Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Today I would’ve seen this fish for the gourmet extravagance that it undoubtedly was; what’s more, I would’ve dug in happily and gratefully. But for four years at college, I had honed my juvenile palate almost exclusively on potato skins bathed in bacon bits, chocolate milk shakes, Jell-O shots, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Egg McMuffins, Domino’s Pizza, Diet Pepsi, and low-fat frozen yogurt. My idea of exotic and adventurous eating was falafel. The fish, glimmering in a puddle of mottled brownish oil, was repulsive to me.

  It was to Claire, too. Despite all her summers spent sailing, she absolutely hated all seafood except shrimp cocktail and lobster Newburg. “Ew,” she cried when she saw the fish. “I’m sorry, but I just cannot eat that.”

  When the waitress finally returned, Claire had the phrase book open and ready. “Please. Ching. Fried rice?” she said, tapping the appropriate translation page. “Or noodles? Fried noodles?”

  The waitress looked at her uncomprehendingly, picked up the plate of untouched fish, and left. A moment later, she returned with a different broiled, whole fish, this one metallic blue and shaped like a flattened enema bag. “No,” Claire cried. But the woman simply set it before us and left. When she returned twenty minutes later, Claire said, “Please. We’re so hungry, and we hate fish. Please?” She rubbed her stomach with exaggeration, then mimed eating from a bowl with chopsticks. “Rice? Noodles? Even, ching, chicken?”

  What followed next can perhaps only be described as a fish beauty pageant. Our waitress determinedly brought out and set before us one fish dish after another. A long plate of small fried bronze-colored fishes stacked up like cordwood. A silver, trout-like fish in a pool of scalliony sauce. A pile of enormous prawns curled up like fetuses in their shells with their eyes and antennas still intact. Bowls of fish soup with what appeared to be fish eyes floating in oily broth. Eventually, seized by hunger and the grim realization that all there was to eat was fish—period—Claire and I tried to make the most of it. I skinned and ate some of the trout, gulped down the fried fishes with tea, and devoured most of the prawns. Claire ate a prawn or two and a few spoonfuls of soup before choking and setting down her utensils in tears. “Oh, God. I’m sorry, but I just can’t eat this, ” she said, gagging.

  Only then did the waitress arrive with two bowls full of steamed white rice. We accepted them gratefully, intoning Shay shay nee over and over again. (No one had explained to us yet that in China, steamed white rice was considered not only a luxury, but dessert.) We sat in the blindingly white room and shoveled rice into our mouths with sloppy, lupine fervor in total silence.

  Back in our room, Claire locked herself in the bathroom with the water running, then staggered out looking sweaty and flushed. She announced. “I really need to sleep now.” Sprawling out on her bed, she fell instantly into a deep, drooly slumber with her hiking boots still on, her nautical watch ticking away loudly on her wrist. While she slept, I puttered about the room. I felt too unmoored to nap. The loneliness and isolation I felt were like being in free fall. Just where on earth were we?

  I stared out the window at the few meager backyards and the one ugly high-rise fronting the mountains. I considered taking a shower to relax, but only an icy dribble sputtered out of the faucet. I sat back down on my bed and stared out the window again. I guess I hoped that if I stared at the mountains and overcast sky long enough, I’d suddenly have some sort of epiphany and know where I was.

  It occurred to me that I’d never really seen mountains before—only the Adirondacks in upstate New York, which looked much more like foothills. In fact the whole morning in Dinghai had been full of firsts. My first time truly not knowing where I was. My first brush with the police. My first time eating fish that had not been battered, deep-fried, and premolded into little fingers. I had always assumed that firsts would feel triumphant—didn’t parents spend hours documenting the firsts of their newborns?—but somehow here it felt like I was inching farther and farther toward a precipice, away from everything normal and familiar. I didn’t feel accomplished or enriched at all, only profoundly anxious. There seemed to be only the thinnest veneer of common reference points here, of recognizably modern civilization—a small dented car, an old telephone, a squeaky elevator—beneath which nothing functioned as we knew it, beneath which was total, seething chaos, an abyss of the unknown.

