Video Night in Kathmandu (22 page)

At this, the quiet Wu spoke up. His great ambition, he shyly confessed, was to work as a journalist in Africa. Then he could send home luxury goods to his family.

Serenaded by the thumping disco beat of the theme from
Flashdance
, we threaded our way through crowded emporia exploding with consumer goods, high-tech radios, cameras, cassettes, more cameras, more radios, more girls in sun visors that said “Lover.” The hottest items of all appeared to be those that added the lure of the long-forbidden to the appeal of the mysterious. Inside a cavernous record store, the most prominent tape on sale was “Peculiarities of English Usage.” At the local bookstore, the front display was given over to the Paul Simon songbook and
The Ultimate Trivia Quiz Book.
On some of the shelves were children’s versions in English of
Vanity Fair, Goodbye, Mr. Chips
and
The Helen Keller Story.
Upstairs, copies of
The Idiot, Oliver Twist
, and
Madame Bovary
were squashed between
The Dialectic of Nihilism, The Politics of Bureaucracy, Social Cohesion
and, best of all,
Beyond Dumping.
A customer could buy eighty copies of Dickens or Dostoevsky, however, for the same $50 it cost to purchase a single copy of
Human Society in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.

Senses bombarded by this video arcade world, we repaired at last for some quiet in another of the city’s grand hotels, the Garden Hotel (whose room keys came stamped with messages that read “I don’t want to leave Guangzhou. Please leave me here”). As we walked past the hotel gift shop, Joe let out a cry, and pointed to a picture of Deng Xiaoping on the cover of a glossy magazine: we went in to take a closer look, and there, to
my companions’ delight and my amazement, was a
Time
cover story on China that I had written before leaving New York three months earlier. Impressed by this, my friends led me up to a lobby filled with huge armchairs, and as we munched on a selection of French pastries, they asked me to describe my impressions of a homeland that was still a little strange to them. In response, I rhapsodized at length about the sunlit lamaseries of Tibet, talked a little about the capital and then, by way of amusing parenthesis, mentioned some of the quirks of the fabled Black Coffee. At that instant, I happened to look across at Joe, my all-knowing guide to every deal in China. He was looking absolutely stunned. I stopped what I was saying. For many moments, he could not speak. Finally, he went on shakily: You mean that there were prostitutes there? I think so, I said; indeed, a colleague of mine had once been approached by a male prostitute on the streets of Shanghai. That left Joe quite devastated.

But prostitutes, he said after a very long while, existed only in the West. And even that he found hard to understand. In
Kramer vs. Kramer
, he had seen Dustin Hoffman meet a girl at a party and invite her home. Did that really happen? And if it was so easy to meet girls, why would any Westerner look for a prostitute? And was it true, Wu piped up, about the American man who had slept with 1,000 women in three years? Or the nymphomaniac who had slept with 500 men before realizing that her thirst would go forever unslaked and had therefore become a prostitute? And was there also much wife swapping in the United States? Wu had read about a Chinese couple visiting America who had been invited to a party only to find, to their horror, that they were expected to trade partners for the evening. Was that very common?

The Chinese, I had always heard, regarded sex less as something to do than as something to have done, and so be done with. And indeed, my friends delivered these questions with none of the smirking or swagger one might expect from young males elsewhere in the world, but rather with a great and somber earnestness. They seemed, in fact, to be delving into the subject in as fearful a way as I might ask about kidnappings in Beirut or the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. Joe had clearly been much heartened by the American he had once met who had been traveling through China for thirty days with a Swedish girl. “He
never kissed her, never once,” reported Joe. “I said, ‘That’s incredible.’ He said, ‘We’ve both had enough of that kind of thing.’”

In China, Joe went on, it was difficult even to contemplate the subject. “We can say the words in English, but in Chinese we are embarrassed. We were worried when the lady in
Daughter of a Miner
was undressing. When I was at school, I got a sex education manual. I said it was for learning English. At first, when I read the book, I got excited. In college, we talked about intercourse position. But that’s all. We are polite in China.”

