Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Dazzled by this splendor of riches—two days earlier, after all, I had been staying in a bare cell on the windswept plains of Tibet—I hurried down to the lobby to inspect its facilities. Though it was 10:30 at night, the shopping arcade was still hectic with activity. Customers and workers buzzed in and out of the shiny Travel Office, the Telex Office, the one-hour Photo Developing Store. A Madison Avenue elegance graced the antique stores in the shopping arcade, and the bookshop was packed with everything from Gertrude Stein to Robert Stone. Tuxedoed men ushered guests into discos and nightclubs. And at the Buffeteria, well-fed customers were tucking into dishes called “Yes, Sir, Cheese My Baby,” “Bacon your Pardon,” “A Legitimate Beef” and “Ike and Tuna Turner.” Not far away was a VIP entrance.

  With Marxism like this, I thought, who needed capitalism?

  ———

  BY THEN, I had also seen enough of the New China to appreciate that Joe, my first contact in the country, had been prompted by something more than simple philanthropy in giving me his train ticket to Beijing; though he had sold it at face value, he had been paid, and always would be paid by newcomers just stepping off the train from Hong Kong, in precious FEC. He had thus been assured of a tidy, riskless, 60 percent profit. At the same time, however, I had only to think back to the CARE package he had pressed upon me as I boarded my train to realize that Joe’s canniness about his own well-being did not necessarily diminish his concern about mine. I therefore wasted no time in ringing up my former benefactor and arranging to spend the weekend with him on a tour of the New China.

  As soon as Joe and his friend, a round-faced and bespectacled journalist called Wu, appeared at my hotel next morning, I explained how the CAAC meal and my ill-advised trip to the Genuine Chinese Restaurant in Chengdu had conspired to incite a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions within my stomach. Without a moment’s hesitation, they whisked me off to the nearby apothecary market and there began enthusiastically pointing out deer antlers, turtle-shell juice, starfish and tiger bone (“In Guangzhou,” said Joe, not very comfortingly, “people eat everything with four legs except a table. And anything that flies except a plane”). Some of these cures were mere superstition, he acknowledged: “the hair vegetable,” for example—he pointed to what looked like a Brillo pad—was regarded as a panacea only because the Chinese word for it sounded like the ideogram for “making a fortune.” But this, he went on—indicating some items in a jar and a drink—would make me healthy for life. Excellent. What did it contain? Oh, nothing much, said Joe: the edible part was bear’s penis and the beverage was tiger’s urine. It would cost me only 400 yuan for the former and 100 yuan for the latter. This, I thought bitterly, sounded very much like the English phrase for “making a fortune”; the miracle cure cost the equivalent of eighteen months’ wages for the average worker.

  Newly convinced of the relative merits of the New China, I dragged my bewildered guides back to the hotel and hurried off to consult its certified nurse—a matron who listened intently as I described all my symptoms in exquisite and excruciating detail, nodded sagely at the end of my heart-wrenching monologue and then revealed that she spoke no English. When a translator delivered a rough summary of my condition, however, she again listened with a seraphic calm and then, without a word, pulled out three tablets, placed them in an envelope and handed them silently over to me. Five hours later, I was cured.

  Back out on the jostled streets, Joe resumed his hymning of the booming energies of the New China. Some of these vendors made 2,000 yuan a month on the open market, he exulted, and one of them was said to be a millionaire. Once he had seen a man pull out 100,000 yuan in cash to pay for a truckful of produce. Guangzhou was so far ahead of the rest of the country that people came here all the way from Beijing just to buy, say, 1,000 pairs of jeans for 22 yuan a piece, each of which they could sell back home for 30 yuan. Many Chinese businessmen, in fact, had grown as active as the entrepreneurs of Hong Kong or New York—except, alas, that they were forbidden to ride planes. In the five days it took them to make the Beijing-Guangzhou round trip by train, the market often rose and fell precipitously. Still, in the new economic order, Guangzhou was unquestionably the capital of the nation. “I tell my friends,” said Joe, “that in the thirties everyone went to Yenan, the center of the Revolution; now, everyone comes to Guangdong, the center of the New Revolution. In Shanghai, ten yuan is a lot of money; here, it’s nothing. In Chengdu, I was once thrown into jail for staying in the Jinjiang tourist hotel; here, I can stay anywhere. In Beijing, people are interested only in politics, in power and prestige; here they want to make money.”

