Video Night in Kathmandu (56 page)

A few weeks later, back in New York, I sent Ead a pair of jeans for her birthday, then rang up the Friends Bar to see if the parcel had arrived. “Hello,” called out a girl at the other end. “Hello. Hello?” But all I could hear was the thump of disco music in the background, and the raucous squeals and beery cacophony of a Bangkok bar in full swing. I blurted out a message, and quickly hung up.

A month or so later, though, a letter arrived from Ead, thanking me for my gift, and asking me to excuse her for missing my call—she had been in the hospital, she wrote. Now, she reported, she was healthy again and “my daughter stay with my mama in upcountry.”

Later that same year, I happened to be passing through Bangkok again, and, on my first free day, I went out from my five-star hotel in search of my friend. It did not take me long to track down the winking neon bars and video pubs of Soi 21—Soi Cowboy—and even on a gray afternoon the place was as loud and brazen as I had remembered. Its air of noisy glamour was
just the same as ever. But as I began to look more closely at the bars, I noticed that all their details had changed. The Friends Bar was gone now, and most of the young girls in the area were new, and all the sites I recalled seemed to have vanished, as if in a dream.

I still had Ead’s home address, though, copied out by her on a small scrap of paper: 193 Soi 22 (Room 404). This, I guessed, must be just down the street from Soi 21—a modest flat, I assumed, in one of the area’s leafy residential streets. I made my way across the main road just as the first fat drops of the daily monsoon started to come down.

As I turned into Soi 22, the pounding of the bars began to subside behind me, and within a few yards the fancy drugstores and air-conditioned cafés also began to fall away. By the time I got to Number 180, the rain was coming down more heavily, and I could only with difficulty make out the number on the next dilapidated building: 210. Between the two ran a muddy alleyway, bordered by two ditches that were quickly filling up with rainwater. Number 193, I assumed, must lie down here.

Wobbling my way down two creaking planks that had been placed across the sludge, strands of wet hair flopping across my face, I followed the path down a few yards and around a corner. In front of me was a jumble of broken tin shacks. Their flimsy walls were shaking under the pounding of the rain. A few naked children waded about in the filthy puddles. Half-naked women stared at me from the openings of darkened doorways, babies at their breasts. Everywhere was sewage.

I could hardly believe that this was the right place, and I looked again at my crumpled piece of paper. The writing was growing smudged in the downpour, but I could still just make out “193.” A little boy scampered past me on the planks, head bowed, and I stopped him and showed him my paper. He shook his head, and raced along. A fat woman came edging her way carefully along the boards, a cloth over her head. “Ead?” I asked. “Ead?” She stopped and squinted at me through the rain. I pointed again to the blurred “193,” and she motioned vaguely toward a nearby shack. I sloshed my way over to a wooden fence, and knocked. No answer. Finally, a haggard, wild-eyed woman appeared above me on the second floor. “Ead?” I called up. “Do you know Ead?” She shouted something out, then hurried back
into her shelter. Clearly, it was useless. I turned and made my soggy way back to my luxury hotel.

Before I left Bangkok, I sent Ead a note telling her about my visit. A few weeks later, to my surprise, I received a reply. She was very sorry to have missed me, Ead wrote, but she had briefly returned home to help her Mamá on the farm: she had not been able to reply sooner, because nobody in her village could write English. Next time I came, she wrote, please could I tell her my flight number, and she would meet me at the airport. Inside, she included a photo of herself, seated on a swing in some sunny northern village with a pixie’s shy smile—scarcely older, so it seemed, than her seven-year-old daughter. And at the end of the letter, she wrote, simply, “I hope you can remember that girl name Ead.”

More than a year passed before I was back in Bangkok, on what I suspected would be my last visit for some time. On my way there, I sent Ead several letters telling her how to get in touch with me. But when I got to town, there were no messages for me at my small hotel, and none at the
Time
bureau, and none at the local American Express office.

