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The relentless rocking of the car became numbing, then peculiarly erotic. I found myself returning to licentious thoughts of Trevor. My precarious time in Dinghai had revived my desire to see him. Travel, I realized, made me lonely, and loneliness made me horny.
I found myself thinking impatiently: So what if there are a few cockroaches in our room? Big deal. They’re everywhere in New York, too.
He called over to the two girls. One was skinny and blond, pocked with acne. The other was chubby and sullen, with dyed black hair and red lipstick. They both wore peasant blouses and ill-fitting canvas hiking pants.
There were no people in this “people’s square,” no hint of passion or lifeblood: no sense at all of what would occur just twenty-seven months later.
The only variable, the only anomaly that I could think of, was Trevor. Ah. I had a guy. Never mind that Claire thought he was creepy and crazy and more than a little vulgar. Trevor had kissed me right in front of her that morning, while she was relegated to pining away for a boat hand who was growing more and more illusory each day. In spite of herself, she was jealous. That had to be it.
The goodwill seemed restorative. Claire was now buoyant, pirouetting. “Can you get over that?” she said as we entered the lobby. “They have nothing, nothing at all. But look at them. Those are good people, Suze. Those are people we can be safe with. Hey,” she said. “Let’s go have a drink and toast to our rescuers.”
The backpacking community was proving to be a small, recycled pool.
But people leaned back in their chairs with their arms crossed, sizing each other up shrewdly. Who exactly are you? And conversations quickly turned competitive: Who was the most hard-core, the most rugged, the most real?
“Personally, I only ever travel in third class,” said a jaded-looking Brit with reptilian eyelids. “It took me forty-six hours to make it here from Kunming, but it’s the only way to experience anything.”
“We traveled for eight days by local bus through the mountains. We had dysentery and there was nothing to eat but rice with maggots. But it cost only six dollars apiece, instead of the three hundred dollars the tourists pay to go in a group, and then they don’t even get to meet the Dalai Lama. They just take pictures outside the temple. The way we did it was just so much more spiritual and genuine.”
We were too young and myopic to recognize the perversity of a logic that equates voluntary deprivation with authentic experience.
It never seemed to occur to us that only privileged Westerners travel to developing countries in the first place, then use them as playgrounds and laboratories for our own enrichment.
Only privileged Westerners consider it a badge of honor to forsake modern amenities for a two-dollar-a-night roach-infested guesthouse. Only privileged Westerners sit around drinking beers at prices the natives can’t afford while sentimentalizing the nation’s lower standard of living and adopting it as a lifestyle.
Granted, it was good, even admirable, that we young backpackers at least attempted to break through the barriers of culture and class to experience firsthand how people in Southeast Asia really lived.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Only the white man could’ve relegated all the other cultures of the world to a curiosity, a subject to be subjected to his study.
Only the white man could decide that all other cultures in this world must be demystified.
Only the white man shows up uninvited. Only the white man treats the rest of the world like a specimen. Only the white man turns his voyeurism into a so-called social science.”
Beneath the white-hot spotlight of their attention, Claire and I exchanged little smiles of carnivorous glee. In the scramble for unique adventures and experience, finally we were winning.
“Please, I have absolutely zero desire to behave like some idiotic tourist,” Claire sniffed. “I mean, going to China and seeing the Great Wall—how fucking unoriginal is that? I want to do something bold.”
But I refused to stop and take it in. Not yet. I wanted to hike to the highest point possible first, beyond any vestige of modern civilization, and see it as it was five hundred years ago.
Finally we were beyond the last tourist. When the Canadians stopped to take pictures, I told them I’d see them on the way back down. It was just me now, panting and wheezing, struggling on alone at the crest.
the Great Wall was a cathedral. I could see that now. Partying on it, strewing the place with empty liquor bottles and milky condoms, was a desecration. As much as I liked to see myself as some sort of erotic outlaw, the truth was, I couldn’t bring myself to do something so obnoxious and illegal.
it’s clean and warm and quiet, and it feels so civilized. Civilized and elegant—nobody’s spitting. Nobody’s frying vegetables in the gutter. And the waiters speak English.
when I was out on the bike, the only dumpling house I could find along Qianmen—the Chinese in it were all just staring and staring at me like I was some kind of freak—and
The guy at the front desk doesn’t understand a word of English, and it takes an eternity,
We have been waiting for almost two hours. And I don’t know who you think you are, but you should know one thing. My father is a very important businessman back in America. And once I tell him how you people have ignored us and abused our goodwill, you will not hear the end of it.”
