Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

Whenever we’d read books about bold, romantic, heroes who’d sailed the oceans, climbed the mountains, and ventured into uncharted territories, we’d been supremely irritated that almost none of them had had a vagina. Why couldn’t women be heroes in great epics too?

Oblivious to the ickiness of our presumption that we would discover cultures that were actually far older and far more evolved than we were, we believed that there was still a great frontier left to explore—a frontier, in fact, that eagerly awaited us.

In just a few months, I’ll get out of here and bestride the world like a goddess.

“You’ll see, sweetie,” Claire murmured as she finally began to drift off to sleep. “A few months from now, this will all just seem really, really funny.”

I DON’T KNOW how many of the world’s great explorers called home in tears immediately after they arrived someplace strange. I suspected I might have been the first.

for women obsessed with liberation, they were as rigid and sensitive as tuning forks: Everything set them off. Freud offended them. Nonvegetarian lasagna offended them. The words fascinating, natural, and objective offended them. Money offended them, too—I suppose because, unlike me, they’d always had more than enough of it.

How to make chicken tarragon in our Soviet-style dormitory using only a saucepan and a fork.

Okay, so she voted Republican. And she could listen to the Gary Numan song “Cars” fifteen times in a row. And she’d decorated her freshman dorm with puppy calendars. But in the end, I found her an enormous relief to be around.

We do this, and for the rest of our lives, we’re going to have this extraordinary experience under our belts. We’re going to know certain things that almost nobody else does.

If we can’t do this, nobody can.

You are so smart and funny and sexy. And a great writer. You’re an amazing woman.

I’d decided I hated Hong Kong. It seemed like the worst of the city and the worst of the tropics combined: skyscrapers; ugly fast-food chains; hot, cramped alleyways stinking of incense, wet bamboo, rotting melons; pushcart hawkers; sizzling concrete; viscous, malarial air.

For a moment I nearly hated her: her pearly beauty, her bake-sale enthusiasm.

At the ferry terminal, she’d purchased a small bag of M&M’s, even though she was eternally on a diet. “Here, you want the green ones?” she’d said magnanimously. “They’re supposed to make you horny. Ha-ha.”

A ribbon of gut peeked out above the elasticized waistband of his shorts; I could see curls of brown, pubic-like hair ringing the puncture of his navel.

Once I’d confessed to Claire that as a Jew, I felt a gut-level distrust and hostility toward Germans, even the younger ones. I couldn’t help it, I said. I assumed they all wanted to kill me. To my great irritation, Claire had scolded me. “That’s so prejudiced. Isn’t that making the same generalizations about them that they once made about you?”

The German leaned over and dutifully scribbled a single character on the corner of Claire’s visa application: a crosshatched stick figure.

In 1986, China was a country with one billion people. And yet until that moment, it had never occurred to us that we might actually be sailing with any of them—or that the chances of doing anything exclusively was in fact pretty much nil.

“So who ever said travel was easy? You think it was easy when my whole family came over from Poland, not speaking a word of English? Where on earth did you ever get that fakaktah idea? Even on a package tour. They schlep you here, they schlep you there. You don’t know the language, where to look for the toilet.

He towered above everyone else, a shaggy, walleyed giant with his meaty hands open by his sides, his belly like a presentation, an offering. Strapped to his back was the same small rucksack he’d been carrying the day before; on his massive frame, it looked ridiculous, like a child’s.

We round-eyed, big-nosed Westerners were summoned to the front of the line and ushered up the gangway while the Chinese—hundreds of hoi polloi with their mountains of possessions—were left waiting behind the ropes on the pier below, roasting in the sun, looking on sloe-eyed while cargo trucks pulled up and unloaded their freight onto the melty asphalt, and the air filled with the oversweet stench of motor oil.

A crease of vexation formed on Claire’s brow. “C’mon, you guys, this is not budget traveling. This isn’t what we signed up for.” “Look. This isn’t exactly a tragedy.” I laughed. “So we paid ninety bucks and wound up comfortable anyway. Why not enjoy it?”

“No, I will not enjoy it,” Claire said sourly,

Claire, Gunter, and I seemed to have our very own steward, ted, a man with a goiter who stood vigil in the corridor directly outside our door at all times.

Martin was a linguistic anthropologist heading to China on a research fellowship. He was fluent in half a dozen languages. Or so he told us. It was hard for me to believe him, given his diamond stud earring and the glossy centerfold of Juggs magazine spread open on his lap.

