Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven Read online

  She glanced down at her hands. “But I can’t force you to go someplace you really don’t want to go.”

  I nodded, swollen with gratitude. “Thank you,” I mouthed.

  “At the same time,” she continued, her voice nearly a whisper, “I can’t not go someplace just because you’re too weirded out, either.

  “I’m sorry, Susie,” she added, “but I just can’t.”

  ———

  The Star Ferry wobbled in the stewy bay. People scrambled across the swaying cabin, vying for seats on slatted wooden benches. The steaminess of the day weighed on us like netting. All the windows were open, yet even when the horn sounded and the engines began grinding, there was no breeze. Passengers waved folded newspapers and paper plates in front of their faces, trying to generate their own weather.

  Across the harbor, the Hong Kong side of the city was barely visible. Enormous neon billboards for Carlsberg beer, Longines watches, and Coca-Cola lined the waterfront, creating a relentless seawall of advertisements, a barricade of corporate graffiti. From behind them, the skyline and mountains of Hong Kong rose up in a blur, decapitated by a veil of lavender haze.

  Claire and I stood at the bow, squinting at the greenish water, the glaring, primordial ooze of it. It stank of algae, gasoline. Pearls of sweat ran down my neck.

  “Well, you can’t say it’s not atmospheric,” Claire teased. Holding on to the ferry rail as if it were a ballet barre, she did a little plié. “Look!”

  An old-fashioned Chinese junk bobbed across the water, its webbed sails fanned out against the sky like the plumage of a magnificent bird. A group of sailors bent over the hull, hoisting emerald nets out of the sea. Water runneled out of them, catching the light.

  “Photo op,” Claire sang. Reaching into her leather bag, she pulled out her Instamatic. When she was done, she lowered her camera. “Okay, now you can’t tell me that that isn’t totally amazing.”

  ———

  The Star Ferry docked at the opposite pier. Slowly we trudged through the Sheung Wan quarter toward the consulate. A hot breeze came down from the mountains, whipping up dust until it felt like we were inhaling chalk. Neither of us said anything. Already I’d decided I hated Hong Kong. It seemed like the worst of the city and the worst of the tropics combined: skyscrapers; ugly fast-food chains; hot, cramped alleyways stinking of incense, wet bamboo, rotting melons; pushcart hawkers; sizzling concrete; viscous, malarial air. It took all my concentration to put one foot in front of the other. All those famous adventurers like Captain Cook and Ernest Hemingway: How the hell had they traveled around the world so blithely? Then it dawned on me: Most of them had been completely drunk all the time.

  By the time we reached the consulate, our clothes were lacquered to our skin. “Well, this is good practice for Indonesia and India,” Claire panted. “They’ll be at least this hot, too.”

  I couldn’t believe that she was actually thinking that far ahead. Indonesia?India? Her optimism was daunting. For a moment I nearly hated her: her pearly beauty, her bake-sale enthusiasm. That morning after our argument, she’d suggested, “Why don’t we adopt special travel names for ourselves—something with a whiff of espionage, say, like Zsa Zsa and Genevieve.” She’d taken out her camera and made me pose in front of Chungking Mansions, saying, “Oh, that’s it. Work it, Zsa Zsa. The camera loves you, baby!” She’d photographed me in front of the seagulls, a motorized rickshaw, a sign for McDonald’s in Cantonese. She’d pirouetted. She’d said that we should have a champagne breakfast to celebrate our arrival. She’d quoted Rilke. At the ferry terminal, she’d purchased a small bag of M&M’s, even though she was eternally on a diet. “Here, you want the green ones?” she’d said magnanimously. “They’re supposed to make you horny. Ha-ha.”

  She was determined to gloss over my blubbering cowardice, to put it behind us and pretend, in fact, that it had never happened. She was insisting that we were still a team. She was generous and patient with me to a fault; her kindness made me feel so callow, I almost couldn’t bear it.

  At the visa office, we took our seats on metal folding chairs and began filling out applications. An official behind the counter gave us a list of rules we had to agree to beforehand.

