The Last Carousel

by Nelson Algren

  The latter charge discourages patrons trying to beat the house by bringing a girlfriend of their own.

  Over a hundred young Chinese women make their livings at The Oriental. Some of their names are adoptive, some use their own: Tammy Ho, Cherry, Pek Yuck, See see, Poi poi, Veiginia Lee, Dominique, Susarna Wong, Wong Man, Wong Way, Sar sar and, simply, Daisy. Tea and Coca-Cola are the only drinks served. Didn’t I tell you The Oriental is a high-class hall?

  A portly young Chinese man escorted me to a table and inquired, politely, whether I preferred an English-speaking friend. I thought that might work out better than one who’d have to depend upon my Mandarin. Then I had a bad moment in which I was sure I’d let myself in for an evening with some kukefied ruin whose best days were long gone. When I looked up and saw her my bad moment was done. I lost no time getting to my feet.

  Her name was Maria Chan. A slender girl, of perhaps twenty-four, with a heart-shaped face and quiet air. We ordered tea. I wanted to make a good impression so I asked if she would have dinner with me.

  “You buy me out, we go where you want,” she assured me, “but I have dinner already.”

  It cost a hundred and fifty Hongkong dollars to buy Miss Chan out —about twenty-five dollars American. Which wasn’t too high consider-ing where I had it in mind to go.

  “Hundred-fifty is just for time,” she dispensed with that fantasy. So we took a cab to Victoria Peak and drank orange juice in an English garden. A wind kept blowing a mist off the harbor. Miss Chan was as reserved as she was beautiful.

  She was Cantonese—“Pure Cantonese,” as she put it—and her right name was Mong-tse. My thinking was to find some way to take her out without buying her out.

  “I am not free,” she explained simply, “Mr. Ding makes my arrange-ments.”

  “Who is Mr. Ding?”

  “My Leader.”

  “The man who introduced us?”

  She nodded: “Every Leader has twelve girls. When a girl wants a day off she must ask her Leader. I have two days a month free, but I don’t go out. I sleep, I rest. The work is hard to do every night. Appearance takes much time. I begin to make my appearance three hours before I go to the ballroom. I stay until one a.m. In a week I will receive half of the money you pay Mr. Ding. Leaders are very smart. If you say you are sick and go out somewhere, he find out. Leader have spies.”

  Maria had had a couple years of high school, but had had to drop out because she is the oldest of nine children. She has four younger brothers. Brothers count more than sisters in Kowloon. The boy has to be given the opportunity of education even though the older sister has to go on the streets.

  When the hour grew late we took a cab down the peak.

  “Where do you live” Miss Chan asked me.

  I told her the address of the guest-house in which I was staying and added, to give her a lead, “It’s a very small room. Two people could just about fit in it. ’’

  She smiled. My fears of being overcrowded were groundless. When the cab pulled up to my door she patted my shoulder. “You’re a nice fellow,” Miss Chan assured me; and gave me her cheek to kiss.

  I kissed it.

  Goodnight, Maria Chan.

  “Hongkong,” according to Pravda, is “an evil-smelling malignant growth on the body of China where millions of Chinese are exploited and oppressed by brutal colonial masters.”

  On the contrary, it is the most tolerant of territories and the least marked by colonialism. Low taxes, no controls, fast profits and free enterprise offer more opportunities here to refugees than any other sanctuary on earth. The place is like some gigantic grocery where anyone who can get his hands on a shelf of goods—noodles, leather, jade, jewels, silk, coconuts, hardware, watches, furs, carpets, silver or gold —is in business for himself. I don’t know how this dumping-ground for twentieth-century techniques makes it by nineteenth-century economics; yet it flourishes. And nobody worries just because it would take no more than a telephone call from Peking to cut it off from the Western world.

  Nine-tenths of the colony must, at any rate, be handed back to China in 1997, when the British lease on the New Territories expires. Mean-while printers circulate a reversible double-faced rotogravure job with Chairman Mao’s face on one side and that of General Chiang on the other. This can be put in a store window on the Communist Liberation Day, October 1; then reversed, nine days later, on the Nationalists’ Day. Some of these photographs bear the legend: Made in Japan.

