be a godsend. It hadn’t occurred to Claire and me that most Chinese maps would be labeled only in Chinese characters. When Gunter handed us the map, my heart broke a little. Poor bigdumbKraut, I thought guiltily, he’s doing the best he can.

  In the morning light, Shanghai looked like a city that had belonged to somebody’s grandparents: a formerly splendid metropolis now moldering in dust and neglect. The hazy streets were a riot of telegraph wires, old enameled bicycles, and outmoded buses shaped like breadboxes. Along the riverfront stood a row of majestic European buildings left over from colonial times. Fanning out behind these was a maze of walled alleyways, dirt lanes, ancient tile-roofed tenements. Nothing appeared to have been constructed after 1932. The colors were muted: slate, dun, sage.

  All the signs, of course, were in Chinese. Although I’d anticipated this, I’d underestimated the impact. It was as if a computer glitch had converted everything into dingbats, squiggles, and glyphs. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t read anything. It made me feel brain damaged.

  The only English appeared atop an abandoned hotel at the north end of the river. A giant white neon aspirin tablet—an advertising billboard left over from World War Two—flickered above the city reading

  like a crucifix, a strange set of crosshairs.

  Our hotel was located not far from this Bayer sign, across an industrial canal called Suzhou Creek. To reach the heart of downtown, we had to walk over a small iron footbridge. A great cascade of bicycles flooded past us toward the main riverfront road known as the Bund. As we stood watching, a crowd of Chinese surrounded us. While we stared at the traffic, they stared at us.

  In 1986, the People’s Republic was still a closed society. Most mainland Chinese had never seen us white-skinned, big-nosed Westerners before. Two girls pointed at Gunter, at the sheer enormity of him, then covered their mouths and giggled. Several old women baldly sized up Claire and me. Our round eyes, mine behind big owlish 1980s glasses. Claire’s size 9½ feet in their Timberland boots. My 36-DD breasts pushing like fists through my lavender sweatshirt. We must have looked like Amazons to them, albino gorillas, freaks of nature. Back at college, I’d decried the ways in which guys had sexually objectified me. Now I saw that I hadn’t experienced the half of it.

  “Nee how,” Gunter said, giving a little half wave at the crowd.

  Taking our cue from him, Claire and I chorused, “Nee how.”

  People burst out laughing. “Nee how,” they replied. A father in a Mao uniform urged his daughter forward. She couldn’t have been older than seven. Her long hair was tied with red strings into two pigtails.

  “Hello. How. Are. You?” she said shyly, tentatively, shaping each syllable with practiced care as her father looked on proudly.

  I kneeled down. “Hello, I am fine.” I overenunciated. “How are you?”

  The girl dashed back to her father and buried her face in his leg. The crowd roared with approval.

  The circus had come to town, and we were it. We walked to Huangpu Park. The crowd walked with us. Gunter stooped down to tie his shoe. The crowd stooped with him. We strolled to the waterfront and gazed across the river at the barren mudflats of Pudong. The crowd strolled with us and gazed at us gazing. I have to say, as much as I’d always fantasized about havi
ng an entourage, it was wildly unnerving.

  “I’m not liking this,” Claire murmured under her breath even as we smiled at the crowds and tried to wave affably. “It’s weirding me out. Can we try to keep moving?”

  As we made our way across the street to the famous Peace Hotel, the crowd finally dispersed.

  Two types of currency existed in China back then, the FEC money we tourists were issued, and local renminbi money issued to Chinese citizens. Only FEC was accepted at Friendship Stores—government-run emporiums that sold the best Chinese and imported goods. And so a black market had sprung up. Local renminbi was being traded for FEC at rates of up to 1.4 to one.

  The Peace Hotel was the center for this. No sooner did we approach the steps than Chinese men with hats tilted over their faces sidled up, whispering, “Change money? Good rate.”

  Without a word, Gunter nodded to one of them, who pointed down the street, then hurried off. Before we could say anything, Gunter followed, disappearing into an alley, leaving us alone on the steps.

  “See? What did I tell you,” Claire fumed. Back in Hong Kong, we’d overheard backpackers bragging about how they’d made a fortune off the locals on the black market in China. We’d thought this was despicable. “It’s like charging people admission to a lifeboat,” Claire had said disdainfully. Although trading on the black market was apparently a necessity—you couldn’t travel independently without renminbi—we ourselves vowed never to do this.