Video Night in Kathmandu (55 page)

Once back in New York, I tried very hard to keep something of that spirit alive. I took long walks by the river at dawn and listened in the darkening afternoons to the unearthly strains of the gamelan. I read deeply in the Zen poets by the light of a single candle and I fasted and burned incense when the moon was full. I joined local groups of Tibetans in their seasonal festivities, and I haunted Thai cafés on East Coast and West. Mostly, though, I spent my hours flipping through photographs and reading old diaries, trying to revisit, in memory and imagination, the places and friends I had known.

Some of these characters, as the months went on, did indeed manage to draw closer to their American dreams. Jain, for example, my constant guide in Burma, informed me that he had befriended a girl from Seattle on her first seven-day trip around his closed country; he had traveled with her, chastely, when she returned for another visit, and had listened, in surprise, as she
told him on the eve of her departure that she loved him; and, after she had turned around in Bangkok and flown back for a third seven-day stay, he had taken her to be his wife in the drafty old Anglican church in Rangoon. They had enjoyed a six-day honeymoon around Burma; then she had returned to Washington, and he to working outside the Strand Hotel in order to save up for his ticket—though she had offered to pay, he said, he did not wish her to feel used. And though his mother was grieving that she might never see him again, he had tried to convince her that his was truly an affair of the heart. “My wife is not beautiful,” he said quietly, “but I can really say I love her. And look at me. I have no job. I am not handsome. I have no degree. I am just a driver. I think she must love me for myself.”

A little later, however, a California friend of mine came back from Rangoon with the news that Jain had been arrested for unofficial tour guiding, and was now condemned to two years in jail.

More cheering news came from Didien, a nineteen-year-old Indonesian girl with whom I had chatted for a couple of hours one morning as we waited for different trains in a small station in eastern Java. At the time, she was on her way to Jakarta to apply for an Australian residency visa. On her first trip ever to the capital, she had not even managed to leave the station before she was robbed of the $100 it had taken her months to save. Now, having saved up again, she was off for another try. If she passed her interview at the embassy, she told me, she would be free to join her sister and her Australian brother-in-law Down Under. Only four months later, I received a birthday card from Canberra: it came from Didien, who was now, she reported happily, studying English at a local college. In the months that followed, she greeted me often with photos of her cat and cheery postcards of Australian cities, bright in the winter sun.

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, was the story of Joe, the friendly entrepreneur of Guangzhou. Just before leaving China, I had given him 25 U.S. dollars to pay for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exam demanded of foreign applicants by American universities. Our transaction had made me wistful, as the encouragement of pipe dreams always does; if trips to America were hard to imagine in most parts of the world, they seemed next to impossible in Communist China.

Six months later, I was sleeping in my apartment at six o’clock one Sunday morning when I was jolted into wakefulness by the insistent ringing of my phone. Groggily, I picked it up—to be assaulted by a relentless torrent of words. “Hullo, Pico! This is Joe from Guangzhou! You can call me John now! I am here in Manhattan! It is like a dream to me, it is so exciting. I walked down Broadway last night and saw many black men. It is very strange for me. One man, a strong man, came up and asked me for money. That was more exciting to me than the Empire State Building. Also, I saw many, many beggars. As you know, we do not have beggars in Guangzhou.”

On and on the breathless narrative raced. “It is so exciting here. Everything here is so old. The buildings are old. Even the cars are old. The streets are very dirty. Many fat women call out to me in the streets, ‘Come here, baby.’ Today, I wake up at three o’clock to write to Wu about all I have seen in New York. You know, it is like a dream to me.”

The world had indeed come full circle: here was a visitor from an impoverished peasant nation savoring New York, not for its skyscrapers and limousines—he had seen all that at home—but for its unimagined supply of beggars, prostitutes, filth and Third World anarchy!

Then I heard an ominous click: our three minutes were almost up. Then I heard another click, and the voice started irresistibly up again. “Here I can find a telephone and put in coins and talk to you! I talked to an operator, and she said, ‘Please put in twenty-five cents.’ Then I put in fifty cents and the phone rings and she tells me to collect my change! Now I can pay more money and talk to you again! For as long as I like! In Guangzhou, as you know, we have no public telephones!”

Before hanging up, Joe smartly invited himself to stay, and I soon reacquainted myself with his curious blend of innocent energy and quick-witted acquisitiveness. (Not, it seems, a unique blend. A couple of months earlier, his friend Wu had written me a reproving letter: “I am always looking forward to your letter after your departure, but I have got no news from you … I here write to you for your help … Thank you in advance for your kindness to send the magazines as you promised … Awaiting your answer …” As soon as I sent him a cache of old
Cosmos
, he fired back an extravagantly grateful reply: “Thank
you very much indeed for your kind letter … It made me really very happy to hear from you … I felt quite lucky to have the chance to know you, a man of so considerable culture and so kind … Thank you again … I don’t know how to express my thanks for your kindness, what I can do for thanking you …”) For his part, Joe, within a few minutes of entering the flat, began ransacking my bookcases for “gifts,” and showering me with names of Chinese sources who would, he said, be invaluable to me in my work.

