Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  AND BURMA’S SINS were so original, its freedom from self-consciousness so absolute, that it was indeed tempting to believe that it languished in some pre-fallen age of the world’s infancy; by the limited standards of the world, Burma had never grown up. It was, I thought, a lost world in both senses of the word: a remnant from the past, but also a baffled child trying to make its way about an adult universe. And though it was customary to situate paradise in locations that were geographically far away —Tahiti, perhaps, or the Seychelles—there was no reason why Shangri-La couldn’t be hidden in the temporally remote. In time-warped Burma, all the grandmotherly saws seemed to apply: what you’ve never had, you’ve never missed; what you don’t know can’t hurt you; les vrais paradis sont les paradis perdus. The mustiest place I had ever seen, Burma was also, in many ways, the freshest, bright with an innocence close to self-possession, a diamond-shaped country in the rough. One of my school friends, a professional globe-trotter who took his holidays in every obscure land from Mozambique to Panama to Yemen, told me that Burma was his favorite place because it was, in a real sense, unspoiled; to his Christian eye, it represented a kind of Eden. And the last word in Norman Lewis’s Golden Earth, itself the last word on Burma, was “Utopia.”

  The country was made doubly alluring, no doubt, by the sweet ache of nostalgia. Rue was in the air, and the mingled wistfulness of splendor recollected. All the props of the Golden Land were soft with an autumnal sense of yesterday, and every sentence seemed to begin with “once upon a time.” “Once,” a gentle Burmese soldier assured me, “Rangoon Airport was one of the great international centers of Asia. Now …” and his voice drifted off into regret. Once, as I awaited a plane at Inle, a prosperous-looking merchant sidled up and asked me where I came from. When I said England, a light came to his eyes as he began to describe the grand capital he had known as a boy. “Gosh,” he said, “Rangoon was glorious. We had one of the best educational systems in Asia. We had dignity too. But now …” and his voice trailed off. And once, when I checked into the Strand, an aged porter asked me where I had been born. Britain, I answered. He replied with a crisp salute. “Rule Britannia,” he intoned, without a trace of irony. “Britannia rules the waves.”

  The scent of elegy was most haunting amidst the pine-scented country lanes of Maymyo (named after some otherwise unremembered Colonel May). The Motor Association Head Office was crumbling now, but still it took its place proudly on the main street beside the Golf Club Repairing Shop and Diamond Confectionery. Down Charing Cross Road and through Downing Street stepped horse-drawn victorias redolent of a gaslit London. And all around the hills were snug little half-timbered cottages with names like All in All and Fernside, tidy with flawless Cotswold gardens. The queen of them all, of course, was Candacraig (formerly the “chummery” of the Bombay-Burmah Trading Company), the boardinghouse where roast beef and vegetables were served at seven sharp every evening, and coffee was taken by the fireplace. From its balcony, in the misty early morning, I could hear the central town clock tolling with the same chime as Big Ben.

  Filtered as it was through the gentling touch of memory, Burma had something of the poignancy of a book one might find in a secondhand bookstore, a hardback sold for 49 cents, which someone had inscribed as a present to a beloved and their future forever together. In Burma, I had found the India that my parents had known in their youth, albeit an India that had slept for ten thousand nights in the same old clothes. And in Burma I returned to the brisk spartanism of my own days at school in an England forever young.

  After a while, however, I began to register a perplexing fact: Burma had been out of it for ages. A full decade before Ne Win had sent the rest of the world into exile, the prescient Norman Lewis had come to the country determined to see “the traditional Burma, with its archaic and charming way of life.” If he waited any longer, he feared, it would be sullied irreparably by East or West, or else might simply vanish forever into “self-isolation” behind the Bamboo Curtain. Fifty years ago, when Orwell wrote his Burmese Days, the place was already a clubhouse of canned food and faded fashions where yesterday’s promising young men read last month’s copies of Punch. Even a century ago, the most famous lines ever written about Burma, by its honorary poet laureate, Kipling, were ruffled by the mild breeze of nostalgia:

  For the wind is in the palm trees, an’

  the temple bells they say:

  “Come you back, you British soldier;

  come you back to Mandalay!”