  So you can buy Playboy or China Reconstructs at the same newsstand and Kung Hai Fat Choy! (Happy New Year and May You Make a Fortune!) is the cry.

  The Oriental Rio is a gigantic Motor-vessel, a sister-ship of the Oriental Jade, and has been in the service of the Republic of China nineteen years. She is bearing some hundred elderly Americans—in addition to her cargo—back to The Big PX.

  Most of the Americans are from Southern California and have been riding this monster for three months. Mr. K.C. Tung, the ship’s single owner, sold world-tours to these Californians for a bargain price of three thousand dollars each.

  It turned out to be no bargain. But then it’s been no bargain for Mr. Tung either. The air conditioning went out somewhere on the equator, the plumbing is unreliable and the Americans are bored to exhaustion.

  For their boredom, however, Mr. Tung can hardly be blamed. If they hadn’t been bored to exhaustion by Southern California, they wouldn’t have boarded the Rio. It’s their own lives that have left them so empty. The peak of dinner conversation is hit when one woman observes that the butterballs have a prettier design than the butterballs served in Mombasa; and everyone inspects the butterballs to verify this observation.

  When the purser informed me that we’d be putting into Kaohsiung for two weeks, for refitting, it occurred to me two weeks was hardly long enough, considering the shape most of the passengers were in. As it turns out, however, it’s the ship which is to be refitted.

  If you happen not to have heard of Kaohsiung, consider that nobody in Kaohsiung has heard of Gary, Indiana. Which, incidentally, Kaohsiung resembles: a country kind of town under a pall of industrial smoke; set down between the sea and ancestral hills. Where the traffic moves mostly on bicycles, and taxies keep up an all-day honking—the point of which is not so much to warn off bicycles, but to call attention to the drivers.

  The lobbies of air-conditioned hotels break up rows of low, wooden, hundred-year-old tenements. Beggar-women beseige tourists. Department stores are thronging with customers and are loaded with goods. The cost of a haircut, a basket of fruit or a loaf of bread is almost too small to believe. But private cars and telephones are out of the reach of all but a few.

  Mr. K.C. Tung is one of the very few. He was a shipyard worker here when General Chiang retreated from the mainland. Now he owns the Oriental Rio and eighty-nine other cargo-liners. He came aboard in Kowloon and spoke to the passengers; but didn’t identify himself. I’m sorry I didn’t know to whom I was talking. I would have asked him for one of his smaller ships. He would have had to give me one or lose face.

  People, like cats, assume their owners’ sense of values. When you hit a port where the bellboy hurries ahead to open a door for you, then stands aside to let you pass; where the desk clerk inquires, in the same tone as when he asks if you want air conditioning, whether you also want a girl; and where your lady-barber cleans your ears, you’re in an Accommodation Nation. Taiwan is an Accommodation Nation and there can be such a thing as just too much accommodation. I don’t mind having a lady clean my ears but I’d rather open doors for myself. The procurers of Kaohsiung surpass those of Saigon in persistency.

  Taiwanese are proud of being able to decline U.S. aid. The country is making it on its own. Buildings, protected by bamboo scaffoldings, are going up everywhere. But wages are low and prospects unpromising for young people. Everybody wants to go to Hongkong.

  Like the intellectuals of Hongkong, those of Taiwan are Chinese nationalists. Yet few are Nationalists. Severed from
their cultural heritage by Big Brother, they find their protector to be Big Brother’s brother. Imperilled by the dehumanization of the mainland, they understand now how, when the pendulum of revolution swings back, it is the artists and intellectuals who are the first to be cut down.

  An American poet can have it both ways: he can be resolutely against the establishment, earn its awards and remain unafraid of travelling abroad. The artist of Taiwan can’t have it either way. Because he has fled from the mainland doesn’t mean he has found freedom. Both regimes are tyrannies. In neither can he survive if he expresses himself individualistically.

  “All we have is Chiang,” a thirty-two-year-old editor assured me ruefully, meaning that Chiang allows him to survive where Mao would not. He came to Taipei “as a little soldier”—as he puts it—fifteen years ago. His family, on the mainland, now believes him to be dead and he intends to let them think so. If he corresponded with them he’d endanger them. And it would be harder on his mother to know he was alive, and to be unable to see him, then to let her resign herself to his death.