He had managed to get out of China, he explained, by befriending an American patron, and then by treating the two local officials in charge of his visa application to a 100-yuan dinner; he would be spending the next four years studying theology in North Carolina. He anticipated no trouble in financing his studies, Joe went on: he would simply travel around churches in the Bible Belt, denouncing the Communist system and affirming his faith in Jesus. He would also explain to his fellow Christians the value of investing in his future. If they gave him $1,000, he would point out, he could win fifty new converts at home. That came to only $20 per Chinese Christian. And if each of his converts made another fifty converts, his American donors would, in effect, be spending only 40 cents for each saved soul! Quite a bargain.

On his second night in New York, this latter-day Charlie Soong eagerly headed off to his first XXX movie. Later, he reported that the experience had been of great sociological interest: he had not been very taken by the business on screen, but he had, from the balcony, enjoyed an excellent view of solitary men in the audience sidling up to one another, conferring in whispers and then leaving in pairs. His observation had been cut short, however, when an old man sidled up to him and began conferring with him in whispers.

Making his way home, Joe had gone into a deli and paid $10 for a cup of coffee. Just as he was leaving, though, a waiter rushed after him to give him $9 in change. “He was an Italian immigrant,” Joe told me. “I had read
The Godfather
and I had a bad impression of them. But he was very honest.” Noting the recurrent theme of his New York experiences, I took care to warn him about the three-card monte sharks on Broadway. “No problem,”
he shot back after I had finished my long explanation. “We have same trick in Guangzhou.”

A few hours later, in the middle of the night, Joe suddenly leapt up from the floor where he was sleeping and threw himself into an eloquent sermon on the works of Christ and the horrors of totalitarianism. By now, the full-circle ironies were beginning to strain credulity: here was a student from Communist China visiting New York to convert an employee of Henry Luce to Christianity and democracy!

In the months that followed, I received many spirited updates from Joe—now wind-surfing on a Carolina beach, now devouring sociology textbooks, now dashing off articles for the Chinese dissident press. Three months into his stay, he declared, with great solemnity, “I have fallen in love with America.”

OTHERS OF THE
friends I made in Asia were not so fortunate. Sarah, the virginal waitress I came to know in Manila, wrote to me more faithfully than anyone else I knew. She always sustained what seemed a characteristically Filipino blend of evergreen optimism and unguarded warmth. And she always wished me well. But her plaintive and affectionate letters, poignant at the best of times, became even more heartrending as they became more open:

Maung-Maung, the trishaw driver I had met in Mandalay, was equally loyal. Ours was not by any means an easy correspondence to maintain: I had to send his letters care of a trishaw stand, registering every envelope lest the government confiscate it. He in turn had to smuggle his letters out through tourists who could post them for him from Bangkok. Once, he begged me not to ask him about politics because “sometimes the police come ask me questions about it and may be put me in jail.” And sometimes I received nothing but empty envelopes from Maung-Maung, their seals cut open and their contents removed.

For all the hazards, though, my friend managed regularly to get through long and thoughtful letters.

Trishaw Stand,
Mandalay,
Burma

Month after month, in beautifully curled English that must have taken him hours—and constant trips to his dictionary—to complete, Maung-Maung sent me increasingly fluent reports of his own life and solicitous best wishes for mine. When it was hot, in midsummer, he wrote that “sometimes I don’t even get one kyat for a day. Anyhow, I will try to improve for my living and I will support to my old parents. I have to try for success, then happiness. But I don’t want to wish for what is impossible. For example, I don’t want to get a star from the sky. Some people ride the car and live in the brick house, I can’t own a trishaw. But I like to do the right things, whether rich or not.”

When I sent him a small gift, he thanked me warmly, but added, “I don’t want to take too much advantage of your kindness. Let me say that I am not a man for the money. Because money cannot buy happiness.” When I apologized for being slow to reply, explaining that work had been all-consuming, he wrote, “Don’t feel deject if you cannot succeed. You will know that industry is the keynote to success. Also please be patient in everything.” Another time, he took pains to remind me that “you are indeed fortunate because you were born from America, and America is the riches and improve city in the world.”

And once, when I commended Maung-Maung on his English, he wrote back to say that “my English is not better than the
English of most Americans as you tell, because I am a simple Burmese trishaw-man in Mandalay as you know. But I shall learn by experience.”

THE ONE OTHER
friend with whom I tried to keep up was Ead, the small and serious Thai girl I had met in the flashy neon bar strip of Soi Cowboy, who did not seem to have the heart for her ambiguous profession. Before I left Bangkok, I had spent one long day with Ead, hearing about her life as we wandered through the city one still and brilliant Sunday. Early in the morning, we had met at Wat Saket, the golden temple that stands on a hill above the city, and together we had climbed to the top and looked out across the gilded pagodas in the cloudless morning calm. Ead had gone off to pray at a shrine, put in a coin for a kind of Buddhist lottery and then returned with a smile: for the first time ever, she explained, she had received the number 1, the highest token of good fortune. Afterwards, we had joined the city’s families in the zoo, watching the bears and tapirs in the bright holiday sunshine; and that evening, we had gone together to a program of classical Thai dance. Next day, Ead came to my hotel to accompany me to the “well-wisher’s lounge” at the airport.