I was still determined, though, to make one last attempt to track her down, and, one bright day, I retraced my steps down the noisy main strip, past the Pizza Hut parlors and the shiny boutiques, past the bars and the sparkling department stores, down to Soi 22. It did not take me long to find the narrow alleyway, and I made my way quickly to the mess of broken shacks. As a little boy skipped past, I showed him the number 193. He pointed to a gate, and I walked hesitantly through. Five or six doors were arranged around a small, dusty courtyard. On one of them, in the corner, I found the number 404. I knocked, and there was a long silence. Then at last a slight teenage girl opened up. Behind her was a tiny, barren room scarcely big enough for the three mattresses on its floor. On the wall a few
Playboy
pinups flapped idly. Two other frightened-looking girls—one of them nursing a baby—looked up at me from where they were sitting on their beds.

“Ead?” I asked. “Do you know Ead?” They looked at each other in bemusement, then chattered something in Thai. I tried again, and one of them said something I couldn’t follow. Then the girl at the door motioned me to remain where I was and
hurried off into the courtyard. “Ead?” I asked again, and the two others nodded and smiled. One, I was sure, was Ead’s little sister.

A couple of minutes later, I heard footsteps behind me. Heart pounding, I turned around. It was not Ead, though, but some other small teenager dressed in a pink Mickey Mouse T-shirt that came hardly lower than her waist. She knew a little English—learned, I assumed, in the nearby bars.

“Hello.”

“Hullo.”

“Can you tell me, please, where Ead is?”

“She gone.”

The finality of the reply sent a chill through me. Then I began to catch her drift. “You mean she’s gone back to her village?”

She nodded.

“For long time?”

“Yes.”

“Will she be coming back here, do you think?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“No.”

There was a silence, and no easy words to fill it. “Well,” I said, fairly sure she could not follow me, “if you see Ead, could you please tell her that I came to say hello?”

She nodded vaguely, and the girls smiled back at me. Smiling back my thanks, I headed off toward the clatter of the noisy tourist strip. Though sorry to have missed Ead, I was happy too, and relieved, to know that she had freed herself from the gaudy bars and from her nightly commute to the dirty shacks. She had always seemed too thoughtful to remain for long in Soi Cowboy, and in a way, I thought, she had indeed found the great good fortune that the Buddha had promised at the temple.

But as I continued on to my hotel, I began to wonder how much she could ever really go back to her village. It could not be easy, I thought, to be back with her daughter and her Mamá, in the world that she knew, yet set apart by her memories of another world, of the bright lights she had seen and the grand hotels, of the Aussie who had promised to take her away and the stories of a good life in the West. And it must be strange for her to be back inside the family hut, yet alone with her thoughts, and alone with the English she had taught herself.

I often thought of Ead in the months that followed, by herself in her northern village with her jeans, her “Hello Kitty” handbag and her dime-store photo album with a bee on the cover. And I realized, when I did, that I had never left Asia at all; while she, like all the others, could never quite go back.

When I was traveling through Asia in the mid-1980s, it was easy to believe that East and West were on opposite sides of the globe, not a great deal closer than in Kipling’s time. The Cold War had everyone thinking in binary terms, and for many people much of Asia still seemed as distant, as exotic, as Shangri-La. Thailand had yet to go global—pad thai and panang curry were hardly known outside of Southeast Asia—and as for Tibet, it seemed no closer to most of us than a scratchy old copy of
Lost Horizon.
China had scarcely emerged from behind its historic walls, and Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam were all more or less forbidden lands. To the young in those places, California was at best an image glimpsed occasionally on screen.

Now, of course, all that has changed, and many cultures seem to have gone from isolation to connectedness in what feels like days. The remotest points now—Luang Prabang, or Ulan Bator—are just a click away from anywhere, and East and West are almost obsolete terms, when they are not irrelevant ones. I often think that I was lucky to get to see Asia at a time when the process had only just begun to accelerate, and young travelers who were contemporaries of the jumbo jet and the small screen were first beginning to visit the places that their parents had only dreamed of (and that had only dreamed of them). In those days East and West had only intimations of the other, as the yin contains a bit of yang, and vice versa.

