Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  During his hikes, Hong noticed a puzzling fifteen-mile gap in fortifications to the northwest of Beijing. Modern writers had claimed that the landscape was so rugged that it didn’t require defenses, which made no sense to Hong. He had visited other areas that were much steeper yet heavily fortified, so he turned to the Ming Veritable Records. He discovered that the Ming believed the region contained an important longmai, or dragon vein, just north of their ancestral tombs. A dragon vein is a ridgeline critical to feng shui, so the Ming went to the trouble of building elaborate walls farther north, on terrain that was naturally less defensible.

  Hong Feng published an article about his findings on www.thegreatwall.com.cn, which has become home to the most vibrant community of Chinese wall enthusiasts. The site was launched by Zhang Jun, a software engineer, on May 8, 1999—the day the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by NATO. (NATO said that the attack was a mistake.) Members of the Web site have regular dinners in Beijing, and at one of the events I asked Zhang Jun why he had been inspired to found the site on that particular day. “You can say that the Great Wall was built to protect China,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

  The Web site has five thousand members, many of whom are interested in the wall for a combination of patriotic and recreational reasons, although there’s also a small community of serious researchers. David Spindler joined in 2000. Like everybody else, he adopted an online name—Spindler’s is Ah Lun, a derivative of the Chinese name that he was given by a language teacher—and he frequently corresponds with others in Chinese. But he doesn’t attend functions, and he’s never identified himself as a foreigner. Starting last fall, he posted two long articles on the Web site, describing the construction history of specific sections of wall. He told me that he would eventually write his book in English, but for initial articles it made sense to write in Chinese, because the Web site is the only community that cares about such esoteric topics. (One of his articles was titled “On the Construction Date of the ‘Pig’s Mouth Fort’ Great Wall.”)

  Spindler had asked me not to identify him to the other members of the Great Wall Web site, and I didn’t, but they quickly brought up Ah Lun on their own. Hong Feng, the policeman, spoke admiringly of Ah Lun’s research, assuming that he was Chinese. “He doesn’t write very much, but what he writes is deep,” Hong said. “He must be some kind of graduate student or scholar. I don’t ask, and he doesn’t tell.”

  Eventually, Spindler planned to “come out” as a foreigner, but he had always been wary of the site’s nationalism. And he remembered the way he felt after defending his thesis at Peking University. “My professor said, ‘In the rules for foreigners, we usually give them a little more latitude,’ ” Spindler told me. “If I had had more presence of mind, I would have said, ‘Well, I’ve been here for the experience, and I’ll be happy to walk away without a degree.’ ” He continued, “I want my work to be evaluated on these stand-alone terms. Who it’s written by, whether he’s Chinese or foreign, shouldn’t matter.”

  It seemed contradictory—Spindler published under a pseudonym because he was worried that he wouldn’t get the credit he deserved for his work. But this was characteristic of many of his actions. He was extremely cautious, but somehow he had risked everything—financial stability, relationships, personal safety—for his research. He had full confidence in his ideas about the wall, and he described them with perfect clarity; it was obvious that he wanted to help dismiss all the popular misconceptions about the structure. And yet he refused to start writing his book before the spreadsheets satisfied him. His work could be seen as a study in obsessions—a man’s single-minded pursuit of one of the most ambitious structures on earth. But beneath it all lay a deep commitment to rationality. Spindler believed that the wall had been built for a military reason, and he believed that he was researching it in the best way possible. He hated any symbolic use of the Great Wall, especially for something as complex as Chinese culture. For Chinese, the wall usually represents national glory, whereas foreigners often see it as evidence of xenophobia. But Spindler felt that neither interpretation was useful. “It’s just one manifestation of what China has done,” he said. “It’s just a way they defended themselves.”

  Of all the people I met, Hong Feng had a viewpoint that reminded me the most of Spindler’s. Hong’s online name was Qiong Shishu, which means “to reach the end of the books.” “People in China always describe the Great Wall as a symbol of ethnic pride,” Hong told me. “But that’s an exaggeration. It wasn’t supposed to be a great monument like the Pyramids. It was built in response to attacks.”

