by Pico Iyer
Now, as I joined them to discuss dinner, I let the fourteen-hour difference from California seep through my woozy system. We could order room service, I was told, from a hotel with 565 rooms next door, or from one with 604 rooms next to it; we could order food from the other hotel in the complex, which had 512 rooms. Around us, in the distance, sat the last sad remnants of British rule: the Happy Valley Racecourse, the Noon Day Gun, the Craigengower Cricket Club. Beneath us, in the area known as Admiralty, were the trappings of the new Empire—a four-story shopping mall (called simply—definitely—the Mall), where shiny signs pointed towards the Atrium, The United Center, One Pacific Place and Two.
“The thing about this place,” Richard said to me as I slipped in and out of time zones, “is that you’ve got a miniairport on the ground floor, where you can check in for all Cathay flights. There’s a Seibu department store on Level Two, where you can buy everything you want. My bank’s next to the elevator, and the Immigration Office is next to my office. You never really have to leave the building.”
When I went into the guest bathroom to splash some water over my face—I hadn’t yet come down to earth—I found some Thai Air hair treatment next to the sink, and a bottle of La Quinta Resort and Spa moisturizer. There was a Delta business class toilet kit nearby, as well as a British Airways towelette and some Princess Cruises French formula shampoo. Otherwise, nothing whatsoever, except for some toothpaste from some Imperial Hotel.
There was maid service, should I want it, and laundry service, too; there were DO NOT DISTURB signs to hang outside the door. The place was run by the Swire Group, the venerable old British hong that had provided new Eastern lives for many of our schoolfriends, and here had constructed a kind of Club Class Lounge three hundred feet above the ground. A permanent hotel.
“It’s an odd life you lead here,” I said to Richard, whom I’d always thought of as a Victorian district officer transferred to a digital age. “It is,” he said, not without some glee, and, with that, he proceeded to pull out his phone bill for the month just past. It was only one of the five he paid every month—and the smallest, as it happened—but still it came to seven hundred dollars. “I have twelve telephone cards,” he said, fishing them out, one by one, from his wallet. “A Singapore Telephone card, an AT&T calling card, and an MCI—three AT&T’s, actually—as well as an ETI—you know, an Executive Telephone International. Also, of course, a GSM phone with two SIM cards”—he drew out his mobile and showed me how he could slip the cards in and out, depending on whether he was in Asia or Europe. “And three Kallback services, with the appropriate cards.”
I was tempted to gape, except that I had just paid almost a week’s salary for my monthly telephone bill, not to mention another bill for the cell phone I’d gotten for my mother, another for a Kallback service, another for my phone in Japan, a few more for fax machines in Japan and California, as well as overseas on-line surcharges. An unlikely fate for two friends raised on Latin hymns.
“I don’t know how you keep up with all this.”
“I don’t have to. I just charge everything to my AmEx card.”
“For which you get miles?”
“For which I get miles enough to send Sharon around the world every month. Look”—and with that he spread open his wallet so I could inspect a colorful assembly of members’ cards—from the Red Carpet Club and the Passages service, for Marriott Miles and Singapore Airlines. He had a Europlus and a Priority Passenger Service card, as well as the customary guarantee that he’d never be turned away from a seat on Marco Polo Class.
“The thing is, I always carry at least five plane tickets with me everywhere I go, so I can use segments sometimes.” He drew out a stash of half-completed, worn, and folded plane tickets, for almost every itinerary he might take tomorrow: Hong Kong–London, Hong Kong–Madrid, Boston–Tokyo, London–Boston. He had courted his wife, I recalled, by flying around the world—London–San Francisco–Tokyo–London—virtually every weekend for two years, and still was without doubt one of the least ambitious and acquisitive people I knew: on expense-account trips, he’d been known to stay in youth hostels.
“I just switch back and forth,” he said, knowing that he was talking to someone similarly trained in living in midair. “It saves the company a lot of money. In fact, I probably pay less for flying First Class than most people pay for Business Class.” After getting off the thirteen-hour flight from London, Richard usually took the A2 bus home.