These days, amidst our latest catchwords—“global market,” “World Wide Web,” and “fusion culture”—Asia has moved as fast as anywhere, from boom to bust to boom to revolution. Living in Japan, as I now do, I often have occasion to travel around my former haunts, and I’ve watched Bangkok, for example, shoot up like a dusty country girl who’s gone off to Harvard Business School and come back with a shiny new efficiency to transform her home. China, in places, has embraced a neon capitalism so furious that Shanghai looks like one of the first cities of the twenty-first century, and Bhutan has transcribed all its sutras onto computers. Where
Video Night in Kathmandu
concerned the mixed responses
of American baseball players in Japan, now it is Japanese pitchers who are throwing American baseball into fits; and where it was then most noticeable that Hollywood was conquering the East, now it is the directors of Bollywood and Hong Kong who are making their presence felt in Hollywood.

And yet, below the surface of our latest toys, I wonder how much any of the cultures I was visiting have really changed, deep down. Whenever I return to my parents’ homeland, India, I am startled to see ads for cell phones and computers and multinational colas tower over the car- (and bullock-and bicycle-) filled streets, and I hear that when graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology want to hold a reunion, it makes more sense for them to do so in Silicon Valley than in Bangalore. India has begun to take in the world at a rate unimaginable to even my parents, Yet when I sit above the Yamuna River at dusk, and watch a ferryman pole across the water, a trail of cows on the far shore and nothing else moving under the setting sun—or when I go into bazaars and run into tribal, bangled kids (from Perth, or Vancouver, or Dusseldorf) collecting talismans of pleasure or wisdom (or the convergence of them both)—India looks to me just as it did a generation ago, or (no doubt) ten generations, too: an image of the Absolute brought down to earth.

I return to Kathmandu and find that people seem as good-natured and gentle as they ever did, even though their city is now, by some counts, the second most polluted in the world; I pass through Hong Kong, now a part of China, and the state-of-the-art new airport, ready to take off into the heavens, seems just as much a terminal of transients as the old one I describe in these pages. Even in the places I could not visit when I was writing the book—Angkor and Vientiane and Hanoi—I am most struck, when I sit along the Mekong River, or wander around Khmer ruins, by the presence of old ghosts. Every country is downloading the latest version of Windows 2000, yet each of them—Indonesia and Burma and the Philippines—is doing so in a different way, true to its distinctive temperament.

Every day, after all, most of us change from pyjamas to jogging clothes to suit or jeans (or Mongolian waistcoat, or whatever); yet when you look at our hearts, as when you look at the eyes of a child in an album recording his growth, it’s less clear that anything is changing. The Japanese girls outside my window
as I write this are clomping off to McDonald’s in cowboy hats, 8-inch platform heels and yellow hair; but I’m not sure they’re so different from their mini-skirted mothers of twenty years before.

The changes that are truly significant—and irreversible, sometimes—are those enforced by politics. Tibet, which was abloom with the excitement of its opening to the world when I first visited, is now all but extinct: the old quarter of Lhasa is bustling only in the sets of Hollywood movies, shot in Morocco or Argentina, and the Potala Palace is ringed by featureless modern Chinese blocks that make a mockery of its meaning. Yet at the same time Tibetan culture and philosophy and color—much that travelers were flocking to Lhasa to enjoy at the time—are now in our midst in New York and Paris and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The mysterious East is all around us when we step out of our front doors in Sydney, Toronto, London.

So the deeper truth, perhaps, is that the globalism I was describing in these places has migrated inwards, and the borders that used to exist mostly in our minds have been replaced by a borderlessness that may be just as notional. The culture clashes that were once so striking to me in the bars of Manila or the markets of Hong Kong are now to be found inside those international beings who don’t know where they come from, or to what culture they belong. The German man I might have watched courting a Thai girl in
Video Night in Kathmandu
is now the father of a half-Thai, half-German daughter who’s growing up in mongrel Los Angeles, and introducing her friends to
The Ramayana
and Hermann Hesse. When I came to write a kind of unacknowledged sequel to
Video Night in Kathmandu
one full turn of the Chinese calendar later—called
The Global Soul
—the slow dances and surprised romances I found myself chronicling were all taking place inside multicultural hearts.