Video Night in Kathmandu (16 page)

So where were all the freaks? I finally asked the Irishman with some plaintiveness. The freaks? he howled. Where had I been for the last ten years? The freaks had been flushed out of Nepal long ago. First the government had made drugs illegal. Then they had begun making occasional raids on the Freak Street crash pads. Finally, they had called upon an instrument even more powerful than simple morality or muscle: economics. A one-month Nepalese visa now cost $16. A one-month extension cost another $23, and a third-month extension $35. Thus a three-month stay in Nepal now cost no less than an apartment in a fairly nice house here (or five hundred pounds of hashish, whichever came first). The only freaks still hanging out in Nepal, said the Irishman, were second-rate leftovers dressed in uniform costumes of individuation: jeans, earrings, baggy pants and “Jesus boots.” But drugs were still available, I noted. “Sure,” said the Irishman. “Anything drug-related is possible here. But it’s a business now, not a trip.”

The absence of drugs was itself no bad thing, what I mourned was the absence of the sensibility that drove some people to
drugs and the searching that others undertook instead of drugs. The Peace Corps had left a few traces of its presence—in the apple pies and health-food stores—but even they seemed to have faded into the woodwork. Where, I wondered, were the idealists? Had they too disappeared? “Of course,” said Tomas, a thoughtful former Magic Bus driver from Amsterdam who now worked here for CARE. “That was ten years ago. That age is past.”

It seemed to be true. “Attention Travelers,” said the sign posted on most of the Freak Street restaurant walls. “Ashramed out, Caféd Out, Caked Out, Biscuit’d out, Chai’d out, Gompa’d out, Chicall’d out, Tea’d out? Bored to Tears? Then why not volunteer to help out at the local clinic run by Mother Teresa’s sister?” Only, it seemed, after every single other option had been tried and every pleasure exhausted might the time come for a little social conscience.

It served me right, I suppose: prosaic justice. I had come to Kathmandu hoping to find a refuge from the trends of Santa Barbara, Cambridge and Manhattan. But that, I realized, was like going to Newcastle if one were allergic to coal. For Nepal’s great skill lay in mirroring Western ways and keeping up with the Western times. It was hardly surprising, then, that it had followed the example of any American dropout from the sixties: shedding its ragged threads, cleaning up its act, going through business school and settling down to a good steady income as a law-abiding, upwardly mobile member of the eighties. Its livelihood depended on it.

These days, indeed, the facts of Kew were the facts of Kathmandu. Communications had sent the world spinning around so fast that every wheel came around full circle. Travel far enough East and you’d quickly end up in the West; go across the globe and you’d find that you had never left home at all.

“Excuse me, sister,” said a Nepali man to my friend when we visited Bodnath Temple. “You want to go to trekking?” It seemed a request as Nepali as apple pie.

T
HE NEW
China—the China that has opened its door to the outside world and is beckoning it inside with a smile—deals with its suitors in Hong Kong. The New China is well aware that her longtime seclusion has only inflamed the romantic illusions of the West, adding the lure of the long-forbidden to the appeal of the mysterious. The New China also knows that many a dreamy admirer will spare no expense at all to catch a long-denied glimpse of her mist-wreathed pagodas and jade mountains; a courtesan’s expensiveness is, after all, part of her seduction.

So it is that the China Travel Service in Hong Kong, the New China’s official overseas agent, offers its visitor as many positions and permutations as a panderer, catering to every fantasy with a variety of tours that range from the most basic, in-and-out package ($1,000) to a host of more exotic options ($2,500 or more). The China Travel Service will procure for a tourist hotels, guides, flights and trains. For $17, it will get him a visa; for $25, a visa overnight. “The Chinese are masters of supply and
demand,” a British financier who did business in Beijing advised me. “They know exactly how to hit the right level.”

