Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “C’mon,” Claire said now. “Run.” Rounding the corner, we made a mad dash down the street, then turned into an alley, then ran down another street, then collapsed in a doorway breathless and giggling as if we’d just orchestrated a prison break.

  “Oh, thank God we’re free of him,” Claire panted. “Okay. Now where the hell are we?” Amazingly, we hadn’t brought our guidebook with us because we didn’t want to stand out like tourists.

  She yanked open the map. The names of the streets—Nanjing, Jiangxi, Guangxi—all ran together. “Oh, let’s just wander,” she said. “Worse comes to worst, we’ll just head back toward the water and look for the big, white aspirin.”

  Shanghai. Pearl of the Orient.

  Nanjing Road was lined with low ice-cream-colored storefronts with Chinese characters painted on their walls in red. Most opened directly onto the street like garages, revealing cheap, modest goods. Crates of tangerines. A grease-spattered hot plate, a wok surrounded by flies. Polyester blouses. Underfoot, the sidewalks were fractured and chalky. It was as if every structure had been ground down into filaments over the years. More overpowering than anything else were the smells. Wave after wave of pungencies and perfumes came over us. Urine. Jasmine. Roasting pork. Mildew. Sandalwood. Gasoline. Decomposing vegetables.

  We walked slowly, quietly, waving away the dust.

  In the lanes, bamboo scaffolding had been erected in front of tenements to create makeshift balconies. So many wires, tubes, cords, and laundry lines were connected to them, they looked like giant electrical outlets. Chickens hopped in the dirt.

  “I’m thirsty,” Claire said. “Let’s try our communication skills.” At a small grocery, plastic crates filled with glass bottles of orange soda were stacked on the sidewalk. A teenage boy stood behind the counter, watching us with fascination.

  “Bonjour,” I said to the boy. “Comment allez-vous?”

  French. Why had that come out of my mouth? I supposed because it was the only foreign language I even remotely knew. Having taken it in high school, I could possibly, if pressed, order a croque-monsieur and a café au lait in Paris. Now it seemed my brain had clicked into it as a default mode.

  Claire laughed. “Want to try that again in Chinese, Zsa Zsa?”

  She turned to the boy behind the counter. “Nee how.” She pulled two bottles of orange drink from the crate and set them on the counter. Handing me our Berlitz phrase book, she said, “Find out how to say ‘please.’ ”

  I riffled through the pages in a panic. “Ching,” I said finally, pointing to the sodas and gesturing.

  The boy nodded. I beamed.

  We had one moment of perfect, shining, cross-cultural communication. Then he said something completely incomprehensible.

  “He’s probably telling us how much it costs.” Claire pulled out her leather Gucci wallet. She insisted on keeping her money in her purse instead of strapped beneath her clothes in a money belt like I did. This drove me crazy. As I saw it, she might as well just tape a sign to her ass reading, “I’m wealthy and careless. Come pickpocket me.” No one from New York City ever flashed money around like she did.

  While she dug around for her FEC, the boy held up two fingers and said, “Bah.”

  “Bah?” Claire chuckled. “What do you suppose bah is?”

  “I think it’s ‘two,’ ” I said. “He’s holding up two fingers.”

  Claire slid two FEC notes toward him. The boy shook his head. He held up his his thumb and index finger again. “Bah.”

  “Yes. I know. Bah,” said Claire, pointing to first one FEC note, then the other.

  The boy shook his head. “Bah,” he repeated, pointing to his fingers.

  “Christ, is he retarded?” Claire whispered.

  I flipped hurriedly through the phrasebook to the section “Counting and Numbers.” “It looks like bah is eight.”

  “He’s saying eight but holding up only two fingers?”

  “Maybe he thinks he’s a Magritte painting,” I said.

  Claire snorted and slapped six more FEC notes down on the counter. “Jesus,” she said soberly. “You’d think at least that counting on your fingers would be the same. I mean, since when are two fingers not two?”

  We stood there for a moment considering this. When we looked up, mothers, fathers, grandparents, and small children had gathered around us, gawking. Word seemed to have gotten out around the neighborhood.