  Burma had long lived in the past tense, I suspected, because Burma had long been preserving the memories of an Empire that had itself been built on memory. For decades, the country had accommodated the longing and homesickness of people in an alien land trying to re-create, however anomalously, every last feature of their old unforgotten homes. If the American Empire had to do with currency, immediacy, annihilation of the past, its British counterpart had been founded on continuity, tradition, a reverence, and remembrance, of things past. If the natives could not come to Britain, so the reasoning of the Raj had gone, Britain must come to the natives. Thus even at their prime, the institutions of the Empire had, in their way, been so studied and textbooked a recreation of the homeland that they might have seemed almost a caricature. These days, Maymyo seemed a charming anachronism from an age long gone. Yet even when the place was new, it must have seemed a trifle backward-looking, a brave imitation of a world abandoned. Burma offered, in the end, a double romanticism: the nostalgic continuation of an age of nostalgia.

  This evergreen outdatedness, combined with the country’s remoteness from what is commonly called reality, had long consigned Burma to the farthest reaches of romance. So few reports of the country trickled into the world outside that Burma seemed to survive now only in the mind or memory: to most people, it was little more than the chime of exotic and evocative names. Mandalay. Kipling. The Irrawaddy. Even after my second visit to the country, I was tempted to think of it as a fabulous fiction: a Disney version of the Empire, called Yesterdayland perhaps, or some Hollywood set of an imperial ghost town. Burma had the beguiling sadness of an elegy; its charm lay in its ruined grandeur, its terminal inefficiency, its picturesque decay. Besides, it was always easy to romanticize what one left behind: childhood, or the past, or a country that seemed compounded of both.

  That, perhaps, was the ultimate Western luxury.

  “It’s easy for you to talk about cultural innocence and integrity,” said a foreign diplomat I met in Rangoon, a large man with a gentle manner who loved the country so much that he had returned for his second tour of duty. “But just go and look sometime at the Rangoon Hospital. Just look at it: the place is a charnel house.” His voice, normally soft, took on an unexpected hardness. “I would rather die in the gutter than be admitted to that place.”

  And two days before I left Burma, as I waited for the plane that would take me back to Rangoon, and thence to the outside world, Lionel, my ever-ironic tour guide, ceased for a moment in his delivery of his country’s madcap vagaries to call me aside for a minute. He was five days short of his sixtieth birthday, he said, and he was rich “only in children.” Please, he said, please could I do him one small favor?

  With that, he drew out from his pocket a crumpled envelope. Its address was folded and smudged almost to illegibility. Dimly, I could make out the name of a house in Essex. Please, said Lionel, please could I take this letter to his British uncle? As a Burmese resident, he was not allowed to send letters abroad. But perhaps I could take it for him and perhaps I could get it to his uncle. And perhaps, said Lionel, perhaps his faraway uncle could do something, anything, anything whatsoever—cut some deal or bribe some official or fill out some form—and somehow, sometime, free him from the slow and terrible death of his motherland.

  HONG KONG

  The Empire’s New Clothes

  SUDDENLY, LIKE almost everyone else on almost every trip through Asia, I found myself at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport. Quick with the honking cri
es of energy and enterprise, pungent with discounts and deals, Kai Tak is as much the Grand Central Station of the Orient as O’Hare, according to Tom Wolfe, is the capital of America. Hemmed in by skyscrapers, pressed down under sheer green hills, its single runway squeezed into a spit of reclaimed land so close to the sea that upon landing I saw a Lufthansa jet nose-down in the water, Kai Tak is the spiritual center—and the discount center—of typhooning Hong Kong.