  At the end of December, I accompanied Spindler on his 340th trip along the wall. During a previous visit to Miyun, north of Beijing, he’d seen some high ridges that he believed might contain towers of piled stone. Slowly, we climbed to the ridges: Nothing. But it was another day to be checked off on the to-do list.

  Although I had never liked the bushwhacking, during the past year I had come to appreciate the distinctive rhythm of the trips. Every journey had it all: good trails, bad trails, hellish thorns, spectacular views. No matter the landscape, I could always see Spindler up ahead, moving steadily, his Tilley hat bobbing above the thickets.

  On the way down, we found a dead roe deer in a trap. The loop snare had caught the animal around the neck; it must have strangled itself. Just beyond that, we reached a long section of wall where most ramparts had crumbled away. As I walked atop the structure, my boot got caught in a hole. I tripped and fell down a short ledge, pitching headfirst toward a ten-foot drop. Somehow—things happened very fast—I threw myself down against the wall. I slammed to a stop with my head peering over the edge.

  “Nice save,” Spindler said, after he had rushed over. I rose slowly, and tried to walk, and knew that my left knee was badly hurt. But we were miles from help, and the temperature was well below freezing; the only option was to keep moving.

  During the descent, I leaned on Spindler whenever possible. It took three hours, and I remember every minute. The next morning I went to the hospital for X-rays. The doctor told me that I’d broken the kneecap in multiple places, and I’d be on crutches for six weeks; and that was the last time I walked on the Great Wall of China.

  The day after the accident, Spindler stopped by my apartment. He asked if there was anything I needed, and I could tell that he felt bad about what had happened. He mentioned that he had made a quick analysis of the spreadsheets, which showed that mine was only the second casualty to be sustained in approximately 1,250 person-days of hiking. Later, he confirmed that the exact figure was 1,245.

  In February, before leaving on a research trip to Taiwan, he visited me again. He planned to study some Ming maps and memorials that were held in Taipei’s National Palace Museum. He still hadn’t written anything in English, but additional Chinese articles were in the works, and he seemed to be thinking more about the future. He planned to start writing the book within a year or so; after it was finished, he’d find a way to continue researching the wall in other parts of China. Maybe he’d start a PhD program, or perhaps he’d remain independent, supporting himself with lectures and books. “I’ll need to learn other languages in order to get academics to give me the time of day,” he said. “You really get written off if you don’t know Japanese, if you don’t know Mongolian. There are others that would be helpful. Probably the next one would be Russian, and possibly German. I guess it would be helpful to learn some Manchurian. A little Tibetan. But those are further down the list.”

  I hopped on crutches to the door and said good-bye. He had an early flight; in order to save money, he’d booked a ticket with a seven-hour layover in Macau, where he’d be restricted to the airport. He figured he’d do some reading. When I asked how many Beijing hiking days were left, he didn’t hesitate. “Eighty-six,” he said.

  The Dirty Game

  Jay-Z loves the Peace Corps. He’s never said so publicly, and there’s no reference to volunteerism in any of his 224
songs, not even the one titled “Money, Cash, Hoes.” But Rajeev Goyal believes that he knows the rapper’s true heart. “Jay-Z and Beyoncé are both very interested in helping the Peace Corps,” Rajeev told me once. He said that last year he was on the phone with somebody who claimed he could arrange for Jay-Z and Beyoncé to speak at a Peace Corps rally that Rajeev was organizing in Washington, D.C. But their appearance fell through, which sometimes happens to Rajeev’s most ambitious plans. He failed to get a Grateful Dead guitarist to telephone a Vermont senator. He was unable to get an audience with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala to request a letter from His Holiness asking Congress to give more money to the Peace Corps. Once, he asked Maureen Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair and Tim Russert’s widow, to contact Senator Barbara Mikulski, of Maryland, in a manner so roundabout that it was like driving from D.C. to Baltimore via the Deep South. “He asked me to ask James Carville to ask Bill Clinton to call Senator Mikulski,” Orth told me. “And that’s just one of four e-mails that I got from him in a day!” Orth didn’t telephone Carville, but on another occasion she called a senator on his cell phone in the middle of a meeting. “It was outrageous, but I did it for Rajeev,” she said—like everybody, she used his first name when talking about him. Orth admired Rajeev’s willingness to try anything, especially since he had appeared in Washington as if “he was dropped in there from a cloud.” She said, “Who else would fly on miles all the way to Hawaii to try to see Obama’s sister? And get it done! I wish he had been a reality series.”