  “Yep, that’s right, everybody. Drop everything and get over here.” Claire groaned, raking her fingers through her hair. “Two Americans are standing around drinking orange soda. Will the excitement never cease?”

  “Boy.” I laughed. “I wish I found us nearly as fascinating as they do.”

  While I’d been unnerved by our anonymity in Hong Kong, the relentless attention we received now in China was at least as unsettling. As we hurried from the grocery store, people everywhere pointed and hollered any little bit of English they’d ever learned. “Hello!” A man dogged us across a pedestrian footbridge. “Miss America! Nuclear missile! Hamburger!” We felt besieged.

  Our only respite came in Renmin Square, a thickly wooded park in the middle of the city with a duck pond and gazebo. Yet even here, a young Chinese man approached us. “Excuse me, but are you busy?” he asked furtively. “I would like to talk with you a few minutes, if that is possible.”

  Unlike other strangers we’d encountered, his English was impeccable. He was also dressed in Western blue jeans and a plaid button-down shirt, his hair cut in modern punkish spikes. He was our age, possibly younger—a contemporary, someone we might really be able to talk to.

  “Please. Sure. Absolutely,” we said.

  He glanced nervously around the park. “Do you mind if we go here?” He motioned to a small thicket of azalea bushes off the side of the path.

  With the Cultural Revolution so fresh in everyone’s memory, some Chinese were reluctant to be seen with foreigners. Once we were seated on a bench, the young man exhaled, though he continued to look around.

  “Thank you so much,” he said, leaning in close. “It is so rare that I get to practice my English. If I do not practice it, I am afraid I will lose it.”

  His name, he told us, was Tom. His father had been a diplomat. When Tom was twelve, his family had lived in England for two years. He was pleased to learn that we were from America. Back in London, he had seen several American movies, including Star Wars and Grease. “Please,” he said. “It is not too rude that I ask about your country?”

  “Fire away,” we said.

  His questions came so quickly, it was hard to keep up: Why has America’s influence been so great when it is such a young nation? Children in America, you are so independent—is there any sense of family? There is a lot of divorce, no? Why are people in America ever discontent when you are so wealthy?

  While Claire and I could’ve responded with aplomb to any questions, say, about Plato’s concept of eudaemonia, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or the Treaty of Versailles, Tom’s questions completely stumped us. We’d never been pressed to explain our country in quite this way before.

  When we finally managed to deliver what were largely defensive and inchoate answers, Tom considered them politely. Then he asked haltingly, “In America, do you get arrested for reading magazines?”

  I laughed. “Are you kidding? Why would a—”

  Shamefully, he looked away.

  “Oh my God.” Claire covered her mouth. Gently, she shifted toward him on the bench. “Was it something political?”

  Tom shook his head. “Playboy. A classmate in England gave it to me when I was fourteen. When they found it, I was sent to reeducation camp for two years.”

  I flashed on Martin, casually thumbing through Juggs magazine, then of myself at college. I’d spoken out vociferously against pornography, declaring that it was violence against women and ought to be illegal.

  I suddenly felt despicably naïve.

  Tom stood up. “Yes, well, okay. I thi
nk I should be going now. Thank you.”

  Before we could respond, the azalea bushes rustled and he was gone.

  Numbly we made our way out of the park. As soon as we stepped back onto Nanjing Road, an old man with a thatch of white hair grabbed me by the forearm.

  “Hello! Welcome to China!” he bellowed, thumping his chest. “I learn English during World War Two.” He had on Mao pants, a brown-and-white-checked shirt. “I work with Americans. Americans very nice. Have good friend in America. He live in Cincinnati. You from Cincinnati?”

  “No, New York City,” I nodded.

  “Oh, New York! Big Apple. Yankee baseball. Brooklyn Bridge!” As he spoke, another crowd began forming.

  “You’ve been to New York?” I asked.

  “Oh no. My friend from Cincinnati, he send me postcards. Postcard of Statue of Liberty. Postcard of World Trade Center.”

