Video Night in Kathmandu (20 page)

As our jailer trudged off, with a satisfied grunt, to deal with other of her prisoners, the Frenchman and I gazed at each other in befuddlement. Then, with all the trepidation of a babysitter in a horror movie, I inched into the bathroom. There was a toilet there, but it could have been mistaken for a sewer. There was a naked wire strung across the room at neck level, perfect for decapitation. There were some dirty old towels hanging from the wire. There were taps in the sink, but no water inside them.

The sandals, however, worked perfectly.

“C’est très bizarre, non?”
I said as I emerged.
“Mais non,”
cried the Frenchman, throwing up his hands wildly.
“Au Black Coffee Hôtel à Chengdu, c’est plus bizarre.”
This I did not doubt. Already I had heard a great deal about this infamous place, an unrenovated air-raid shelter that now served as a $1.50-a-night bordello where beds were laid out in the windowless corridors and guests could reach the bathroom only by crawling through a hatch. In the lobby of this now legendary underground haunt, a rock-and-roll band serenaded drunken couples, while well-fed sixteen-year-old girls spread themselves languorously out on couches. Keys, of course, were strictly forbidden.
“Une fois,”
began my roommate,
“je devais attendre trente minutes parce que la gardienne lavait ses mains.”

Sobered by that cautionary tale, we decided to minimize our comings and goings, as well as to synchronize them. Since it was now dinnertime, we quickly put this policy to the test, ventured out into the corridor in search of the dining room, sticking as close to one another as members of a chain gang. As we edged through the winding hallways, we found them crowded with other guests waiting to be admitted to their rooms. Finally, after many curses and collisions, we arrived at a huge assembly hall of a dining room. A sweet-faced girl was seated at a desk outside. She directed our attention to a piece of paper that said “Airpot Hotel.” Below that curious inscription were eight rows of Chinese characters. We stared at the list for a while in despair, and then the girl smiled back her understanding and motioned us to follow her into the kitchen. Proudly, she pointed to a bowl of chicken and a bowl of vegetables. And what could we have to drink? “Yes,” she said, smiling brightly. “Beer.”

“Would it be possible to have some tea, please?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, pointing to a bottle. “Beer.”

“Thank you. But do you have tea, please? Tea.” I did an unworthy imitation of the dainty movements of a deb at Brown’s Hotel. The girl looked crestfallen. Deciding that it might be undiplomatic to remind her that Tibetans, according to Heinrich Harrer, drink two hundred cups of tea a day, I tried another tack.

“Does the Airpot Hotel have any soft drinks?” She looked confused. “Coke? Fanta? Lemon?”

Suddenly, her face brightened. “Beer,” she pronounced agreeably. “Yes!”

“Do you have water?”

She was now the picture of happiness. “Yes, yes! Beer.”

Drinkless, we proceeded to a table set aside for foreigners. There, the twenty-year-old student from Cambridge hell-bent on entering business school whom I knew from the Banak Shol was engaged in a dialectical session with the seventy-year-old Communist I had met in Lhasa. (He: “Did you have any problems during the McCarthy era?” She, eyes twinkling happily: “Oh no, dear. McCarthy was the one with problems.”) As the meal proceeded, I began to think, for a variety of reasons, of Mao’s famous injunction—“Self-criticism is like eating dog meat: if you haven’t tried it, you don’t know what you’re missing.” My cell mate, however, looked as if he knew all too much what he was missing. Recalling that he spoke no English, I suspected that it might be best for us to return to our room. We painstakingly mapped out an elaborate pincer movement for tracking down our elusive jailkeeper, and, a few minutes later, were rewarded with success.

Just as we were beginning to reacquaint ourselves with the pleasures of our suite, however, a young Chinese man in a corduroy jacket materialized at our door. He was round and bald and beaming. He looked at me happily. “Hindu?” I nodded, and he walked in, grabbed my head lustily and pressed his cheek against mine, kissing the space between ear and shoulder.

Then he turned to the Frenchman. “Karachi?” The Frenchman looked stunned. “English?” The Frenchman looked thunderstruck. “American? Japanese??” There was a long and terrible silence. “Hindu? German? Kar…” At this, the Frenchman
wisely blurted out something about France. Our visitor turned around to me with a satisfied smile, then rewarded my cell mate with a kiss.

Niceties behind us, the stranger looked me in the eye. “I am porridge.” Now it was my turn to look horrified. “Yes, yes,” he said, thinking that I doubted him. “I am pirate.” This was little better. “PIRATE!” he shouted out.

Through a leap of deductive reasoning, I came to two conclusions, neither of them heartening: (1) our guest was the beneficiary of the Airpot Hotel’s unbending beer-only policy; and (2) he was the man who would be guiding our plane across some of the world’s highest mountains just a few hours later.

