Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

I can dance like Michael Jackson about as well as I can sing like Aretha Franklin. But spending my adolescence running around Studio 54 in my underwear had its benefits.

Despite the lights being left on mercilessly and our bunkmates’ incessant cigarette smoking, Jonnie and Gunter fell asleep folded into their bunks like origami.

In 1986, both electricity and telephone service were in short supply around China.

Only Gunter, it turned out, had been excused from any questioning and was allowed to wander off through Dinghai unmolested; only Gunter, it turned out, had been canny enough to obtain an “all entry” alien travel permit back in Hong Kong using a letter from his Chinese language school in Bavaria.

But the NYPD in my neighborhood were generally viewed with suspicion and hostility: “pigs” who shoved black teenagers up against squad cars for no good reason, took kickbacks from drug dealers, and beat antiwar protestors with nightsticks.

Until that moment, I’d assumed the officer’s visit was mostly a formality, a bureaucratic ritual designed to impress and intimidate visitors. As he’d questioned us, I’d even started imagining how I was going to embellish this story later telling it to loved ones back home.

A twisty unease came over me as I began to see Claire and me not as the bright, lovable Americans we believed ourselves to be, but as Chinese eyes might view us instead.

In her nervousness and desperation, she delivered quite a performance; it was practically an opera. She leapt up from the bed, rubbing her backside in distress, then faked crying, rubbing her eyes with her fists and pointing melodramatically at the broken equipment.

“Tell him that not only do we thank him,” Claire added with a regal flick of her hair, “but that my father does as well. Tell them that my father is a very rich and very important businessman in America.”

“Jonnie, please, don’t worry about it.” I glared at Claire. “We’re actually very tired and would prefer to stay here. Right, Claire?” Claire shrugged noncommittally. When I shot her a prompting look, she managed to fake a yawn. “Sure,” she said.

“Whatever,” Claire said with a little flutter of her hand. “Okay,” he said, but he sounded unconvinced. Even as I began to close the door behind him, he insisted on poking his head back in and waving. “Okay, Miss Crair?” When he was finally gone, I scowled, but all Claire did was smile at me fakely and curtsy. “There. He’s gone, and we’re not. Better?”

She stretched, feline and indolent. “So. Who did you think was more annoying just now?” She settled a pillow beneath her head. “Jonnie or the cop?”

when Claire and I had first dreamed of venturing into uncharted territory, we’d somehow assumed that uncharted meant exotic—lush jungles dripping with vines; toucans; natives in feathers; and some sort of untouched Eden at the end of a dirt trail.

The elderly couple in our cabin had stayed up talking and chain-smoking. When Claire had hissed, “Could you please be quiet?” they’d only smiled and encouragingly offered us cigarettes.

Today I would’ve seen this fish for the gourmet extravagance that it undoubtedly was; what’s more, I would’ve dug in happily and gratefully.

Claire said, “Please. We’re so hungry, and we hate fish. Please?”

There seemed to be only the thinnest veneer of common reference points here, of recognizably modern civilization—a small dented car, an old telephone, a squeaky elevator—beneath which nothing functioned as we knew it, beneath which was total, seething chaos, an abyss of the unknown.

Back in college, I’d spent an inordinate amount of time participating in multicultural awareness dialogues. The goal of these seemed to be to impress upon all of us a terrific contradiction, namely, that every ethnic group had its own distinct culture—that needed to be celebrated and respected—but that in no way should ever be used to stereotype them.

“Stereotypes are not only wrong and racist, but intellectually lazy,” I once declared.

I realized that everything I’d known up to that point about China was, basically, a gross cultural stereotype. What’s more, I realized that I would welcome still more of these gross cultural stereotypes—or pre-masticated facts, or massive generalizations—or anything, really, that would at least give me a clue about where I was and whom I was dealing with.

everything that I knew about China could be boiled down to a single list: Confucius, gunpowder, printing press, noodles, dynasties, concubines, foot-binding, opium, Communists, tai chi, acupuncture, and pandas.

Now that Claire and I were actually in Asia, I was determined to spackle these holes in my education. Mostly, I did this by reading the background chapters in our guidebook.

Lying on my bed in Dinghai, I skimmed a few paragraphs about Chinese culture, then promptly fell asleep.

Claire and I had purchased three apiece from a vendor in Shanghai before boarding the ferry. It had been an ordeal to get him to part with the glass deposit bottles.