  As tourists, all our travel inside China would have to be authorized by the government’s China International Travel Service (CITS). All train and airplane reservations, sightseeing tours, and theater tickets would have to be booked through them. That September, CITS had designated approximately fourteen cities as open, meaning we could visit them freely without prior approval or alien travel permits. But we’d also be issued a separate currency: FEC, or foreign exchange certificates. These would insure that we paid “foreigner” prices for everything.

  Prior to entering China, we’d also have to fill out customs forms documenting each item we were bringing into the country. Upon leaving, our luggage would be searched. If any item on our list—say, a Walkman or a camera—was unaccounted for, we’d have to explain its whereabouts to the authorities.

  All in all, it didn’t seem like we were being given visas so much as being put on a retractable leash.

  As I shifted in my chair, the door buzzed. Another Westerner lumbered in. He slung down his rucksack, then stood there scratching his belly. He was tall and bulky, with massive tree-trunk legs. A ribbon of gut peeked out above the elasticized waistband of his shorts; I could see curls of brown, pubic-like hair ringing the puncture of his navel. On his feet were ribbed socks and Birkenstocks. With his shaggy hair and beard, he looked vaguely like Jesus—or rather, like Jesus’s older, dumber brother. His eyes were deep-set and slightly too close together. There was a thickness to his face, a suggestion of vague, affable dementia.

  “Is tsis tsee place for tsee wee-zah?” he said, pointing to the counter. Claire and I nodded. His German accent was so heavy, it was almost a parody: You could hear the beer and mustard in it, the bratwurst and pretzel salt. The smallness of the office highlighted his size, making him seem gargantuan by contrast. As he tramped past us to take a clipboard, Claire made a goofy face and mimed a Nazi salute. I clamped my hands over my mouth to keep from giggling.

  Once I’d confessed to Claire that as a Jew, I felt a gut-level distrust and hostility toward Germans, even the younger ones. I couldn’t help it, I said. I assumed they all wanted to kill me. To my great irritation, Claire had scolded me. “That’s so prejudiced. Isn’t that making the same generalizations about them that they once made about you?” She hadn’t been the first person to say this, either; several classmates at Brown had sighed aloud that they wished “the Jews would just get over the Holocaust already.” One of these was a Southerner whose grandmother was still complaining about General Sherman stealing the family silver. Another had been in Jungian psychoanalysis since she was six. If you asked me, it seemed that nobody anywhere ever got over anything.

  But now, in the name of solidarity, I suppose, Claire whispered in my ear, “I know nut-tink!” mimicking Colonel Klink from the TV show Hogan’s Heroes. “Is tsis tsee place for tsee wee-zah?”

  “Stop,” I giggled as my clipboard slid to the floor with a clatter. “I’ll pee.”

  As the German stumbled back with his papers, he reached down, picked up the clipboard, and handed it to me.

  Lowering himself carefully into the narrow chair, he motioned to my visa forms. “Do you speak Mandarin?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Do you?”

  Claire and I were both surprised when he nodded. “For some reason, it is very funny. I am speaking better than I am reading.”

  “You’re fluent?”

  The man tilted his head from side to side. I noticed he wore a stone arrowhead around his neck on a leather cord. “Not so much, not so little. I can ask for pork. I can ask for water. I can ask for the hotel. But I cannot be making the jokes. I cannot be talking of the philosophy.”

  We looked at him, impressed. “Whoa, that’s more than we can say,” Claire admitted.

  �
��Hey,” I asked as a thought suddenly occurred to me. “Can you show us the Chinese character for ladies’ room?”

  The German leaned over and dutifully scribbled a single character on the corner of Claire’s visa application: a crosshatched stick figure.

  “How do you say it out loud?” Claire asked.

  He said something completely incomprehensible, a garbled, throat-clearing grunt.

  “Oh, well, we’ll just stick to pointing to the character,” I said.

  “How are you going to China?” he asked.

  Claire shrugged. “Train, I guess. Or maybe a hydrofoil to Guangzhou. What about you?”

  The German untied the drawstring of his rucksack and began rooting through it. “First, I am thinking I am taking the train, too. But then I am learning there is the sailboat.” He pulled out a mimeographed flyer and handed it to Claire. It read:

  SAIL TO CHINA!!!

  JORNEY TO THE MAINLAND ON THE HIGH SEAS!!!

