Video Night in Kathmandu (57 page)

Besides, the core of this book (which is, I think, the core of our travels) has little to do with East and West, or official forms of designation, and more to do with something universal, which never changes: our encounters with the alien. A girl in Baguio listens to a pop song by Whitney Houston, and then meets a man from Arkansas, and doesn’t know how much he is an embodiment of the culture she’s in love with, and how much not; he, in turn, reaches out to her—an embodiment of the East—with an equal mix of wonder and uncertainty. It doesn’t matter whether you’re
a woman in Shigatse or Sheboygan—you’re drawn, in some measure, towards the foreign, you’re drawn towards what is familiar, and the complications of both increase when you find yourself surrounded by the alien even in your home.

In the pages that precede this, you will have met a trishaw driver in the old city of Mandalay, who caught my heart in the way that distant characters always catch our hearts, with his mix of innocence and hopefulness. I met him at the station, as I came off the overnight train from Rangoon, and he invited me into his home, his life.

Later, once I returned to California, we often exchanged letters, and sometimes I sent friends to see him, and report back on how his new family and job were going. Then, however, three years after our meeting, and just as this book was being published, a new government suddenly clamped down with new ferocity on all independent-minded Burma, and the country disappeared again behind a wall. The capital city was now called Yangon, the nation itself was renamed Myanmar, and my friend’s letters suddenly stopped arriving. I, meanwhile, in my own life, went through my own small revolutions: a forest fire burned my house to the ground, and I found myself as far from coordinates and possessions as many of the people I had written about.

For more than a decade, I never heard from my old friend. Then, one day in Japan, after a few false leads, a message came from a stranger in London, asking me for my address, so he could forward a letter from a trishaw-driver in Mandalay. I sent it, and heard nothing. Then, a little later, a letter arrived from Montreal, and inside it was the handwriting I recalled from many years before, filling me in on his life.

Soon after I had met him, my friend wrote, twelve years before, a Texan couple had come to Mandalay, and been so moved by his solicitude and enterprise that they had given him two hundred dollars, enough money to fulfill his lifelong dream of buying his own trishaw. He had done so, and counted his blessings, when he met another visitor, from Italy, who had promised to give him a camera—a whole new life as a photographer—if he would find some old Burmese coins for him. My friend had done so, spending all his money to collect the coins the Italian had wanted. He had sent him the coins and gone to Rangoon, as instructed, but he waited and waited, and the Italian never showed up. He went
back to his wife, and told her that their life savings were gone, and together with their five children they had returned to their village to start their lives again.

Now, he wrote, after many years he was back at last in Mandalay, working, as it happened, as a trishaw driver outside the station once again; if ever I came back, perhaps I could visit him?

Tourists had made his dream come true, and tourists had robbed him of everything he had. Whatever was mysterious or ambiguous about the passage across borders, I thought—whatever had first propelled me towards Mandalay, and him towards me—was no different than it had ever been: a foreigner steps off the overnight train from the capital and there, in the early light, stands a stranger, beside a trishaw, a bright shine of expectation in his eyes.

    Nara, Japan
    December 2000

My warmest thanks are due, first of all, to my editors at
Time
, an institution that richly deserves its reputation for civility and hospitality. I know few other companies that would allow a young employee, on the job for less than a year, to take three long vacations in Asia in the space of a year and then to take off six more months to pursue his Eastern interests still further. In the course of that leave, the
Time
family was again as godfa-therly as ever: in many a faraway place, colleagues I had never met guarded my mail, lent me their facilities, and gallantly rescued me, with fine meals and local intelligence, from the style to which I was growing accustomed.

I owe a different kind of thanks to all the friends who shared and shaped a few of these adventures, especially Louis Greig, my schoolfriend, doctor, driver, guide, and sidekick, everywhere from Rome to Rangoon, Vegas to Gstaad, and Istanbul to Marrakesh; and Kristin McCloy, a whirling dervish with a pilgrim soul. Thanks are due no less to all those other kind beings who put up with me and put me up in Asia, especially Georges Holzberger in Hong Kong, Lawrence Macdonald in Beijing, my relatives in India, and the many others, named and unnamed, who grace these pages.

In writing up my experiences, I am also, as ever, deeply grateful to all my friends in Santa Barbara, whose generosity and idealism have long indulged, as much as they have humbled, me. In this context, I owe particular thanks to Joe and Donna Woodruff, who sustained me with wonderful food and warm companionship all the time I was writing; and to Elton Hall and Kilian Coster, who frequently dropped whatever they were doing in order to rescue a sorcerer’s apprentice from life-and-death struggles with computers, printers, and other modern beasts. I could not hope to find better readers, more discriminating and yet understanding, than Mark Muro and Steve Carlson, who made honesty and sympathy seem good friends after all.

