Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Read online

  The goodwill seemed restorative. Claire was now buoyant, pirouetting. “Can you get over that?” she said as we entered the lobby. “They have nothing, nothing at all. But look at them. Those are good people, Suze. Those are people we can be safe with. Hey,” she said. “Let’s go have a drink and toast to our rescuers.”

  At the hotel bar, travelers sat around in loose groups smoking and trading stories. Most were dressed in rough Tibetan sweaters and batik drawstring pants, and no one was much older than we were. It was like a scruffier version of college. I recognized a few faces from back at the Pujiang Hotel in Shanghai. The backpacking community was proving to be a small, recycled pool.

  Back in Shanghai, however, our fellow travelers had been positively magnanimous, routinely lending out shampoo, trading guidebooks, and giving away their leftover foreign currencies. You’re going to Katmandu? Here. Take this card for this guesthouse. Tell the owner that Molly and Angela sent you. And do you want these two sweaters? No, please, take them. We’re off to Bali, so we don’t need them anymore. Save your money.

  But in Beijing, the mood had turned noticeably frostier. Perhaps it was the cold. Perhaps it was the pollution exfoliating our lungs. But people leaned back in their chairs with their arms crossed, sizing each other up shrewdly. Who exactly are you? And conversations quickly turned competitive: Who was the most hard-core, the most rugged, the most real?

  “Personally, I only ever travel in third class,” said a jaded-looking Brit with reptilian eyelids. “It took me forty-six hours to make it here from Kunming, but it’s the only way to experience anything.”

  “Oh, hard seat is the only way to go,” a bearded New Zealander quickly agreed. “I did practically the whole eighteen-hour trip from Xian to Beijing standing up in hard seat because the car was so packed. There was no ventilation and no working toilets. Everyone was coughing and spitting. I even slept standing up. I was the only Westerner in the whole car.”

  “When my boyfriend and I went to India, we made sure to get a private meeting with the Dalai Lama—because otherwise, why go at all, right?” said a Danish woman, reaching behind her to tap her cigarette ash into an empty beer can by her feet.

  “We traveled for eight days by local bus through the mountains. We had dysentery and there was nothing to eat but rice with maggots. But it cost only six dollars apiece, instead of the three hundred dollars the tourists pay to go in a group, and then they don’t even get to meet the Dalai Lama. They just take pictures outside the temple. The way we did it was just so much more spiritual and genuine.”

  Soon we were all vying to establish our backpackers’ street cred, to prove how intrepidly we’d been traveling, how much discomfort we’d incurred at how little expense. The irony of this was wholly lost on us. We were too young and myopic to recognize the perversity of a logic that equates voluntary deprivation with authentic experience. We thought that by wearing burlap pajamas, contracting intestinal parasites, and opting to ride in third class with “the people,” we were somehow being less Western and more Asian. It never seemed to occur to us that only privileged Westerners travel to developing countries in the first place, then use them as playgrounds and laboratories for our own enrichment. Only privileged Westerners consider it a badge of honor to forsake modern amenities for a two-dollar-a-night roach-infested guesthouse. Only privileged Westerners sit around drinking beers at prices the natives can’t afford while sentimentalizing the nation’s lower standard of living and adopting it as a lifestyle.

  The Asians we were seeing, of course, didn’t live famished, agrarian lives due to some sort of Eastern spirituality or enlightenment. Give most of the world’s population our money and opportunity, and they weren’t going slumming at all. They were booking a Club Med vacation in Cancun and drinking a mai tai.

  Granted, it was good, even admirable, that we young backpackers at least attempted to break through the barriers of culture and class to experience firsthand how people in Southeast Asia really lived. But we were kidding ourselves in thinking that we were somehow transcending our Western privileges by doing this.

  Back in Greenwich Village, I’d once heard a self-styled preacher dressed in African kente cloth sermonizing for the Nation of Islam from atop a milk crate in Washington Square Park.

