Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Late one evening, as I wandered through the streets of Chiangmai, I came upon groups of men flinging themselves through a game of volleyball played entirely with head and feet. Their suppleness was a marvel. They somersaulted and pirouetted, making corkscrew pivots in the air; they lunged and twisted high above the ground; they dazzled with their slinky acrobatics. Yet all the while, feet kicked faces, heads banged nastily together. And all around the dusty floodlit square hung a cockfight air of menace.

  The Thais, wrote le Carré, are the world’s swiftest and most efficient killers. Yet executioners would shoot their victims through gauze so as not to offend the Buddha, and monks would strain their water through their teeth so as not, by chance, to harm a single insect.

  But at least, I thought, there was one clear-cut division here, in the Manichean setup of Bangkok. The city’s two most common and appealing sights, after all, were its holy men, in spotless saffron robes, and its scarlet ladies. By day, the monks evoked a vision of purity, of hallowed groves filled with golden novitiates; by night, the whole grimy city felt polished, renewed and transformed as sequined girls sang the body electric. At least, so I thought, this day-and-night division would ensure that good was good, and evil evil, and never the twain would meet.

  But no. For after a while, I began to notice that, as the whores were engagingly girlish, the monks seemed endearingly boyish. I saw them poring over Walkmans in electronics stores with shopping bags slung over their shoulders, puffing ruminatively on cigarettes, playing tag with their friends in temple courtyards. Once, on venturing inside a monastery on a drowsy afternoon, I chanced upon a group of monks, with beautiful faces, huddled, in the cool shadows, before a TV set that was blasting out cartoons. Then I registered a deeper confusion: some monks, I gathered, were criminals on the lam, while others scattered blessings each night upon the go-go bars; many bar girls, for their part, paid regular visits to Buddhist temples, joined palms together whenever they passed a shrine and knelt in prayer before undertaking their bump and daily grind. Finally, quite flummoxed, I was coming to see the girls as something close to martyrs (“72 prostitutes rescued,” proclaimed The Nation), and the holy men as something close to con men (the Bangkok Post told how five monks had killed one of their fellows with axes and knives, because he dared to criticize them for shooting another monk during a party).

  Thus the real sorcery of this dizzying place was that, before one knew it, it could work on one not just a physical but a moral seduction. For here was decadence so decorous that it disarmed the criticism it invited; amorality expressed with the delicacy of a ballerina’s nod. And amid such a guiltless marketing of love, righteous indignation could only bounce off the mirrors and the shadows. Slowly, I saw, the city would unbutton your beliefs; gently, it would unbuckle your scruples; coolly, it would let your defenses slither to the floor. Buddhism did not forbid pleasure, the Thais kept saying—just the infliction of pain. So why find shame in enjoyment, and why take enjoyment in shame? What is so harmful or unnatural in love? Must sweetness be seen as a kind of laxness? Why not see sex as an act of communion? “Mai pen rai” ran their constant refrain. No matter. No sweat. Never mind. “Everyone make love,” cooed sweet-smiling Nitya. “What is so wrong? No problem, dahling, no problem.”

  VIII

  And for all my unease in Bangkok, I could not deny that it was quite the most invigorating, and accommodating, city I had ever seen—more lazily seductive than even Rio or Havana. For elegance here was seasoned with funkiness, and efficiency was set off by mystery. Sugar was blended with spice. On Sunday mornings, I often went early to the Temple of the Dawn, and spent several noiseless hours there, surrounded by Buddhas and gazing at the gilded temples that lay across the river like slumberous lions; the minute I grew hungry, however, I could jump into a ten-cent local bus and savor a delectable lunch of watermelon juice and spicy chicken while watching Eurhythmics videos in a spotless air-conditioned café. In the evenings, I would sip Twining’s tea from porcelain cups in an exquisite teak-tabled restaurant, soothed by the sound of George Winston, then saunter outside to find the wind blowing around the sleeping canals and three-wheel tuk-tuks puttering through the tropical night.