  Eventually I climbed underneath the mosquito netting of my bed and tried to read.

  Back in college, I’d spent an inordinate amount of time participating in multicultural awareness dialogues. The goal of these seemed to be to impress upon all of us a terrific contradiction, namely, that every ethnic group had its own distinct culture—that needed to be celebrated and respected—but that in no way should ever be used to stereotype them.

  As a Jew, I’d understood this paradox innately. At college, my sensibilities had often seemed strangely out-of-synch with those of my blue-blooded classmates; our differences lay dormant beneath the surface until something caused them to flare up like a muscle spasm. Often I sensed it when they exclaimed, “You’re so funny” with a mixture of admiration, surprise, and discomfort on their faces, as if humor was a strange food that they almost never ate but enjoyed—provided it was served in small, elegant doses. My way of talking, my unvarnished passion, my offense at the “Campus Crusade for Christ” banner draped across the green—all of this was like a pair of hands clapping off-beat in a room full of applause.

  But ironically, while I longed for my classmates to understand my perspective, I was also loath for them to view me as “a Jew”—or to assume that everyone I came from kept kosher and walked around in a yarmulke. I didn’t want to be reduced to any sort of caricature. “Stereotypes are not only wrong and racist, but intellectually lazy,” I once declared.

  Yet lying beneath a mosquito net in a deserted hotel in an uncharted backwater in the People’s Republic of China, in a place that I literally could not locate on a map in a culture that I could not even begin to comprehend—I realized that everything I’d known up to that point about China was, basically, a gross cultural stereotype. What’s more, I realized that I would welcome still more of these gross cultural stereotypes—or pre-masticated facts, or massive generalizations—or anything, really, that would at least give me a clue about where I was and whom I was dealing with.

  Embarrassingly, until that moment, everything that I knew about China could be boiled down to a single list: Confucius, gunpowder, printing press, noodles, dynasties, concubines, foot-binding, opium, Communists, tai chi, acupuncture, and pandas. And oh yes, the Gang of Four, which I knew first not as the instigators of the Cultural Revolution, but as my freshman roommate’s favorite punk rock band. A few dates, names, and facts also floated around in my head from high school history class. I knew, for example, that the Empress Dowager had once been a concubine with fingernails like curly fries. There was the Boxer Rebellion, Chiang Kai-shek, the Great Leap forward. But there you had it. That was pretty much it.

  Now that Claire and I were actually in Asia, I was determined to spackle these holes in my education. Mostly, I did this by reading the background chapters in our guidebook.

  Lying on my bed in Dinghai, I skimmed a few paragraphs about Chinese culture, then promptly fell asleep.

  I awoke suddenly to a tightening around my left forearm. Someone was shaking me. Claire loomed above me tearfully, dressed only in her sports bra and the pair of Parker’s boxer shorts she slept in. Her face was flushed; her brow sparkled with sweat.

  “Susie, you’ve got to help me. I’m burning up.”

  I disentangled myself from the mosquito netting, and felt for my glasses. Claire’s normally pale skin was now an angry reddish pink; it made her blond hair, her delicate eyebrows, and her lashes appear blanched by comparison. She looked like an albino aflame. I pressed the back of my hand to her forehead. It was scalding.

  “Oh God. I’m so sick,” Claire gasped, keening over on my mattress. “I had to crawl across the floor just to get to your bed.
I think it’s from the fish.” Her hair was damp with sweat; her boxer shorts were matted to her lower back. Her chest heaved in what were either breaths or sobs.

  Scrambling up, I rummaged through my backpack for the first aid kit. “Did you take any medicine?” I tried to sound as calm as possible.

  “Uuuh-huuhh,” came a groan. “I took two Tylenol. They’ve just made me more nauseous. The whole room. It’s spinning.”

  I looked around the hotel room as if the walls and the few bits of furniture might suddenly, magically present some solution. Then I remembered that I had one small bottle of club soda left in my day pack. Claire and I had purchased three apiece from a vendor in Shanghai before boarding the ferry. It had been an ordeal to get him to part with the glass deposit bottles.

