Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Next morning, nursing a mild fever, I boarded an express train in Hong Kong. Three air-conditioned, soft-seated hours later, I got out in China. In front of me in the bright afternoon was a vast square, ringed by giant billboards and graying skyscrapers. Beside me, extending for block after block after gray, gray block, was the main body of the station. Along its walls were ragged clumps of people, sleeping, spitting, fighting, jostling, crouched on cases, encamped on the ground. All around was vastness and great vacancy.

  Across the length of the whole great square, I could decipher not a single sign but one: “China Travel Service,” inscribed on a drab gray building behind a barbed-wire fence. That, however, was all I needed. Hoisting my case over the barrier, I ducked under it myself, tramped across a courtyard and walked into the gray stone building. I found myself within a maze of shadowed hallways, musty stairwells, empty rooms. I passed through a frosted-glass door and was directed out again into another series of dark corridors. I stopped a passerby and was sent down another hallway. I found another official, and was pointed down a series of high school passageways, to a large room in which sat three small men. I asked them for a ticket to Beijing, and they pointed me out toward the station.

  Back in the sun, I started walking across the square, past crowds and empty spaces, past bus stands and dollar-mongers, past more people and more empty space, along the side of the never-ending station, for ten minutes or more. Finally, halfway down the immense block, I came upon the departure hall. Inside, it was echoing and empty as the belly of a whale. Vast waiting rooms the size of auditoriums were utterly unpeopled. Grand staircases swept heavenward to more balconies. Long, long corridors led through unlit hallways that led into long, long corridors. The main hall, in which a few ragtag bands of nomads were camped, forked this way and that, into a garden courtyard, a nursery, a checkroom, a puzzle of bleak entrances.

  Anxious to find anyone or anything that I could understand I began walking—around the hall, and through it, up the stairs and down a corridor, into an empty room, and out of it again. I walked along the length of corridors and around a balcony and through the garden, back around the hall, into waiting rooms and out of them, back up the sweeping staircase and down again. Everywhere it was the same: no English, no help, no good. I went back to a duty-free shop crammed with high-tech goods, and around again, and back to the waiting hall, and out. Nowhere any English, nowhere any help. I walked up, and down, and up once more. No English. No use. No good. Canton Station was a maze designed by Escher with considerable assistance from Borges—not dizzying like Tokyo Station, which buzzes with microchip lights and bustling armies, beehive catacombs and secret passageways, but impenetrable in the manner of an enormous tomb cluttered with overstuffed filing cabinets.

  And so I walked around and around. Finally, after almost an hour, I suddenly caught sight of a Caucasian couple being led by a $20 escort onto a platform. Where could I get tickets? I called out as they disappeared into freedom. Booth Number 6, called back the guide; for foreigners only.

  Back out in the sunlight, I set out again past more clumps of people, more dark entranceways, more empty spaces, until at last I arrived at a series of booths. The Arabic numeral 6 was written above one hatch, but the rest of the sign—an old piece of wood—was all in Chinese. In front of it was a long line that showed no sign of moving. People spat and looked up at the boards, pushed their neighbors, spat again. Minutes passed, and more minutes; the line grew larger and more restless. I looked all around, at large walls and departure boards: nothing I could fathom. I went up to a counter and was directed to another booth, and then to a third, especially for tourists. Where could I get a ticket to Beijing? “China Travel Service.” “But they said to come here.” “Only China Travel Service.”

  Picking up my case, I set off again, through the sun-baked square, over the wall and under the fence and up to the CTS door. By now, it was bolted. I looked for side entrances, but everything was closed. Tens, hundreds, thousands of people hurried through the square. Buses buzzed off down spacious boulevards.

  Virtually dragging my case along by now, half exhausted from the fever, the heat, the confusion, I staggered back across the huge square, past the ragged groups, under the sun, past block after block after block, sweating as I walked, back to the ticket booths. Nothing had changed. Chinese characters swarming, no sign of English, certainly no movement. Spitting and waiting and blankness. Shouts, lines, chaos. I gave up. I would check into a hotel, no matter the expense, go to the CTS tomorrow morning, offer to pay $20—or anything they wanted—in exchange for their assistance.