  Inside the sweaty and disheveled transit lounge, the expatriate life was spinning around in all its wound-up frenzy. All about was the bustle, the dash, the dynamism, of people passing through, moving on, sloughing off old selves and picking up new ones. Beefy bronzed men in tropical shirts tapped restless fingers on briefcases as they waited to jet off to K.L., Bangkok, Manila; imperial Brits in impeccably tailored suits marched with a soft-spoken swagger through aisles where clipboard girls fussed busily about. Back and forth between bar and bookstore, bookstore and bar, eyes always open for an unoccupied seat or an unexpected offer, travelers from every corner of the continent circled and circled—smooth-faced Thais and straw-hatted Filipinos, groups of white-clad Japanese honeymoonies, ruddy Australians and curry-reeking Indians trailing all the possessions of this life and the last one and the one before that.

  Departure signs clicked over, baggage carousels turned around, red-faced expats marched off to their commuter planes.

  People on the rise, on the move, on the go.

  MINUTES LATER, I was in a taxi winding along the narrow roads that snake through the hills of the “Mid-Levels.” Below, in the distance, the city was a scintillant dream. Swerving up a steep incline, the car rolled into an underground garage complex and stopped by the side of three Mercedeses, a Rolls, a Porsche and a Ferrari. A noiseless elevator whisked me up to the eighteenth floor, and there, among the stars, stood Georges, a friend from Eton, tanned, barefoot and shirtless after a day at the office. Only a few months earlier, when last we had met, Georges had exhausted all his savings on a squat studio apartment amid the clutter and clamor of Greenwich Village. Now, thanks to an overseas transfer, he was living in a three-bedroom luxury apartment, with exquisite framed Thai prints along the wall, glass cases for his books, a twenty-first-century stereo system alive with green and scarlet flashes. Through his picture window we saw the switchboard lights of the city below, a thousand fireworks arrested in midflight, and, beyond, the illuminated curves of the world’s most breathtaking harbor. Far in the distance gleamed the hills of Kowloon.

  “You know,” said Georges, leading me out onto his terrace in the soft autumn evening, “this place is really something.” Below us, the curving road was lit up by the moon. The night was polished to a sheen and the breeze was warm. “It’s not easy to leave,” he sighed. “Seventeen and a half percent taxes. A free flat. A Filipina amah who comes in once a week to clean the place. Expat Services, Ltd., to take care of all my maintenance. Free holidays. All this.” He swept his hand across the multicolored night. “That’s why gwei lo never go home.”

  We stood outside and a breeze came up, as the nocturne soothed on. Below us, on the next block down, a roof was strung with colored lights. Bodies mingled and gyrated. The crystal tinkle of small talk drifted up to us, and, more faintly, the insistent bass of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”

  “You know,” said Georges, talking slowly, “when you’re ninety years old, and you’re in your rocking chair, and you’re talking to your grandchildren …” And, you know, he was right.

  THE NEXT NIGHT, since it was Friday, we did what expats do on Friday nights. Georges invited two Chinese girls to join us for dinner at a soigné little café in Central, and we chatted about capital ventures and venture capitalists, futures and options, common friends from Harvard and London. Then, since it was Friday, we headed off to a party at the very top of the Peak. “Can I stop in at your flat for just a sec?” asked the girl from Morgan Guaranty. We did, and she put through a call to New York. “Oh. He’s trading? Okay, I’ll call again this afternoon, your time.”

  Into another cab we hopped, whizzing around and around the darkened hills, higher and still higher, around Mulholland twists and Côte d’Azur turns until the lights stretched everywhere before us and we were left upon their jeweled diadem. When last I had seen our host, he too was cohabiting with roaches and mass murderers in Manhattan. Now, high riser in a city of high rises, he lived at the top of the whole carousel. The designer shelves in his bachelor pad were elegantly bare save for a book by Adam Smith, a copy of Competitive Strategies and a pile of old copies of the Far Eastern Economic Review. The men at the party were expats, the girls, with one exception, Chinese.