  Rajeev Goyal is thirty-one years old, but he could pass for a college student. He stands only five and a half feet tall, with dark skin and long-lashed eyes. He has the portable confidence of the second-generation immigrant—no matter where he goes, he knows there are benefits to being an outsider. In the part of eastern Nepal where Rajeev served as a Peace Corps volunteer from 2001 to 2003, people sometimes weep when his name is mentioned. Locals refer to him as Shiva, the god who is also the source of the Ganges River. Old folks turn on a tap and say: “This is what he gave us.” In the halls of Congress, most people have no idea what to make of him. For the past two years, he’s approached the place as if it were just another Nepali settlement with a caste system to untangle. He figured out the Washington equivalent of village well routes—hallways, hearing rooms, and coffee shops where anybody can hang around and meet a member of Congress. “He just picked off Democrats and Republicans one by one,” Sam Farr, a Democratic congressman from California, told me. “I don’t know lobbyists who are that persistent.” Others complained that his unorthodox approach was too personal, but even critics acknowledged the results. During the past two years, funding for the Peace Corps has increased by record amounts, despite partisanship in Congress and a brutal economic climate. “I’ve been in the Congress for seventeen years, and always lobbying for the Peace Corps, but I’ve never been as effective as I have in the last two sessions,” Farr said. “And I would attribute that to Rajeev.”

  In March of 2011, the Peace Corps will turn fifty years old. The anniversary is bittersweet: despite the new funding, which has allowed for a significant increase in volunteers, the agency sends fewer than 60 percent as many people abroad as it did in 1966. Many Americans aren’t aware that the Peace Corps still exists. Its impact on foreign policy seems minimal, especially in light of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rajeev told me that the agency might have a higher profile if former volunteers applied lessons from the developing world to U.S. politics, which is the opposite of how most people think of the Peace Corps. Instead of introducing American values to some benighted country, Rajeev wants to move in the other direction. “The way we organized this campaign was asking who was in the Peace Corps, and who cares about it. That’s your blood link; that’s your caste. You define your tribe.” He said, “Washington is a village. Decisions in Congress, some of the biggest decisions, are based on a personal act.”

  Rajeev Goyal didn’t know his own caste until he joined the Peace Corps. He grew up in Manhasset Hills, Long Island, where his parents, Ravindra and Damyanti Goyal, had settled after immigrating from Rajasthan, India, in the early 1970s. They raised their three sons to speak Hindi, but they never told them they were Vaishya, a caste known for its success in business. “To us, everybody is equal,” Ravindra Goyal, who is a cardiologist, told me, explaining that he didn’t like the caste system. But after the Peace Corps sent Rajeev to Nepal, which has a system similar to India’s, he telephoned his mother. “He asked me, ‘Are we Brahmin, or Vaishya, or Kshatriya, or what?’ Damyanti told me. “He said, ‘People want to know what I am.’ So I told him.”

  The Goyals had initially opposed their son’s decision to go abroad. They wanted him to become a doctor, and he took premed courses at Brown University before deciding to apply to law school. They didn’t see the point of deferring admission in order to live in an undeveloped country. Damyanti, who had recently undergone chemotherapy for breast cancer, worried about her son being far away, but his arguments finally swayed her. “He said that this country has given us too much,” she told me. “We have a nice house, nice car, we live in a nice neighborhood. It’s time to give something back. When he explained it like that, I liked the idea a little better.”