  Bangkok was the heart of the Orient, of course. But it was also every Westerner’s synthetic, five-star version of what the Orient should be: all the exoticism of the East served up amidst all the conveniences of the West (“It seems to combine,” a fascinated S. J. Perelman once wrote, “the Hannibal, Missouri, of Mark Twain’s boyhood with Beverly Hills, the Low Countries and Chinatown”). And all the country’s variegated Western influences seemed, finally, nothing more than decorative strands that could be woven at will into the beautiful and ornamental tapestry of the country’s own inalienable texture (“We provide attractive Thai, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Belgian, Austrian and French girls,” offered one escort agency. “Also handsome and nice boys [gay] entirely at your service”). The Thais, moreover, seemed to know exactly what their assets were—melting smiles, whispering faces, a beseeching frailty, a luxurious grace—and exactly how to turn those virtues into commodities that the West would covet. The carnal marketplace known as the Grace Hotel was, to that extent, aptly named. “Experience unique courtesy only Thai girls can offer.”

  In the end, then, the lovely doubleness with which the bar scene enthralled its foreign votaries seemed scarcely different from the way in which the stealthy East had often disarmed its visitors from abroad. For had not the Buddha himself said that all that we see is illusion? And had not the war in Vietnam turned on much the same conflict between straight-ahead assault and tricky depth? Perhaps its truest representation, Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, had, after all, suggested that the struggle on the battlefield, as in the mind, opposed the usual hard slog of war with the phantom forms of imagination. And in the war too, the result had been the same. Bombs could not annihilate shadows; guns could not demolish mirror images. Strength could not deal with what it could not understand. Throughout the fighting, the Americans had held their own by day. But the Vietnamese had ruled the night. So too, it seemed, in Bangkok.

  Ultimately, then, it began to seem no coincidence that Thailand, the most open and most complaisant of all Asian nations, was also the only one that had never been conquered or colonized. The one woman who never gives herself away, D. H. Lawrence once wrote, is the free woman who always gives herself up. Just so with Thailand, a place, quite literally, more ravishing than ravished. For though it was known as the “Land of Smiles,” the smiles here really gave nothing away; Thai eyes often seemed to laugh, and Thai smiles shone with the light of all that was left unsaid. Many years ago, some Americans had tried to unravel the mystery by calling the Thais “the nicest people money can buy.” But even that seemed too simple a summary of the country’s opacities. And even now, the Thais, with a gentle smile, continued to confound their visitors from abroad. A Westerner was not exactly in the dark here; just always in the shadows.

  The effects of this silken sorcery were clearest, perhaps, in the alien residents who studded the country. For the expats I ran into in Thailand were very different, by and large, from the industrious yuppies who crowd Hong Kong, the vagabond artists who drift through Bali or the beaded seekers who traipse around India. A surprising number of them were underground or marginal men—professional renegades, mercenaries, free-lance writers, drug dealers, proprietors of girlie bars, men (and only men) whose wanderlust was spent. And all of them, in their way, seemed to have slipped into the city’s resistless lifestyle as into the tempting embrace of a goddess. By now, therefore, they seemed almost stranded here, immobilized by their addiction to cheap drugs, to memories of the war or to the same “soft beds of the East” that had once seduced Mark Antony away from his official duties. “This,” said Emmanuelle, “is a place where doing nothing is an art.”

  Yet the hardened expats were at least victims of their own worst selves; visitors to Bangkok with even a tou
ch of naïveté were more likely to fall prey to their better impulses. For the bars provided a perfect setting in which susceptible visitors could lose themselves in thinking they had found themselves, shadow-loving their mirror girls, playing hide-and-seek with their consciences. They tempted their subjects to exchange ideals for fantasies. They teased them into circles of self-doubt. And they invited them to ignore the prudent spinster’s voice of reason, in favor of the coquettish flirtations of pride—I am the one who can save her, I only think of her as a daughter, she really does care for me. Girls with dreams trigger daydreams in men, and make them feel like boys again.

