Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Before I left Bangkok, I sent Ead a note telling her about my visit. A few weeks later, to my surprise, I received a reply. She was very sorry to have missed me, Ead wrote, but she had briefly returned home to help her Mamá on the farm: she had not been able to reply sooner, because nobody in her village could write English. Next time I came, she wrote, please could I tell her my flight number, and she would meet me at the airport. Inside, she included a photo of herself, seated on a swing in some sunny northern village with a pixie’s shy smile—scarcely older, so it seemed, than her seven-year-old daughter. And at the end of the letter, she wrote, simply, “I hope you can remember that girl name Ead.”

  More than a year passed before I was back in Bangkok, on what I suspected would be my last visit for some time. On my way there, I sent Ead several letters telling her how to get in touch with me. But when I got to town, there were no messages for me at my small hotel, and none at the Time bureau, and none at the local American Express office.

  I was still determined, though, to make one last attempt to track her down, and, one bright day, I retraced my steps down the noisy main strip, past the Pizza Hut parlors and the shiny boutiques, past the bars and the sparkling department stores, down to Soi 22. It did not take me long to find the narrow alleyway, and I made my way quickly to the mess of broken shacks. As a little boy skipped past, I showed him the number 193. He pointed to a gate, and I walked hesitantly through. Five or six doors were arranged around a small, dusty courtyard. On one of them, in the corner, I found the number 404. I knocked, and there was a long silence. Then at last a slight teenage girl opened up. Behind her was a tiny, barren room scarcely big enough for the three mattresses on its floor. On the wall a few Playboy pinups flapped idly. Two other frightened-looking girls—one of them nursing a baby—looked up at me from where they were sitting on their beds.

  “Ead?” I asked. “Do you know Ead?” They looked at each other in bemusement, then chattered something in Thai. I tried again, and one of them said something I couldn’t follow. Then the girl at the door motioned me to remain where I was and hurried off into the courtyard. “Ead?” I asked again, and the two others nodded and smiled. One, I was sure, was Ead’s little sister.

  A couple of minutes later, I heard footsteps behind me. Heart pounding, I turned around. It was not Ead, though, but some other small teenager dressed in a pink Mickey Mouse T-shirt that came hardly lower than her waist. She knew a little English—learned, I assumed, in the nearby bars.

  “Hello.”

  “Hullo.”

  “Can you tell me, please, where Ead is?”

  “She gone.”

  The finality of the reply sent a chill through me. Then I began to catch her drift. “You mean she’s gone back to her village?”

  She nodded.

  “For long time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will she be coming back here, do you think?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  There was a silence, and no easy words to fill it. “Well,” I said, fairly sure she could not follow me, “if you see Ead, could you please tell her that I came to say hello?”

  She nodded vaguely, and the girls smiled back at me. Smiling back my thanks, I headed off toward the clatter of the noisy tourist strip. Though sorry to have missed Ead, I was happy too, and relieved, to know that she had freed herself from the gaudy bars and from her nightly commute to the dirty shacks. She had always seemed too thoughtful to remain for long in Soi Cowboy, and in a way, I thought, she had indeed found the great good fortune that the Buddha had promised at the temple.

  But as I continued on to my hotel, I began to wonder how much she could ever really go back to her village. It could not be easy, I thought, to be back with her daughter and her Mamá, in the world that she knew, yet set apart by her memories of another world, of the bright lights she had seen and the grand hotels, of the Aussie who had promised to take her away and the stories of a good life in the West. And it must be strange for her to be back inside the family hut, yet alone with her thoughts, and alone with the English she had taught herself.

  I often thought of Ead in the months that followed, by herself in her northern village with her jeans, her “Hello Kitty” handbag and her dime-store photo album with a bee on the cover. And I realized, when I did, that I had never left Asia at all; while she, like all the others, could never quite go back.