  A British banker approached a girl. “What do you think of the dollar?”

  “As you know,” said an American investment banker, “work takes up a hundred and ten percent of one’s life here. There’s no demarcation between business and real life. It’s all business. That’s all people do, all they talk about.”

  “Do you know Terry?” asked a local trader. “Sister’s a Cathay girl?”

  “We’re definitely a golden company,” said a Brit in computers. “Five hundred million in fifteen years. Sorry—could you excuse me for a moment? I’ve got to call New York.”

  And sometime after one o’clock, we wandered out into an evening gentler, more coaxing than any I could recall. The moon was so bright, and so bright the incandescence below, that the sky was the blue of faded denim. It felt like the last few minutes before daybreak, and I almost mistook the only diamond in the heavens for the morning star. Lulled by the sentimental muzziness of the faraway lights, buoyed by the sense of limitless possibility, I felt like wandering all night.

  “It’s a seductive city.”

  “It’s a degenerate city.”

  FIRST AND FOREMOST, Hong Kong is an expat city, the world’s great community of transients and refugees—less a community, perhaps, than a dervishing congregation of self-interests. In point of fact, forty out of every forty-one of the Colony’s people are Chinese, not expats but exiles driven to the non-Forbidden City more by circumstance than choice. Yet still the expat seems to preside over the place, symbolically at least, as surely as the salaryman in Tokyo or the party hack in Moscow. The official face of the Crown Colony is white, its official voice the Queen’s English. His Excellency the Governor administers the place, and its fortunes rest with the taipan. One of the major seats of power in the city—represented in my guidebook by a full-color photo—is still the loo at the Foreign Correspondents Club.

  By 1985, moreover, negotiations had made formal what circumstances had long made inevitable—in 1997, Hong Kong would be handed over from Whitehall to Beijing. And with the signing of that agreement, reality had converged with metaphor, and the Colony seemed truly to be left in no hands but its own, directed by nothing save the force of individual will. An unregulated free-for-all, Hong Kong in 1985 seemed more than ever a kind of special economic zone for the international businessman, a giant version of one of those anonymous, convenient intercontinental spaces—the convention center, the five-star lobby, the departure lounge—where people can meet between flights to cut deals, have drinks, talk options. Offering all the amenities of a city with none of the encumbrances of a state, the entrepôt provided a perfect movable feast for go-getters, over-achievers and rootless ex-patriots—driven, self-making men with no allegiances except to the self. The Colony observed no ideology, after all, but laissez-faire, no law except that of the marketplace. It promised plenty of income and almost no tax. It honored no absolutes save profit and impermanence. And the only common denominator, the only lingua franca binding everyone together in Hong Kong—Chinese back-street tailor, British administrator and American investment banker—was money. “Business and shopping are the only things to do here,” announced my Chinese colleague the day I arrived—making money and spending it.

  And if the most concrete and convenient symbol of the city of concrete and convenience
was Kai Tak—a hectic and duty-free and perennially overcrowded waiting room for the future—the most unvarnished was surely the Walled City, the six-acre section of Kowloon which had ended up, through one of the pieces of small print that are the Colony’s history and destiny, policed by neither the Chinese nor the British. Now a kind of no-man’s-land occupied by a neo-Elizabethan hugger-mugger of racketeers, drug dealers, gangsters and abortionists, the shark-toothed area seemed only a rawer version of the city all around—a freewheeling, free-spending center of free enterprise.

  Where freedom meets money—that was the location of Hong Kong. And by 1985, the city had become the last wide-open settlement in the Wild East, the final El Dorado. This was where corporate cowboys came to lasso their futures, where fortune hunters flocked to pan for gold. “This is the second frontier,” an advertising executive told me, excitement in his eyes. “Shoot from the hip,” said his boss, stopping by for a brief strategic chat. “In Hong Kong,” said a cabbie, “there’s lots of freedom. You have money, you can do anything.” And where anything goes, everyone goes, to be somebody.