  “AN-THRO-POLOGY,” he’d fairly spit. “An-thro-pology. Only the white man could’ve invented anthro-pology. And for that, we demand an a-pology. Only the white man could’ve relegated all the other cultures of the world to a curiosity, a subject to be subjected to his study. Only the white man could decide that all the other cultures in this world are implicitly inferior. Only the white man could decide that all other cultures in this world must be demystified. Think about the hubris, brothers and sisters. Think about the arrogance it takes to say, ‘We are going to observe cultures less developed than ours, different from ours, in order to see what we can learn about our primeval selves.’ Think about the supreme egotism it takes to create a field of study in which your culture is the baseline—the norm against which all other cultures of the world are measured.

  “Brothers and sisters,” the man went on, saliva spraying from his mouth, “do Eskimos come down to Wall Street, pitch a tent in the stock exchange, and say, ‘We’re here to observe your culture’? Do Zulu warriors go to the Dalton School on the Upper East Side and demand to measure the height of all its children in the name of research? Do Filipinos travel to farm towns in Kansas on a Fulbright scholarship, then walk into someone’s dining room during Thanksgiving to announce, ‘We’ve come to record this sacred ritual of yours. Carry on as if we aren’t here. After living among you, we’re going back to Manila to publish articles about you and stick photographs of your family in a museum’. Does this happen, brothers and sisters? No, it does not. Only the white man shows up uninvited. Only the white man treats the rest of the world like a specimen. Only the white man turns his voyeurism into a so-called social science.”

  I’d thought he had a point. But sitting in the guesthouse in Beijing, Claire and I got as caught up in the moment as everyone else. We glanced at each other conspiratorially, like the straight-A students we were, determined to score the highest marks in the class for derring-do and advanced voyeurism.

  “I’m sorry, but I have a question,” Claire interrupted, clearing her throat. “How do you guys deal with the military police? I mean, two weeks ago, when we went home with this Chinese friend of ours to this town that wasn’t on the map, we got questioned right away because we didn’t have an alien travel permit. How have you handled this sort of situation?”

  The crowd grew quiet. “You got stopped by the military police?”

  Claire shrugged. “Hasn’t everybody?”

  Watching her blink innocently and rotate her wrists in that sinuous way she had, I absolutely loved her. It was hard not to laugh.

  “I mean, isn’t it pretty standard,” Claire said, “if you arrive someplace where Westerners haven’t ever been before?”

  Slowly she began unfurling our story, performing it like a striptease, letting a few odd details drop here and there. I interrupted at intervals, tossing off a few titillating asides, until people’s curiosity was aroused and they pressed us to reveal more. Soon we had taken center stage, painting scenes for our riveted audience, acting out the various characters, finishing each other’s sentences. As travelers were galvanized around us, we described the foreign affairs officer appearing in our Dinghai hotel room, the surreal all-fish ten-course luncheon served to us in vacuum-packed silence, and Jonnie’s family’s house with its refrigerator used as a storage locker. Almost as an afterthought, we recounted our harrowing encounter with the Chinese rural medical system: the poultry in the waiting room, the hole-in-the-ground latrine, the rusty syringe.

  By the time we finished, the room was eerily silent.

  “Wow,” the New Zealander said after a spell. “You were very lucky to get out of there, is all I can say. There was a Belgian girl who got sick in Chengdu. She was ha
llucinating because she had an extremely high fever. The Chinese locked her in a mental institution. They wouldn’t let her out for a year.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that girl, too,” said the Brit somberly, setting down his beer can. “The Chinese don’t look kindly on mental illness.”

  “They don’t look kindly on any sick foreigners, period. You two are really, really lucky you got out of that hospital is all I can say.” The New Zealander shook his head.

  Beneath the white-hot spotlight of their attention, Claire and I exchanged little smiles of carnivorous glee. In the scramble for unique adventures and experience, finally we were winning.

  ———

  The next morning, however, Claire was in a snit again. She stomped around the room, flinging her dirty clothing this way and that.

