Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  “Would it be possible to have some tea, please?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, pointing to a bottle. “Beer.”

  “Thank you. But do you have tea, please? Tea.” I did an unworthy imitation of the dainty movements of a deb at Brown’s Hotel. The girl looked crestfallen. Deciding that it might be undiplomatic to remind her that Tibetans, according to Heinrich Harrer, drink two hundred cups of tea a day, I tried another tack.

  “Does the Airpot Hotel have any soft drinks?” She looked confused. “Coke? Fanta? Lemon?”

  Suddenly, her face brightened. “Beer,” she pronounced agreeably. “Yes!”

  “Do you have water?”

  She was now the picture of happiness. “Yes, yes! Beer.”

  Drinkless, we proceeded to a table set aside for foreigners. There, the twenty-year-old student from Cambridge hell-bent on entering business school whom I knew from the Banak Shol was engaged in a dialectical session with the seventy-year-old Communist I had met in Lhasa. (He: “Did you have any problems during the McCarthy era?” She, eyes twinkling happily: “Oh no, dear. McCarthy was the one with problems.”) As the meal proceeded, I began to think, for a variety of reasons, of Mao’s famous injunction—“Self-criticism is like eating dog meat: if you haven’t tried it, you don’t know what you’re missing.” My cell mate, however, looked as if he knew all too much what he was missing. Recalling that he spoke no English, I suspected that it might be best for us to return to our room. We painstakingly mapped out an elaborate pincer movement for tracking down our elusive jailkeeper, and, a few minutes later, were rewarded with success.

  Just as we were beginning to reacquaint ourselves with the pleasures of our suite, however, a young Chinese man in a corduroy jacket materialized at our door. He was round and bald and beaming. He looked at me happily. “Hindu?” I nodded, and he walked in, grabbed my head lustily and pressed his cheek against mine, kissing the space between ear and shoulder.

  Then he turned to the Frenchman. “Karachi?” The Frenchman looked stunned. “English?” The Frenchman looked thunderstruck. “American? Japanese??” There was a long and terrible silence. “Hindu? German? Kar…” At this, the Frenchman wisely blurted out something about France. Our visitor turned around to me with a satisfied smile, then rewarded my cell mate with a kiss.

  Niceties behind us, the stranger looked me in the eye. “I am porridge.” Now it was my turn to look horrified. “Yes, yes,” he said, thinking that I doubted him. “I am pirate.” This was little better. “PIRATE!” he shouted out.

  Through a leap of deductive reasoning, I came to two conclusions, neither of them heartening: (1) our guest was the beneficiary of the Airpot Hotel’s unbending beer-only policy; and (2) he was the man who would be guiding our plane across some of the world’s highest mountains just a few hours later.

  Realizing, on both counts, that he was not a man to be crossed, I returned with new gusto to our small talk. Before long, the banter was proceeding swimmingly. The pilot told us his age, his wife’s age, our ages. He reminded us of his age, and his wife’s age. He taught us several Mandarin profanities, spitting out guttural sounds with angry nonchalance, then hissing as I tried to reproduce them. He volunteered, somewhat unexpectedly, that he had been to America, Russia, Karachi, Japan. He offered to buy my watch, then tickled me under the chin. He repeated his age, and his wife’s age.

  The spirit of jollity mounted. I gave him a guided tour of our amenities, flipping on the TV that did not work, pressing the button on the bulbless lamp. He chuckled delightedly. I whispered conspiratorially that the Frenchman was in fact a minority Muslim from Turkestan. He chortled with pleasure. I asked him his wife’s age, and he whooped like a wild man.

  Then, just as the bonhomie was reaching its peak, we heard a knock on the open door. There stood the girl from the dining hall. “Change money?” she offered, under her breath.

  Smiling all around, she walked inside. Then she pulled out a napkin and, frowning with concentration, wrote down a number. The Frenchman stared at it in puzzlement, then scribbled down some numbers of his own. She scrutinized them for a moment, smiled with infinite sweetness and shook her head no. The pilot beamed at all parties with the air of a satisfied matchmaker.

