Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Read online

  “I don’t know,” I said warily. I’d grown up in a rough inner-city neighborhood in New York. I’d gotten harassed often enough to know when something looked like a bad idea. It didn’t take much imagination to see the entire filthy corridor cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape.

  Claire sighed and raked her hands through her hair. Of the two of us, she was by far the more optimistic. “Well, we won’t know until we see.” She jammed the button for the elevator. “Let’s start with the Lucky Guesthouse at the top. If we don’t like it, we’ll just work our way down till we find something.”

  I tried to keep my pulse in check. Claire had been raised in New Canaan, Connecticut, in a colonnaded house with a circular driveway flanked by topiaries and a swimming pool that looked like a giant turquoise paramecium. When the Van Houtens had invited me and my family up for a little post-graduation party, their maid had greeted us at the door with a tray full of champagne and lemonade.

  The door to the Lucky Guesthouse had a frosted window like an old detective agency. The proprietor sat behind a dented metal desk smoking a cigarette and staring at a television mounted high on a shelf in the corner. Two men onscreen appeared to be beating each other with sticks.

  “Hello,” Claire said. I had to admit, I admired her fearlessness. She just walked right in on her long, caliper legs.

  The proprietor continued staring at the TV. An electric fan whirred on his desk, making the papers flutter. The tiny room smelled like an ashtray. Somewhere a toilet flushed gaseously. “Room or dormitory?” he said gruffly.

  “A room,” Claire said crisply. “With a private bathroom and two beds, please.”

  The man yanked open a drawer and tossed a key at her, never once removing his gaze from the screen. “Number six,” he said. “Down hall, on right. Eighty dollars. Cash only. You pay first thing in morning.” Eighty Hong Kong dollars was roughly eleven bucks.

  Claire strode down the corridor. I bumbled along behind her. Room 6 was a concrete cell with two denuded mattresses. A bare plastic lamp molded in the shape of a candlestick sputtered on the floor between them. When we tried the light switch, the overhead bulb blew out with a spark and a pop and a huge cockroach scuttled out from a crack in the ceiling.

  Without a word, Claire spun around and walked back down the hall. When she dropped the key back on the desk, the manager never even took his eyes off the television.

  Riding and stopping at each floor in Chungking Mansion’s elevator for the next twenty minutes was like reading one of those pop-up books I’d had as a child in which you pulled open little paper flaps to reveal tiny domestic scenes behind each one. Except in this case, each time the elevator door slid open, it unveiled a tiny tableau of squalor and depravity.

  On one floor, we saw an obese Chinese man sitting on the landing in a giant diaper. His hair was matted; he was masturbating, weeping, and growling like a rabid dog. On the floor below that was an empty hallway heaped with garbage, a sole lightbulb swinging overhead like a noose, the walls gouged with graffiti. On the next was a red and gold sign for a massage parlor and the sound of people fighting. Puffs of greasy, garlic-scented smoke filled the hallway in front of the Happy Family Hostel.

  With each stop, our trepidation increased. But when I finally suggested we take out the credit card we had for emergencies and check into the Kowloon Holiday Inn, Claire cried, “No!”

  “Please,” she said more gently, “if we check into a fancy place for one night, soon we’ll be, like, ‘Oh, let’s just stay here.’ It would be too easy. We’ve got to stay strong, okay? I promise we’ll find something, okay?”

  Eventually we arrived at the Boston Guesthouse, whose name, at least, sounded promising. “Hello. Welcome. I am Mr. Chung, ” said a studious-looking young man behind the counter. “Come.” He smiled extravagantly. “I have nice rooms. You want with air-conditioning or fan?”

  “Air-conditioning,” we chorused wearily, our foreheads glistening. So much for roughing it.

  In its previous incarnation, the Boston Guesthouse had clearly been a bathhouse; the rooms were windowless, aquamarine tiled stalls with an asterisk of a drain embedded in their floors. Each was blindingly lit by a fluorescent tube running the length of the ceiling. Tiny bathrooms were sectioned off from the beds by a shiny plastic shower curtain. A few ants scurried across the tiles, but otherwise, the rooms seemed clean enough. In fact they reeked of chlorine. Air conditioners were bolted unevenly to the walls just below the ceiling. It was now almost eleven p.m. We were running out of options.

