Video Night in Kathmandu (3 page)

On an individual level too, Western tourists invariably visit destruction on the places they visit, descending in droves on some “authentic Eastern village” until only two things are certain: it is neither Eastern nor authentic. Each passing season (and
each passing tourist) brings new developments to the forgotten places of the world—and in a never-never land, every development is a change for the worse. In search of a lovely simplicity, Westerners saddle the East with complexities; in search of peace, they bring agitation. As soon as Arcadia is seen as a potential commodity, amenities spring up on every side to meet outsiders’ needs, and paradise is not so much lost as remaindered. In Asia alone, Bali, Tahiti, Sri Lanka and Nepal have already been so taken over by Paradise stores, Paradise hotels and Paradise cafés that they sometimes seem less like utopias than packaged imitations of utopia; Ladakh, Tibet and Ko Samui may one day follow. No man, they say, is an island; in the age of international travel, not even an island can remain an island for long.

Like every tourist, moreover, I found myself spreading corruption even as I decried it. In northern Thailand, I joined a friend in giving hill tribesmen tutorials in the songs of Sam Cooke until a young Thai girl was breaking the silence of the jungle with a piercing refrain of “She was sixteen, too young to love, and I was too young to know.” In China, I gave a local boy eager for some English-language reading matter a copy of the only novel I had on hand—Gore Vidal’s strenuously perverse
Duluth.
And in a faraway hill station in Burma, a group of cheery black marketeers treated me to tea and I, in return, taught them the words “lesbian” and “skin flicks,” with which they seemed much pleased.

Yet that in itself betrays some of the paradoxes that haunt our talk of corruption. For often, the denizens of the place we call paradise long for nothing so much as news of that “real paradise” across the seas—the concrete metropolis of skyscrapers and burger joints. And often what we call corruption, they might be inclined to call progress or profit. As tourists, we have reason to hope that the quaint anachronism we have discovered will always remain “unspoiled,” as fixed as a museum piece for our inspection. It is perilous, however, to assume that its inhabitants will long for the same. Indeed, a kind of imperial arrogance underlies the very assumption that the people of the developing world should be happier witnout the TVs and motorbikes that we find so indispensable ourselves. If money does not buy happiness, neither does poverty.

In other ways too, our laments for lost paradises may really have much more to do with our own state of mind than with the state of the place whose decline we mourn. Whenever we recall the places we have seen, we tend to observe them in the late afternoon glow of nostalgia, after memory, the mind’s great cosmetician, has softened out rough edges, smoothed out imperfections and removed the whole to a lovely abstract distance. Just as a good man, once dead, is remembered as a saint, so a pleasant place, once quit, is recalled as a utopia. Nothing is ever what it used to be.

IF THE FIRST
World is not invariably corrupting the Third, we are sometimes apt to leap to the opposite conclusion: that the Third World, in fact, is hustling the First. As tourists, moreover, we are so bombarded with importunities from a variety of locals—girls who live off their bodies and touts who live off their wits, merchants who use friendship to lure us into their stores and “students” who attach themselves to us in order to improve their English—that we begin to regard ourselves as beleaguered innocents and those we meet as shameless predators.

To do so, however, is to ignore the great asymmetry that governs every meeting between tourist and local: that we are there by choice and they largely by circumstance; that we are traveling in the spirit of pleasure, adventure and romance, while they are mired in the more urgent business of trying to survive; and that we, often courted by the government, enjoy a kind of unofficial diplomatic immunity, which gives us all the perks of authority and none of the perils of responsibility, while they must stake their hopes on every potential transaction.

Descending upon native lands quite literally from the heavens,
dei ex machinae
from an alien world of affluence, we understandably strike many locals in much the same way that movie stars strike us. And just as some of us are wont to accost a celebrity glimpsed by chance at a restaurant, so many people in developing countries may be tempted to do anything and everything possible to come into contact with the free-moving visitors from abroad and their world of distant glamour. They have nothing to lose in approaching a foreigner—at worst, they will merely be insulted or pushed away. And they have everything to
gain: a memory, a conversation, an old copy of
Paris Match
, perhaps even a friendship or a job opportunity. Every foreigner is a messenger from a world of dreams.