Realizing, on both counts, that he was not a man to be crossed, I returned with new gusto to our small talk. Before long, the banter was proceeding swimmingly. The pilot told us his age, his wife’s age, our ages. He reminded us of his age, and his wife’s age. He taught us several Mandarin profanities, spitting out guttural sounds with angry nonchalance, then hissing as I tried to reproduce them. He volunteered, somewhat unexpectedly, that he had been to America, Russia, Karachi, Japan. He offered to buy my watch, then tickled me under the chin. He repeated his age, and his wife’s age.

The spirit of jollity mounted. I gave him a guided tour of our amenities, flipping on the TV that did not work, pressing the button on the bulbless lamp. He chuckled delightedly. I whispered conspiratorially that the Frenchman was in fact a minority Muslim from Turkestan. He chortled with pleasure. I asked him his wife’s age, and he whooped like a wild man.

Then, just as the bonhomie was reaching its peak, we heard a knock on the open door. There stood the girl from the dining hall. “Change money?” she offered, under her breath.

Smiling all around, she walked inside. Then she pulled out a napkin and, frowning with concentration, wrote down a number. The Frenchman stared at it in puzzlement, then scribbled down some numbers of his own. She scrutinized them for a moment, smiled with infinite sweetness and shook her head no. The pilot beamed at all parties with the air of a satisfied matchmaker.

Then, however, overexcited perhaps at the success of this cultural exchange, he began barking out numbers with the random
frenzy of a bingo caller. “Twenty. Fourteen. Fifty. Thousand. Thirty. Sixteen. Seven.” We stared at him in wonder. “Nineteen. Fifty. Four. Seven.” What on earth was going on? “Fifty. Sixteen. Twenty. Thousand.” Wild-eyed now, the Frenchman muttered something poisonous and scribbled down a few more figures. Again the girl shook her head no. Then, without a warning, the pilot broke off from his demented chant and tried to broker a four-part deal involving my watch, his watch, foreigners’ currency and people’s money. Foiled in an instant, he struck up again his terrible cry. “Thirty. Seven. Fifteen. Four.” The Frenchman and the girl huddled together. “Nineteen. Forty. Three …” Then, just as the pilot’s call was hitting a crescendo, the place was plunged into darkness. Lights-out at the Airpot Hotel!

As suddenly as they had appeared, the pilot and the girl vanished. Fumbling my way to my bed through the utter darkness, I heard a chorus of
merdes
as the Frenchman did the same. Since neither of us had any idea when, or whether, our plane would leave, I set my alarm clock for six. Next thing I knew, it shrilled me out of bed and I threw the light switch. Nada. Outside, the mountains were utterly dark. Dismally, I returned to bed. Just as I was beginning to relapse into sleep, however, there came a terrible banging at our door. I jumped to attention once more. Outside in the corridor, a hotel employee stared at me urgently. “Bus leave.”

Driven like madmen, the Frenchman and I flung on our trousers, threw all our belongings into our bags, pushed some toothpaste toward our gums and, picking up our possessions, raced out into the corridor. Hurling ourselves at top speed along the hall, we careened into the lobby. There, we were brought to a sudden stop: the place was pitch black. Everything was motionless. A small army of Tibetans were seated on cases with the look of the damned, heads buried in hands or thrown back over their seats. For all we knew, they had spent much of the night in fruitless search for the doorkeeper or else had seen the rooms and elected to sleep in the familiarity of this plainlike space.

As we considered the melancholy scene, a hotel worker scurried up to us through the darkness. “Breakfast?” I thought bitterly of a choice between beer, beer and beer. “No, thank you.” We sat down and waited. Maybe two hours later, the bus came
into view, to be greeted by another mad stampede. We were driven to a terminal, then taken by another bus to a customs shed. There we waited for an hour or two before the plane arrived. After another short wait, we were told that it might be ready to leave.

THE INCIDENT AT
Lhasa exemplified all the comic clumsiness of the New China’s attempts to accommodate the West. But it also demonstrated its canniness. For at the airport, we encountered the package tourists who had been staying at a luxury hotel on the Chinese side of Lhasa; it did not seem a coincidence that they had been permitted to spend their last night in town (where they were paying 100 yuan a night) and had been driven to the airport only that morning, while we (who were paying 5 yuan a night on the Tibetan side of Lhasa) had been compelled to spend the night together with other improvident locals at the relatively exorbitant Airpot Hotel. Only the 30 yuan that came from every member of a captive and otherwise unremunerative audience could explain the erection of a shiny new hotel in the midst of a windswept plateau three hours from the nearest town.