  Afterword to the Vintage Edition

  When I was traveling through Asia in the mid-1980s, it was easy to believe that East and West were on opposite sides of the globe, not a great deal closer than in Kipling’s time. The Cold War had everyone thinking in binary terms, and for many people much of Asia still seemed as distant, as exotic, as Shangri-La. Thailand had yet to go global—pad thai and panang curry were hardly known outside of Southeast Asia—and as for Tibet, it seemed no closer to most of us than a scratchy old copy of Lost Horizon. China had scarcely emerged from behind its historic walls, and Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam were all more or less forbidden lands. To the young in those places, California was at best an image glimpsed occasionally on screen.

  Now, of course, all that has changed, and many cultures seem to have gone from isolation to connectedness in what feels like days. The remotest points now—Luang Prabang, or Ulan Bator—are just a click away from anywhere, and East and West are almost obsolete terms, when they are not irrelevant ones. I often think that I was lucky to get to see Asia at a time when the process had only just begun to accelerate, and young travelers who were contemporaries of the jumbo jet and the small screen were first beginning to visit the places that their parents had only dreamed of (and that had only dreamed of them). In those days East and West had only intimations of the other, as the yin contains a bit of yang, and vice versa.

  These days, amidst our latest catchwords—“global market,” “World Wide Web,” and “fusion culture”—Asia has moved as fast as anywhere, from boom to bust to boom to revolution. Living in Japan, as I now do, I often have occasion to travel around my former haunts, and I’ve watched Bangkok, for example, shoot up like a dusty country girl who’s gone off to Harvard Business School and come back with a shiny new efficiency to transform her home. China, in places, has embraced a neon capitalism so furious that Shanghai looks like one of the first cities of the twenty-first century, and Bhutan has transcribed all its sutras onto computers. Where Video Night in Kathmandu concerned the mixed responses of American baseball players in Japan, now it is Japanese pitchers who are throwing American baseball into fits; and where it was then most noticeable that Hollywood was conquering the East, now it is the directors of Bollywood and Hong Kong who are making their presence felt in Hollywood.

  And yet, below the surface of our latest toys, I wonder how much any of the cultures I was visiting have really changed, deep down. Whenever I return to my parents’ homeland, India, I am startled to see ads for cell phones and computers and multinational colas tower over the car- (and bullock-and bicycle-) filled streets, and I hear that when graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology want to hold a reunion, it makes more sense for them to do so in Silicon Valley than in Bangalore. India has begun to take in the world at a rate unimaginable to even my parents, Yet when I sit above the Yamuna River at dusk, and watch a ferryman pole across the water, a trail of cows on the far shore and nothing else moving under the setting sun—or when I go into bazaars and run into tribal, bangled kids (from Perth, or Vancouver, or Dusseldorf) collecting talismans of pleasure or wisdom (or the convergence of them both)—India looks to me just as it did a generation ago, or (no doubt) ten generations, too: an image of the Absolute brought down to earth.

  I return to Kathmandu and find that people seem as good-natured and gentle as they ever did, even though their city is now, by some counts, the second most polluted in the world; I pass through Hong Kong, now a part of China, and the state-of-the-art new airport, ready to take off into the heavens, seems just as much a termina
l of transients as the old one I describe in these pages. Even in the places I could not visit when I was writing the book—Angkor and Vientiane and Hanoi—I am most struck, when I sit along the Mekong River, or wander around Khmer ruins, by the presence of old ghosts. Every country is downloading the latest version of Windows 2000, yet each of them—Indonesia and Burma and the Philippines—is doing so in a different way, true to its distinctive temperament.

  Every day, after all, most of us change from pyjamas to jogging clothes to suit or jeans (or Mongolian waistcoat, or whatever); yet when you look at our hearts, as when you look at the eyes of a child in an album recording his growth, it’s less clear that anything is changing. The Japanese girls outside my window as I write this are clomping off to McDonald’s in cowboy hats, 8-inch platform heels and yellow hair; but I’m not sure they’re so different from their mini-skirted mothers of twenty years before.