“Do you know Beverly Hills?” I was once asked by a young Burmese boy who had just spent nine months in jail for trying to escape his closed motherland. “Do you know Hollywood? Las Vegas? The Potomac, I think, is very famous. Am I right? Detroit, Michigan, is where they make cars. Ford. General Motors. Chevrolet. Do you know Howard Hughes? There are many Jewish people in New York. Am I right? And also at
Time
magazine? Am I right?” Tell us about life behind the scenes, we ask the star, and which is the best place in the whole wide world, and what is Liz Taylor really like.

The touts that accost us are nearly always, to be sure, worldly pragmatists. But they are also, in many cases, wistful dreamers, whose hopes are not so different from the ones our culture encourages: to slough off straitened circumstances and set up a new life and a new self abroad, underwritten by hard work and dedication. American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

I first met Maung-Maung as I stumbled off a sixteen-hour third-class overnight train from Rangoon to Mandalay. He was standing outside the station, waiting to pick up tourists; a scrawny fellow in his late twenties, with a sailor’s cap, a beard, a torn white shirt above his
longyi
and an open, rough-hewn face—a typical tout, in short. Beside him stood his bicycle trishaw. On one side was painted the legend “My Life”; on the other, “B.Sc. (Maths).”

We haggled for a few minutes. Then Maung-Maung smilingly persuaded me to part with a somewhat inflated fare—twenty cents—for the trip across town, and together we began cruising through the wide, sunny boulevards of the city of kings. As we set off, we began to exchange the usual questions—age, place of birth, marital status and education—and before long we found that our answers often jibed. Soon, indeed, the conversation was proceeding swimmingly. A little while into our talk, my driver, while carefully steering his trishaw with one hand, sank the other into his pocket and handed back to me a piece of jade. I admired it dutifully, then extended it back in his direction. “No,” he said. “This is present.”

Where, I instantly wondered, was the catch—was he framing me, or bribing me, or cunningly putting me in his debt? What was the small print? What did he want?

“I want you,” said Maung-Maung, “to have something so you can always remember me. Also, so you can always have happy memories of Mandalay.” I did not know how to respond. “You see,” he went on, “if I love other people, they will love me. It is like Newton’s law, or Archimedes.”

This was not what I had expected. “I think,” he added, “it is always good to apply physics to life.”

That I did not doubt. But still I was somewhat taken aback. “Did you study physics at school?”

“No, I study physics in college. You see, I am graduate from University of Mandalay—B.Sc. Mathematics.” He waved with pride at the inscription on the side of his trishaw.

“And you completed all your studies?”

“Yes. B.Sc. Mathematics.”

“Then why are you working in this kind of job?”

“Other jobs are difficult. You see, here in Burma, a teacher earns only two hundred fifty kyats [$30] in a month. Managing director has only one thousand kyats [$125]. Even President makes only four thousand kyats [$500]. For me, I do not make much money. But in this job, I can meet tourist and improve my English. Experience, I believe, is the best teacher.”

“But surely you could earn much more just by driving a horse cart?”

“I am Buddhist,” Maung-Maung reminded me gently, as he went pedaling calmly through the streets. “I do not want to inflict harm on any living creature. If I hit horse in this life, in next life I come back as horse.”

“So”—I was still skeptical—“you live off tourists instead?”

“Yes,” he said, turning around to give me a smile. My irony, it seems, was wasted. “Until two years ago, in my village in Shan States, I had never seen a tourist.”

“Never?”

“Only in movies.” Again he smiled back at me.

I was still trying to puzzle out why a university graduate would be content with such a humble job when Maung-Maung, as he pedaled, reached into the basket perched in front of his handlebars and pulled out a thick leather book. Looking ahead as
he steered, he handed it back to me to read. Reluctantly, I opened it, bracing myself for porno postcards or other illicit souvenirs. Inside, however, was nothing but a series of black-and-white snapshots. Every one of them had been painstakingly annotated in English: “My Headmaster,” “My Monk,” “My Brothers and Sisters,” “My Friend’s Girlfriend.” And his own girlfriend? “I had picture before. But after she broke my heart, and fall in love with other people, I tear it out.”

