Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “And it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, going home with Jonnie. I mean, we can’t pass it up, can we? I promise we’ll let him down gently. When the time is right, I’ll think of something. I mean, we’re young, we’re bright—”

  “And you can burp ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ ” I conceded.

  Claire gave me her most dazzling smile, her upper lip stretching above her teeth like a ribbon. “Think of the stories we’ll be able to tell. It certainly beats smuggling wristwatches, no?”

  I said that I supposed it did.

  “I owe you.” She stood up, flung her hair over her shoulders, and smiled at me indulgently. “Go. Take a few hours to say goodbye to your crazy tattooed love boy. I’ll pack up our stuff and deal with the hotel.”

  Trevor, dressed in nothing but cutoff shorts, was sorting through a mountain of dirty laundry on top of his bed. “You’re leaving me already?” he cried when I told him the news. “But you’re my dream girl. And we’ve only just… Okay. Quick.” He pulled me across the hall to the women’s dormitory, which, unlike his, was empty.

  Afterward he said, “Where will I find you again? Where are you going after this village?”

  “Beijing.” I traced the outline of his Leila tattoo with my finger. It was odd to be in the arms of a man whose arms were literally covered with other naked women; it felt like competition. I flashed on Tom, punished by the Chinese authorities for owning an old Playboy.

  Trevor reached for my guidebook and pointed to a map of downtown Beijing. “October nineteenth, it’s me birthday. We’ll meet here, just outside the Forbidden City. Fourteen hundred hours. That’s the time I was born.”

  I smirked. “Will you have a password, too?”

  “I’m serious, girlie.” He tossed aside the book and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. “We’ve got a date. We said we’d celebrate our birthdays together on the Great Wall of China. So? Let’s do it. One of my mates says we can even sleep out there—”

  “Oh, yeah. Right. Sleep out on the Great Wall.”

  Trevor gave a low, wicked laugh. “Oi. The Communists don’t give a shit what we do. They’re too busy policing their own.”

  “It’s not the Chinese government I’m worried about.” I wiggled my eyebrows.

  “Aha! Just you wait, then.” He laughed, nuzzling my neck. “I’m going to take you all over Beijing. Do forbidden things to you in the Forbidden City, undress you in the Temple of Heaven… ”

  At the time it had all seemed so promising and possible. Of course we would meet up weeks later and find each other. Of course we would live out some epically tawdry romance. We were two Libras, charmed, seductive, and daring. We were up for anything. We were not so different after all.

  ———

  Yet now, standing alone by the railing on the outer deck of the ferry, I knew better. It had been a sweet, ephemeral moment, nothing more. Already it seemed very far away.

  Around me, families huddled on straw matting they’d brought, their belongings piled against the bulwarks like barricades. Crates of live poultry. Bags of clicking crabs. Bundles of bok choy, newspaper, and clothing. As the ship chugged through darkness, I could hear the swishing against the hull, the leviathan throb of the engines. In the moonlight, the silhouette of the mountains on the shore looked like ripped black paper against the sky. I had no idea where we were heading. None of the maps had Dinghai on them.

  I felt a shiver of ecstatic terror. Except for Trevor, not a single person in the entire world knew that I was on board a night ferry right now, plowing through the darkness in the East China Sea. Since our arrival in Shanghai, Claire and I hadn’t been able to contact our families. I stared at the black water forlornly. In the end, I realized, this was all there ever really was: dark mountains, a turbulent sea. A boat hurtling through a vacuum toward an unknown port. The true condition of anyone once you stripped them of their loved ones, their culture, and their passions was just this: Loneliness. An incurable longing. Insecurity. And grief.

  Suddenly I started to cry. I felt foolish, but then, who would hear me? Who would even care? I leaned against the railing, feeling pitiful and forsaken. I pulled out a Kleenex and blew my nose unglamorously.

  In the distance, a man began singing. It took a moment for it to register. At first I was certain I was imagining it.