The discrepancy also, however, revealed another hazardous strain in China’s careful courtship of the West. For although the country had managed to keep package tourists successfully out of touch with the man in the Chinese street, it had not yet managed to bring the solo traveler to heel. And if feelings and finances were often dangerously confused at the larger level, the confusion was many times more explosive on the individual level, where finances had not been agreed upon, or emotions decided upon, in advance. The budget traveler, moreover, was resolutely determined to avoid the prescribed route, to scorn big hotels, to travel by train and to steal across any and every boundary between the cultures. Most dangerous of all, the backpacker sought at every point to make contact with locals—striking up deals and conversations without ever really troubling to distinguish between them. Floating around the country’s bloodstream like a clump of bacteria, the individual traveler spread still further the contamination of individualism: not only did he refuse to be abstracted by being absorbed into a group, but he encouraged the same in those he met.

As it was, these impromptu meetings between locals and foreign individuals had already begun to subvert the rituals of official exchange and so to afford the individual a perfect revenge upon the system. To take just one example, the establishment of two separate but equal currencies—Foreign Exchange Certificates and “people’s money”—worked wonderfully so long as foreigners and locals were strictly segregated. But as soon as the two parties mingled, their currencies were mixed together, and as soon as the currencies mingled, the foreigners’ law of supply and demand came into devastating effect.

By 1985, therefore, the FEC was already worth 60 percent more than the renminbi with which it was supposed to enjoy parity, and a vigorous black market had arisen to fill the gap between theory and practice. Already too, rickshaw drivers had taken to loitering outside many tourist hotels, soliciting passing foreigners by rubbing thumbs and fingers together and muttering figures under their breath. Any tourist who wished to make a killing had only to reach an agreement by haggling on paper, in the manner of the Frenchman and the Chinese girl in the hotel, and the driver would usher him into his rickshaw and take him for a leisurely ride around the block. As he pedaled, the Chinese would casually slip some “people’s money” into the tourist’s hand, and as they went on, the tourist would press a roll of FECs into the driver’s grasp. By the time the two had disembarked, a few minutes later, their positions were as good as reversed. The foreigner could now live as cheaply as a local, and the rickshaw driver as lavishly as a tourist. The only loser was the system.

UPON MY RETURN
to Chengdu, famous “city of revolutions,” I had more and more occasions to note how inevitable were these unscheduled meetings, and how incendiary. As soon as we arrived at the airport, the tour groups dutifully filed into their buses, while the four odd men out—I, the Frenchman, the Cambridge student and the Communist old lady—grabbed a taxi together and headed for the only tourist hotel in town, the Jinjiang. There we were informed that there were no suites available, no rooms, not even any dorm beds; we would have to find a flight out at the CAAC office. There we were told that the next seat available was on a plane leaving town three weeks from
now, we would have to stay at the Changshi, the town’s best nontourist hotel. There we were told that it was full (of delegations) and we would have to try the Black Coffee.

At this, the Frenchman, already all too familiar with the unorthodox facilities of that windowless prison, shouted out something passionate and went off to catch the next train out of town, regardless of its destination. The adventurous old lady picked up her three bags, cheerfully announced that her American Express card had been stolen two nights before and began trudging down a huge avenue toward the air-raid-shelter-turned-bordello. The Brit and I, however, decided to attempt another assault upon the Jinjiang.

Hailing a rickshaw driver, we recited our destination. He held up five fingers, we held up three. He held up four. We nodded, he rolled his bicycle up to us, and we took the five-minute ride to the hotel. Getting out, we handed him 40 fen (there are 100 fen in a yuan), and he pushed the money back to us. Again, the Brit gave him the fare, and began walking away. He hurried up and grabbed the Brit by the arm, thrusting the money back into his hand. His friends began gathering around. He shouted at us. We stood our ground. He shouted again. The Brit shouted back. The mood of the crowd started to turn ugly. The man poked at the Brit’s arm, and the Brit pushed him back. There were shouts and threats. The Brit gave him the money again and he threw it on the ground. Alarmed by the mounting air of violence, I raced into the hotel and brought back a young gift-shop proprietress to serve as an interpreter. She explained that the man wanted 4 yuan. We told her that we had paid only 1 yuan for four people on the way over. The Brit handed over 40 fen again, and the man let out a shout. The girl, looking back and forth with rising alarm, told us that the driver was going to bring the police. Thirty or forty people had gathered around by now, some of them curious, some of them furious. The Brit threw 40 fen onto the ground and began walking away. The man spit at us. The girl, looking more and more miserable, said we would be taken to jail. The man hovered over us. The Brit cursed. The girl asked us just to pay 2 yuan and be done with it. We protested. The man circled around. At last, we handed over 2 yuan and, twenty-five minutes after the dispute had begun, the gang of rickshaw drivers shambled sullenly away.