  He drew closer to Claire and me, clutching our wrists to steady himself, his hands as small and bony as starfish. “New York, big city. One day, Shanghai be number one city like New York! How many people live in New York?”

  “I dunno. Seven million?”

  “Seven million!” The man took a step back in disbelief. “But that not so big! Shanghai bigger! Shanghai twelve million! You say Shanghai bigger than New York?”

  “I guess so.” While Shanghai certainly didn’t feel bigger, it seemed to have at least as many people in it—most of whom now seemed to be standing around gaping at us.

  The man turned to our Chinese audience and said something that generated a lot of excitement. “I am telling them that you are from America. That you say Shanghai bigger than New York City. That New York City have only seven million people.”

  Another man in the crowd pushed forward and shook my hand. “Shanghai bigger!” he said exuberantly. “Shanghai have fourteen million people!”

  “Shanghai have fifteen million people!” A woman leaned over, poking Claire.

  “Shanghai very big city. Twenty million people!” announced a young man straddling a bicycle.

  Standing there surrounded by traffic and exuberant loudmouths, I felt curiously at home. I was used to being the only white girl in a subway car, on a city street, in an entire neighborhood, in fact. I was used to being jostled by crowds. And the Chinese? All of them talking at once, arguing over whose version was right, insisting you pay attention to them—why, they were pretty much like Jews.

  Claire clutched me. “Susie,” she whispered, “can we get out of here? I’m hot. I’m dizzy. And I really need to go to the bathroom.”

  Her face was flushed. For all her self-assuredness, I realized, she was still a child of the suburbs. Her world was one of oak trees and horse farms, country clubs, golf greens, and quaint New England towns dotted with colonial banks. When she looked out her dormer windows in Connecticut, she saw only people like herself reflected in the swimming pool. For once, my upbringing put me at an advantage.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s head back to the Pujiang.”

  “No,” she cried desperately. “I mean, I really need to go. Now.”

  She appeared to be in pain. Help me, she mouthed. I had no idea what to do. We were somewhere on the map in a tangle of streets, all named Donglu. I looked around. “Maybe back down that street with the store. I think there was a restaurant.”

  Urgently we tried to retrace our steps, hurrying down one alley, then another. Dust, scaffolding, walls, chickens. Dead end. We doubled back, crossed a street. A lattice of overhead wires, laundry. More tenements. A shirtless old man on a folding chair, fanning himself. An abandoned bicycle. An outdoor sink. A woman with a baby in one arm, washing clothes in a plastic bucket with the other. Everything smelling like a musty throw pillow. Go left. Scallions frying. A man crouched on the curb before a broken louver door. Another alley.

  I hurried through the lanes, searching. Claire stumbled behind me, clutching her stomach as if she were holding her internal organs together. Finally we came upon a tiny restaurant. A few people seated around a crude wooden table looked up, set down their chopsticks, and stared.

  “Quick,” Claire cried, leafing through her phrase book. “How do you say ‘toilet’ ”

  “Claire.” I pointed. The cover read Cantonese for Travelers. In her distress, she’d pulled out the wrong one; we needed Mandarin. She gave a little cry. “I have to go!”

  I ran up to the woman behind the counter. “Bonjour. I mean, Nee how. Ching?” I pointed to Claire and pantomimed squatting.

  “Ah!” The woman smiled. She was plump, dressed in a Mao uniform and an incongruously frilly apron. Motioning us back through the kitchen, she led us out down a narrow alley full of weeds and tiny houses.

  “Where is she taking us?” Claire cried, hugging herself. “Did you explain?”

  The woman led us around the corner to a low concrete barrack with two cutaway doors. She steered us into one, urging us inside, pointing and nodding.

  “Merci beaucoup. Shay shay nee.” I bowed idiotically. Claire hesitated. The woman took her by the elbow and guided her in.

  The low concrete room was bare except for a trough running down the middle of the floor. Two women were both squatting over it with their Mao pants and underwear pushed to their ankles. They glanced up impassively as they defecated. At the far end of the room, water ran out of a rusted spigot and trickled down the trough toward a drain. The place stank of feces and urine—though it was not any worse, I supposed, than the New York City subway system or of any gas station bathroom off Interstate 95.