  That, he said, had always been the great problem with his country: lack of incentives. Why should members of a construction crew try to complete a 120-day project in 100 days? They knew they would get no extra money and no extra jobs; besides, their bosses would never give them bonuses in which they could not share themselves. Even now, there was no incentive to get educated: a taxi driver could earn in two days what a teacher made in a month. But nowadays, at least there were some inducements to work hard; there was more drive, more ambition, a greater will to succeed. People in the New China were ready to do anything, said Joe, to make money. In one province, two peasants had tried to sell off bottles of industrial alcohol, diluted to 60 percent, as booze. The result was twenty-two deaths. Recently, a more professional outfit on Hainan had been caught in a $1.5 billion scam, in which they had used Party funds to smuggle in 3 million television sets, 200,000 VCRs and 90,000 vehicles.

  Politicians too were growing shrewder about courting the public “Sure,” continued the ever-fluent Joe. “Many people say, ‘Democracy is hypocrisy.’ Yet even baby kissing is better than what happened before, however selfish the motive. Sure, there are many sad effects to competition. But right now it is needed. Our people are lazy, inefficient. They don’t want to achieve anything. The peasant is still poor, but now at least he has something to work for. And now he has pride in his heart.”

  Naturally, he went on, the New China could not solve all the problems of his country overnight. Some people resisted every kind of change. One local firm had invited a German expert to inspect their operations. At the end of his tour, the visitor had submitted a hundred-page report, accompanied by a promise to turn the company around if he were allowed to act as president for a few months. The company obliged, and the German promptly fired the vice president and the Party Secretary. Instantly, profits soared. In general, however, it was impossible to fire the Party Secretary. And if the Party Secretary could not be fired, neither could X, who was his ally. And if X could not be fired, it was difficult to fire Y, his rival. And so it went.

  Indeed, said Joe, chuckling, the prison in which he had once spent two months was a perfect reflection of society as a whole. The entire place had been run on a basis of bribery, patronage and seniority. Only by befriending the senior convict had he managed to get a bed on the other side of the cell from the dreaded “shit pit.”

  At lunch, Joe casually tossed off the equivalent of an average worker’s weekly wages on a sumptuous feast for the three of us, and then we returned to the clangorous commotion of downtown Guangzhou. The area was as crowded as Fifth Avenue on the Saturday before Christmas. In Beijing, Joe announced proudly, only 60 percent of the buildings in the central blocks were commercial; here, the figure was 90 percent. Shopkeepers paid 1,000 yuan a month just for a building overlooking the main street. And all about, he whispered, were the covert influences that flourished in the New China. Those men over there with the red armbands were the “Social Order Keepers.” Many of the shoppers pushing through the crush were plainclothesmen, seeking out some of the 10,000 smugglers who worked the district, hawking watches, high-tech goods, porno tapes. Because of the 500 percent tax placed on luxury items, a VCR cost 18,000 yuan, and even a pair of sunglasses 50. Overseas Chinese, however, were permitted to bring eight luxury items into the country duty-free. “The government is too poor to buy new films,”
Joe reported with delight. “But the people can afford to buy all the latest videos.”

  At this, the quiet Wu spoke up. His great ambition, he shyly confessed, was to work as a journalist in Africa. Then he could send home luxury goods to his family.