Even marriage, Wu volunteered, was not so easy in China. It was possible for a man to visit a marriage agency and find a partner for 2 yuan (quite a bargain, I thought, next to a bowl of tiger’s urine), “but it is harder to find a flat than a fiancée.” A typical couple could get an apartment, if they were lucky, of six square meters. Then too, he went on, there was an entire phantom generation of people now in their late twenties or thirties who had lost their best years to the Cultural Revolution. “They are very talented. If they just had a little education, they could do marvelous things. It’s sad.” Sadder still, perhaps, these “young old people” had never learned to be at ease with the opposite sex. And the longer they lived without contact, the less chance of contact they had. Many women in particular were turning bitter as they found themselves spinsters. But if they tried to find a husband, the man would dismiss them curtly: “Marriage is not only a product of love.”

THAT EVENING, AFTER
returning to Joe’s office to see his stamp collection, I went back to my hotel room to take stock of all I had seen. In the course of the day, I had picked up a copy of the maiden issue of the
Shanghai Student’s Post
, which proudly billed itself as the first English-language newspaper to appear in Shanghai since 1949. “The front page,” the paper announced, “covers leading issues of the day—international, domestic, local and educational.” Underneath that bold promise, the front page consisted, almost exclusively, of a large picture of Sissy Spacek, accompanied by a handwritten message from Sissy to her followers in China. On its inside pages, the paper described an “English Evening” in Shanghai in which four-year-olds donned skirts and then “filed to the center of the hall, saying in English,
‘May I have the honor to dance with you?’” A column by one Hou Chen argued that vacations should be longer and then, cunningly citing the laconic example of ancient Sparta, that committee meetings should be shorter. On the following page, across from a history of Coca-Cola, were a list of dos and don’ts for eating with Westerners and short essays on the history of glasses, the Hovercraft, the waltz, UFOs and family-owned KYUS-TV in Montana, the smallest TV station in America.

Another magazine I had picked up,
Sight and Insight
, recorded a hailstorm of facts about the greening of China. The first fast food in Tiananmen Square. The first highway over the Heavenly Mountain. The first American movie shot entirely in China (starring June Lockhart). The first credit-card conference. That breathless litany took me back to all the headlines that had been pounding through the American papers in recent months, chronicling each and every surprising development within the land of Mao: the country’s first beauty contest, its first sale of stocks, its first rock concert; a luxury resort built in the Valley of the Ming Tombs, fashion shows in Beijing, the arrival of a fleet of twelve Cadillacs for Party use, complete with bars, TVs and refrigerators. The government had even taken to trumpeting forth the country’s first case of AIDS, as if it were proof that China had finally entered the twenty-first century. By now, moreover, six out of every seven Chinese families owned a television set. More Chinese had watched the Super Bowl than Americans. And China was already leading the world in American Express frauds.

Thus the get-rich-quick policies of the Cultureless Revolution were spinning ahead as furiously as the Cultural Revolution in reverse. Not only was the ancient behemoth turning, quite literally, on a dime; it was also turning overnight. So many cars had been put in the hands of so many new drivers that China was suffering 12,000 traffic fatalities a year, on roads that were still largely empty—in one typical day in Beijing, I had seen a bicycle crumpled under a truck, another truck lodged inside a tree trunk and two lots of crowds gathered around smashed cars. Likewise, the country was snapping up so many imports so fast that its trade deficit was rocketing up, in 1985, from $2 billion to almost $15 billion. As I thought of the shopping-spree frenzy of Canton, and of the feverish hospitality of the CAAC stewardesses, I
began to understand why so many of the New China’s guardians were worried that the girl was throwing open the door too far and embracing her admirer with an altogether unseemly warmth.

In some ways, indeed, the New China seemed like a headstrong young girl, so exhilarated by her new sense of power that she was determined to see how far she could take it, even though she did not know where she was going. Under Deng’s new “socialism with a Chinese character,” comrades were becoming mad for fads: men were parting with two weeks’ wages to get their hair permed, women with two months’ salary to have their eyelids doubled; people of both sexes were paying fifty times face value for tickets to fashion shows and thirty times as much for a porno tape as for a video of Chinese melodrama. Even the country’s leaders were not immune to the blandishments of the West. Here were Premier Zhao Ziyang looking dapper in his tailored Western suits, Deng Xiaoping indulging his fondness for croissants and Deng’s bridge partner, General Secretary Hu Yaobang, urging the people to relinquish chopsticks for knives and forks, on grounds of hygiene.