  “They’re fine. We’ll take them,” Claire sighed, tucking her hair back behind her ears. She had an opalescent complexion, like milk glass; you could see the fine blue veins at her temples. In the queasy fluorescence of the guesthouse, her hair looked almost green.

  We paid Chung seventy Hong Kong dollars apiece, and he handed us keys to two small, adjoining rooms. And there we were: officially ensconced in Asia.

  I closed my door and dropped my backpack on the floor, the thunk reverberating off the tiles. I sat down on the bed. In a few minutes, Claire would come over to uncork the champagne we’d brought to toast our arrival. Yet somehow I couldn’t bring myself to move. Although the air-conditioning was on high, I couldn’t stop sweating. Perspiration bloomed in the armpits of my T-shirt, damp flowers of exhaustion.

  From overhead came the sizzle of mosquitoes frying against the fluorescent bulb. I looked around. Without any windows, it was impossible to get oriented. I sat on the edge of the metal-framed bed, trying to catch my own breath.

  It was the first time I’d ever been alone in a foreign country.

  It didn’t feel triumphant or glorious at all.

  ———

  Like most grandiose ideas, ours had begun stupidly. Claire and I had first conceived of our little adventure at four a.m. at the International House of Pancakes fifteen days before our graduation from Brown. We were both drunk and bemoaning the fact that we had no idea what the hell to do with ourselves once we tossed off our mortarboards. We were, I suppose, typical twenty-one-year-olds: We believed we were exceptional.

  Both of us had had big plans for ourselves after college. Mine had been to write the Great American Novel by the end of senior year and publish it to international acclaim. Claire’s had been to win a Rhodes scholarship. Yet somehow neither of these had panned out. All that awaited Claire was a gelatinous summer at her family’s beach house in Hilton Head, where her stepmother (whom she called “the Lady Macbeth of the dog show circuit”) would dote on her six pedigree bichons-ises while yelling at Claire not to spill Tab on the slipcovers. All that awaited me was moving back home with my parents and pretending that a job at Lady Footlocker was some sort of feminist activism.

  At the IHOP, a beleaguered waitress had set a couple of paper place mats in front of us with the menu printed on them. “Pancakes of Many Nations!” they’d read. Beneath this were little pictures that reduced the world’s great cultural differences to a matter of hotcakes and waffles: Vive La France: crepes. Polynesia Paradise: pineapple and ham. O, Canada: flapjacks, maple syrup. The pictures had a faded, nostalgic quality: they appeared to have been taken in the fifties. Presented this way, the vast world we were about to enter suddenly appeared cheery and infinitely manageable; there was not a single nation on earth, the IHOP menu implied, that couldn’t be mastered with a fork.

  Staring at it, we’d had a jolt of inspiration. Why not eat pancakes of many nations in many nations? Why not travel the world? Oddly, barreling headlong into developing countries with a backpack somehow seemed far easier to us than simply getting a job.

  “Oh my God, let’s do it!” we cried. “Let’s literally circle the globe.”

  Neither of us knew the other terribly well. Our freshman year at Brown, we’d lived on the same hallway and taken comparative literature together. Although Claire had gone on to join a sorority and to frequent football games while I’d installed myself at the Womyn’s Center with other leftie malco
ntents, once a semester or so, we went out for coffee. We’d end up laughing so hard that the proprietors of the café invariably asked us to leave. Parting, we always blew each other silly, exaggerated air kisses, said “Au revoir, darling,” and left flushed with goodwill and kinship.

  Deciding to travel the world together on impulse didn’t strike either of us as unreasonable. We were at that age when we still believed that genius arrived in bolts of lightning and shrieks of “Eureka!” We still believed in love at first sight, not just with people, but with ideas—that in a single instant, you could just know.

  What’s more, we’d been raised to assume that one day we would in fact conquer the world. Claire and I had come of age during that rare moment in human history when little girls were pumped full of the steroids of feminism, told en masse that we could do anything, be anything, go anywhere. During our freshman orientation week at Brown, the university president had addressed us as “the best and brightest, the future leaders of America.”

