Video Night in Kathmandu (17 page)

He often chose to spend his evenings here, Joe explained while brewing up some coffee, because his own apartment was even smaller than this kitchen. Sometimes, he went on, he came here just to read
Time
and
Newsweek
, sometimes he listened to the BBC World Service; two or three times a week he did body-building exercises nearby. He had read much of Hemingway and Twain, and he had seen
On Golden Pond
, as well as
Daughter of the Miner
with Sissy Spacek. Also, of course,
Nightmare. Nightmare!
Yes, said Joe with a smile, it was a film about capitalism.

A few minutes later, good as his word, Joe took me back to the station and showed me to my berth on the Beijing train. Just as the train began to pull out, he wished me good health and asked me to call him on my way back. Then, very shyly, he pressed into my hands a bag of bananas and three Cokes, waving goodbye to me as I pulled away into the dark.

FOR THE NEXT
forty hours, I lived inside a kind of merry peasant home on wheels, a fragment of the old China transported by the New. Opposite me in my “hard sleeper” second-class
compartment sat a family of four, a middle-aged couple and two teenage sons. One of the boys had a withered hand and a T-shirt that said “Milano”; his brother had a shirt that said “Ferrari.” All four were huddled over jars filled to the brim with what looked like eel juice, but was doubtless only strong tea, matted with an inch or two of leaves. On my side, one entire berth was given over to a huge box that said “Microcomputer”; another was occupied by a wiry man in his early fifties, with Schwarzenegger muscles over his string shirt, and a belt around his waist that said “U.S.A.”; inside the third, most curious of all to my companions, no doubt, sat a scrawny, scruffy foreign devil in an ancient blue blazer from Harrods, a pair of old corduroys that grew grayer and smaller by the day, a blindingly bright scarlet T-shirt and a pair of $2 sneakers just purchased in Hong Kong. Over us all hung a friendly, down-home air.

Next morning, I awoke from a fitful, fevered sleep to see the mist beginning to lift above long green fields. Slowly, the carriage began to stir into life. Someone in the next compartment put on a radio that crackled into the treble strains of a lilting folk ditty. Someone else interrupted these melodious sounds with an instrumental version of “Yesterday” and “The Gambler.” In the corridor, a ponytailed little girl sat on a fold-down seat by the window, playing cards with a smile-wrinkled man in a vest. The ever-busy matriarch across from me briskly handed out jars of broth to her troops, filling our carriage with the smell of noodles. The muscleman calmly broke open eggs on the bench.

Thus the day lazed on, and I fell asleep again, awoke, nibbled on bananas, read Mishima in feverish snatches, slept and awoke and slept once more. Outside, the landscape unscrolled itself like a watercolor by Wang Wei, field upon field dotted with the peaked triangles of bamboo hats, or the bent forms of peasants carrying buckets of water under T-shaped bars. Just before nightfall, I suddenly felt my body being shaken. I looked up foggily. A guard barked something out at me. I stared back blankly. He shouted something else. I gazed back helpless. A crowd began to gather at the door, whispers spread along the corridor. The guard looked around for help. Finally, the mob parted and a young man in spectacles stepped forward. The guard was offering me a first-class sleeper, he explained—it was much better for foreigners. That was very kind, I said, but please
could he tell the guard that I was happy where I was? “He says that the first-class compartment is more comfortable for you. This is no good.” “Thank you, but this is comfortable enough.” At that, the guard looked unhappier than ever. More words were exchanged. Finally, convinced no doubt that it was better to leave the barbarian to his folly than to try to coerce him out of it, the guard padded off. He came from Mongolia, my amiable rescuer explained, and he had learned English at his university in Peking. Was there anything else I needed? Only sleep, I assured him, collapsing into Mishima dreams. When I awoke, I found that my new friend had slipped into the compartment to close the chilling window above me as I slept.

Next morning, a sense of festive anticipation crackled through the mobile commune as we drew into Beijing. From out of a nearby radio, Teresa Teng, or some sound-alike songstress, whinnied sweetly. The ponytailed little girl clapped her hands while her father smiled proudly, and the two of them sent paper planes shooting along the corridor. The Mongolian appeared again at my door, followed by an old lady who pressed upon me some tablets for my fever. There was much excitement, my new friend explained—during the night, my roommate from Hong Kong had been robbed!