  Claire let out a cry, then backed out. It was odd. China was supposed to be a closed society, yet almost every basic aspect of life seemed to be lived out in the open—cooking, eating, washing, and shitting were all carried out in full view of others. Standing there, I grasped a fundamental irony. If you wanted to live freely, in an open democratic society, you had to be able to shut your door. You had to have the privacy to pee or think or speak away from the relentless gaze of your neighbors, the public, and your government. While I supposed that going to the bathroom publicly en masse was in a certain way a great leveler—perhaps even perversely democratizing—to Claire and me, it just seemed degrading.

  “I can’t go in there! That’s disgusting.” She was now in tears, half doubled over, leaning against a wall.

  “I know, sweetie. But I don’t think we can make it back to the hotel, do you? Better to pee in there than in your pants.”

  She looked at me in horror.

  “Look.” I took a deep breath. “We are two young, brilliant Ivy League graduates. If we can’t use a public bathroom in the People’s Republic of China, who the hell can? I’ll even pee with you.” I dug into my pocket and pulled out two tissues. “We can have a contest. Who can finish first. Or who can pee on their shoes the least.”

  Bracing herself, Claire turned reluctantly and walked with me back to the doors.

  “Good thing I got that nosebleed in the airport, huh?” I said. “Otherwise, we might not be carrying around Kleenex.”

  Stepping back inside, we tried hard not to breathe through our noses. Mercifully, the two other women had left.

  Claire walked to the far end of the trough next to a little window and stood with her back to me. I stood at the other end, facing the door. It was as if we were preparing to duel.

  “Okay. Ready?” I giggled, straddling the trough, pulling down my pants. “On the count of three, drop and pee.”

  I heard her inhale miserably, then her khakis unzipping and the stereophonic fwish of our pee simultaneously hitting the floor.

  Suddenly Claire screamed, “Stop looking at me!”

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw her bent over, struggling to pull up her pants while waving furiously at the window. “Get the hell away from there!”

  “Oh, God, Susie,” she cried, pointing. “Those women were watching us.”

  ———

  Back at the Pujiang, the dormitory was empty. We both went to our narrow iron beds and
lay down on them, listening to the sounds of the traffic below without saying anything. A moment later, I heard a sniffle.

  “Sweetie,” I said gently, “you okay?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said bitterly, blowing her nose. “I just don’t understand how I’m supposed to function with everybody looking at me all the time.”

  As she said this, dozens of Western women tromped into our dormitory, talking and laughing, dropping their day packs heavily on the floorboards, kicking off their shoes, unbolting their lockers, flouncing on their creaky beds. It was lunchtime. They had returned to the hotel to eat.

  We were the only Americans in the entire dorm. Everyone else was Canadian, Australian, Kiwi, European. Virtually all of them had been on the road for months, if not years. Their skin had been burnished to the color of burnt sugar. Their faces had the flinty-eyed look of war veterans. Dressed in patchwork drawstring pants and batik tunics purchased from street markets across Asia, they’d dispensed with all Western frivolities a long time ago. They were expert navigators now, muscular with experience. Sitting among them with our brand-new backpacks, my snow-white virginal Reeboks, our crisp pastel-colored L.L. Bean sportswear, Claire and I weren’t impressing anybody.

  “Siberia is Siberia,” a Danish woman shrugged. She yanked off her grimy T-shirt and used it to blot her armpits. “But Outer Mongolia… now that was worth going to.”

  “Well, it took a while, but eventually the Brazilians realized they’d made a mistake and released me,” someone else said. “The good thing was, I met another gal from Brisbane who was jailed by mistake too, and we hitchhiked down to Patagonia.”

  A Swiss woman in the bed next to Claire’s had just returned from Lhasa. Embarrassingly, until that moment, I’d thought Lhasa was a yogurt drink, a sort of irritatingly nutritious Indian milk shake. But no, it turned out to be the capital of Tibet.