  Whenever we’d read books about bold, romantic, heroes who’d sailed the oceans, climbed the mountains, and ventured into uncharted territories, we’d been supremely irritated that almost none of them had had a vagina. Why couldn’t women be heroes in great epics too?

  That night at the IHOP, Claire had reached into her purse, pulled out a ballpoint pen, and clicked it expertly, as if preparing to administer an injection. “Let’s star in our own epic. Let’s write down every place in the world we’ve ever wanted to go.” Flipping over her place mat, she’d scribbled down the words Katmandu, Thailand, Greece, then passed it to me.

  Marrakech, I’d jotted down. Paris. Bali. I could barely identify these places on a map, but they sounded cool. I couldn’t quite believe we were actually going to go through with this, but so what? Italy, I wrote. Sri Lanka.

  In the scheme of human history, 1986 is not long ago. And yet as we made our lists, the foreign countries we were naming seemed a lot farther away than they do now. With the Cold War raging, the entire Eastern Bloc was sequestered behind the iron curtain, and mass tourism beyond Europe was only nascent. This was years before the Internet; before routine transpacific flights; before American jobs were outsourced to Mumbai and Manila; before overseas direct dialing and cell phones; and before CNN, Sky TV, and the 24-hour news cycle regularly transmitted images around the globe into everybody’s living rooms. And this was, of course, before September 11.

  Oblivious to the ickiness of our presumption that we would discover cultures that were actually far older and far more evolved than we were, we believed that there was still a great frontier left to explore—a frontier, in fact, that eagerly awaited us. The People’s Republic of China. It seemed so vast, so unknown, so pregnant with promise! “Look out, world,” we giggled. “Here we come!”

  As we scribbled, the sun started to rise, inflaming the windows of the IHOP, blinding us with hot slats of gold reflected off the Formica tabletop. Claire glanced up at me, brushed her white-blond hair back with her wrist, and smiled a dazzling, exuberant smile. “We’re really going to do this, you know,” she said rapturously. “We’re going to have an adventure worthy of great literature.”

  Across from us, four truckers stood up, hiked up their pants, adjusted their belts, inserted toothpicks between their lips. The waitress wiped down their table and reset it. Then she untied her apron and sauntered off.

  The restaurant was empty. The stillness felt like relief. We could hear the clanking of pans in the kitchen, a griddle being hosed down, a time clock chomping a punch card. From the parking lot came the first tentative peeps of sparrows. As we wrote, scribbling down budgets, listing the supplies we might need, we became more and more giddy. Our laughter rang out like a carillon in the morning. We grew increasingly delirious with our newfound sense of possibility, our widescreen visions, our raw, voracious ambition. We were young, brilliant, and drunk. We were the future leaders of America. We were off and running. We now had a plan.

  ———

  When Claire’s mother had died, she’d left Claire a trust fund. I, however, had grown up in a government-subsidized housing project and attended Brown on financial aid. To pay for our trip, I’d had to defer repaying my student loans and work multiple jobs. That summer I’d answered telephones during the day at a real estate office, then waitressed at a grungy Upper West Side bar at night. The bar was notorious for serving alcohol to minors. The fact that I could get arrested for this didn’t bother me nearly so much as the fact that teenagers never tipped.

  By the time the jukebox was switched off at the end of my shift each night, it was close to three a.m. To save money, I walked home. The dark, cracked pavement glittered in the heat. Back at my parents’ apartment, I’d tiptoe into the kitchen and make myself a Kahlúa and milk, then carry the clinking glass to my bedroom and sip it as I counted out my tips. I’d smooth each dollar bill lovingly, fanning them out on my bedspread. On a good night, I earned over seventy-five bucks; on a bad night, less than forty.

  My parents’ apartment overlooked rows of dilapidated brownstones, their backyards strewn with rusted baby carriages, disemboweled sofas, plastic pink flamingos bleached to the color of an infection. Beyond these towered ugly, Braque-like buildings like our own. As the sun came up each morning, I’d stare out the window and listen to the sound of jackhammers, to the police sirens ripping by and our neighbors yelling from fire escapes, “I kill you, you dumb fuck,” and I’d think with relief: In just a few months, I’ll get out of here and bestride the world like a goddess.

