Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  In every café and penthouse, at every brunch and party, New York seemed to hover above Hong Kong as the sparkling apotheosis of all the values it enshrined: Speed, Money, Hard Dazzle. The hottest nightclub in town was Manhattan, the second best was New York, New York. A New York opera company came here once a year, said a Chinese girl from Harvard Business School, but they were never up to scratch; other cultural adornments of the beau monde never came at all. Luckily, she added, she would be taking a holiday next week in Manhattan. And some of this repeated frustration might only have reflected the glamour lent by distance, compounded by the wistfulness bred by exile. Part of it probably betrayed the congenital restlessness of the overachiever who finds himself at the top of his world and yet must find new worlds to conquer every day. Most of it, though, seemed to arise from the nervous self-doubt of the expat, who, ruling his small pond, can never forget that he succeeded only by seceding. Whenever I went to an expat party, I thought, with unkind irony, of the sign pinned up on every Hong Kong minibus—“For complainants, please call …” For everywhere, the lament continued. New York was prodigal, Hong Kong was only provincial; New York was cosmopolitan, Hong Kong was simply metropolitan; New York was everything, Hong Kong was nothing.

  “This is a small town, amateurish,” said a chubby Brit at a party, joyful because the next day would find him moving to Tokyo. “I want decency. I want professionalism. The East? It’s awful here. I mean, I’ve been to Thailand and all the rest. But after one day of Asian villages, how much can you see? I know it’s terrible, but I’m a businessman. I’m not interested in Asia. If I go away for two days, I can’t read the FT.”

  SOMETHING OF THE great terror of the expat—to be trapped between the whirlpool of an incestuous foreigner community and the forbidding cliffs of an outer world that will always be alien—had come home to me in Brunei. Though the gold-plated sultanate was famous for its $350-million palace (complete with a telephone in each of its 2,200 rooms), its $15-billion surplus spread among a population about the size of Colorado Springs’ and its per capita income, the highest in the world outside Kuwait, the only Neronian splendors I could find in its torpid capital were a multistory car park, a stadium, two overpriced hotels and a supermarket (which accepted American Express cards). Within two hours of arrival, I had exhausted its main sights—a tiny aquarium and a museum commemorating Winston Churchill on the grounds that Churchill had never been here—and was reduced to reading old copies of Harper’s in the local library. In the streets, I saw tired-looking Mummies in sundresses leading whining children by the hand, and in the Grill Room (a pubby place with barrels of sherry on its walls and place mats representing the churches of Albion), red-faced Brits sullenly knifed their steaks while their Malay mistresses gaily chattered away. By my second day in town, I was beginning to see the same faces in the same places, and by my second night I was longing for the days to end. I stayed up till 1 a.m. to watch I Was a Mail Order Bride on TV and spent much of a morning reading the local phone book’s essay “How to Use a Telephone” (Step #1: “Ascertain from the current issue of the Telephone Directory the number you wish to call”). That evening, at the Sheraton coffee shop, I saw the same Brit sipping what looked like the same $7 celery juice and paging his way through the same worn volume of Angus Wilson. I got on the next bus to the airport, and fled.

  YET HONG KONG, I told myself, was in a different league; Hong Kong was a large international city that offered something for everyone. But even in Hong Kong, after three days in town, I began to find spheres overlapping, lines converging, my life noosed into a very small circle. All roads led to home. As I made the rounds of the expat circuit, I found myself playing the same party game of “Do you know so-and-so?” and then remarking, with an ease that left me uneasy, “What a small world!” So-and-so was at Jardine’s and her friend was at Morgan Guaranty and she knew him from the Asian Wall Street Journal. At first I was excited to learn that a colleague from Time lived in the very next house to my school friend Georges. But soon it became apparent that everyone lived next door to everyone else. I had lunch one weekday—chile rellenos and Coke—at the place where expats have their weekday lunch—the American Club, forty-seven floors above the world. That night, on the other side of the harbor, in another world filled with young Chinese couples romancing under the stars, I saw my two expat friends from lunch, dressed in black-jacket Gatsby splendor, reeling out of the Regent Hotel in a swirl of laughter and drinks, a sequined Daisy Buchanan teetering along between them. I told Georges I’d like to introduce him to a journalistic couple I’d met in Manila. “Sure,” said Georges, “I met him at a party two nights ago given by this girl who reads the news at ATV. Together with his friend Jack.” “Really? I met him at brunch last Sunday.”