  Then, however, overexcited perhaps at the success of this cultural exchange, he began barking out numbers with the random frenzy of a bingo caller. “Twenty. Fourteen. Fifty. Thousand. Thirty. Sixteen. Seven.” We stared at him in wonder. “Nineteen. Fifty. Four. Seven.” What on earth was going on? “Fifty. Sixteen. Twenty. Thousand.” Wild-eyed now, the Frenchman muttered something poisonous and scribbled down a few more figures. Again the girl shook her head no. Then, without a warning, the pilot broke off from his demented chant and tried to broker a four-part deal involving my watch, his watch, foreigners’ currency and people’s money. Foiled in an instant, he struck up again his terrible cry. “Thirty. Seven. Fifteen. Four.” The Frenchman and the girl huddled together. “Nineteen. Forty. Three …” Then, just as the pilot’s call was hitting a crescendo, the place was plunged into darkness. Lights-out at the Airpot Hotel!

  As suddenly as they had appeared, the pilot and the girl vanished. Fumbling my way to my bed through the utter darkness, I heard a chorus of merdes as the Frenchman did the same. Since neither of us had any idea when, or whether, our plane would leave, I set my alarm clock for six. Next thing I knew, it shrilled me out of bed and I threw the light switch. Nada. Outside, the mountains were utterly dark. Dismally, I returned to bed. Just as I was beginning to relapse into sleep, however, there came a terrible banging at our door. I jumped to attention once more. Outside in the corridor, a hotel employee stared at me urgently. “Bus leave.”

  Driven like madmen, the Frenchman and I flung on our trousers, threw all our belongings into our bags, pushed some toothpaste toward our gums and, picking up our possessions, raced out into the corridor. Hurling ourselves at top speed along the hall, we careened into the lobby. There, we were brought to a sudden stop: the place was pitch black. Everything was motionless. A small army of Tibetans were seated on cases with the look of the damned, heads buried in hands or thrown back over their seats. For all we knew, they had spent much of the night in fruitless search for the doorkeeper or else had seen the rooms and elected to sleep in the familiarity of this plainlike space.

  As we considered the melancholy scene, a hotel worker scurried up to us through the darkness. “Breakfast?” I thought bitterly of a choice between beer, beer and beer. “No, thank you.” We sat down and waited. Maybe two hours later, the bus came into view, to be greeted by another mad stampede. We were driven to a terminal, then taken by another bus to a customs shed. There we waited for an hour or two before the plane arrived. After another short wait, we were told that it might be ready to leave.

  THE INCIDENT AT Lhasa exemplified all the comic clumsiness of the New China’s attempts to accommodate the West. But it also demonstrated its canniness. For at the airport, we encountered the package tourists who had been staying at a luxury hotel on the Chinese side of Lhasa; it did not seem a coincidence that they had been permitted to spend their last night in town (where they were paying 100 yuan a night) and had been driven to the airport only that morning, while we (who were paying 5 yuan a night on the Tibetan side of Lhasa) had been compelled to spend the night together with other improvident locals at the relatively exorbitant Airpot Hotel. Only the 30 yuan that came from every member of a captive and otherwise unremunerative audience could explain the erection of a shiny new hotel in the midst of a windswept plateau three hours from the nearest town.

  The discrepancy also, however, revealed another hazardous strain in China’s careful courtship of the West. For although the country had managed to keep package tourists successfully out of touch with the man in the Chinese street, it had not yet managed to bring the solo traveler to heel. And if feelings and finances were often dangerously confused at the larger level, the confusion was many times more explosive on the individual level, w
here finances had not been agreed upon, or emotions decided upon, in advance. The budget traveler, moreover, was resolutely determined to avoid the prescribed route, to scorn big hotels, to travel by train and to steal across any and every boundary between the cultures. Most dangerous of all, the backpacker sought at every point to make contact with locals—striking up deals and conversations without ever really troubling to distinguish between them. Floating around the country’s bloodstream like a clump of bacteria, the individual traveler spread still further the contamination of individualism: not only did he refuse to be abstracted by being absorbed into a group, but he encouraged the same in those he met.

  As it was, these impromptu meetings between locals and foreign individuals had already begun to subvert the rituals of official exchange and so to afford the individual a perfect revenge upon the system. To take just one example, the establishment of two separate but equal currencies—Foreign Exchange Certificates and “people’s money”—worked wonderfully so long as foreigners and locals were strictly segregated. But as soon as the two parties mingled, their currencies were mixed together, and as soon as the currencies mingled, the foreigners’ law of supply and demand came into devastating effect.