  But from across the deck came the thin, fragile, unmistakable words:

  Country roads, take me home,

  To the place, I belong

  West Virginia, Mountain Mama

  John Denver? Who the hell was singing John Denver? A few yards to my left, a slim young Chinese man in a white button-down shirt and Mao pants was pressed against the railing. His head was thrown back, his eyes closed, his small, tapered hands pressed to his heart.

  Take me home, country roads

  “Country Roads” had been one of the preeminent songs of my childhood. My whole family sang it in the car when we drove up to Silver Lake—a bungalow colony north of Manhattan where we went to flee the heat every summer. It was a song of gilded late-afternoon light shimmering on the lake, of walking barefoot on dirt roads after a rainstorm, delighting in the mud and the thrum of crickets from the marshes near the handball court. It was the song of uncomplicated happiness, of a time when my family was at its best—before my parents’ marriage began shredding, before my father began disappearing and my mother began storming through our apartment slamming drawers and screaming with frustration. It was the song from when I was six years old and felt loved and serene, when I never felt a yearning to be anywhere else. Now, halfway around the world, a young Chinese man just happened to be singing it beside me in the darkness aboard a ferry bound for a hidden recess of the People’s Republic of China.

  I hear her voice,

  in the morning hour she calls me

  The radio reminds me of my home far away

  He seemed strangely unfazed when I drew up beside him and began singing along. We sang as if it were the most natural duet in the world, as if it had been preordained, the two of us harmonizing without once glancing at each other, just gazing straight ahead at the sea in tandem.

  When we finished the last verse, however, we turned and shook each other’s hand. “Nee how,” I gushed. “Oh my God. Do you know what that song means to me? I spent my whole childhood singing it.”

  The young man smiled at me glassily. I realized he had no idea what I was saying. He didn’t speak a word of English.

  How the hell had he learned an American folk song? This was 1986. People were still listening to record albums on turntables. The Internet and MP3 files were more than a decade away. MTV was an American novelty. There was no independent television in China, no pop radio, no Western movies, and in some places, no electricity. And yet—John Denver?

  Gesturing, I managed to persuade the young man to come with me to find Gunter.

  “Gunter, this man was singing a song from my childhood. Please,” I begged when we’d found him. “Ask him how he learned it.”

  Gunter translated. The young man’s name was Wen. “Wen is saying that he has learned this song a long time ago from his English instructor. But he is saying that his instructor only teaches him the song phonetically. He says he does not know the meaning of the words. He is asking to you to explain them, please.”

  I had Gunter tell Wen that “Country Roads” is about a man who is far from his mountain home in West Virginia. Everywhere he goes, he misses it and hears its beauty calling to him. He yearns for the country roads to carry him back there.

  When Gunter finished, Wen looked at both of us sadly. He spoke at length to Gunter.

  “He is saying he is understanding the song very well,” Gunter relayed. “He is saying in China, many people are being made to work very far away from their homes. He is saying that many people in the world are missing this West Virginia.”

  The three of us were quiet for a moment. Some things needed no translation at
all.

  ———

  After Wen departed, Gunter said, “I have also met a singer on the ship. I invite him to sing for us, yah?”

  A small, smiling, middle-aged man in a blue Mao uniform arrived at our cabin. When Jonnie saw him, he leapt up from his bunk, flabbergasted. It turned out Gunter had befriended a famous Chinese opera star. Yet the star shook our hands as if we were the celebrities.

  “He says you are very special guests. That he never meet foreigners on boat like this before, only overseas, when he give concert in Europe,” Jonnie translated. “He will now give special concert for you.”

  Gripping the side of one of the metal bunks, the man drew himself up and positioned himself with balletic precision, placing one foot per-pendicular to the other, puffing out his chest and tucking his right hand theatrically into his jacket, as if emulating Napoléon. Then, he began to sing.

  In Shanghai, Claire and I had gotten tickets for the opera through CITS one night. Chinese opera, we’d discovered, was a very big deal. Troupes performed in towns and villages across the provinces, so that the Chinese grew up knowing classic librettos the way we Americans grew up conversant in movies, cartoons, and sitcoms. In China, a nation with hundreds of regional dialects, opera was a lingua franca.