At the very back of his book, in textbook English, Maung-Maung had carefully inscribed the principles by which he lived.

• 1) Abstain from violence.
  

• 2) Abstain from illicit sexual intercourse.
  

• 3) Abstain from intoxicants of all kinds.
  

• 4) Always be helpful.
  

• 5) Always be kind.
  

“It must be hard,” I said dryly, “to stick to all these rules.”

“Yes. It is not always easy,” he confessed. “But I must try. If people ask me for food, my monk tell me, I must always give them money. But if they want money for playing cards, I must give them no help. My monk also explain I must always give forgiveness—even to people who hurt me. If you put air into volleyball and throw it against wall, it bounces back. But if you do not put in air, what happens? It collapses against wall.”

Faith, in short, was its own vindication.

I was now beginning to suspect that I would find no more engaging guide to Mandalay than Maung-Maung, so I asked him if he would agree to show me around. “Yes, thank you very much. But first, please, I would like you to see my home.”

Ah, I thought, here comes the setup. Once I’m in his house, far from the center of a city I don’t know, he will drop a drug in my tea or pull out a knife or even bring in a few accomplices. I will find out too late that his friendliness is only a means to an end.

Maung-Maung did nothing to dispel these suspicions as he pedaled the trishaw off the main street and we began to pass through dirty alleyways, down narrow lanes of run-down shacks. At last we pulled up before a hut, fronted with weeds. Smiling proudly, he got off and asked me to enter.

There was not much to see inside his tiny room. There was a cot, on which sat a young man, his head buried in his hands.
There was another cot, on which Maung-Maung invited me to sit as he introduced me to his roommate. The only other piece of furniture was a blackboard in a corner on which my host had written out the statement reproduced in the epigraph to this book, expressing his lifelong pledge to be of service to tourists.

I sat down, not sure what was meant to happen next. For a few minutes, we made desultory conversation. His home, Maung-Maung explained, cost 30 kyats ($4) a month. This other man was also a university graduate, but he had no job: every night, he got drunk. Then, after a few moments of reflection, my host reached down to the floor next to his bed and picked up what I took to be his two most valuable belongings.

Solemnly, he handed the first of them to me. It was a sociology textbook from Australia. Its title was
Life in Modern America.
Then, as gently as if it were his Bible, Maung-Maung passed across the other volume, a dusty old English-Burmese dictionary, its yellowed pages falling from their covers. “Every night,” he explained, “after I am finished on trishaw, I come here and read this. Also, every word I do not know I look up.” Inside the front cover, he had copied out a few specimen sentences.
If you do this, you may end up in jail. My heart is lacerated by what you said. What a lark.

I was touched by his show of trust. But I also felt as uncertain as an actor walking through a play he hasn’t read. Perhaps, I said a little uneasily, we should go now, so we can be sure of seeing all the sights of Mandalay before sundown. “Do not worry,” Maung-Maung assured me with a quiet smile, “we will see everything. I know how long the trip will take. But first, please, I would like you to see this.”

Reaching under his bed, he pulled out what was clearly his most precious treasure of all. With a mixture of shyness and pride, he handed over a thick black notebook. I looked at the cover for markings and, finding none, opened it up. Inside, placed in alphabetical order, was every single letter he had ever received from a foreign visitor. Every one was meticulously dated and annotated, many were accompanied by handwritten testimonials or reminiscences from the tourists Maung-Maung had met. On some pages, he had affixed wrinkled passport photos of his foreign visitors by which he could remember them.

Toward the end of the book, Maung-Maung had composed a
two-page essay, laboriously inscribed in neat and grammatical English, called “Guide to Jewelry.” It was followed by two further monographs, “For You” and “For the Tourists.” In them, Maung-Maung warned visitors against “twisty characters,” explained something of the history and beauty of Mandalay and told his readers not to trust him until he had proved worthy of their trust.