  By 1985, therefore, the FEC was already worth 60 percent more than the renminbi with which it was supposed to enjoy parity, and a vigorous black market had arisen to fill the gap between theory and practice. Already too, rickshaw drivers had taken to loitering outside many tourist hotels, soliciting passing foreigners by rubbing thumbs and fingers together and muttering figures under their breath. Any tourist who wished to make a killing had only to reach an agreement by haggling on paper, in the manner of the Frenchman and the Chinese girl in the hotel, and the driver would usher him into his rickshaw and take him for a leisurely ride around the block. As he pedaled, the Chinese would casually slip some “people’s money” into the tourist’s hand, and as they went on, the tourist would press a roll of FECs into the driver’s grasp. By the time the two had disembarked, a few minutes later, their positions were as good as reversed. The foreigner could now live as cheaply as a local, and the rickshaw driver as lavishly as a tourist. The only loser was the system.

  UPON MY RETURN to Chengdu, famous “city of revolutions,” I had more and more occasions to note how inevitable were these unscheduled meetings, and how incendiary. As soon as we arrived at the airport, the tour groups dutifully filed into their buses, while the four odd men out—I, the Frenchman, the Cambridge student and the Communist old lady—grabbed a taxi together and headed for the only tourist hotel in town, the Jinjiang. There we were informed that there were no suites available, no rooms, not even any dorm beds; we would have to find a flight out at the CAAC office. There we were told that the next seat available was on a plane leaving town three weeks from now, we would have to stay at the Changshi, the town’s best nontourist hotel. There we were told that it was full (of delegations) and we would have to try the Black Coffee.

  At this, the Frenchman, already all too familiar with the unorthodox facilities of that windowless prison, shouted out something passionate and went off to catch the next train out of town, regardless of its destination. The adventurous old lady picked up her three bags, cheerfully announced that her American Express card had been stolen two nights before and began trudging down a huge avenue toward the air-raid-shelter-turned-bordello. The Brit and I, however, decided to attempt another assault upon the Jinjiang.

  Hailing a rickshaw driver, we recited our destination. He held up five fingers, we held up three. He held up four. We nodded, he rolled his bicycle up to us, and we took the five-minute ride to the hotel. Getting out, we handed him 40 fen (there are 100 fen in a yuan), and he pushed the money back to us. Again, the Brit gave him the fare, and began walking away. He hurried up and grabbed the Brit by the arm, thrusting the money back into his hand. His friends began gathering around. He shouted at us. We stood our ground. He shouted again. The Brit shouted back. The mood of the crowd started to turn ugly. The man poked at the Brit’s arm, and the Brit pushed him back. There were shouts and threats. The Brit gave him the money again and he threw it on the ground. Alarmed by the mounting air of violence, I raced into the hotel and brought back a young gift-shop proprietress to serve as an interpreter. She explained that the man wanted 4 yuan. We told her that we had paid only 1 yuan for four people on the way over. The Brit handed over 40 fen again, and the man let out a shout. The girl, looking back and forth with rising alarm, told us that the driver was going to bring the police. Thirty or forty people had gathered around by now, some of them curious, some of them furious. The Brit threw 40 fen onto the ground and began walking away. The man spit at us. The girl, looking more and more miserable, said we would be taken to jail. The man hovered over us. The Brit cursed. The girl asked us just to pay 2 yuan and be done with it. We protested. The man circled around. At last, we handed over 2 yuan and, twenty-five minutes after the dispute had begun, the gang of rickshaw drivers shambled sullenly away.

  As soon as the rickshaw drivers retreated, the Brit and I advanced into the Jinjiang to resume our siege. For more than an hour, we hurried up to each new attendant who appeared at the desk and repeated our appeal. For more than an hour, we were rebuffed. Finally, with a hearty curse, the Brit gave up and went off in search of a train timetable. I, as a last resort, decided to try that ever-helpful model of civic pride, Zheng.

  Upon arrival at Zheng’s office, however, I was greeted only by two young girls who could hardly contain their delight at finding someone on whom to practice their English, German and French. For an hour or so, we complimented one another on our proficiency in all three languages. Then Zheng reappeared. Chengdu was a Paradise on Earth, I reminded him, but I was being kept out of it. Predictably outraged, he summoned his troops, and the four of us returned to the Jinjiang. My cohorts marched up to the desk. I heard a few shotgun sentences. I saw a desk clerk try to save face. I was told that a room was available.