A few minutes later, the train stopped and the crowds began pouring out onto the platform, hoisting boxes, handing cases through the windows, scrambling for room. Guiding me gently away from the mob, the Mongolian led me down long corridors and up stairs and across waiting halls and then out into the daylight and across another enormous square. Did I have a friend in Beijing? he asked. Not really, I gasped—just a secondhand invitation to stay with a correspondent for Agence France-Presse, whom I had never met. His fiancée in Hong Kong had told me to stay with him, but he knew nothing about it. The Mongolian looked surprised, but guided me nonetheless to one of the city’s only public telephones and dialed the number I gave him. The phone crackled, he shot something out and then he was shot at in return. He put down the receiver with an air of anxious melancholy. It would not be easy, he said, to find my friend.

The only other name I knew in Beijing was the Peking Hotel. As soon as I mentioned it, my tireless guide nodded briskly, led me across an enormous street and delivered me onto a jam-packed
bus. Two stops later, he led me off again onto another wide boulevard. By our side, at the end of an ambassadorial driveway, stood an old gray monument, sleepy and stately as an elderly gentleman at some interminable committee meeting.

I invited my savior to join me for some tea, but he reminded me gently that he was not allowed to enter such places. Thanking him warmly, I headed alone across the imposing courtyard. Inside, the building resembled nothing so much as a dusty castle deserted by its fleeing lords and left in the care of the servants. There were grand red carpets in the corridors, but they were torn. There were rows of gift-store display cases, but they were covered with dust. There were cavernous banquet halls on every side, but they were crowded with ghosts. Chamber after chamber was haunted by an air of lavish desolation.

For many minutes, I wandered and wandered through the endless lounges. Then I walked into another huge lounge, and found myself suddenly amidst a whole crowd of noisy foreigners, seated over small circular tables crammed with cups. Like their surroundings, the whole chattering assembly had a somewhat queer and old-fashioned look to it, as if it had just stepped out, a little the worse for wear, from the pages of Marguerite Duras. Bohemian girls from the Continent in baggy trousers sat back from their tables with the air of veteran café-goers, languorously letting smoke escape from their lips as they exchanged greetings with thick-bearded Quartier Latin types in pajama suits and Chinese slippers. Shifty-looking businessmen in shabby suits conferred in whispers. Mountebanks seemed imminent.

Collapsing into a chair, I treated myself to some tea dispensed by what seemed a British hospital canteen and picked up a copy of the
China Daily.
On television today, I read, I could watch “We Are the 8th Army Soldiers,” “Accelerating the Ripening of Cotton,” “Around the World: Beautiful Bulgaria,” “Les Misérables” (a cartoon) and a show on knock-knees. On the radio, I could listen to “Australian Song: Spring Is the Season for Sheep Shearing” or “Vocal Solos: Offering a Bouquet to the Party.” Strangely fortified by all this, I hoisted myself up and wandered out again to the main thoroughfare. Herds of bicyclists were streaming down the sides of a street as wide as the Pasadena Freeway; along the pavements, groups of green-clad workers
chattered past rows of buildings lined up as formidably as poker-faced dignitaries at a May Day parade. Uniformed young soldiers walked together in animated schoolboy clusters, joking and pushing one another about; solitary peasants looked around in openmouthed astonishment. Wisp-bearded old men whose wrinkled faces seemed older than surprise shuffled past, looking at nothing but the ground.

A few blocks down, the main artery—so cluttered at its fringes, so empty at its center—gave way to the enormous open space of Tiananmen Square, the largest in the world. In one corner of the huge, but quiet, square was a pair of small stone bridges and a tiny gap, underneath a giant poster of Mao. Through it, throngs of visitors were streaming into a further courtyard. Falling into step with them, I entered the Forbidden City. The first thing I saw was a basketball court.

For several hours, still feverish, I found and lost and found myself in a leafy labyrinth of courtyards and pavilions. As I made my way unguided around serpentine turns and dragon-shaped detours, through sunlight and shade, I could relate it to nothing I knew except the Chinese emperor in the Marguerite Yourcenar story, “beautiful, but blank, like a looking-glass placed too high, reflecting nothing except the stars and the immutable heavens.” Finally, more disoriented than ever, I staggered back to the Peking Hotel and tried another phone call. This time, surprisingly, my unknown and unknowing host answered the phone; more surprisingly still, when I invited myself to stay, he graciously acquiesced.