  The opera that Claire and I had seen was about a concubine in love with the emperor. Since there was no English translation, all we could glean from the histrionics on stage was that the emperor forsook the concubine and she committed suicide.

  As an overall cultural experience, it was illuminating (the Chinese ate and talked throughout the performance). But the music itself was excruciating. It was simply beyond the range of Western aural comprehension—atonal, shrill, nerve splitting.

  As the opera singer in our cabin arranged himself before us, I steeled myself. But when he opened his mouth, the elegiac notes of “Ave Maria” rose over the bunks and hung in the air like nebulae. Above the chickens squawking, the unremitting prattle of the PA, and the guttural haaatchhhing of people spitting in the corridor, his exquisite tenor sounded even more incongruous than John Denver.

  Ave Maria.

  Jonnie, Gunter, Claire, and I stood mesmerized, almost unwilling to breathe for fear of interrupting him. When he finished, we applauded wildly, Claire and I woo-hooing in that barnyard way Americans do. The man beamed. Inhaling, he launched into a weepingly beautiful rendition of Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.”

  He must have sung at least three other arias, each one more unearthly than the next, until sheer fatigue forced him to stop for a sip of tea from Jonnie’s thermos. Claire and I exchanged looks of gleeful disbelief: Not only were we sailing to a town no Westerner had ever visited before, but we’d just had a private concert performed for us by the Communist equivalent of Luciano Pavarotti.

  “Please,” we begged Jonnie, “ask him what we can do to thank him.”

  The opera singer removed his cap, thought for a minute, then whispered bashfully.

  Jonnie grinned. “He says that when he was in Europe, he saw an American performer on an American TV show. He says that he would like you to teach him to dance like this person you call Michael Jackson.”

  “Michael Jackson?” I laughed. “Are you kidding?”

  Claire riffled through the cassette tapes in her backpack, held one up triumphantly, and slipped it into Jonnie’s little tape recorder. “Oh, this is going to be good,” she said. “Okay, Zsa Zsa.” She turned to me. “This one’s all yours. Teach Pavarotti here to shake his booty.”

  What can I say? I can dance like Michael Jackson about as well as I can sing like Aretha Franklin. But spending my adolescence running around Studio 54 in my underwear had its benefits. Shamelessly I took the Chinese opera singer by the hand. In the narrow confines between the bunks, I got him shimmying with me to the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back,” gyrating to Prince’s “1999,” and bumping and grinding our way through “Rock Me Amadeus.” We waved our hands in the air to “The Roof Is On Fire” and did the bump to “Superfreak.” Disturbingly, the opera singer had more energy than I did. By the end, he was practically improvising a moon walk to the A-Ha song “Take on Me.”

  Finally the tape was over and we were both breathless. The opera singer bowed.

  “Shay shay nee,” I replied, attempting a curtsy.

  “He says he will always remember this night,” Jonnie translated. “He is saying for once he has danced like an American.”

  After the singer departed, the steady commentary over the PA system was replaced with a low, crackly patter of Chinese music. Despite the lights being left on mercilessly and our bunkmates’ incessant cigarette smoking, Jonnie and Gunter fell asleep folded into their bunks like origami. The cabin took on a strangely subterranean feel. Claire propped herself up on her elbows and whispered from the adjacent bunk, “Okay now, you see? This is what I had in mind. This is what we came here for. Am I right?”

  “Uh-huh,” I whispered, inhaling the cold air through the porthole, the salty chowder of the sea. “Tonight was absolutely amazing. Thank you, my friend. Thank you for getting my sorry ass over here.”

  “Look at us,” Claire said with amazement. “Can you believe where we are? I mean, seriously, Suze. You and me. We’re really doing it. We’re conquering the fucking world.”

  The next morning we disembarked groggily onto a clumsy wooden pier in Dinghai. We found ourselves miles from anywhere, in a muddy, hut-lined alleyway. There was no sign of the young man who’d sung “Country Roads” with me. Nor was there any sign of the opera star. But at Dinghai’s one Overseas Chinese Hotel, where we checked in ten minutes later, the military police were already waiting for us.