The New China also prefers to keep its rendezvous with the West strictly organized and closely chaperoned, a series of blind dates on which the two parties may inspect one another from a safe distance, swap reassuring smiles and then go their separate ways, separately enriched. Nearly all the country’s modern facilities are therefore confined to the well-roped trail of the Imitation Silk Route, along which groups of tourists are led as through some special museum exhibition. Traveling in China alone, especially without any Chinese language, was still in 1985 an act of folly. I, however, was willing to put up with any amount of inconvenience in order to be spared the red-carpet rituals of the guided tour—the picture-perfect vistas, the routine exchange of pleasantries with well-trained hosts and, above all, the infamous climax of every New China visit, the group of adorable schoolchildren welcoming Westerners with an impromptu chorus of “Jingle Bells.” (Even a nine-hour day trip across the border included a “visit to a kindergarten where children will greet you warmly with laughter, hand-clapping, singing and dancing.”) I therefore asked for nothing more from the China Travel Service than a $30 train ticket to Guangzhou, spurning even the extra $20 service that would ensure someone to greet me on arrival and see me safely onto the next train to Beijing.

Next morning, nursing a mild fever, I boarded an express train in Hong Kong. Three air-conditioned, soft-seated hours later, I got out in China. In front of me in the bright afternoon was a vast square, ringed by giant billboards and graying skyscrapers. Beside me, extending for block after block after gray, gray block, was the main body of the station. Along its walls were ragged clumps of people, sleeping, spitting, fighting, jostling, crouched on cases, encamped on the ground. All around was vastness and great vacancy.

Across the length of the whole great square, I could decipher not a single sign but one: “China Travel Service,” inscribed on a drab gray building behind a barbed-wire fence. That, however, was all I needed. Hoisting my case over the barrier, I ducked under it myself, tramped across a courtyard and walked into the gray stone building. I found myself within a maze of shadowed hallways, musty stairwells, empty rooms. I passed through a
frosted-glass door and was directed out again into another series of dark corridors. I stopped a passerby and was sent down another hallway. I found another official, and was pointed down a series of high school passageways, to a large room in which sat three small men. I asked them for a ticket to Beijing, and they pointed me out toward the station.

Back in the sun, I started walking across the square, past crowds and empty spaces, past bus stands and dollar-mongers, past more people and more empty space, along the side of the never-ending station, for ten minutes or more. Finally, halfway down the immense block, I came upon the departure hall. Inside, it was echoing and empty as the belly of a whale. Vast waiting rooms the size of auditoriums were utterly unpeopled. Grand staircases swept heavenward to more balconies. Long, long corridors led through unlit hallways that led into long, long corridors. The main hall, in which a few ragtag bands of nomads were camped, forked this way and that, into a garden courtyard, a nursery, a checkroom, a puzzle of bleak entrances.

Anxious to find anyone or anything that I could understand I began walking—around the hall, and through it, up the stairs and down a corridor, into an empty room, and out of it again. I walked along the length of corridors and around a balcony and through the garden, back around the hall, into waiting rooms and out of them, back up the sweeping staircase and down again. Everywhere it was the same: no English, no help, no good. I went back to a duty-free shop crammed with high-tech goods, and around again, and back to the waiting hall, and out. Nowhere any English, nowhere any help. I walked up, and down, and up once more. No English. No use. No good. Canton Station was a maze designed by Escher with considerable assistance from Borges—not dizzying like Tokyo Station, which buzzes with microchip lights and bustling armies, beehive catacombs and secret passageways, but impenetrable in the manner of an enormous tomb cluttered with overstuffed filing cabinets.

And so I walked around and around. Finally, after almost an hour, I suddenly caught sight of a Caucasian couple being led by a $20 escort onto a platform. Where could I get tickets? I called out as they disappeared into freedom. Booth Number 6, called back the guide; for foreigners only.

Back out in the sunlight, I set out again past more clumps of
people, more dark entranceways, more empty spaces, until at last I arrived at a series of booths. The Arabic numeral 6 was written above one hatch, but the rest of the sign—an old piece of wood—was all in Chinese. In front of it was a long line that showed no sign of moving. People spat and looked up at the boards, pushed their neighbors, spat again. Minutes passed, and more minutes; the line grew larger and more restless. I looked all around, at large walls and departure boards: nothing I could fathom. I went up to a counter and was directed to another booth, and then to a third, especially for tourists. Where could I get a ticket to Beijing? “China Travel Service.” “But they said to come here.” “Only China Travel Service.”