  Now, sitting on a metal bed ten thousand miles from home in a cell the pale blue-green color of chewing gum, listening to two people yelling in Cantonese through a grimy ventilation duct, I realized what a mother lode of stupidity this had been. Claire and I didn’t speak a word of Chinese. What if we got sick? Our guidebooks were full of warnings about parasites, worms, fungi, fevers. What if we were molested or robbed? What if we got lost?

  We didn’t know one soul in the entire hemisphere. We’d landed in Asia without a single name scribbled on a napkin. No friend of a friend’s cousin teaching English. No army buddy of her father’s. No Brown alumnus to call in case of an emergency. When we’d finally made it into the arrivals hall at Kai Tak, there’d been absolutely nobody waiting for us. For all my talk about wanting to be a bold, independent traveler, I’d never considered what it would actually feel like to journey halfway around the world with no one to greet me on the other end.

  The reality of how utterly alone we were was starting to hit me; the loneliness of it was sonic. We could disappear or die here—who would even care?

  It was, I realize, a Copernican moment. For perhaps the first time in my life, it became viscerally clear to me just how little I mattered, just how much I was not in fact the center of the universe. It was like a swift kick to the gut.

  I had just spent two thousand dollars on a nonrefundable around-the-world airplane ticket, received a battery of vaccinations against everything from tetanus to yellow fever, and traveled halfway across the globe for what was clearly a hideous mistake.

  My teeth began chattering so hard I thought they would crack. Shutting off the air-conditioning, I curled up in a fetal position in my sleeping bag and tried to think of how to break it to Claire that I was sorry, that I just wasn’t that type of girl after all—that this was all wrong—and I had to go home immediately.

  As if on cue, there was a knock on my door. “Susie?”

  Leaping up, I switched the AC back on and tried to recompose myself. Claire hurried in. Her hair was wet from showering. She was clad in light-blue-and-white-pinstripe pajamas that smelled of fabric softener.

  “The champagne. I’m sorry. I think I left it in the bathroom at the airport. Oh, Susie!” She sat down on my bed and buried her face in her hands.

  “Claire, what is it?”

  “This place! My mattress is crawling with ants. The AC is broken. My room’s like an oven. And it’s so strange. There are all these we
ird noises. And I suddenly feel so completely alone. What are we doing here?”

  I dropped down beside her. “I don’t know.” I hiccuped. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Claire choked. “First I go, ‘Hey, let’s travel the world. Let’s go totally off the beaten path.’ And then I’m, like, ‘We’re going to rough it. No Hilton hotels for us. I’m not some pampered little princess.’ But you know what, Suze? I am a pampered little princess. I didn’t think I was, but I am. Tonight has totally creeped me out. My father is right.”

  When he’d seen us off at JFK, Claire’s father had paced around the departure gate, chain-smoking and cracking his knuckles, his sport coat tugging across his shoulder blades. “They’re making a terrible mistake,” he told my parents, shaking his head gravely.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, princess,” he said to Claire. The muscle in his jaw spasmed. He had a long patrician face and pewter-colored hair clipped close to his skull. He looked like a pained greyhound.

  Asia was a cesspool, he said loudly. Didn’t we know that? It was Third World, rice fields and shanties, filthy children, beggars in the streets. Of course, he’d only been to Tokyo, back in the seventies. But trust him. Oriental culture was perverse. Those men had schoolgirl fetishes. They read pornography openly on the subways, and nobody ever went jogging. Worse yet, they considered us white people to be monkeys. “And this after we rebuilt their country. They bombed Pearl Harbor, and we gave them Toyota, ” he said. No, sir, he was 100 percent opposed to us setting foot in Japan.

  “We’re not going to Japan, Daddy,” Claire had said irritably. “We’re starting in China.”

  “The People’s Republic. A Communist empire.” He’d snorted. “When you come crying home to us, princess, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”