  One man, Ead told me, had stayed with her for five weeks, and had never laid a hand on her; when he left, he had given her a video-machine. Others I knew invariably kept up two girls at once, in the hope that they would fall in love with neither. But even that seemed something of an illusion. And on my third day in Thailand, the Bangkok Post, ever sagacious about the salacious, ran on its front page a pointed warning from Auden: “Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.”

  Yet still each day, the would-be conquerors kept flying into town in droves, old men and young, Arabs and Australians and Americans, on pleasure or a kind of business. Some of them had come many times before, some still had a first-time innocence. And as the airport bus left Johnny behind and drove past the Garden of Eden, Ltd., they could still be seen in the half-light, poring over crumpled pieces of paper (this is Soi Nana, the sex show is here), asking whether the girls were pretty and clean and safe, and concluding, with somewhat shaky assurance, “I think I’ll relax this evening with a good Thai massage.”

  And all night long, in darkened hotel rooms across the length and breadth of the city, from the Sukumvhit Road to Suriwongse, uncertain foreigner and shy-smiling girl kept whispering a ritual litany amidst the mirrors and the shadows.

  Do you really like me?

  Do I really like you?

  Why did you choose me?

  How much? How much? How often?

  When again? How much? Why not?

  You have good heart? You will write to me soon?

  Can you? Will I? Should we?

  No problem, dah-ling. No problem.

  JAPAN

  Perfect Strangers

  WHEN FIRST I set foot in Japan, baseball fever was sweeping the country. Every radio in every cab, so it seemed, crackled with play-by-play commentaries. Blackboards had been set up outside electronics stores to provide passersby with inning-by-inning scoreboards. Huge Sonys in tidy blond-wood cases filled every departure lounge in Narita Airport with faultless images of the game of the moment. And the games and the moments never ended: from dawn to midnight, the screen was filled with one mega-montage of half-familiar images—high fives and hyperactive electronic scoreboards and the swaying of fans to caterwauling organ music, and men circling the bases, half-mythic figures, in many cases, from my boyhood, like Reggie Smith. “Baseball School for Children” was on one network at noon, pro baseball was on another at 7:04 p.m. and the All-Japan National High School Championship was being featured on the government station for nine hours each day.

  At 9 a.m. on the opening day of the high school championship, I settled down before a TV set in a Kyoto coffee shop. Already, Koshien Stadium outside Osaka was filled to capacity with 55,000 fans, screaming their appreciation of opening ceremonies worthy of the Olympic Games. Trumpets sounded from the ramparts. Squadrons of girls trooped onto the field in perfect formation, waving flags. Then the teams themselves marched in, goose-stepping together, hands swinging rigidly by their sides, faces turned bravely in the same direction. The Education Minister came on to throw out the first ball. And for the next two weeks, thousands of people across the nation took time off work or closed down shop in order to follow the High School Championship. This was not, it seemed, a land that believed in half measures.

  Baseball, indeed, was everywhere I looked in Japan. In the narrow streets of Tokyo, I saw children working and working to perfect their moves, and along the wide boulevards, businessmen were lined up in batting cages to refine their skills against pitching machines. Soft-drink machines incorporated games of baseball roulette, magazines offered readers in Hiroshima the chance to “meet your Carp.” Half the little boys across the length of the country seemed to be sporting Giants caps, and every day brought seven different newspapers dealing with nothing—nothing—but sports. Earlier in the summer, a colleague told me, he had been on a photographic assignment in a Buddhist monastery outside Kyoto. Gradually, and patiently, he had won the trust of the head monk. Finally, once the sacred rituals were complete, the holy man had been moved to give his visitor, as a token of his appreciation, a poem. Oh, and one more thing, the monk had added: Were Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle still playing in the major leagues?

  “Baseball is the All-American sport,” marveled Tina, a horse-trainer from Seattle who was bicycling through Japan. “But they’re more fanatic about it here than they are at home.” So indeed it seemed. In America, baseball was only the national pastime; in Japan, it was a national obsession.