  Weeky sailings on the Jin Jiang.

  Depart Kowloon Thursday, Arrive Shanghai Sunday.

  HK$630

  Port tax inclus.

  Must Have Valid Visa for PRC

  RESERVE NOW!!!

  An EXCLUSIVE Jade Buddha Travel Agency Exclusive.

  “This, she is from the budget travel agent near the Star Ferry,” said the German. “I am thinking it is looking very interesting, no?”

  I glanced at Claire. Everything about the flyer smacked of fraud—from the lousy photocopying job to the misspellings to the suggestion that a tourist pay $630 Hong Kong dollars for the “exclusive” privilege of sleeping on a hammock in a Chinese fishing boat for three days. It might as well have read: come to the jade buddha travel agency and we will turn you upside down by your ankles and shake all of the money out of your pockets.

  Claire studied the flyer.

  “Wow, it sails tomorrow?” she said.

  The German nodded. “Jah. That is why I am bringing the extra money to be getting the instant visa.”

  “Have you booked your ticket yet?”

  The German shook his head. “You need to be showing them first the visa. Just like with the train.”

  “Do you think there are any more places left?”

  I could hear the gears in her head clicking. “Claire,” I said anxiously, nudging her. “This doesn’t exactly look legit.”

  The German shrugged. “I ask the lady, and she is telling me there is still room but that the reservations for the boat, they have to be made by three o’clock today.”

  Claire’s eyes glittered as she did the calculations. “So, if we get our visas now, here, today, we could be on a boat to China by tomorrow?”

  The German nodded. “If you want, we can be going together to the travel agent.”

  “Oh my God, that is beyond awesome,” Claire exclaimed. She turned to me. “Can you imagine? Sailing to China on one of those boats we just saw? How cool would that be?”

  “Claire, look,” I said. I began to feel queasy, a wave cresting in my gut. The Van Houtens were avid sailors. Claire had her own Sunfish. At the graduation party in Connecticut, Claire’s father had given us a tour of his den. Decorated in a nautical motif, it was designed to resemble a captain’s cabin, though mostly it reminded me of a New England seafood restaurant. Photographs of his boats hung on paneled walls, and a model of a Spanish galleon was displayed atop a sea chest. Mr. Van Houten explained the history of each one to us in great detail. My family and I had stood there with our half-finished flutes of champagne, feigning comprehension. Finally my mother could no longer restrain herself. Leaning over to my brother, she whispered, “John, darling. Our own family’s boat. You did take it out of the bathtub this morning, didn’t you?”

  Now Claire was imagining Odysseus, Magellan, Columbus and being on the open seas doing something bold that no one we knew had ever done before. All I could envision was fending off water rats with a shovel, peeing in a bucket, and projectile vomiting into the Straits of Taiwan.

  “Six hundred and thirty Hong Kong dollars? That’s only ninety U.S.,” she exclaimed. Leaning across me, she offered her hand to the German. “I’m Claire,” she said enthusiastically. “This is my friend and co-conspirator, the Divine Ms. Susie G.”

  “Hello. I am Gunter.” The German shook her hand, then mine. “In Chinese, to say hello, you say nee how.”

  “Nee how!” said Claire.

  “Yah,” said Gunter. He turned to me. “Now you,” he prompted. “Nee how.”

  “Nee how,” I said dispiritedly.

  “And to say ‘Thank you,’ you say Shay shay nee.”

  “Shay shay nee,” I said.

  “See.” He smiled. “You are learning the Chinese already.”

  Chapter 3

  The Straits of Taiwan

  THE PIER WAS deserted. Garbage in the water bumped listlessly against the pylons. Just as I’d anticipated, the excursion to Shanghai aboard the Jin Jiang had been a scam, a version of three-card monte for Western suckers like us eager to plunk down HK$630 for the dubious thrill of sleeping on a fishing junk.

  “This can’t be right,” Claire said anxiously. “Where’s the boat?”