  Even the Chinese I met in Macao were silky men in beautifully tailored blue suits with courtly manners who might as well have been Old Etonians, or their neighbors. One told me that his daughters were studying in California. The other described how a friend had lost $2 million in a single afternoon at the casino.

  By the time I had been in the Colony a while, I was no longer surprised that Georges, on his first day here, had chanced to meet a fellow from his house at Eton. Where? At a cocktail party, actually.

  AFTER A WHILE, moreover, I gathered from party whispers that not all the Brits here were old school types, and not all the fugitives were Chinese. If most Chinese came to Hong Kong to flee the tyranny of classlessness, many Brits had come to escape the rigidity of class. Expatriation in any place is a shortcut to upward mobility, but in Hong Kong, where the British held symbolic sway yet the law of the commercial jungle obtained, the dice were even more loaded. Hong Kong had the jitters of an arriviste.

  “I know this Welsh architect. He left a dull job in some grimy town and came over here. Suddenly he had maids, cars, an oceanfront villa in Repulse Bay. The firm paid for his children’s schooling and for his private clubs. When his time was up, after thirty-six months, he was willing to do anything—anything at all—to extend his stay. Anything. He was almost begging.”

  One of the appeals of expatriation, I had always thought, was that it allowed one to treat real life as romantic; abroad, one could credit the lies one saw through at home. But one of the dangers of expatriation, I came to see, was that it tempted one to live the lies that would be seen through at home. Expatriation was often just evasion disguising itself as election. Expatriation permitted every john to become a sahib, and every girl to turn herself into le Carré’s Lizzie Worthington, and both of them to flourish their new identities before people who could do nothing but defer.

  “So this policeman comes here—just a regular British bobby—and all of a sudden here he is, with sixty men at his beck and call, two thousand subordinates in all. You can imagine the exploitation that follows.”

  Thus the trappings of expatriation became traps, and a freedom from attachments never did quite amount to detachment. Many Brits, I gathered, longed not so much to flee snobbery as to exercise it in a system in which they could at last be on the giving, rather than the receiving, end. Expatriation allowed them to get their revenge on Britain, even as they became more and more British the farther they got from home. Expatriation encouraged them to define themselves by their distance from the world around them, to make their very separation their identity and their exile their home. It did not seem a happy exchange.

  “Most typical English people, middle-class, come here,” explained a twenty-four-year-old Brit I had never met before. “Suddenly they’ve got an amah. And a fantastic flat. And a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year housing allowance. And a salary five to ten times higher than they’d ever get in the U.K. And it’s a fabulous life. And they also have the natives, who’ll do anything for them and whom they can always treat as natives. I find it disgusting. I’m sorry, but I do.”

  But surely only a very few people fit into that category?

  “I’d say about ninety-five percent.”

  ON MY LAST
Wednesday evening in the Colony, I did what expats do on weekday evenings, heading off to the Culture Club, a private joint done up in pinstripe gray and black with a video screen in the bar playing old Bogart movies and sleek young beauties serving up “Nouvelle Japonesque” dishes (popular, I suspected, less because it was Japanese than because it reeked of Nouvelle York). By way of matters domestic, I and my three executive hosts discussed our home from home in the Colony, Cathay Pacific. I had chosen to fly with them, I said, not because they served free drinks in economy, or because they recruited their hostesses from all the Asian nations, but mostly because they seemed to be the only Eastern airline that stocked Sports Illustrated. Also, I added, I half hoped to meet the girlfriends of my expat school friends on the flights; most of them, by all accounts, were Cathay girls.