At that point, bulky envelopes began to emerge from his briefcase—one after another, till I’d counted twenty-seven—and I saw that every single one of them was stuffed with telephone cards, coins, and tokens for the twenty-seven countries he was likeliest to find himself in tomorrow. “Bus tickets for Amsterdam,” he said. “That’s the best way to get around there. Phone cards for Japan. Pesetas for Madrid.”
“And you can still keep working wherever you are?”
“Absolutely. I have voice mail in Japan, Hong Kong, and Boston, and I can check my messages from anywhere. The only trouble is, I don’t have a mobile modem, so I can’t collect my E-mail in a car.”
“But you’re never in a car!”
“That’s true. I’m more often in a plane than in a car. Some flight attendants recently were working out that I fly more than they do.”
We paused a little while I took in the SIM cards. “But you’re right,” Richard continued. “We don’t have a car anywhere. We don’t need one. I don’t even have an office, really. I’ll show you when I get back from overseas.”
The thing to stress here is that Richard is by no means extravagantly rich, and certainly no jet-setter; he’s just an extremely hardworking international management consultant in a global market that asks him to move as fast as it does. He’s also one of the most human people I know, loyal and affectionate and strong enough to root himself in something other than the circumstances of his life.
But he works—more and more of us do—in an accelerating world, for which the ideal base of operations was this international Home Page of a city. There were four cinemas in the Mall where we were sleeping, more than twenty places in which to eat, and fully ninety-seven boutiques (Gucci, Guess, Valentino, Vuitton; Boss, Hugo Boss, the Armani Exchange). There was access to the MTR subway, to the Far East Finance Center, and to a car park. There were the great department stores of Britain, Hong Kong, and Japan. “A world of delights,” as the literature announced, “under one roof.”
On the plane coming into the old city airport, I’d flipped through the in-flight magazine and found a kind of mobile emporium of goods to allow “flexecutives” like Richard to take care of business in midair. There were ads for Sky Tel alphanumeric paging services and for World Cell pocket phones, for credit card–sized “PC companions” and “voice file portable IC chip recorders.” As I scribbled down on a piece of paper the details of teleconferencing speakers with satellites and digital cameras with built-in PC cards, not to mention a Card Scan Plus 300 for scanning cards into your “Personal Pilot,” I felt, as I did more and more often these days, as if I’d left my language on another continent. In any case, most of these devices would probably be out of date by the time we hit the ground.
I could order any one of them, I read, in my “Airborne Office,” by credit card, using the Airfone nearby, which could also be used for sending faxes, taking calls, and charging everything to an En Route credit card. The airline was about to install ATMs in its aisles, and even in Economy Class, the Entertainment Guide for my personal video system was a glossy magazine sixty-four pages long. You could live on the plane, I realized, or on the phone—or, best of all, on the phone on the plane. The declaration of John Self, the transoceanic creature in Martin Amis’s mid-eighties novel Money—“I am a thing made up of time lag, culture shock, zone shift”—needed only minor updates now—to “jet lag, shell shock, paradigm shift.” The “thing” part could remain.
“The Indians here, they are having a hard time,” said the G
erman next to me, catching my eye with a shrewd glance, his eye having fallen on my disembarkation card (Indians living in Hong Kong would soon be given British passports with a crown on them, but no right to live in Britain). “They are like stateless people now.”
I fingered my old British passport, heartbreakingly close to a Hong Kong one, but minus two extra words that mark all the difference between freedom and incarceration.
“Sometimes the Indians are third-generation,” he went on, “but the Chinese won’t take them, the British won’t take them. Things will be strange under the new management.”
“That’s all right,” I said, writing off the Indians with the blitheness of one born in Britain. “They’re used to getting on everywhere. They know how to make a living out of displacement.”
“I know,” he said, nodding seriously. “I, too, am so cosmopolitan now. I do not care where I live. Anywhere, it is the same: you can do business.”