The other passenger we befriended was a leggy blond divorcee from Southern California. Cynthia Lukens strode onto the Jin Jiang in high heels with ankle straps and big white movie-star sunglasses, moving across the parquet as if jazz cymbals were tapping out a rhythm with her hips.

Although Jonnie’s English was excellent, he was unable to reproduce certain sounds. Instead of love, he said ruv, and instead of Susie and Claire, he said Sushi and Crair.

I suddenly understood why people struggled to get rid of their accents and teased others for theirs.

Even if you had a zillion other outstanding characteristics, even if you didn’t keep kosher or go to temple, even if you were like me and had been educated by Presbyterians, Quakers, and a bunch of crackpot maharishis, you were regarded as almost a separate species. Jewishness marked you forever, like a radioactive isotope.

Ideally, I believed, travelers abroad should carry something with them to endear themselves to the natives.

His mind was inverted somehow. He seemed more captivated by a scrap of Chinese newspaper or the rivets on his backpack than by any conversation taking place directly in front of him.

From what I could glimpse, she didn’t have an ounce of fat on her. The keys of her spine pressed through her back. Her legs were so narrow, the space between them was concave. Why were the girls with the best bodies always the most self-hating?

When Gunter handed us the map, my heart broke a little. Poor bigdumbKraut, I thought guiltily, he’s doing the best he can.

All the signs, of course, were in Chinese. Although I’d anticipated this, I’d underestimated the impact. It was as if a computer glitch had converted everything into dingbats, squiggles, and glyphs. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t read anything. It made me feel brain damaged.

The only English appeared atop an abandoned hotel at the north end of the river. A giant white neon aspirin tablet—an

Most mainland Chinese had never seen us white-skinned, big-nosed Westerners before.

My 36-DD breasts pushing like fists through my lavender sweatshirt. We must have looked like Amazons to them, albino gorillas, freaks of nature. Back at college, I’d decried the ways in which guys had sexually objectified me. Now I saw that I hadn’t experienced the half of it.

I’d spoken out vociferously against pornography, declaring that it was violence against women and ought to be illegal.

I was used to being the only white girl in a subway car, on a city street, in an entire neighborhood, in fact.

Although Claire and Gunter seemed appalled by its compactness, by New York City standards, it looked pretty fabulous to me.

It seemed unimaginably rude and intrusive to ask all the questions that I was really dying to ask. Are you happy? Do you have any idea what the world is like outside of China? Do you long for freedom? Do you feel hopelessly oppressed, a mere cog in the wheel of a totalitarian Communist regime? Are you allowed to read books? What’s with the public squat toilets?

Without knowing Mandarin, we were, in the end, just voyeurs. All that set us apart from any other slack-jawed, gum-chomping tourists was the fact that neither of us had a camera.

Trevor Fisk was a sailor from a small town near Perth. He had the wispy goatee of a young pirate and slate-blue eyes that pillaged everything they looked at. His shoulders were pinioned with muscle. He was so swaggering and lascivious, he was practically feral.

This was still a good decade before tattoos became the trendy accessory for every high school kid in Dayton and Scarsdale; in 1986 they were still, for the most part, the markings of an outlaw.

His skin was warm and smelled of cloves. I could feel his biceps pressing against me, the tautness of his abdomen.

an elderly, rotund Chinese man went around hugging everyone and dancing in an artful, angular manner that reminded me of Kabuki. I had spent my teenage years in New York drinking illegally at Studio 54 and Danceteria, yet nothing came remotely close to this.

Gripping the side of one of the metal bunks, the man drew himself up and positioned himself with balletic precision, placing one foot per-pendicular to the other, puffing out his chest and tucking his right hand theatrically into his jacket, as if emulating Napoléon.

The opera that Claire and I had seen was about a concubine in love with the emperor. Since there was no English translation, all we could glean from the histrionics on stage was that the emperor forsook the concubine and she committed suicide.

As an overall cultural experience, it was illuminating (the Chinese ate and talked throughout the performance). But the music itself was excruciating. It was simply beyond the range of Western aural comprehension—atonal, shrill, nerve splitting.

Not only were we sailing to a town no Westerner had ever visited before, but we’d just had a private concert performed for us by the Communist equivalent of Luciano Pavarotti.