  Across the bay, there wasn’t so much as a dinghy in sight. Yet over by the ferry terminal, hundreds of Chinese lined up along the waterfront. Many stood beside refrigerator boxes. Others were surrounded by pieces of furniture wrapped so snugly in brown paper, it looked as if they’d simply moved entire living rooms of their apartments out onto the sidewalk. Others sat fanning themselves atop piles of enormous shopping bags made of candy-striped plastic. The bags looked toxic and indestructible, taxidermied with clothing and bedding. Odder still, everyone carried grocery sacks bulging with oranges, pineapples, and cabbages. They didn’t look like passengers so much as refugees.

  “Maybe I ask?” said Gunter.

  Claire and I watched uneasily as he lumbered across the street. As he approached a Chinese couple, they looked at him with alarm. A moment later, Gunter waved us over.

  Claire frowned. “He can’t be serious. All these people are going with us? On a fishing junk?”

  In 1986, China was a country with one billion people. And yet until that moment, it had never occurred to us that we might actually be sailing with any of them—or that the chances of doing anything exclusively was in fact pretty much nil. Now it was starting to appear that the Jin Jiang might not be a fishing boat so much as a great floating gulag crammed full of China’s great unwashed proletarian masses. Judging from these masses, all of us were expected to supply our own food, bedding, and linens for the trip, too. The People’s Republic of China was the no-frills concept applied to an entire nation.

  While Gunter held our place in the line, Claire and I hurried into the terminal to see if we could stock up on provisions and make a couple of last, desperate calls home. Once we docked in China, we had no idea if or when we’d have access to telephones again.

  While I bought snacks, Claire hunched over a pay phone. “Daddy, I told you—” she whispered fiercely, her hand cupped around the mouthpiece, a lock of hair falling over one eye.

  “Daddy, what don’t… Shanghai. It’s right there in the folder… No, look again—I’m not—”

  She shot me a furious look and mimed shooting the receiver. Turning back around, her hair drawn over her face like a curtain, she hissed, “Daddy, please don’t cry. Nothing bad is going to—”

  A little boy ran by holding a finger puppet, his pregnant mother waddling after him. A garbled announcement came over the loudspeaker.

  Claire slammed down the receiver so hard it rang back at her, reverberating in its cradle. “Augh!” she cried. People seated in the waiting room looked over at us.

  “You know, if it was Alexander or Edward or Dominic, he would not be doing this. He goes to me, ‘Oh, princess, when are you coming home to Daddy?’ ”

  With a great sweep of her hand, she motioned toward the red aluminum can I was holding. “I mean, for chrissake, you’
re standing here drinking a Coca-Cola. I told him that. What on earth does he possibly think is going to happen to us?”

  She whirled around and struck the pay phone with the side of her fist. Families glanced over at us again. I had no idea what to say, how to react. It was hard to imagine Claire’s truculent father, his feet propped up on his mahogany desk, blubbering into the telephone like a twelve-year-old girl.

  “Fuck.” Claire pressed her forehead against the receiver. “It is so. Not. Fair.”

  Gently I moved beside her and put my arm around her shoulder. She reached up and squeezed my hand. For a moment we just stood together, breathing. It was odd. Back at college, my other friends and I had been touchy-feely to the brink of lesbianism. But Claire’s greetings consisted of a stiff nod that seemed to say Yes, I’m here and so are you, so let’s not make a big deal about it, followed by a perfunctory pair of air kisses. Once when I’d gone to hug her goodbye on campus, she’d flinched. “I’m sorry, ” she said, stepping back awkwardly, “but in my family, we’ve just never done that.”

  Now we stood intertwined in front of the pay phone while strangers circled us, angling to make a call.

  “I’m fine,” she said after a moment. Disengaging, she ran a finger under each eye and shook her hair out as if that would free her of all unpleasantness.

  “He just—he thinks I can’t possibly do anything without his supervision, without… Aw, fuck it,” she announced. “I’m going to get a Coke. Phone’s all yours, Zsa Zsa.” She pressed a handful of coins into my palm and strode off to the snack bar.

  I watched her get in line beneath an arrow reading “Order Here,” then slotted my coins into the phone. In 1986, there were no phone cards or credit card calls. If you wanted to call overseas, your only option was to feed fistfuls of unfamiliar change into a public phone, contact the operator, and pray that she could get a connection and reverse the charges while the line crackled and hissed like a campfire.