  Serenaded by the thumping disco beat of the theme from Flashdance, we threaded our way through crowded emporia exploding with consumer goods, high-tech radios, cameras, cassettes, more cameras, more radios, more girls in sun visors that said “Lover.” The hottest items of all appeared to be those that added the lure of the long-forbidden to the appeal of the mysterious. Inside a cavernous record store, the most prominent tape on sale was “Peculiarities of English Usage.” At the local bookstore, the front display was given over to the Paul Simon songbook and The Ultimate Trivia Quiz Book. On some of the shelves were children’s versions in English of Vanity Fair, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Helen Keller Story. Upstairs, copies of The Idiot, Oliver Twist, and Madame Bovary were squashed between The Dialectic of Nihilism, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Social Cohesion and, best of all, Beyond Dumping. A customer could buy eighty copies of Dickens or Dostoevsky, however, for the same $50 it cost to purchase a single copy of Human Society in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.

  Senses bombarded by this video arcade world, we repaired at last for some quiet in another of the city’s grand hotels, the Garden Hotel (whose room keys came stamped with messages that read “I don’t want to leave Guangzhou. Please leave me here”). As we walked past the hotel gift shop, Joe let out a cry, and pointed to a picture of Deng Xiaoping on the cover of a glossy magazine: we went in to take a closer look, and there, to my companions’ delight and my amazement, was a Time cover story on China that I had written before leaving New York three months earlier. Impressed by this, my friends led me up to a lobby filled with huge armchairs, and as we munched on a selection of French pastries, they asked me to describe my impressions of a homeland that was still a little strange to them. In response, I rhapsodized at length about the sunlit lamaseries of Tibet, talked a little about the capital and then, by way of amusing parenthesis, mentioned some of the quirks of the fabled Black Coffee. At that instant, I happened to look across at Joe, my all-knowing guide to every deal in China. He was looking absolutely stunned. I stopped what I was saying. For many moments, he could not speak. Finally, he went on shakily: You mean that there were prostitutes there? I think so, I said; indeed, a colleague of mine had once been approached by a male prostitute on the streets of Shanghai. That left Joe quite devastated.

  But prostitutes, he said after a very long while, existed only in the West. And even that he found hard to understand. In Kramer vs. Kramer, he had seen Dustin Hoffman meet a girl at a party and invite her home. Did that really happen? And if it was so easy to meet girls, why would any Westerner look for a prostitute? And was it true, Wu piped up, about the American man who had slept with 1,000 women in three years? Or the nymphomaniac who had slept with 500 men before realizing that her thirst would go forever unslaked and had therefore become a prostitute? And was there also much wife swapping in the United States? Wu had read about a Chinese couple visiting America who had been invited to a party only to find, to their horror, that they were expected to trade partners for the evening. Was that very common?

  The Chinese, I had always heard, regarded sex less as something to do than as something to have done, and so be done with. And indeed, my friends delivered these questions with none of the smirking or swagger one might expect from young males elsewhere in the world, but rather with a great and somber earnestness. They seemed, in fact, to be delving into the subject in as fearful a way as I might ask about kidnappings in Beirut or the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. Joe had clearly been much heartened by the American he had once met who had been traveling through China for thirty days with a Swedish girl. “He never kissed her, never once,” reported Joe. “I said, ‘That’s incredible.’ He said, ‘We’ve both had enough of that kind of thing.’”

  In China, Joe went on, it was difficult even to contemplate the subject. “We can say the words in English, but in Chinese we are embarrassed. We were worried when the lady in Daughter of a Miner was undressing. When I was at school, I got a sex education manual. I said it was for learning English. At first, when I read the book, I got excited. In college, we talked about intercourse position. But that’s all. We are polite in China.”

  Even marriage, Wu volunteered, was not so easy in China. It was possible for a man to visit a marriage agency and find a partner for 2 yuan (quite a bargain, I thought, next to a bowl of tiger’s urine), “but it is harder to find a flat than a fiancée.” A typical couple could get an apartment, if they were lucky, of six square meters. Then too, he went on, there was an entire phantom generation of people now in their late twenties or thirties who had lost their best years to the Cultural Revolution. “They are very talented. If they just had a little education, they could do marvelous things. It’s sad.” Sadder still, perhaps, these “young old people” had never learned to be at ease with the opposite sex. And the longer they lived without contact, the less chance of contact they had. Many women in particular were turning bitter as they found themselves spinsters. But if they tried to find a husband, the man would dismiss them curtly: “Marriage is not only a product of love.”