  Pulling out my Swiss Army knife, I uncapped the soda and handed it to Claire. At first she refused it with a “Nnuuugghh,” but then took one sip, then another, then downed the whole bottle in a swallow. “Oh, God,” she cried, falling back on the bed.

  Despite all we’d packed, neither of us had brought a thermometer, our thinking being that we might break it by accident and get mercury all over our backpacks.

  “Water,” Claire said. “Can you please find me some more? Or some soda? Anything cold?”

  Of course we’d packed a water purifier and charcoal tablets, but we hadn’t bothered reading the instructions or testing it out yet; in my panic, I knew that this was not the time to start. If I screwed up, I’d only make Claire sicker. In the bathroom, I pressed a towel beneath the frigid dribble of water and made a compress.

  Claire screamed when I draped it across her forehead. “Oh, God, no! I’m freezing!” Grabbing her sleeping bag off her bed, she wrapped it tightly around herself. “Oohh,” she moaned, shivering so hard she seemed to be seizing. “So cold. Oh, Susie, I think—I think I need a doctor.”

  Grabbing the phrase book, I hurried across the hallway and pounded on Gunter’s door. But there was no answer; I imagined him lurching through the center of Dinghai with his backpack and a dopey grin, clutching a bagful of hot dumplings. “Big dumb Kraut,” I swore under my breath. On the way downstairs in the elevator, I felt my heart thump in my rib cage. Please, I thought, let somebody be manning the reception desk. And please let them speak a modicum of English.

  A woman was in fact sitting behind the front counter, yet when I tried to communicate with her, she stared at me with the cool impassivity of a tollbooth clerk. Not only didn’t she understand English, but any attempt I made to pronounce the Mandarin words in my phrase book appeared to irritate her. Apparently, “Call a doctor” was Ching jyao ee-sherng gwor-lai. In my panic, I had absolutely no idea how to pronounce this; even the phonetics seemed like gibberish. Ching, ching! I cried, pointing dementedly at the printed phrase. The woman glanced at the page and shrugged.

  I tried another one: “My friend is sick.” Wor-der perng-yo sherng-bing… oh, fuck me. “Orange juice?” I attempted. Cherng-jir? This the woman seemed to vaguely understand. Sighing, she said something back—a question of some sort. Of course I couldn’t understand. As I stammered, she turned away and resumed doing her paperwork.

  Cherng-jir, I cried again. Ching! Shay shay! I mimicked someone drinking. Parlez-vous français? I pleaded. I pantomimed coughing, sneezing, vomiting. Surely there had to be some cross-cultural frame of reference, some international language for illness and doctor. When the woman glanced over at me indifferently, I burst into tears.

  I guess this must have been the international language I’d been looking for, because finally, wearily, she set down her abacus and gestured for me to wait. She disappeared into the back room and returned with another woman, this one wearing an ill-fitting white polyester blouse that I assumed was meant to distinguish her as the manager.

  No sooner had I wiped my eyes on my sleeve, reopened the phrase book, and attempted to pronounce “Please call a doctor,” than the manager’s eyes glazed over, too. Whatever I was saying clearly wasn’t getting through to her either. I thought of Claire upstairs, going into convulsions. From there, it wasn’t hard to imagine her slipping into a coma or dying of dehydration. I had no transportation and no way of contacting Jonnie (his family, like most Chinese families, did not have a telephone). And then, of course, I didn’t even know where I was. “Please,” I cried.

  Just then, someone said “Nee how” with a distinctive German accent.

  Gunter!

  He had lumbered into the lobby carrying what looked like a fistful of twigs.

  “Look, tsis man I meet on zee road, he give me something from which you can be making tsee tea,” he said, holding up the cluster of leaves proudly.

  “Gunter,” I cried. “Oh, thank God you’re here. Gunter, Claire’s very sick. Can you ask the hotel staff in Mandarin to please to call her a doctor and bring her some orange juice or some soda water or something?”

  Gunter looked at me, then at the receptionist and hotel manager, who were eyeing him with horrified fascination. In the modest scale of the lobby, he looked like the King Kong of China.

  With his free hand, Gunter stroked his beard contemplatively. “Yah, I can try, but they do not understand Mandarin.”