Picking up my case, I set off again, through the sun-baked square, over the wall and under the fence and up to the CTS door. By now, it was bolted. I looked for side entrances, but everything was closed. Tens, hundreds, thousands of people hurried through the square. Buses buzzed off down spacious boulevards.

Virtually dragging my case along by now, half exhausted from the fever, the heat, the confusion, I staggered back across the huge square, past the ragged groups, under the sun, past block after block after block, sweating as I walked, back to the ticket booths. Nothing had changed. Chinese characters swarming, no sign of English, certainly no movement. Spitting and waiting and blankness. Shouts, lines, chaos. I gave up. I would check into a hotel, no matter the expense, go to the CTS tomorrow morning, offer to pay $20—or anything they wanted—in exchange for their assistance.

Then, just as I was sitting down on my case to gather my strength for the walk back to the taxi stand, I caught a snatch of something familiar. “There is no other way. The sign says no more tickets. This ticket okay. Listen, I show you. You can ask anyone.” “Ees no good. Thees second class. No good for touristes.” I looked up. “But this the only way to go to Beijing. There is no other ticket.” “Non. Ees no good. I do not want.” With that, a scruffy young French girl turned her back defiantly to reassert her place in the motionless line, and a lanky, bespectacled young Chinese smiled helplessly in my direction.

The girl was crazy, he volunteered; the board at the front of the
line explained that all tickets were gone, and he had a ticket he was willing to sell at face value. Face value? Sure—was I interested? In case I didn’t trust him, he went on earnestly, I need pay him only when he actually put me on the train four hours from now. I shouldn’t trust him, I decided, and he might very well put me on the train four years from now. But even that seemed preferable to a night at the station or a return next day to the mandarins of the China Travel Service. Gladly accepting his offer, I shook his hand, he invited me to dinner and we jumped into the nearest taxi.

Twenty minutes later, a doorman pushed open the heavy doors to the China Hotel. In its ads, the $100-million hotel promised to treat every guest “like a merchant prince” and inside it did indeed boast the studiously exotic elegance of a costly Manhattan restaurant. Lavish dragon hangings hung from its walls. Black marble pillars stretched up to its roof. The gift stores in the shopping arcade sparkled like chandeliers, and the shining, blond-wood tables at the cafeteria gleamed under bright modern lights.

This, explained my guide over $1.25 Cokes, was a symbol of the New China. As it happened, he went on, he was another. Not long ago, in fact, he had been stranded in a faraway village with a menial job—his reward for being an active democrat at his hometown university in Changsha. But then, only a year after his rustication, the ideological winds had begun to change. The Cultural Revolution had ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. Mao had died. Almost overnight, the country had begun to turn on its head. And suddenly, Joe said, he had found himself at its top. Suddenly, the very skills that had once condemned him—his free-enterprising spirit, his independent mind, his easy command of English—had recommended him to the system. Wasting no time at all, he had hurried off to Guangdong Province, the capital of the Gold Rush, and started to play the market.

Nowadays, he went on, he could get almost any job he wanted. An American oil company was currently employing him as interpreter and intermediary for 500 yuan ($150) a month—equivalent to the salary of twenty average workers. But he could triple his earnings whenever he wanted. He was only twenty-six,
he said, but he already had his own shop, was already, in fact, a 10,000-yuan household, the country’s equivalent to the millionaire. Would I like to visit his office?

Somewhat taken aback by such a grand display of wealth—this, after all, was the world’s largest Communist nation—I readily agreed. Joe led me off to one of the hotel’s elevators. Fifteen floors later, we got out in a paneled and carpeted corridor. At one end was an executive set of glass doors. Joe pushed a button, and a mellifluous chime greeted us with the tune, “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.”

Home indeed! The office inside was plusher than any I had ever seen in Manhattan (not surprisingly, perhaps: many a two-room office in China, I later read, costs $70,000, twice as much as in New York). Leather chairs lazed around a comfortable lobby. Bright corridors gave off into kitchens and computer centers. Office windows offered penthouse views of the glittering city below. Everyone, explained Joe, was joining in on the mad search for oil in the South China Sea. Over there—he pointed into the illumined night—was the $100-million building built by BP. That ten-story monstrosity was Esso’s headquarters. In the distance, the big skyscraper was the Garden Hotel.