  With that, the conversation perceptibly perked up. Of course, said my hosts; Cathay girls were the main reason for being here. Cathay girls were one’s social life. Cathay girls were one’s principal diversion. If one flew a lot—and one did, since one almost lived on planes—one couldn’t fail to get to know a lot of Cathay girls pretty well. Swire’s employees had the first pick, of course, since they worked for the same company, but every expat was in with a chance. The girls were bivouacked at the YWCA in Kowloon, but it was never hard to get around the visiting-hour restrictions. One of my hosts, by virtue of living in Bangkok, had a special expertise in the habits of Cathay girls from Thailand. They often went to a special Vietnamese restaurant in Kowloon, he said, but they could also be found at the Sawadee Thai restaurant, which was owned by a couple of Cathay girls from Thailand. The real Cathay aficionado, however, was said to be the absent Chris. He knew so many Cathay girls so well that on one celebrated occasion, he had stepped onto a plane and seen a girl he had once dated. Then he had looked up and there was another. And then a third. For the entire flight, like some figure from a Tony Curtis movie, he had had to keep his face hidden inside his copy of the airline magazine. Nowadays he flew only with Singapore Airlines.

  Certainly, my hosts assured me, I could hardly leave Hong Kong without meeting a few Cathay girls. Come to dinner on Friday, one of them offered, and I’ll round up a few Cathay girls to come with us to the Vietnamese restaurant.

  “For girls,” confided an American headhunter at another party, “you’ve got to go to the Chinese community.”

  “Funny thing, you know,” said a British merchant-banker, shaking his head at lunch. “Most of my female friends here are Oriental. But all my male friends are British.”

  “You know, over here, you really become something of an experience freak,” said an American sales executive. “You just get lost in your self-created universe. Did I tell you about the girls at the Regent Hotel in Bangkok?”

  ON MY LAST night in Hong Kong, a Friday, I did what expats do on Friday evenings when there isn’t a party to go to: I went out for a meal with some Cathay girls. But two of the girls, as it turned out, were flying that evening and the other was “kind of committed.” Next time I came through, said my host consolingly, he’d come through with some Cathay girls for dinner. In the meantime, though, he could show me what expats do when Cathay girls are busy.

  At the cocktail hour, we taxied across the harbor to the Regent Hotel and stopped off for a drink there. After dinner in Kowloon, we had a choice between the two places that expats haunt: Rick’s Bar or Haley’s Rock and Roll Club. The latter sounded more promising to me, so we walked through jumbled streets, letters wriggling vertically into the sky, people scurrying horizontally across the road, all of it a spiced pandemonium. We entered a small dark room. A wild-eyed Brit was jumping up and down on a piano stool and thumping out seventies art-rock songs on an electric keyboard. A long-haired Tamil was singing raucous backup and a couple of bespectacled Chinese who looked like Ph.D. candidates in physics were laying down some pragmatic bass lines. Expats in loosened ties and striped shirts were sprawled around the booths, extending lazy arms around the waists of passing Filipina barmaids. At some of the tables were a few Chinese girls, all ivory cool and Gucci hauteur, indulging their Chase Manhattan dates; against the wall were two British slatterns, eyes too black and skin too red and hair a little too yellow. When the singer told everyone to join in, everyone moaned, together and on cue, “Oh, Carol.”

  The maniac brought the song to a tidy conclusion and then stopped for a breathy intro to “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” “I’d like to dedicate this song,” he began, “to Bank of America, and to its continued policy of lending money only to those who are unreliable.” Wild whoops of laughter greeted the sally, and drunken cries of glee.

  The night grew boozier and looser. More rockabilly financial numbers followed. A horn-rimmed Morgan Guaranty type in a blue-and-white-striped shirt and suspenders got up and laid an arm on one of the Filipina waitresses. He whispered something, and she pushed him away with a giggle. The next song, he tried the other barmaid, but she had been warned already. A few minutes later, he came lurching over to the British girls. One of them smiled as he whispered something in her ear, and, standing up, let him lead her through a dance. With that, she returned to her seat. What had he said? her friend asked urgently. “He gave me a thousand dollars [$120].” “What for?” “Just for agreeing to dance with him.”

  A little later, we left Haley’s. My friend had to catch a 6 a.m. flight to Taipei the next morning. For business? No; not business, actually. He was off to see a girl. The same one he’d been to see in Taiwan last weekend? No, this one, as it happened, was different.