  No wonder he sounds rueful.

  The weather alone sufficed to make one rueful. The morning I boarded the Kaohsiung-Keelung bus it began to rain. It rained the whole ten-hour ride, and was still raining when, the next morning, I looked out of my window of the Hotel Mandarin in Taipei.

  The hotel lobby was crowded with passengers waiting for their water-borne nursing-home to take them to Yokohama. There was nothing to do but hit the streets of Taipei; rain or no rain.

  What do you do on a rainy morning in a big city that has no burlesque houses and all the movies are in an alien tongue? You find a sweatbath-massage parlor and investigate the city’s subculture, of course. Any itinerant journalist can tell you that.

  The most interesting distinction between the Asian and the American sweatbath, I had perceived in Saigon, is that the masseurs of the Orient are masseuses. And that there is a world of difference, not only between sweatbaths, but between masseuses.

  If the price is cheap and the bath-floor is dirty and there is no steam, it’s run by Vietnamese. If the bath is immaculate, the steam is steaming and the price is higher, the owner is Japanese. If the masseuse comes in barebreasted, she’s not Japanese. If she gives you a few languid caresses, asks “You like spesal?” it’s a Vietnamese brother, not a bath. But if she stretches you out prone, wraps a towel around your middle, and goes to work, she’s either Japanese or has a Japanese boss. The Japanese don’t confuse their enterprises. If you’re looking for a whore, go to a whorehouse; if you’re looking for a sweatbath and massage, that’s what you pay for and that’s all you get.

  Oriental sweatbaths don’t advertise “Chinese attendants” or “Vietnamese hostesses.” The billing always claims that the masseuses are Japanese or French. Yet I never met a French masseuse. Speaking liter-ally, of course.

  “Taipei’s reputation among bachelors rests primarily on Peitou,” the guidebook informed me, “a hot-springs resort just twenty minutes by cab from the city. A legacy of the Japanese, who ruled Taiwan until 1945, Peitou provides what are perhaps the most complete bathing facilities in the East. The difference between Peitou and similar places in Japan is that at Peitou the girl gets into the sulphur bath with you.”

  “Peitou !” I instructed the cab-driver in front of the Hotel Mandarin.

  Attention Please —a polite warning, in English, was hung above the sauna room, at the entrance to the pool—We cannot accept those who tattooed to take a sauna bath. We propose the man tattooed to take the private room of Turkish bath.

  That’s one way of avoiding trouble with American seamen, I surmised.

  The sauna was Japanese: all bamboo panelling, tile and dry heat. Two middle-aged Chinese men, sitting crosslegged, were reading newspapers. I returned to my locker and brought back Portnoy’s Complaint. (Any Portnoy in a storm!) It struck me as a sort of pomographied rehash of Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern. When I’d gotten up a sweat I jumped into the hot pool, then the cold. Then wandered around, in a kimono, until I found a massage table.

  The masseuse, wearing a pair of white briefs and a bra, was a gentle, even shy-appearing woman in her early thirties. I lay on my stomach while she massaged my torso. When she got up on the table, straddling me the better to work on my rib cage, I didn’t mind. After squirrel-eyeing her right thigh awhile I let my right arm swing back and took a gentle hold of it; just to see what her reaction would be.

  “No,” she told me quietly. I let go.

  With my face pressed into a small pillow, I had time to think things over. My thinking was that I’d taken hold of the wrong thigh. I tried the left one.

  The pillow came out from under my face in a gentle movement, my face went softly down into a cushioned declevity in the table, a powerful hand rested on the nape of my neck. I removed my hand from the thigh.

  I suffered no discomfort. But the point had been made plain. When she’d finished massaging my legs she stood up, planted her feet on my calves and began walking up and down my spine. The curious part of this little jaunt was that, although it took away my breath, it was wonder-fully relaxing. She didn’t do it as though she were mad at me. Nor, I must add sadly, as though she were in love, either.