At that point, the pilot gave his mellow-voiced, BBC-worthy announcement of the time and temperature awaiting us on the ground—which we could follow on the Airshow Channel—and the cabin attendants prepared for landing, the vessel itself a perfect model of the old colonial order (cool British male at the helm, and women from ten Asian nations dishing out the drinks).
We descended between tall apartment blocks, almost entangled in lines of washing, and touched down.
When I arrived at the desk in the Immigrations area, I handed an official my passport. He looked at it, looked at me, looked at it again. A superior was called over, and he, looking at it, asked to see my ticket, my alien registration card, my Time Inc. ID. Then a third man came over, and led me to an “Interview Room,” where I sat down under a sign that informed me of my rights “under custody.”
I could make a single phone call, I read; I could contact my solicitor. I was, for the moment, an alien resident of limbo.
A fourth official came into the cell and, pulling up a chair across from me, looked at my face, flipped through my passport, and peered some more at my pinkish-colored green card. Why did I choose to live for twenty-nine years in a country not my own? he asked.
Because I liked America as a base, but never began to think of it as home.
This is not normal, he said, to live for almost all your life as an alien.
However, he could find nothing officially wrong with my papers, except for the fact that my face didn’t match my birthplace, and people who looked like me were stateless. Finally, releasing me with ill-disguised unease into the colony of transients—the Customs Hall decorated with a pangolin, a monitor lizard, and other replicas of endangered creatures—he got up to attend to two young Germans in the next booth, whom I heard being told to wait for the next plane home, to be deported.
In Richard’s apartment, the wonder of his phone cards and his plane cards exhausted, I retired to my bedroom, half-dazed and half-electrified (jet-lagged, in other words), and tried to will myself to sleep. But one sleeps strangely in such a state, in fitful, violent fragments, and my dreams unraveled like action movies, till I jerked up into wakefulness, after a month’s worth of images, only to see that I’d been out for hardly more than an hour.
The clock beside the bed read 2:23.
I flicked the remote beside me, for what was here known as “terrestrial television,” and stock-market listings came up on Channel 4. Listlessly, I flipped through Pearl TV, Jade TV, Phoenix TV; through CNN International, BBC World, CNBC Asia. I caught Asian music videos on Channel V, some intimate Kanto drama on NHK-1, a Cantonese show on ATV-Home. I decided to walk off my confusion in the darkness.
Slipping out of the apartment, I went down in the elevator to the lobby, where two security guards were watching me on rows of monitors. Outside, through a set of electric doors, I passed into an open glass elevator and descended into the Mall below, the names all around the same ones that I’d seen on the other side of the planet that morning (Florsheim, The Body Shop, See’s Candies).
I took an escalator up to the second floor, and walked through the brilliantly lit corridors of the empty arcade—Timberland, Lacoste, DKNY, The Athlete’s Foot. Signs led me up steps and out into the night, to a sixty-one-story hotel.
Inside the lobby, the clocks showed the times in major centers of the world, while machines flashed and hummed in the Business Centre. Outside, in a small banyan-tree garden, two lovers (made of concrete) embraced, a bag of potato chips (also made of concrete) between them.
Looking for something to ground me—or simply to sustain me—I began walking down the main, deserted street, till I came to Lockhart Road, where heavy bass rhythms were thumping out of the Express Club and what looked like Moslems were gathered outside a pita and kebab stall called Midnight Express. A pretty young Filipina in a Dallas Cowboys jacket sat on the stoop of the New Pussycat club, while other of her compatriots, flouncily done up in pillbox hats and gold-chain bags, clucked and fluttered past noisy holes called the Lady Club, Hot Lips, and Venus. Upstairs, in a loud Western bar, where I tucked into a burger, a man in a jacket and tie was running his hands along the bare arms of a small dark girl with a baseball cap on backwards, while a five-a-side soccer match unfolded on-screen. A few hefty British traders in gray suits were wailing, “I would do anything for love,” in time to the record, at the bar, pumping their fists and steadying themselves against one another’s shoulders.