  The changes that are truly significant—and irreversible, sometimes—are those enforced by politics. Tibet, which was abloom with the excitement of its opening to the world when I first visited, is now all but extinct: the old quarter of Lhasa is bustling only in the sets of Hollywood movies, shot in Morocco or Argentina, and the Potala Palace is ringed by featureless modern Chinese blocks that make a mockery of its meaning. Yet at the same time Tibetan culture and philosophy and color—much that travelers were flocking to Lhasa to enjoy at the time—are now in our midst in New York and Paris and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The mysterious East is all around us when we step out of our front doors in Sydney, Toronto, London.

  So the deeper truth, perhaps, is that the globalism I was describing in these places has migrated inwards, and the borders that used to exist mostly in our minds have been replaced by a borderlessness that may be just as notional. The culture clashes that were once so striking to me in the bars of Manila or the markets of Hong Kong are now to be found inside those international beings who don’t know where they come from, or to what culture they belong. The German man I might have watched courting a Thai girl in Video Night in Kathmandu is now the father of a half-Thai, half-German daughter who’s growing up in mongrel Los Angeles, and introducing her friends to The Ramayana and Hermann Hesse. When I came to write a kind of unacknowledged sequel to Video Night in Kathmandu one full turn of the Chinese calendar later—called The Global Soul—the slow dances and surprised romances I found myself chronicling were all taking place inside multicultural hearts.

  Besides, the core of this book (which is, I think, the core of our travels) has little to do with East and West, or official forms of designation, and more to do with something universal, which never changes: our encounters with the alien. A girl in Baguio listens to a pop song by Whitney Houston, and then meets a man from Arkansas, and doesn’t know how much he is an embodiment of the culture she’s in love with, and how much not; he, in turn, reaches out to her—an embodiment of the East—with an equal mix of wonder and uncertainty. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a woman in Shigatse or Sheboygan—you’re drawn, in some measure, towards the foreign, you’re drawn towards what is familiar, and the complications of both increase when you find yourself surrounded by the alien even in your home.

  In the pages that precede this, you will have met a trishaw driver in the old city of Mandalay, who caught my heart in the way that distant characters always catch our hearts, with his mix of innocence and hopefulness. I met him at the station, as I came off the overnight train from Rangoon, and he invited me into his home, his life.

  Later, once I returned to California, we often exchanged letters, and sometimes I sent friends to see him, and report back on how his new family and job were going. Then, however, three years after our meeting, and just as this book was being published, a new government suddenly clamped down with new ferocity on all independent-minded Burma, and the country disappeared again behind a wall. The capital city was now called Yangon, the nation itself was renamed Myanmar, and my friend’s letters suddenly stopped arriving. I, meanwhile, in my own life, went through my own small revolutions: a forest fire burned my house to the ground, and I found myself as far from coordinates and possessions as many of the people I had written about.

  For more than a decade, I never heard from my old friend. Then, one day in Japan, after a few false leads, a message came from a stranger in London, asking me for my address, so he could forward a letter from a trishaw-driver in Mandalay. I sent it, and heard nothing. Then, a little later, a letter arrived from Montreal, and inside it was the handwriting I recalled from many years before, filling me in on his life.

  Soon after I had met him, my friend wrote, twelve years before, a Texan couple had come to Mandalay, and been so moved by his solicitude and enterprise that they had given him two hundred dollars, enough money to fulfill his lifelong dream of buying his own trishaw. He had done so, and counted his blessings, when he met another visitor, from Italy, who had promised to give him a camera—a whole new life as a photographer—if he would find some old Burmese coins for him. My friend had done so, spending all his money to collect the coins the Italian had wanted. He had sent him the coins and gone to Rangoon, as instructed, but he waited and waited, and the Italian never showed up. He went back to his wife, and told her that their life savings were gone, and together with their five children they had returned to their village to start their lives again.