  Rajeev was assigned to teach English at a school in Namje, a village of fewer than six hundred people. Namje is located in eastern Nepal, where the Terai Plain gives way suddenly to the foothills of the Himalayas. At an elevation of more than five thousand feet, Namje villagers grew coriander, soybeans, radishes, and other vegetables. They also spent much of their time hauling water. Snowcaps provide Nepal with abundant water resources, but rivers are often inaccessible in mountain towns like Namje. The nearest source was the Saacho Khola, a spring that was more than two hours away by foot on steep mountain paths. People often made three trips a day, carrying sixteen-liter aluminum jugs. “You learn that not everything needs to be washed,” Rajeev told me. “Soap isn’t always necessary. You waste a lot of water with soap. Of course, I didn’t do this as well as they did, so I got sick.”

  He caught a case of scabies so bad that it scarred his arm. After visiting a doctor in Kathmandu, he returned to the village and noticed other effects of the water shortage. “One day a good student didn’t come to class, and I asked him why. He said he was getting water. I brought all the villagers together and asked, ‘If there’s a way to solve this problem, are you willing to donate your labor?’ They were willing to do it.”

  Rajeev spoke with engineers in Kathmandu, and he read books about electric pumps, piping, and filtration systems. Using the skills he had acquired in premed physics classes, he learned to calculate water friction. He finally decided that the best option was a two-stage pumping system capable of lifting water thirteen hundred vertical feet. In the city of Dharan, he found a pipe salesman named Kishan Agrawal, whose ancestors came from the same part of India as Rajeev’s. After the two men discussed their family histories, Kishan agreed to order hundreds of pieces of three-inch galvanized iron pipe on credit, interest-free. In order to raise funds, Rajeev returned to Long Island, where families in the Indian immigrant community often host big weekend meals that include singing and dancing. The Goyals arranged a dinner and invited their doctor friends, without mentioning that the night’s entertainment would involve Rajeev asking for money. “I had the idea to do the fund-raiser here,” Damyanti told me. “I knew that if we didn’t have a fund-raiser, we’d end up paying for all of it ourselves.” Within ten minutes, Rajeev had raised $18,000, which was eventually supplemented by funds from the Peace Corps, USAID, and the American Himalayan Foundation.

  For the twenty-two-year-old Rajeev, the most daunting challenge was organizing labor. The villagers had no power tools, and all materials had to be carried via mountain paths to construction sites. Women did much of the work, because many men had gone abroad as laborers. Through his research, Rajeev learned that one of the biggest threats was something called water hammer—the pressure that builds in a lon
g pipe when the lower outlet is closed. He consulted with engineers, who suggested building a stone staircase more than a mile in length, which would pin down the pipe and also allow access for repairs. In designing the staircase and the pump houses, Rajeev relied heavily on Karna Magar, a villager who was naturally gifted but had only a ninth-grade education. Harka Lama, the headmaster of the local school, organized the village into twenty-five groups, each of which would help coordinate different aspects of the project.

  Another teacher named Tanka Bhujel handled village politics. “I’m only realizing now how much he taught me,” Rajeev told me recently. “We would go to a meeting and he would say, ‘If we can get this one guy, we’ll get everybody.’ And the guy would have three wives and things would be complicated. So much was based on ancestry and bloodlines. It’s the same in Washington. It’s identity.” Tanka was an outsider in the village, a member of an obscure subcaste, and he relished the political maneuvering. “Tanka would be speaking in Nepali to a group, and then out of nowhere he would say in English, ‘Po-litics is the dur-ty game,’ ” Rajeev said, mimicking a Nepali accent. “And he wouldn’t translate it! He understood Kathmandu, he understood the Maoists, the military, the family politics.”

  At the time, Nepal was ripped apart by unrest. Since the mid-1990s, Maoist groups had been trying to overthrow the monarchy, and after peace talks failed in 2002 there were increased attacks on the army. Often, the military responded with brutal violence as soldiers searched villages. Thousands of people were killed, and more than a hundred thousand were displaced. One of the main guerilla tactics involved setting off homemade bombs, which meant that anybody with a pipe was suspect. Rajeev got the local army commander to issue a letter explaining why villagers were handling so much plumbing equipment, and everybody carried a copy at all times.