  Chapter 6

  Dinghai

  WHEN JONNIE HAD described his hometown to us, he’d used the word village. He might have used this word because his English was limited. He might have used it because his family’s home itself was on a remote hillside shrouded in fog. But as we quickly discovered, the “village” of Dinghai actually had a population of 830,000 people. What’s more, it was home to a large, high-security Chinese military installation and an even larger, higher-security hydroelectric facility. It had not appeared on any published Western map for a reason. And for this reason it was not on the PRC’s official list of approved backpacking destinations. No American apparently had ever been allowed to set foot in Dinghai before.

  Which is why, I suppose, the Chinese military police were extremely curious to know what Claire and I were doing there that morning in our wine-dark lip gloss, arriving merrily at the region’s one Overseas Chinese Hotel without an alien travel permit, official Communist Party invitation, or approved CITS government escort, yet loaded down with backpacks that, when searched, revealed a great cache of phrase books, maps, cameras, film, batteries, cassette tapes, water purifiers, binoculars, Swiss Army knives, flashlights, and notebooks.

  No sooner had we checked into our room than an official from the Bureau of Foreign Affairs appeared on our doorstep. How he’d located us so quickly was a mystery. In 1986, both electricity and telephone service were in short supply around China. Whole cities appeared to be lit by a single forty-watt lightbulb, and the only telephones available to most people were public pay phones housed in corner stores or post offices. Our own hotel room, ostensibly the fanciest in all of Dinghai, had a bulbous plastic telephone with fraying wires; the only illumination came from an anemic fluorescent doughnut bolted to the ceiling. But somehow—without benefit of cameras, computers, telecommunications, or searchlights—the Chinese government had tracked us down within ten minutes of our arrival.

  The foreign affairs officer stood in our doorway dressed in full military regalia, epaulets bracketing his shoulders, his officer’s cap emblazoned with the red-and-gold insignia of the Chinese army and tilted downward over his brow so that it eclipsed the upper half of his face.

  “Hello,” he said in Chinese as Jonnie translated. “Welcome to Dinghai. I need to ask you some questions, please.” Th
en, as if to quash any imminent panic, he added awkwardly: “Do not be alarmed. I am your friend.” This “friend” then marched into the center of our room and gestured commandingly at the twin beds. “Please,” he instructed, “have a seat.” Claire and I collected ourselves and sat down rigidly on the edge of one of the mattresses while Jonnie hovered nervously beside us. Not coincidentally, the military officer also seemed interested in him. Only Gunter, it turned out, had been excused from any questioning and was allowed to wander off through Dinghai unmolested; only Gunter, it turned out, had been canny enough to obtain an “all entry” alien travel permit back in Hong Kong using a letter from his Chinese language school in Bavaria.

  The officer asked us to surrender our passports. He flipped through them almost casually. With his face half shadowed by his cap, it was impossible to gauge his reactions. “How long are you planning on staying in Dinghai?” he asked. As we answered, he wandered over to the low wooden banquette near the door, nonchalantly yanked open the zippers of our backpacks, and began sifting through their contents almost absentmindedly. He was standing behind us now, just beyond the range of our peripheral vision. The ttzzzzzppp of pockets being opened, the pluck of snaps unsnapping, the crackle of Velcro being unpeeled, sounded discordantly musical. Overhead, the fluorescent light flickered berserkly. It made the room appear as if it were having convulsions. “What are your professions?” the officer asked.

  Growing up, the only interaction I’d ever had with the police had been in kindergarten, when a local traffic cop came to teach us how to cross the street. But the NYPD in my neighborhood were generally viewed with suspicion and hostility: “pigs” who shoved black teenagers up against squad cars for no good reason, took kickbacks from drug dealers, and beat antiwar protestors with nightsticks. Now, confronted by a bona fide officer, I froze. It seemed like a trick question: What exactly were our professions? The only thing that came to mind was “unemployed backpackers,” which I suspected was not any kind of answer you should ever give law enforcement.