Of course we’d packed a water purifier and charcoal tablets, but we hadn’t bothered reading the instructions or testing it out yet;

I imagined him lurching through the center of Dinghai with his backpack and a dopey grin, clutching a bagful of hot dumplings. “Big dumb Kraut,” I swore under my breath.

I was back in the playground in Central Park, watching a little girl getting bullied. “Hey, don’t you be telling her what to do,” I snapped, sounding oddly like every New York City cabdriver and Puerto Rican homegirl I’d ever grown up around.

“No, this is good. This is better,” Claire murmured as we sat in the back of the doctor’s tiny, rusted car. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the spotted glass of the window. “I’ll be more comfortable this way. I’ll get more attention.”

I’d grown up around poverty and slums, but this was of a different league—a different century, really.

“I don’t know what they say,” I cried. “I can’t read Chinese.” There seemed to be pages and pages, line after line of characters blurring together into gibberish, a rain of cross-hatchings and pen strokes.

An austere-looking man sat behind the wheel dressed in full military regalia. Oddly, I assumed he was a chauffeur.

There was something about his voice, the Shakespearean tenor and delicacy of it, that made me inexplicably sad and ashamed.

At that moment, it seemed to me that living in a Communist country was not actually half bad. If you had a problem: poof! Officials were at the ready to arrive like the cavalry to rescue you, to disentangle you, to provide you with the appropriate paperwork, and even, it seemed, to arrange for hotel room service. Was that really so horrible?

If she longed for a totalitarian regime, it was because on some level, she assumed she’d be running it. In her Communist utopia, legions of Hispanic cleaning women, Yiddish waiters from Barney Greengrass (“The Sturgeon King!”), Asian dry cleaners, Irish parking garage attendants, black store clerks, teenage cashiers, and everyone else in the service industry whom she routinely bossed around and abused would now legally be required to abide by her wishes.

“There is one other thing you could do, actually, that would really help Claire and me. Do you think you could find us a map of some sort—it doesn’t have to be anything fancy—just a little tourist map or a diagram or something to give us a sense of where we are?”

All I remember is the oppressive sense that the visit to Jonnie’s house was mandatory and inescapable, that declining his invitation was not an option.

In all, I recorded later in my journal, a dozen people lived in Jonnie’s family’s little stone house—though I have no memory of them and no further notes.

Looking back on it now, I realize the house was emblematic of the entire condition of the People’s Republic of China at that precise moment in time, though of course I didn’t know this and I didn’t have wisdom yet to even sense the metaphor.

It has long been a tradition in the West to mythologize peasants as being happier and purer than those of us corrupted by materialism and ambition.

Having grown up in a rough neighborhood in New York City, where my brother and I were routinely mugged and harassed by kids from the surrounding housing projects—and where our parents themselves were often strapped for cash—I never for a moment harbored any illusions about the nobility or innocence of the lower classes.

The poor kids I knew were tough. They would kick your ass, break your nose, wreck your bicycle, and steal your lunch money without another thought. What’s more, they were far savvier, tougher, and more cy...

I hate the idea of the poignant peasants, with all its implicit judgment, con...

I hesitate to write that Jonnie’s family was unlike any other I had ever enco...

She glared at me desperately and shook her head. “It’s all seafood,” she whispered.

“No,” I announced, “Claire isn’t going anywhere until we’re finished, Jonnie. What she means is that she’ll wait outside until you can go. So sit down. We’re all going to eat for a few minutes.” He looked at me uneasily. “Sit,” I said.

I longed to buy him breakfast but realized I’d used up all my Chinese money the night before. I didn’t even have enough for our ferry tickets back to Shanghai.

So when we abandon Jonnie on the platform of the Shanghai Terminus, when we leave him to his fate by dashing abruptly onto the last night train for Beijing while shouting at him, “Jonnie, the train is leaving! Hurry up! Where’s your ticket?” knowing full well he doesn’t have a ticket—he’s been under the impression that we’d bought one for him—he looks stricken.

I feel like I’ve committed murder. He has been nothing but generous and kind to us. And look what we’ve done. We’ve not only rejected but humiliated him. We’ve caused him to lose face. Hundreds of his countrymen have witnessed his desperation and unraveling in public.

I tell myself that betraying Jonnie had been her idea, her problem, her responsibility, not mine; after all, wasn’t she the one who’d insisted we go with him to Dinghai in the first place?

“Please. Don’t be so naive,” she said tightly. “That’s exactly how those people operate, you know. Befriend you, then exploit you.”