  “They don’t speak Mandarin?”

  Gunter shook his head. “The people of Dinghai, they are speaking the special dialect. All over China, most people are speaking only the dialect. They are not understanding the Mandarin, only maybe reading it.”

  “So you’re telling me my phrase book is useless? That not even you or Jonnie can communicate with them?”

  “Jonnie, he is speaking the dialect here in Dinghai, but me?” Gunter shrugged and held open his broad palm. “I try, but I am not thinking anyone will be understanding.”

  I pressed my hands together. “Please, Gunter,” I begged.

  Gunter cleared his throat and said something to the two women. They said something back. Gunter tried again. This time the women giggled. Everyone seemed to be shaking their heads helplessly in a volley of incomprehension. Finally the manager disappeared and returned with another hotel worker. He apparently was able to grasp what Gunter was saying just enough to understand that we needed orange juice. Somehow a bicycle was procured and a young man in an oversize Mao uniform was prevailed upon to pedal into Dinghai to buy several bottles. The gist that there might be a medical emergency was starting to sink in.

  Finally the hotel worker who spoke a little Mandarin managed to locate a former teacher in the area who spoke a little English. The woman was elderly and slightly stooped, with a proud, dust-streaked face and wild gray hair coming lose from its chignon. In her soil-stained Mao uniform, she appeared to have been brought in directly from the fields. When she saw me, she smiled and said, “Hello. How do you do?” with a triumphant finality that suggested that these five words were her entire repertoire of English.

  Still, I made an attempt. “My friend is very sick.”

  The woman smiled at me with almost grandmotherly concern. “Yes. How do you do?” she said again.

  “My friend,” I said. “Sick.” I pantomimed coughing and vomiting again.

  The woman smiled. “Yes. How do you do?”

  “We need a doctor,” I said despairingly.

  “Doctor?” the woman repeated.

  I nodded. “Doctor,” I said, then coughed for real.

  “Doctor,” the woman said again. Suddenly she pressed her fingertips gently to my forehead, then reached for my wrist and acted as if she were taking my pulse. “Doctor, yes?” she said encouragingly.

  “Yes!” I cried. “Doctor!”

  The woman turned to the receptionist and hotel manager and said something to them. Reaching under the counter, the manager pulled out a rice paper notebook and consulted it for a few minutes. She lifted the telephone receiver and dialed.

  When I arrived back upstairs, Claire was sleeping, curled tightly under her puffy down sleeping bag. The curtains had been drawn, and the room felt overheated and bacterial, as if it ha
d absorbed her fever and was beginning to sweat itself. The hotel manager’s brother had returned from Dinghai clutching five dusty bottles of warm orange soda and a paper envelope full of small green tangerines. I tiptoed around in semi-darkness looking for Claire’s collapsible travel cup and my Swiss Army knife. Since the military officer had rummaged through our belongings, nothing was where it was supposed to be, and everything stank of my peppermint castile soap, which had leaked all over my toiletry bag. As I stumbled around, I heard a wan “ahem” followed by a small croak. “I’m not asleep.”

  I carried the cup and orange soda over to the nightstand, then sat down on the bed beside her. “How are you feeling?” I asked. Claire rolled over and pressed her forearm to her forehead. Her face was still damp, her eyes glassy.

  “Uhh,” she swallowed, then closed her eyes again. “Not great,” she whispered hoarsely.

  I reached over and touched her brow, which was now clammy and cadaverously cool, then stroked her sweat-drenched hair. “A doctor should be coming,” I said. “I got you some orange soda. It’s all they had. You want to sit up and drink a little?”

  Claire just lay there breathing, letting me stroke her hair. She whispered almost inaudibly, “Oh, that feels so nice.”

  “My mother always used to do this to me when I was sick,” I said gently, my voice lulled to the rhythm of my hand. “You know … just sit beside me… stroke my hair… holding my hand if I got the chills.”

  After a moment Claire said softly, “I wish I’d had my mother. I wish I had her back.” She looked away toward the wall. “I wish I had her here now.” Slowly her face crumpled, and she started to cry. “Oh, Susie,” she sobbed.