  And next day, I too was back at Kai Tak, transit lounge in a city of transients, great thoroughfare of the continent. The expat life was spinning around in all its wound-up frenzy. People shouted out goodbyes, hurried to find spare seats, waited for tomorrow. Departure signs clicked over, baggage carousels turned around, red-faced expats marched off to their commuter planes.

  People on the make, on the edge, on the run.

  INDIA

  Hollywood in the Fifties

  A MEMBER OF my family, I was told when I arrived in India, a handsome man in his late thirties with two children, had been given a year to live. He could not sleep at night, and neither could his family for his constant cries of pain.

  THE MOMENT WAS tense; a group of well-dressed dignitaries had assembled in the imperial palace. The country was in the midst of crisis; turbulence was all around. Then, suddenly, out into the center of the hall came an enormous birthday cake, and out of that popped our strapping hero, dressed as a Jesuit father and playing an antic tune on his fiddle. As soon as she saw him, our sultry heroine fell pouting to her knees. At that, the redeemer ripped off his disguise to reveal a white tuxedo, and the two began blurting out a duet while shaking their hips together in a copy of Saturday Night Fever. Instantly, there was joy all round. Scores of onlookers turned into blazered men and bangled and bejeweled houris, writhing and wriggling in unison. The lead couple shimmied and slithered through a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers routine, arching their hips and flashing their eyes as they went. And everyone was happy, everything seemed good. There was plenty of singing and dancing.

  Hero and heroine had met only shortly before. He had chanced to see her dragging an old woman through the dust of her palace grounds from the back of her snow-white Chevrolet. Hating such injustice, he had leaped into a horse cart and given chase. In the blink of an eye, he had overtaken the convertible and stood in its path and rescued the old lady. Little did he guess that this was the mother he had never known! And the girl was a princess, pale-skinned, pantsuited and voluptuous, while the man was nothing but a low-caste “tonga wallah.” Yet when her eyes flashed with rage, he stared back unterrified. And so it was that their eyes locked and their hearts beat as one and they knew they could never live apart. The rest, in its way, was history.

  Meanwhile, the entire country was ablaze with the flames of strife! For its people were under the thumb of a race of wicked despots from across the sea, white of skin yet black
of heart. Already, the cruel tyrants had killed a thousand brave fighters at Amritsar; now, merciless fiends, they wished to drain the blood of every Indian in order to sustain their own soldiers. Outside their opulent club hung a sign—“Dogs and Indians Are Not Allowed.” Inside, the shameless imperialists sat around a swimming pool, sipping wine as they ogled slinky girls in bikinis.

  And then, without a warning and out of nowhere, who should come to the rescue but Our Hero? Sending his tonga crashing through the club’s french windows, he rode into the pool to deliver an impromptu sermon in his heroic baritone; then, striding out, he seized a shaven-headed villain by the throat, forced him to drink Indian beer, kicked him into the water and began playing the drums on his head. And by the hero’s side came Moti, the Wonder Dog, and behind them both the Wonder Horse, a silver stallion willing to risk anything in the cause of freedom. The Wonder Dog lifted his leg on the Empire. The Wonder Horse galloped this way and that. And the Wonder Man rubbed a foreigner’s bloody nose into the detested sign until it blotted out one of the hateful words. Now the sign read: “Dogs and Indians Are Allowed.” Jubilation! Ecstasy! Liberation! Joyfully, the crowd jumped up and followed its hero through a great deal of singing and dancing!

  And so the humble tonga wallah led the downtrodden masses to freedom. He rescued poor babies, he lectured the oppressed, he brought speech to the dumb and made the lame to walk. He even, in the manner of a holy man, broke a coconut on his head. The dastardly British tried everything they could to stop him. They locked him up. They tied him up. They beat him up. They made him enter a gladiatorial arena and fight to the death the father he had never known. But nothing could stop him, neither Man nor Nature. Fearless in the fight for freedom, he burned effigies of Dyer and smashed a statue of Curzon. Like a good son, he embraced his father when he learned that he had been exchanged at birth for another. Like a good hero, he was ready at a pinch to wink and wiggle with his beloved. And like a good Hindu, he was as pious as he was playful: at his foster mother’s grave, he sorrowfully performed all the appropriate devotional rites before scattering her ashes on the Ganges.