  Thus, six hours after my arrival, I was able at last to settle down in a room. In the day that followed, I made a full inspection of the capital of Sichuan, the capital of the New China’s agricultural revolution. In the proverbial “land of heavenly abundance,” I quickly realized, I had emerged into an entirely different world from that of the capital. For in Beijing, the New China and the Old China seemed to be safely laid out side by side; in Chengdu, however, the two were as strangely mixed as if a color Polaroid had been superimposed upon a sepia-colored snapshot. The city’s main arteries were crowded with vegetable carts and shops, and the shops were crowded with ancient vials and pounding ghetto blasters. At the head of the main street was the largest statue of Mao in the world and, around it, giant billboards commemorating the holy trinity of the New China—Sanyo, Seiko and Sony. First Blood was showing down the street, while in my hotel room I could listen, on the radio, to “Phoenix-Shaped Hairpin” at 3:30, move on to “Foreign Music: Thank you; Coffee-Bean Grinding; A Song” at 6:00, catch “Medley of Themes from Hawaiian Music” at 6:30 and hear “Instrumental: My Sweetheart: A Lovable Rose” at 7:30. Only half an hour later, the programming culminated in “Su Wu Tends Sheep.” But when at last I did get my first, long-awaited taste of Chinese television, I found myself staring at a group of children dressed as cats and dogs, crazily swirling around a toy car. At the conclusion of this Dance of the Sugar Plum Comrade, on came another show in which real, animated cats and dogs merrily chased one another around, in honor, I could only assume, of Deng’s most famous maxim (“It matters little whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice”). A little later, a Hong Kong movie was shown, but it was soon thrown completely off kilter by a long and unusually frank topless scene—testament, I suspected, to some editor’s erratic scissors.

  Somewhat discombobulated, I went out into the bustling, light-filled streets. Chengdu and I, however, were never on the same wavelength. I saw a sign for a rest room and gratefully hurried in—to find an impassive matron crouching in a cu
bicle behind an open door. I bought a ticket to see some local acrobats in action—and went in to discover a huge screen blasting out a kung fu classic. I hired a rickshaw to take me to the Jinjiang and was dropped off, an hour later, in front of a small house at the end of a maze of back streets. And when I ventured into a local restaurant for my first-ever genuine Chinese meal, I pointed at a chicken, and was swiftly served a banquet for ten with a bill for twenty. Before very long, the meal had also succeeded in reuniting me with a traveling companion even more mercurial than the Frenchman—a fever. Thus I returned to Guangzhou in much the same state as when I had left it, at the start of my circular journey, fevered and fatigued.

  THE GUANGZHOU THAT I saw now, however, seemed a very different place from the one I had left just a few weeks before, if only because my sense of China was radically altered. As I drove through the electric streets on my way back into town, I felt myself in a different country, a different century, from Beijing or Chengdu. On every side was a quickening pace, a flashing commotion, a boomtown dynamism and drive that could have put Bombay or Jakarta to shame. The boys who elsewhere rode bicycles were revving up scooters, the girls who elsewhere looked sadly miscast in ill-fitting costumes here struck worldly poses in their pretty dresses, nail polish and T-shirts that said “Superstar” or “Cute.” I saw what looked like Sears, and it turned out to be the local Friendship Store. A notice in English advertised a “Motorcar Fitting Company.” Signs, huge billboards, colored lights, pulsed through the brilliant streets. I could easily have believed that I was over the border in Hong Kong. Only one thing reminded me I was not: in the capital of capitalism, flashing neon is prohibited, while in the capital of southern China all the lights were winking furiously.

  Passing through the electric doors of the White Swan Hotel, a glittering palace built on a lake, I entered a lobby graced with a tumbling waterfall and a beautifully landscaped three-tier garden of red bridges, ferns and tidy walkways. At the reception desk, rows of neatly lipsticked young ladies stood to attention, while a nearby pianist trilled her way through “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” With a few brisk taps on a computer, a receptionist assigned me a room. At the elevator bank, a liveried attendant pressed the P button for me. Soothed by a melodious piano concerto, I was lifted twenty-seven floors closer to heaven. At the top, a floor attendant led me to a suite glittering with luxuries: a mini-bar; a set of boxed soaps and shampoos; a color TV that received two English-language stations from Hong Kong, in-house video and a channel devoted entirely to recording the facilities of the hotel; and a booklet describing the swimming pool, the tennis court, the babysitting service, the health club, the Hong Kong direct-dial phones and every other feature befitting a member of the Leading Hotels of the World. Then the lady pulled back the curtain and there—hey presto!—was a terrace and a blaze of lights.