“You know, back in America, my father is a very important businessman,” Claire said loudly. “We are special guests from America—”
She shook her head and looked at me. “I don’t see how the Chinese think they’re ever going to amount to anything in this world. Their whole fucking system is medieval.”
“I’m sorry, but what kind of business?” She looked at me cryptically. “Sweetie, Libras shouldn’t ask questions.”
Watching their blond heads bobbing, then dissolving into the sea of dark hair, I felt a stab of grief.
Although he was Asian, something about the oversize, unapologetic sprawl of him seemed strangely familiar.
Claire arrived suddenly, in a flurry of apologies, carrying two enormous plastic shopping bags from the Friendship Store that knocked against the tables as she passed breathlessly through the room.
The processed yellow cheese stuck to the roofs of our mouths, making it difficult to talk, but it was a reprieve from the acrid, bone-riddled stir-fry we’d been eating all week at our hotel.
While Lee and I laughed and drank bottle after bottle of Tsingtao, Claire sullenly picked at her food, unwrapping the pancakes and tweezing out slivers of scallions with her chopsticks.
She, too, wanted to climb up high along the ridge. “But not too far. I want to make sure there are witnesses around.”
Lee wished me happy birthday again and handed us each a thick bar of Swiss chocolate and a pack of Doublemint gum. We were beside ourselves. Suddenly, I understood what life must have been like for people during World War Two. Stockings! Chocolate! Then it occurred to me that this was what life was like for the Chinese every day. Everything was rationed. Everything was a luxury.
When Chief mentioned that his father was the ambassador to Ghana, Claire flinched as if she’d been stung. She stepped back and studied him outright, like a specimen.
I wrote dozens of postcards. Later I would find out that only those in which I praised China got through to America; the cards on which I wrote “travel here is difficult” somehow never arrived.
I wrote my friend Maggie a long letter on Grand Hotel Beijing stationery. When she finally received it, it had clearly been opened, read, and resealed. There were even Chinese notations on the outside.
While she was increasingly suspicious of Westerners, she seemed to have become immune to the Chinese. She happily told Sam that her three stepbrothers all had advanced degrees, that her father was an extremely important American businessman, and that she herself was preparing to become a teacher “on a global scale”—which was, frankly, news to me.
In Guilin, apparently, you could sit in a tropical garden and feast on a zoo.
On a rise above a broad lawn stood the town’s one fancy modern tourist hotel, the Osmanthus. Built of white concrete and tinted glass, it looked like a 1970s spaceship plopped down in a flower bed. Claire exhaled. “Finally, civilization. Mind if we go inside?”
the hotel restaurant. “Look,” she said, pointing to the menu posted on the entrance. “All English. And no dogs or cats. Only normal Chinese food.”
After being in Asia for a full month, Chinese faces were becoming the norm to me, while Western features appeared increasingly alien and grotesque.
We were in the middle of nowhere—ground zero of prehistory—and yet we’d stumbled into an oasis of Western hippie youth culture and English nestled among the ancient karsts.
She was Chinese, though there was something strangely Western looking about her. She was tall and slim, dressed in a pink, puffed-sleeve blouse and a beige dirndl. Her shoulder-length hair was cut across her forehead in thick bangs, but the front locks were pulled back with a pink polka-dot ribbon. When she smiled, her full-moon face looked satiny and untarnished.
She couldn’t be any older than Claire and me. Buoyant, aspiring, she was a Chinese version of us:
They laughed, and in the concentrated beam of their attention, I felt myself bloom.
Did Lewis and Clark ever get on each other’s nerves? In the depths of East Africa, did Richard Burton and John Speke ever irritate each other so much that they just wanted to reach over and whack each other upside the head? Did Sir Francis Drake ever sulkily give his crew the silent treatment? What about Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? Did they bicker all the way up and down Everest?
She is sick, too, of my sloppiness—the pile of balled-up Kleenex on the floor by my bed is enough to make anyone psychotic. And that idiotic astrology. Oh, and my verbosity! Can’t I ever just talk in sentences instead of anecdotes? Does everything have to be a fucking story?