  “I have to get out of here. This room is disgusting,” she snapped, stuffing a pile of crumpled laundry into her backpack. “I can’t sleep here. I can’t even think straight.”

  To keep the cockroaches off the mattresses, we’d moved the beds away from the walls and slept with the lights on. Despite the relentless hissing and clanking of the pipes, the room had stayed as cold as a meat locker all night, too, so we’d slept in virtually all of our clothes, one grimy layer piled on top of another. In the end, it hadn’t been that dissimilar to being on the train. Neither of us had slept much, and my cough was now markedly worse.

  “Go to the Great Wall today if you want, but I’m staying here,” Claire announced, yanking off her gray cardigan and balling it up.

  “What? You don’t want to see the Great Wall?”

  Our plan had been to take the CITS bus leaving from the hotel that morning after breakfast. Trevor and all his friends were going on it, too, loaded down with goodies for his birthday party. He’d instructed us to bring sleeping bags and flashlights.

  “Please, I have absolutely zero desire to behave like some idiotic tourist,” Claire sniffed. “I mean, going to China and seeing the Great Wall—how fucking unoriginal is that? I want to do something bold.”

  “What are you talking about? The Great Wall is bold,” I cried. “?‘Hey. Let’s build a wall and seal off all of Mongolia’—I mean, talk about chutzpah.”

  But Claire refused to stop rummaging through her backpack and look at me. I couldn’t tell if she was honestly opposed to the idea or simply punishing me for my romance with Trevor.

  “C’mon, Claire,” I pleaded. Ever since we hatched our plans back at the International House of Pancakes, we’d been talking about climbing the Great Wall together. It’d been one of our primary goals for the whole trip. Plus, though I was loath to admit this, if Trevor blew me off and ended up spending the night with Adele or Luxana instead, I didn’t want to be left sleeping alone on the wall, stewing in rejection and heartache.

  “C’mon, Genevieve,” I prodded. “Think about how cool it’s going to be to tell everyone that we camped out on the Great Wall.”

  Claire glanced at me disdainfully. “The only thing that’s good for is getting arrested. Trevor and those guys are lunatics. If they get caught sleeping out there, they’ll probably spend the next seven years in a Chinese prison.”

  “Okay, we don’t have to sleep out, if you don’t want to,” I said, trying to conceal my disappointment. “We can just go there, turn around, and come back. But you can’t miss out—”

  Claire crossed her arms and tilted her head, as if considering me from a different angle. “Look. Go,” she said peevishly, with a dismissive flutter of her hand. “Go see it for both of us, okay? I actually need to stay here and take care of some business.”

  “Business?”

  She looked at me cryptically. “I can’t… I don’t… There’s a contact I have to make here today.”

  “A contact?”

  She exhaled with exasperation. “Forget it.”

  When I continued to stare at her, she conceded, “Look, it’s something to do with my father, my father and his business, okay? And Adom. And that’s all I can say right now. I just… I don’t want to get into it.”

  She snatched up her toiletry bag, strode into the bathroom, and clicked the lock behind her. I heard the shower twist on. But a moment later, she poked her blond, disheveled head back out through the door.

  “Look, just go, okay?” she said over the running water. “Have fun. See Trevor. Do—whatever. But don’t tell anyone what I’ve just told you, okay? And don’t get arrested, either. I’m serious, Suze.”

  ———

  By bus, it took two hours to reach the Great Wall at Badaling. Trevor sat in the back with Adele, Luxana, and a contingent of shaggy, derelict travelers who appeared to have spent the majority of their time in Asia cultivating bizarre facial hair and playing Hacky Sack. When I first boarded the bus, he motioned for me to come and sit on his lap, but I declined; now that I appeared to be just another girl in his harem, the prospect of being with him wasn’t nearly so appealing. Although he clamped his hand over his heart and feigned being stabbed, he made no attempt to move up to join me. I sat instead beside two quiet, affable Canadian women in sun hats and lemon-yellow cardigans who attempted to follow the route along in their guidebook. Slowly the housing projects and industrial buildings of the city gave way to desolate countryside.