  Next was the big soap-up soap-down scene where, seated on a stool in front of a mirror, she fussed about first with warm water then with cold. Fanned me dry and, sitting beside me, produced what appeared to be a pair of chopsticks tipped by cotton batting. Before I realized what she was about, she was probing my pointy ears. The result was embarrassing: I’ve been moderately diligent, through the years, in splashing a palmful of water at these curious appendages every morning. But my ears had never been cleaned. Is this something other Americans do and only I don’t? Isn’t American advertising missing a billion-dollar opportunity in concentrating upon nicotine-stained teeth and overlooking the imminent peril of deafness caused by unclean ears?

  I was ready for the tête-à-tête in the sulphur bath. So was she. She pointed to the door that led to the pool and I flopped in. A moment later she came out nude. She had small breasts and a graceful walk.

  Too graceful. When she reached the edge of the pool she stood a moment with one hand extended; then found the ladder. At the top of the ladder she turned her head as if wondering where I was at. I made a splashing sound and she smiled; yet her eyes weren’t directly on me. She came down the ladder, swam slowly in my direction, then stood up, smiling, with one hand held out tentatively.

  It didn’t come to me until then that she was blind.

  Who Sent for You?

  Dear Joel Wells,

  Kindly cancel my complaint about Accommodation Nations being too accommodating.

  Everybody loved me in Cholon: bartenders and bargirls, landlords and cab drivers, pedicab-pushers, trishaw-wheelers, black-market money-changers, head-waiters and market-women; beggars, cripples, leaping pimps and weeping lepers.

  Where have all those procuring clerks and eager bellboys gone? Why don’t taxies wheel up to where I’m waiting whether I want a cab or no? Where are all those smiling faces of Saigon and Kaohsiung? Where have the miniskirted lovelies standing in bar-doors gone?

  Nobody loved me in Kobe. Nobody pulled my sleeve in Nagoya. Here are fifty thousand humans milling down the Ginza and not one needs me! I tell you, men, it’s plain hell when you get into a country that has self-respect.

  Another complaint about Japan: they’ll tell you that English is the second language; but I think it must be the twenty-ninth. If you want a restaurant, a barber shop, a movie, or a sweatbath, learn Japanese. And don’t mess around with American green, because not even the cabbies will accept it here. You deal in yen. There are places where a traveller’s check can be cashed—but try your hand at an American Express Order and you’re in for a hard time.

  Not that the Japanese set out, deliberately, to give you a hard time. The attitude is simply that nobody sent for you, did they? Everybody has his own gig, everybody’s i
n a hurry; nobody knows what you’re talking about; and if you don’t know how to ask for what you want, why did you come here?

  The realization dawns at last, upon the confused tourist, that, despite American conquest, despite Hiroshima, despite American know-how and American investment and American movies, the conviction of Caucasian superiority hasn’t had the faintest impact upon Japanese pride.

  Another assumption, which can be cleared up by a stroll down the Ginza, is that it’s a close thing when comparison is made between the American and the Oriental woman. If it was ever a close thing, it must have been before the American woman began looking more like Duke Wayne than like Eve.

  Argue, if you will, about Chuck Davy’s chances against Kid Gavilan, Silky Sullivan’s chance against Tim-Tam or how many successive games Luke Appling will be able to play—the debate about Oriental vs. American women is over, too. And it was a mismatch as bad as Joe Louis vs. Johnny Paycheck.

  Nor is this simply because the Oriental woman has more grace, a finer complexion, dresses unpretentiously and possesses poise. It’s because she has the inner composure derived from knowing she is a woman. The reason the American woman overdresses, flops when she sits, strides when she walks, booms when she speaks and gets stoned on half a martini, is because she doesn’t feel sure she is a woman. And that is also the reason for her perpetual complaint—“What happened to the men? There aren’t any men any more. Virile men.”

  Perhaps one reason is that, when she is confronted by male virility, she goes to such great lengths to destroy it. Which also throws some light on the reason for American men still going bamboo.

  All of which may be to imply that the Japanese woman is enabled to be a simpler person because her life has been arranged for her by an ancestral society. An implication which would be untrue. The young woman here who has come up in the generation since 1945 is often in deep conflict with her society. She is divided between the traditional role of subservience to the male, and her awakening to the possibility of having a life as fulfilling as that of her boyfriend or husband.