And through it all, the high-tech, open-market, westward-looking New China seemed to have a much clearer sense of the system it was abandoning than of the one it sought. As the government moved into the unknown, advancing by trial and error, stretching Marxism further and further without knowing quite where it was heading or when to stop, a quarter of the world’s people were being turned around and around so dizzily that nobody was sure where anything stood. In the New China, money was still regarded as the source of all evil; but it was also now a source of much pride. One official slogan enjoined, “To Get Rich Is Glorious,” while another exhorted, “Sacrifice for Socialism.” One day Deng Xiaoping happily declared, “Capitalism cannot harm us,” and two months later he warned of the necessity of “combating the corrosive influence of capitalist ideas.” The government reveled in its embarrassment of riches, even as it betrayed its embarrassment about riches. One day Maoism was enjoined, and the next day Me-ism, and the next day both, and the next day neither. Nobody knew anymore what was right, or what was wrong, or even what was left; the door, it seemed, was swinging wildly on its hinges.

I could only wonder what would happen when the honeymoon ended. Again and again in its history, after all, the long-xenophobic country had begun to open its door to the world, and then, in a frenzy of anxiety, had slammed it shut. In the mid-nineteenth century, the alien Manchu Dynasty had been rocked by a sudden rush of nationalism among the puritanical Taiping rebels, and 20 million people had died by the time China was returned to the Chinese. In 1897, the Emperor Guang Xu had encouraged Western commerce under the slogan “Chinese learning for the essence, Western learning for the application,” only to provoke the Boxers into a fury of hatred indiscriminately aimed at all foreigners. Fifty years ago, Chiang Kai-shek’s policies of free enterprise had prompted one American senator to predict that Shanghai would be “built up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City,” before they were reversed, with a terrible vengeance, by Maoism. Even with the blood of the Cultural Revolution still fresh, Deng’s own reformist policy had already touched off a savage backlash, as conservatives began raising the cry of “spiritual pollution” and banning everything from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

It seemed only a matter of time before an even more violent reversal erupted. Not long before I arrived, China had lost a soccer match to Hong Kong, and its supporters had gone berserk. What was most chilling about their bloodcurdling riot, though, was that the fans had chosen to direct their rage not at their team, or at their opponents, or even at the referees, but simply, and irrationally, at any foreigners they could find. They had smashed cameras, stomped on cars, crushed glasses. During my own trip, I had seen and heard about several fistfights between tourists and locals, a phenomenon unknown to me in all the rest of my travels. And by the time I got home, as the anti-reformist movement picked up momentum, pictures of my Californian host in Beijing were suddenly splashed across the world’s front pages. Why? He had, I read, been evicted from China for growing too friendly with some local students.

ON MY FINAL
day in China, Joe and Wu took me to see the area that had moved deepest into a deracinated future—the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. As soon as we crossed the fifty-four-mile-long border that separates the land of plenty from the
rest of the country, we were definitely in another world. Shacks gave way to four-story homes, open fields to office towers. Esso signs sprouted up along the roads, and Cal Tex logos. Construction cranes jerked spasmodically over the skyline, hovering over buildings that lay under scaffolds like eggs half hatched. Not long ago, explained Joe, the sleepy fishing village had had a population of 20,000; now it was sixteen times that size.

In the beautifully landscaped area of Shekhou, we walked around rows of smart white condos, with red-tiled roofs, lined up, as if in La Jolla or Cassis, against a deep blue waterway. The trim little gardens exuded the surface-deep good health of a bright new singles complex somewhere in the Sunbelt. Every one of these units cost $20,000, explained Joe, and most of their residents were Japanese businessmen. “The Japanese tried to conquer us with arms, and they failed,” he said. “Now they have managed to conquer us with trade.”