  Then, just as I was sitting down on my case to gather my strength for the walk back to the taxi stand, I caught a snatch of something familiar. “There is no other way. The sign says no more tickets. This ticket okay. Listen, I show you. You can ask anyone.” “Ees no good. Thees second class. No good for touristes.” I looked up. “But this the only way to go to Beijing. There is no other ticket.” “Non. Ees no good. I do not want.” With that, a scruffy young French girl turned her back defiantly to reassert her place in the motionless line, and a lanky, bespectacled young Chinese smiled helplessly in my direction.

  The girl was crazy, he volunteered; the board at the front of the line explained that all tickets were gone, and he had a ticket he was willing to sell at face value. Face value? Sure—was I interested? In case I didn’t trust him, he went on earnestly, I need pay him only when he actually put me on the train four hours from now. I shouldn’t trust him, I decided, and he might very well put me on the train four years from now. But even that seemed preferable to a night at the station or a return next day to the mandarins of the China Travel Service. Gladly accepting his offer, I shook his hand, he invited me to dinner and we jumped into the nearest taxi.

  Twenty minutes later, a doorman pushed open the heavy doors to the China Hotel. In its ads, the $100-million hotel promised to treat every guest “like a merchant prince” and inside it did indeed boast the studiously exotic elegance of a costly Manhattan restaurant. Lavish dragon hangings hung from its walls. Black marble pillars stretched up to its roof. The gift stores in the shopping arcade sparkled like chandeliers, and the shining, blond-wood tables at the cafeteria gleamed under bright modern lights.

  This, explained my guide over $1.25 Cokes, was a symbol of the New China. As it happened, he went on, he was another. Not long ago, in fact, he had been stranded in a faraway village with a menial job—his reward for being an active democrat at his hometown university in Changsha. But then, only a year after his rustication, the ideological winds had begun to change. The Cultural Revolution had ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. Mao had died. Almost overnight, the country had begun to turn on its head. And suddenly, Joe said, he had found himself at its top. Suddenly, the very skills that had once condemned him—his free-enterprising spirit, his independent mind, his easy command of English—had recommended him to the system. Wasting no time at all, he had hurried off to Guangdong Province, the capital of the Gold Rush, and started to play the market.

  Nowadays, he went on, he could get almost any job he wanted. An American oil company was currently employing him as interpreter and intermediary for 500 yuan ($150) a month—equivalent to the salary of twenty average workers. But he could triple his earnings whenever he wanted. He was only twenty-six, he said, but he already had his own shop, was already, in fact, a 10,000-yuan household, the country’s equivalent to the millionaire. Would I like to visit his office?

  Somewhat taken aback by such a grand display of wealth—this, after all, was the world’s largest Communist nation—I readily agreed. Joe led me off to one of the hotel’s elevators. Fifteen floors later, we got out in a paneled and carpeted corridor. At one end was an executive set of glass doors. Joe pushed a button, and a mellifluous chime greeted us with the tune, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”

  Home indeed! The office inside was plusher than any I had ever seen in Manhattan (not su
rprisingly, perhaps: many a two-room office in China, I later read, costs $70,000, twice as much as in New York). Leather chairs lazed around a comfortable lobby. Bright corridors gave off into kitchens and computer centers. Office windows offered penthouse views of the glittering city below. Everyone, explained Joe, was joining in on the mad search for oil in the South China Sea. Over there—he pointed into the illumined night—was the $100-million building built by BP. That ten-story monstrosity was Esso’s headquarters. In the distance, the big skyscraper was the Garden Hotel.

  He often chose to spend his evenings here, Joe explained while brewing up some coffee, because his own apartment was even smaller than this kitchen. Sometimes, he went on, he came here just to read Time and Newsweek, sometimes he listened to the BBC World Service; two or three times a week he did body-building exercises nearby. He had read much of Hemingway and Twain, and he had seen On Golden Pond, as well as Daughter of the Miner with Sissy Spacek. Also, of course, Nightmare. Nightmare! Yes, said Joe with a smile, it was a film about capitalism.