  THAT EVENING, AFTER returning to Joe’s office to see his stamp collection, I went back to my hotel room to take stock of all I had seen. In the course of the day, I had picked up a copy of the maiden issue of the Shanghai Student’s Post, which proudly billed itself as the first English-language newspaper to appear in Shanghai since 1949. “The front page,” the paper announced, “covers leading issues of the day—international, domestic, local and educational.” Underneath that bold promise, the front page consisted, almost exclusively, of a large picture of Sissy Spacek, accompanied by a handwritten message from Sissy to her followers in China. On its inside pages, the paper described an “English Evening” in Shanghai in which four-year-olds donned skirts and then “filed to the center of the hall, saying in English, ‘May I have the honor to dance with you?’” A column by one Hou Chen argued that vacations should be longer and then, cunningly citing the laconic example of ancient Sparta, that committee meetings should be shorter. On the following page, across from a history of Coca-Cola, were a list of dos and don’ts for eating with Westerners and short essays on the history of glasses, the Hovercraft, the waltz, UFOs and family-owned KYUS-TV in Montana, the smallest TV station in America.

  Another magazine I had picked up, Sight and Insight, recorded a hailstorm of facts about the greening of China. The first fast food in Tiananmen Square. The first highway over the Heavenly Mountain. The first American movie shot entirely in China (starring June Lockhart). The first credit-card conference. That breathless litany took me back to all the headlines that had been pounding through the American papers in recent months, chronicling each and every surprising development within the land of Mao: the country’s first beauty contest, its first sale of stocks, its first rock concert; a luxury resort built in the Valley of the Ming Tombs, fashion shows in Beijing, the arrival of a fleet of twelve Cadillacs for Party use, complete with bars, TVs and refrigerators. The government had even taken to trumpeting forth the country’s first case of AIDS, as if it were proof that China had finally entered the twenty-first century. By now, moreover, six out of every seven Chinese families owned a television set. More Chinese had watched the Super Bowl than Americans. And China was already leading the world in American Express frauds.

  Thus the get-rich-quick policies of the Cultureless Revolution were spinning ahead as furiously as the Cultural Revolution in reverse. Not only was the ancient behemoth turning, quite literally, on a dime; it was also turning overnight. So many cars had been put in the hands of so many new drivers that China was suffering 12,000 traffic fatalities a year, on roads that were still largely empty—in one typical day in Beijing, I had seen a bicycle crumpled under a truck, another truck lodged inside a tree trunk an
d two lots of crowds gathered around smashed cars. Likewise, the country was snapping up so many imports so fast that its trade deficit was rocketing up, in 1985, from $2 billion to almost $15 billion. As I thought of the shopping-spree frenzy of Canton, and of the feverish hospitality of the CAAC stewardesses, I began to understand why so many of the New China’s guardians were worried that the girl was throwing open the door too far and embracing her admirer with an altogether unseemly warmth.

  In some ways, indeed, the New China seemed like a headstrong young girl, so exhilarated by her new sense of power that she was determined to see how far she could take it, even though she did not know where she was going. Under Deng’s new “socialism with a Chinese character,” comrades were becoming mad for fads: men were parting with two weeks’ wages to get their hair permed, women with two months’ salary to have their eyelids doubled; people of both sexes were paying fifty times face value for tickets to fashion shows and thirty times as much for a porno tape as for a video of Chinese melodrama. Even the country’s leaders were not immune to the blandishments of the West. Here were Premier Zhao Ziyang looking dapper in his tailored Western suits, Deng Xiaoping indulging his fondness for croissants and Deng’s bridge partner, General Secretary Hu Yaobang, urging the people to relinquish chopsticks for knives and forks, on grounds of hygiene.