Twenty minutes later, a gliding taxi took me through broad avenues of tree-lined quiet, past an elaborate network of sentry posts and into the Forbidden City of the New China: Beijing’s main foreigners’ compound. Jinguomenwai reminded me of nothing so much as some bleak housing estate in a featureless British industrial town: block after block of numbered concrete towers, encircled by parking lots and vacant lots in which African kids played dustily and Muslim mothers wheeled prams. Behind them, stretching grayly into the gray distance, were more built-by-number blocks, a motorway, a hazy skyline. Within this well-guarded protectorate, my host explained, the expat community was obliged to live as if it were a commune like any other: foreigners did their shopping at the Friendship Store, their
socializing at the International Club, their living inside this group of blocks, or one of two others.

That night, for dinner, we went around the corner to the Jianguo Hotel, a replica of the Holiday Inn in Palo Alto. Aliens, my host explained, did enjoy a little more freedom now than they had done in the past, but they were still kept largely under house arrest. A few lucky foreigners were put up in the splendor of the $150-a-night Great Wall Hotel (which offered on Friday nights “the romance of the Mediterranean … souvlaki, pastas, gnocchi”), and others could take $85 lunches at Maxim’s. But the Jianguo was the place where most foreign residents usually ate. In the coffee shop, customers consulted menus on HOJO place mats while white-bloused, green-skirted waitresses circulated with refills of coffee and men in tall white hats cooked burgers; in the lobby, a girl clunked her way unhappily through “Beautiful Dreamer” and the theme from
Love Story
, while in the French restaurant, tuxedoed waiters with Parisian manners served us filet mignon, duck à l’orange and mandarin sorbet with peach slices. As we went on chatting, my host happened to mention that he came from California. In reality, he came from the next town up the coast from mine. And, as it transpired, he had been to college in my own hometown. As a matter of fact, we soon discovered, he had learned some of his political theory from my father. That was my first sign that Beijing was among the smallest of places, as well as the largest.

SCALE, INDEED, WAS
the single great feature of Beijing: sheer monumentality. The city had little of the decorous dignity or stately grandeur of a Washington, D.C., or even a New Delhi; it just had bigness plain and simple. And the plainness and simplicity only heightened the bigness. Beijing’s buildings seemed solid, unguarded, declarative, tributes in block capitals to the rightness of the Right Way. This was not, it seemed, a place that allowed itself the luxury of decorative flourishes or side-street nuances; it was a city of grand simplicities.

In Beijing, moreover, proportion was an expression of priority. The huge public buildings made concrete the assertion of a will that was public, an ego that was only collective; their effect was to state inarguably that the sum of individuals was less than the whole of the state. Beijing thus appeared to be both imperial and
impersonal: a city drafted by committee. And this in turn made for a curious disjunction: while the public world here seemed constructed on the epic scale, the private was on the miniature. The place seemed built not for people but for abstractions. The streets were huge, but virtually carless. The official buildings were enormous, but the sidewalk stalls were cramped. The bureaucratic monoliths were gargantuan and yet, by all accounts, private homes were smaller here than anywhere else in the world. Everything, in fact, was topsy-turvily scaled, right down, and up, to a system in which more than a thousand million people were ruled by one twinkling four foot eleven octogenarian who liked to remain behind the scenes. Beijing seemed a Brobdingnag peopled by Lilliputians.

In recent years, of course, this vertical division had been further stressed and strained by a horizontal split. Erected like a Trojan horse within the very heart of the Old China was a New China, designed to encourage all the influences that the country had long worked hard to keep out: capitalism, individualism, fashion, freedom, the flash and grab of the West. The rationale was simple: China wanted progress, and progress meant the West. In return for giving foreigners a precious glimpse of the past, the country now hoped to gain a lucrative taste of the future; by attracting the outer world, it planned to bolster the inner.

Thus the world’s largest country had started putting Mao’s celebrated maxim—“Make the past serve the present, make the foreign serve China”—to radically new use. The Great Wall, established to keep out the world at large, was now being used to attract it. Foreign influences, long reviled as obscene, were now being welcomed. The little red book was now being rivaled by the big greenback. And as the country began hawking its tradition to the outsiders it had long distrusted, it also set about importing Western goods, methods and funds—everything, so it hoped, but Western values.