  A few minutes later, good as his word, Joe took me back to the station and showed me to my berth on the Beijing train. Just as the train began to pull out, he wished me good health and asked me to call him on my way back. Then, very shyly, he pressed into my hands a bag of bananas and three Cokes, waving goodbye to me as I pulled away into the dark.

  FOR THE NEXT forty hours, I lived inside a kind of merry peasant home on wheels, a fragment of the old China transported by the New. Opposite me in my “hard sleeper” second-class compartment sat a family of four, a middle-aged couple and two teenage sons. One of the boys had a withered hand and a T-shirt that said “Milano”; his brother had a shirt that said “Ferrari.” All four were huddled over jars filled to the brim with what looked like eel juice, but was doubtless only strong tea, matted with an inch or two of leaves. On my side, one entire berth was given over to a huge box that said “Microcomputer”; another was occupied by a wiry man in his early fifties, with Schwarzenegger muscles over his string shirt, and a belt around his waist that said “U.S.A.”; inside the third, most curious of all to my companions, no doubt, sat a scrawny, scruffy foreign devil in an ancient blue blazer from Harrods, a pair of old corduroys that grew grayer and smaller by the day, a blindingly bright scarlet T-shirt and a pair of $2 sneakers just purchased in Hong Kong. Over us all hung a friendly, down-home air.

  Next morning, I awoke from a fitful, fevered sleep to see the mist beginning to lift above long green fields. Slowly, the carriage began to stir into life. Someone in the next compartment put on a radio that crackled into the treble strains of a lilting folk ditty. Someone else interrupted these melodious sounds with an instrumental version of “Yesterday” and “The Gambler.” In the corridor, a ponytailed little girl sat on a fold-down seat by the window, playing cards with a smile-wrinkled man in a vest. The ever-busy matriarch across from me briskly handed out jars of broth to her troops, filling our carriage with the smell of noodles. The muscleman calmly broke open eggs on the bench.

  Thus the day lazed on, and I fell asleep again, awoke, nibbled on bananas, read Mishima in feverish snatches, slept and awoke and slept once more. Outside, the landscape unscrolled itself like a watercolor by Wang Wei, field upon field dotted with the peaked triangles of bamboo hats, or the bent forms of peasants carrying buckets of water under T-shaped bars. Just before nightfall, I suddenly felt my body being shaken. I looked up foggily. A guard barked something out at me. I stared back blankly. He shouted something else. I gazed back helpless. A crowd began to gather at the door, whispers spread along the corridor. The guard looked around for help. Finally, the mob parted and a young man in spectacles stepped forward. The guard was offering me a first-class sleeper, he explained—it was much better for foreigners. That was very kind, I said, but please could he tell the guard that I was happy where I was? “He says that the first-class compartment is more comfortable for you. This is no good.” “Thank you, but this is comfortable enough.” At that, the guard looked unhappier than ever. More words were exchanged. Finally, convinced no doubt that it was better to leave the barbarian to his folly than to try to coerce him out of it, the guard padded off. He came from Mongolia, my amiable rescuer explained, and he had learned English at his university in Peking. Was there anything else I needed? Only sleep, I assured him, collapsing into Mishima dreams. When I awoke, I found that my new friend had slipped into the compartment to close the chilling window above me as I slept.

  Next morning, a sense of festive anticipation crackled through the mobile commune as we drew into Beijing. From out of a nearby radio, Teresa Teng, or some sound-alike songstress, whinnied sweetly. The ponytailed little girl clapped her hands while her father smiled proudly, and the two of them sent paper planes shooting along the corridor. The Mongolian appeared again at my door, followed by an old lady who pressed upon me some tablets for my fever. There was much excitement, my new friend explained—during the night, my roommate from Hong Kong had been robbed!