Back out on the street, as I tried to walk off my restlessness, a man bumped into me, slipping out of a 7-Eleven with a package of Pro-Fil condoms in his hand; another, in a straggly leather jacket, was clutching a chubby new girlfriend to his chest and roaring, “But she’s in England—thousands of bloody miles away!”
I passed the Duke of Windsor Social Services Department, a large skyscraper with a neon sign for TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) at its top, a rat scuttling across a vacant lot. In a small business hotel, I found a Japanese girl in a very short skirt, nursing a Heineken, while a young man in golfing pants, holding a glass of wine, whispered to her from the far end of the same small sofa. UKIYO-E, said the sign by the elevator button. FLOATING WORLD.
It was getting light by the time I returned to the room where I was staying, and the phone was ringing—from New York—while faxes continued to chug in through the night. I found a copy of Time International lying around, and opened it to see pages of classified ads at the back—for Offshore Companies and Second Passports, for EU Residence Permits and Call Global telephone cards. I could enter a green-card lottery through the magazine; I could apply for Canadian citizenship. I could even get goods from the Counter Spy Shop. The overseas edition of Time, like the Sky Mall catalog on the plane, suggested (with its ads for “Camouflage Passports” and “Satellite Decoders”) that the future was just a video war conducted by other means.
Outside, though, the day looked warm and sunny, and, still in some cloudless afternoon state from California, sixteen time zones away, I decided to go out to take in the scenery. People talk these days about how the world is turning into a Microsoft and McDonald’s uniculture, but every empire has always tried to remake its image around the globe, and when I went out into a place like Hong Kong, even now, I was almost instantly in boyhood again, in some tropical rendering of Berkshire.
Taking a tram (with “Cathay Pacific” written all over its sides) down to the Bank of China, I got out and started climbing the steep concrete slope to the Citibank Plaza—Hong Kong’s Central district was a web of such anonymities—when suddenly I saw the towers of an Anglican church down the street. I walked along to its entrance, stepped inside, and instantly I was in England, on a gray November morning, being prepared for a war—or an Empire—that never came. It hardly mattered that birds were chirping in the rafters here, or that fans were waiting to turn above the pews; I hardly noticed the signs in the parking lot speaking of a vehicle impounding zone. The circulars pinned up with thumbtacks, the “collects” fluttering from green baize notice boards, the hymnals lined up higgled
y-piggledy along the pews, and the grand organ ready to strike up another chorus of “Almighty, Invisible, God Only Wise” made the years, the miles evaporate.
It was a space as generic in its way as any Burger King, I thought; I could have been standing outside the Supreme Court building in Singapore, or along the Avon in the tree-shaded parks of Christ Church: the Empire had meant that children singing of “a green hill far away” were all thinking of the same place. Standing in this mock thirteenth-century Gothic cathedral, I could have been my father, in Bombay in 1937, reciting a borrowed litany—except that his world was made up of two cultures that he knew, while I, at this moment, was between two homes (California and Japan) that were quite strange to me.
In recent times, in fact, when our family got together, the discussions we had were about whether it was better to fly from Los Angeles to Bombay via Frankfurt or via Tokyo, and how best to convert PAL videotapes into U.S.-compatible ones; our local issues had to do with green-card applications and student visas, and which international phone company offered the best rates for Bangalore. A hundred and fifty years before, Tennyson and those around him had seen the railway as both the force of history and the death of neighborhood; now the jumbo jet made all such thoughts antique.
Outside my bedroom, as I returned to sleep, huge cranes were moving clumps of earth, to construct a new British embassy for the postimperial order.
The next morning, when I awoke—my body only slowly following my mind—the clock showed 4:00, 4:45, 6:00, though inside my stomach it didn’t feel like 4:00 a.m. or 6:00 p.m. or any time I could recognize. For hours, my dreams had organized themselves around the sounds of transmissions coming in from around the globe. And all through the night, the phone by my head had kept ringing, though every time I picked it up, all I could hear was the shrill tone of a fax, or, in one case, a friend of mine, from the far side of the world, calling and calling my name (to be answered by a sharp mechanical whine).