  Now, he wrote, after many years he was back at last in Mandalay, working, as it happened, as a trishaw driver outside the station once again; if ever I came back, perhaps I could visit him?

  Tourists had made his dream come true, and tourists had robbed him of everything he had. Whatever was mysterious or ambiguous about the passage across borders, I thought—whatever had first propelled me towards Mandalay, and him towards me—was no different than it had ever been: a foreigner steps off the overnight train from the capital and there, in the early light, stands a stranger, beside a trishaw, a bright shine of expectation in his eyes.

  Nara, Japan

  December 2000

  Acknowledgments

  My warmest thanks are due, first of all, to my editors at Time, an institution that richly deserves its reputation for civility and hospitality. I know few other companies that would allow a young employee, on the job for less than a year, to take three long vacations in Asia in the space of a year and then to take off six more months to pursue his Eastern interests still further. In the course of that leave, the Time family was again as godfa-therly as ever: in many a faraway place, colleagues I had never met guarded my mail, lent me their facilities, and gallantly rescued me, with fine meals and local intelligence, from the style to which I was growing accustomed.

  I owe a different kind of thanks to all the friends who shared and shaped a few of these adventures, especially Louis Greig, my schoolfriend, doctor, driver, guide, and sidekick, everywhere from Rome to Rangoon, Vegas to Gstaad, and Istanbul to Marrakesh; and Kristin McCloy, a whirling dervish with a pilgrim soul. Thanks are due no less to all those other kind beings who put up with me and put me up in Asia, especially Georges Holzberger in Hong Kong, Lawrence Macdonald in Beijing, my relatives in India, and the many others, named and unnamed, who grace these pages.

  In writing up my experiences, I am also, as ever, deeply grateful to all my friends in Santa Barbara, whose generosity and idealism have long indulged, as much as they have humbled, me. In this context, I owe particular thanks to Joe and Donna Woodruff, who sustained me with wonderful food and warm companionship all the time I was writing; and to Elton Hall and Kilian Coster, who frequently dropped whatever they were doing in order to rescue a sorcerer’s apprentice from life-and-death struggles with computers, printers, and other modern beasts. I could not hope to find better readers, more discriminating and yet understanding, than Mark Muro and Steve Carlson, who made honesty and sympathy seem good friends after all.

  Finally, I would like to thank the people at Knopf, who were gracious enough to reply to an anonymous proposal sent through the mail in a brown en
velope, and trusting enough to give this unknown quantity their support. Through the patience and care of his editing, Charles Elliott has taught me a great deal about writing.

  My first debt is recorded in the dedication; so too is my last.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. For four years he wrote on world affairs for Time, and he continues to contribute essays and reviews to the magazine. His literary pieces have appeared in Partisan Review, Smithsonian, The Village Voice, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.

  ALSO BY PICO IYER

  THE GLOBAL SOUL

  Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

  Beginning in Los Angeles International airport, where town life is available without a town, Iyer goes to Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels, and to Toronto, which has been given new life and a new literature by its immigrant population. Ultimately Iyer takes us to Japan, where amid alien surfaces and an apartment building ironically called The Memphis, he discovers a kind of belonging. The Global Soul is a thought-provoking examination of what the word “home” can possibly mean in a world whose face is blurred by its cultural fusion and its alarmingly rapid rate of change.

  Current Affairs/Travel/978-0-679-77611-6

  SUN AFTER DARK

  Flights into the Foreign

  A cryptic encounter in the perfumed darkness of Bali; a tour of a Bolivian prison, conducted by an enterprising inmate; a nightmarish taxi ride across southern Yemen, where the men with guns may be customs inspectors or revolutionaries—these are just three of the stops on Pico Iyer’s latest itinerary. But the true subject of the book is the dislocation of the mind in transit. And so Iyer takes us along to meditate with Leonard Cohen and talk geopolitics with the Dalai Lama. He navigates the Magritte-like landscape of jet lag, “a place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago.” And on every page of this poetic and provocative book, he compels us to redraw our map of the world.