  A few minutes later, the train stopped and the crowds began pouring out onto the platform, hoisting boxes, handing cases through the windows, scrambling for room. Guiding me gently away from the mob, the Mongolian led me down long corridors and up stairs and across waiting halls and then out into the daylight and across another enormous square. Did I have a friend in Beijing? he asked. Not really, I gasped—just a secondhand invitation to stay with a correspondent for Agence France-Presse, whom I had never met. His fiancée in Hong Kong had told me to stay with him, but he knew nothing about it. The Mongolian looked surprised, but guided me nonetheless to one of the city’s only public telephones and dialed the number I gave him. The phone crackled, he shot something out and then he was shot at in return. He put down the receiver with an air of anxious melancholy. It would not be easy, he said, to find my friend.

  The only other name I knew in Beijing was the Peking Hotel. As soon as I mentioned it, my tireless guide nodded briskly, led me across an enormous street and delivered me onto a jam-packed bus. Two stops later, he led me off again onto another wide boulevard. By our side, at the end of an ambassadorial driveway, stood an old gray monument, sleepy and stately as an elderly gentleman at some interminable committee meeting.

  I invited my savior to join me for some tea, but he reminded me gently that he was not allowed to enter such places. Thanking him warmly, I headed alone across the imposing courtyard. Inside, the building resembled nothing so much as a dusty castle deserted by its fleeing lords and left in the care of the servants. There were grand red carpets in the corridors, but they were torn. There were rows of gift-store display cases, but they were covered with dust. There were cavernous banquet halls on every side, but they were crowded with ghosts. Chamber after chamber was haunted by an air of lavish desolation.

  For many minutes, I wandered and wandered through the endless lounges. Then I walked into another huge lounge, and found myself suddenly amidst a whole crowd of noisy foreigners, seated over small circular tables crammed with cups. Like their surroundings, the whole chattering assembly had a somewhat queer and old-fashioned look to it, as if it had just stepped out, a little the worse for wear, from the pages of Marguerite Duras. Bohemian girls from the Continent in baggy trousers sat back from their tables with the air of veteran café-goers, languorously letting smoke escape from their lips as they exchanged greetings with thick-bearded Quartier Latin types in pajama suits and Chinese slippers. Shifty-looking businessmen in shabby suits conferred in whispers. Mountebanks seemed imminent.

  Collapsing into a chair, I treated myself to some tea dispensed by what seemed a British hospital canteen and picked up a copy of the China Daily. On television today, I read, I could watch “We Are the 8th Army Soldiers,” “Accelerating the Ripening of Cotton,” “Around the World: Beautiful Bulgaria,” “Les Misérables” (a cartoon) and a show on knock-knees. On the radio, I could listen to “Australian Song: Spring Is the Season for Sheep Shearing” or “Vocal Solos: Offering a Bouquet to the P
arty.” Strangely fortified by all this, I hoisted myself up and wandered out again to the main thoroughfare. Herds of bicyclists were streaming down the sides of a street as wide as the Pasadena Freeway; along the pavements, groups of green-clad workers chattered past rows of buildings lined up as formidably as poker-faced dignitaries at a May Day parade. Uniformed young soldiers walked together in animated schoolboy clusters, joking and pushing one another about; solitary peasants looked around in openmouthed astonishment. Wisp-bearded old men whose wrinkled faces seemed older than surprise shuffled past, looking at nothing but the ground.

  A few blocks down, the main artery—so cluttered at its fringes, so empty at its center—gave way to the enormous open space of Tiananmen Square, the largest in the world. In one corner of the huge, but quiet, square was a pair of small stone bridges and a tiny gap, underneath a giant poster of Mao. Through it, throngs of visitors were streaming into a further courtyard. Falling into step with them, I entered the Forbidden City. The first thing I saw was a basketball court.

  For several hours, still feverish, I found and lost and found myself in a leafy labyrinth of courtyards and pavilions. As I made my way unguided around serpentine turns and dragon-shaped detours, through sunlight and shade, I could relate it to nothing I knew except the Chinese emperor in the Marguerite Yourcenar story, “beautiful, but blank, like a looking-glass placed too high, reflecting nothing except the stars and the immutable heavens.” Finally, more disoriented than ever, I staggered back to the Peking Hotel and tried another phone call. This time, surprisingly, my unknown and unknowing host answered the phone; more surprisingly still, when I invited myself to stay, he graciously acquiesced.