Finally, I would like to thank the people at Knopf, who were gracious enough to reply to an anonymous proposal sent
through the mail in a brown envelope, and trusting enough to give this unknown quantity their support. Through the patience and care of his editing, Charles Elliott has taught me a great deal about writing.

My first debt is recorded in the dedication; so too is my last.

A
BOUT THE AUTHOR

Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England, and educated at Eton, Oxford, and Harvard. For four years he wrote on world affairs for
Time
, and he continues to contribute essays and reviews to the magazine. His literary pieces have appeared in
Partisan Review, Smithsonian, The Village Voice
, the
Times Literary Supplement
, and many other publications.

ALSO BY
P
ICO
I
YER

THE GLOBAL SOUL

Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

Beginning in Los Angeles International airport, where town life is available without a town, Iyer goes to Hong Kong, where people actually live in self-contained hotels, and to Toronto, which has been given new life and a new literature by its immigrant population. Ultimately Iyer takes us to Japan, where amid alien surfaces and an apartment building ironically called The Memphis, he discovers a kind of belonging.
The Global Soul
is a thought-provoking examination of what the word “home” can possibly mean in a world whose face is blurred by its cultural fusion and its alarmingly rapid rate of change.

Current Affairs/Travel/978-0-679-77611-6

SUN AFTER DARK

Flights into the Foreign

A cryptic encounter in the perfumed darkness of Bali; a tour of a Bolivian prison, conducted by an enterprising inmate; a nightmarish taxi ride across southern Yemen, where the men with guns may be customs inspectors or revolutionaries—these are just three of the stops on Pico Iyer’s latest itinerary. But the true subject of the book is the dislocation of the mind in transit. And so Iyer takes us along to meditate with Leonard Cohen and talk geopolitics with the Dalai Lama. He navigates the Magritte-like landscape of jet lag, “a place that no human had ever been until forty or so years ago.” And on every page of this poetic and provocative book, he compels us to redraw our map of the world.

Travel/Essays/978-1-4000-3103-0

TROPICAL CLASSICAL

Essays from Several Directions

In
Tropical Classical
, Iyer visits a holy city in Ethiopia where hooded worshipers practice a Christianity that has remained unchanged since the Middle Ages. He follows the bewilderingly complex route of Bombay’s
dabbawallahs
, who each day ferry 100,000 different lunches to 100,00 different workers. Iyer chats with the Dalai Lama and assesses books by Salman Rushdie and Cormac McCarthy. And he brings his perceptive eye and unflappable wit to bear on the postmodern vogues for literary puffery, sexual gamesmanship, and frequent-flier miles. Overflowing with insight, and often laugh-out-loud funny, this is Pico Iyer at his globe-sprinting best.

Travel/Essays/978-0-679-77610-9

FALLING OFF THE MAP

Some Lonely Places of the World

What does the elegant nostalgia of Argentina have in common with the raffish nonchalance of Australia? And what do both these countries have in common with North Korea? They are “lonely places,” cut off from the rest of the world by geography, ideology, or sheer weirdness. And they have all attracted the attention of Pico Iyer, one of the finest travel writers ever to book a room in the Pyongyang Koryo hotel. Whether he is documenting the cruising rites of Icelandic teenagers, being interrogated by tipsy Cuban police, or summarizing the plot of Bhutan’s first feature film (“a $6,500 spectacular film about a star-crossed couple; she dies, he throws himself on the funeral pyre, and both live happily ever after as an ox and a cow”), Iyer is always uncannily observant and acerbically funny.

Travel/Adventure/978-0-679-74612-6

THE LADY AND THE MONK

Four Seasons in Kyoto

When Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, and to find out something about Japanese culture today—not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power. All this he did. And then he met Sachiko. Vivacious, thoroughly educated, speaking English enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of a Japanese “salaryman” who seldom left the office before 10 P.M., Sachiko was as conversant with tea ceremony and classical Japanese literature as with rock music and Goethe. Iyer fashions from their relationship a marvelously ironic yet heartfelt book that is at once a portrait of cross-cultural infatuation—and misunderstanding—and a delightfully fresh way of seeing both the old Japan and the very new.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73834-3

ALSO AVAILABLE

Abandon
, 978-1-4000-3085-9
Cuba and the Night
, 978-0-679-76075-7

VINTAGE BOOKS

Available at your local bookstore, or
visit
www.randomhouse.com

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PICO IYER

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