  JAPAN’S WHOLE-SCALE, WHOLESALE importation of things American was by now, of course, a universal cliché: students taking courses in Beginning Incongruity or Irony 101 could revel in a treasure house of easy absurdities and crazy juxtapositions, the silliness of signs for “Jerry Beans” or “Gland Beef,” the almost willful absurdity of calling a video arcade “We’ll Talk.” In the hip young streets around Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, a department store (called American Blvd.) advertised “Jeans” in one area, “Accessories” in another and, in a third, “American Spirit”; the coffee shops nearby were mostly decorated in the borrowed nostalgia of American Graffiti, aglitter with shiny prom-night music and retro-mythic images of American Dream-in’. Tokyo’s strip joints, where blondes were at a premium, were called U.S.A. or Campus City, and the magazines I saw at newsstands seemed ready to adopt any title at all, so long as it was English. Their contents were entirely Japanese, but their names were McSister, Miss Hero, Fine, Belove, More, Say, Here, With and, more alarmingly still, Lemon; in the well-endowed Adult section, I saw Big Man and Bachelor, Mr. Dandy and Cool Guy (this last including a bold promise on its cover: “Guaranteed Fully Ellection”).

  Only three days after my arrival in Tokyo, I made the statutory pilgrimage to Mount Fuji. The holy peak, as legend dictates, was veiled behind a screen of clouds that sometimes thickened, sometimes parted, sometimes drifted across the top to register the mountain’s changing moods. Up at the Fifth Station, old men with backpacks and walking sticks, waving flags of the Rising Sun, made their final preparations for a long, emotion-filled ascent that could, in many cases, be the high point of a lifetime. And as they did so, the PA system blasted out a deafening version of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

  “Kyoto?” a member of Bruce Springsteen’s band had pronounced in Newsweek the day I arrived in the ancient capital. “It was just like New Jersey.” As it happened, I thought, he was righter than he knew. For the Stars and Stripes was everywhere in Japan: waved by children at baseball games, fluttering from tables in restaurants, haloed by neon in the streets. As I ate my enormous American-style buffet breakfast in an enormous American-style coffee shop, the room was flooded with a piped-in rendition of “Home on the Range.” And when I rang up a hotel a little later, I was put on hold, and once again there floated over the line the anesthetic strains of the same Ail-American tune.

  The deer and the antelope played here, all right, and seldom was heard a discouraging word. But even so, Japan did not really feel like home to me. Not just because the Mister Donut outlets offered powdered green tea shakes. Nor even because “Radio City” was a disco here, and “The Village Voice” a bar (while “Manhattan St. NYC Coffee” carried a message inviting one to “taste the happiness of New York … where the streets speak to you, something good will probably happen”). But mostly because the Japanese seemed to have erected a
ll the postcard-perfect props of American Suburbia, even as they continued, behind them, to enact their own unfathomable rites. Waseda University had painstakingly re-created an entire Shakespearean theater, I read, and then turned it into a Kabuki museum.

  And if the first familiar truism about Japan was its conspicuous consumption of all things Western, the second was its inability ever to make those things fully its own. “There are few who would seriously object to exposure to foreign habits and customs through copying,” wrote an eighteen-year-old local high school student, Raymond Wong, in a magazine called Tokyo, “but when absorbed only at face value—and without understanding—the purpose is lost and the original intention devalued.” Certainly, the culture often appeared to be perversely determined to forswear the matchless refinement that seemed its birthright in favor of an imported crudity that suited it not at all. The best examples of this, I often thought, were the chic young ladies who marched in battalions through the Tokyo streets in Western styles of elegant blandness. Dressed all alike in clothes that deviated not an inch from the textbook norm, they invariably had Givenchy sewn on their skirts and Gucci on their bags (no trace of Issey Miyake here!). But in their eyes was still a shyness, and in their bearing a reticence, that was only and inalienably Japanese. And it was a revelation to me, on the Night of a Thousand Lanterns in Kyoto, to see the same girls who looked so awkward in their cutoff pants and off-the-shoulder provocations sloughing off their imported styles and suddenly returned to inarguable grace in kimonos that moved with the motions of their flowing bodies.