  Several miles before we arrived, the road descended into a ravine, and we started to catch glimpses of the Great Wall snaking over the pleated mountains. The sight was thrilling, a jolt of adrenaline. When we arrived in the little parking lot beneath the entrance, there wasn’t much besides a ticket booth, a crude snack cart, and a small lean-to selling souvenir T-shirts. As soon as we poured out of the bus, it was like a starter pistol had gone off. Everyone raced up the hill at the same time. We not only wanted to be the first ones on the Great Wall, but to get away from everyone else. Mind you, there were perhaps thirty of us all told, but we had each somehow decided that we constituted a mob. We each wanted this experience to be ours alone. We all seemed to be under the impression that we were the only people ever to set foot there.

  One of the Canadian women shouted, “I’ve heard that the right side, the steeper side, is better and less crowded.” As soon as we got our tickets, the three of us dashed up the ancient stone steps scaling the wall on the right.

  When we emerged from the guardhouse at the top, the view was magnificent. The Wall appeared to be draped over the mountains like bunting.

  But I refused to stop and take it in. Not yet. I wanted to hike to the highest point possible first, beyond any vestige of modern civilization, and see it as it was five hundred years ago.

  The two Canadians and I climbed doggedly. The tepid shower at the hotel had done nothing to improve my respiratory system. My chest hurt each time I inhaled; I couldn’t seem to get enough air into my lungs. The more we climbed, the more distance we gained, the farther out we got from the entrance and the others, the more exhilarating and perilous it felt. Amazingly, the wall was entirely unsupervised. There were no emergency call boxes, public address systems, tourist information kiosks, or guards. It had simply been left to molder there as it had been moldering for centuries, slinking up and down over the mountains, crumbling and serpentine. Ostensibly we could’ve climbed all the way to Mongolia without anybody noticing or caring.

  Finally we were beyond the last tourist. When the Canadians stopped to take pictures, I told them I’d see them on the way back down. It was just me now, panting and wheezing, struggling on alone at the crest.

  The view was astounding. For 360 degrees around me, there were nothing but mountains and the single sinuous wall slithering all the way to the horizon in either direction. I was a city kid. I’d never stood on top of a ridge like this before. I’d never experienced such topography. The wall felt sacred and majestic. There was no sound but the ruffling of the wind. I felt as though I were standing on the roof of the world.

  Looking out over the stones and the hills, I experienced a seizure of joy.

  The wall and its landscape
existed beyond all petty, quotidian fears. There was only stone, permanence, the curvature of the earth. The wind was as relentless and rhythmic as the tide. Standing there, I felt my anxiety dissolve. I suddenly no longer had bickering parents hurtling toward divorce. My student loans evaporated into the ether. I stopped glancing over my shoulder. My flat, thin hair, my glasses, my belly vanished. The college advisors demanding “So Now What Are You Going to Do?”; my rejection letters from publishers, magazines, scholarship committees; the disapproving looks from Claire; our daunting itinerary traced on a world map in fluorescent pink Magic Marker; the chronic voices deep in my own head saying: Who do you think you are? You’ll never amount to anything. You’re untalented and unlovable. You will die alone.—all of this was banished by a slow suffusion of peace. At the Great Wall, I no longer feared my own powerlessness and insignificance. All individuals are nothing, the stones seemed to say, just a speck in the continuum. Whether we’re beautiful or skeletal, whether we’re sharecroppers or neurosurgeons, whether we fight in wars or give birth to children, whether we eat tofu or watch Morton Downey Jr. on television, whether we’re tormented lovers or house cleaners loaded down with shopping bags on the subway train, whether we’re Chinese or American—all of this is irrelevant. In the end, we’re all just atomic particles destined to be reabsorbed into the cosmos. And it’s okay. Life will come and go, over and over. Only the mountains and this wall have managed to endure.