Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

by Susan Jane Gilman

  ———

  Competing smells of urine, lacquer, and roast duck still permeate the streets. Avenues still have patchy sycamore trees and paving stones like pressed tin. The same ramshackle assortment of wheelbarrows and rusty pushcarts clutter the sidewalks. But in less than twenty years, the country has progressed a century.

  I feel like an archaeologist, looking desperately for some small fragment from the past. On a corner of Chang’an Avenue, flapping in the wind above a darkened restaurant is the tattered red awning of Maxim’s. But the restaurant seems to have disappeared; a gargantuan apartment building rises above it.

  At the edge of Tiananmen Square, there’s a new Metro station and a 7-Eleven convenience store. A young Chinese man approaches. “Excuse me. But do you speak English?”

  “Nee how. Yes,” I exclaim. Finally something familiar: a Beijing University student still eager to make contact.

  The young man hands us a card. Lucky Dragon Silk Paintings, Ltd. “You like special silk paintings? Come, I show you, yes? For you, special price.”

  Bob and I wend our way through the crowds to the entrance of the Forbidden City. There, exactly two decades earlier, I was supposed to meet an Australian sailor named Trevor on his birthday. Now I stand there and kiss my husband instead. The enormous portrait of Mao Zedong continues to stare down at us benevolently. It alone has not changed.

  ———

  My sweet, troubled friend with that incredible laugh. In China, I find myself homesick for her. She is one of the few people on this planet who can truly appreciate the enormity of what I am witnessing, who can share in my shock and disbelief. I try imagining her reaction to Shanghai, which is now a futuristic city straight out of science fiction, with strobe lights orbiting the tripod of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower each night. I long to take digital photos with my cell phone of the Pujiang—which still exists, refurbished as a hip, historic boutique hotel—and text, “You won’t believe where I am.” I want to send her postcards of the two giant pagodas, one silver and one gold, that now rise like Excalibur swords out of a newly created lake in the center of Guilin. This entire country has undergone an extreme makeover, I’d write. As Nietzsche said…

  But of course this is impossible.

  To be fair, Claire is with me always. Every time I board a plane, I still feel as if I’m about to undergo a triple bypass. My own internal hardwiring for cowardice, my emotional, personal GPS still whispers to me insidiously, Go home. You can’t handle this. But then I hear her voice like a mantra, urging me on: I have faith in you. You can do this.

  I would not be living my life the way I am today if it wasn’t for her. Claire Van Houten unleashed something in me; she set me off on a path far beyond anything I ever imagined for myself or believed I was capable of doing. In this way, back in China in 1986, she saved my life, too.

  ———

  But as far as she—or Jonnie, for that matter—is concerned, I cannot offer you the happy ending I wished for, the redemption and reunion this story demands. Truth may be stranger and wilder than fiction, but it’s also more frustrating in its refusal to conform to a neat little narrative. Of course I’ve done the requisite Googling. I’ve scanned our alumni directories and newsletters. I’ve looked up phone numbers. But to no avail. And I can’t say I’ve pushed it either. Because I suspect that clearly, Claire would rather not be found.

  For closure, I can only offer you this.

  On our last day in Guilin, before heading home, Bob and I take a cruise down the Li River.

  Such cruises are now a huge tourist business. They’re showboats with full kitchens on board, some with lounges decorated like eighteenth-century French parlors. During the three-hour trip downriver to Yangshuo, passengers are served cocktails and multicourse Chinese lunches. So many boats make this trip each day that they parade down the river in an absurd beribboned flotilla.

  The day we make the trip it is broiling. There is scarcely any breeze. The boat is packed. Nonetheless, the karsts are more magnificent than I remember. Two decades ago, such trips weren’t possible, so I never got to see the full topography from the river, with all its phantasmagoric beauty. Guangxi province. It really is something to see. For three hours, Bob and I stand mesmerized on the deck, watching the landscape grow increasingly spectacular. The vanished prehistoric sea is a lush, shimmering Eden.

  As the boat turns in to Yangshuo, this ends abruptly. Chinese kids wave to us from the docks, where dozens of hulking tour boats are now moored. Brand-new condominiums and modern hotels are terraced against the hills; a wall has been constructed along the embankment draped with a garish banner in English: “Chinese Famous Tourist County—Welcome to Yangshuo.”

  Scores of tour groups are shepherded by guides with bullhorns up the hill to cafés with rainbow-colored umbrellas and rows of plastic deck chairs. The woodsy hamlet of twenty years ago is now a city of 300,000.

  By now, however, I’m used to this. I’ve grown up, and so has China. It’s time to accept it. “Ah, well,” I say to Bob, waving dismissively at the yellow construction cranes looming in front of the limestone karsts, “let’s go get an ice cream.”

  Pushing through the crowds, I come across a few lanes similar to those back in 1986. One small section of Yangshuo, it seems, has not lost its funkiness. Tiny open storefronts still sell glass beads, used paperbacks, milk shakes, T-shirts. Backpackers still sit in sidewalk cafés writing postcards. The guesthouse trade survives; quirky little three-story inns sport hand-printed signs: “Western toilets! Hot water! Bike rentals! Bus tickets sold here!”

  Squeezed in among the little bars and shops, I almost miss it. But there it is. A restaurant with a sign over it in gilded script: “Lisa’s Hotel.”

  “Whoa. Is that possible?”

  Bob shrugs. He’s heard my stories before. “How many Lisas are there in Yangshuo?”

  I honestly don’t know. Back in 1986, it seemed that everyone Chinese was either a Lisa or a Jonnie. It could be her or one of a billion other people with that moniker. But what are the chances?

  My heart bangs as I step inside. The restaurant is dark, cool, rustic. I look around for clues. There is a display case full of glittering Mao memorabilia. A white guy with dreadlocks sits eating a plate of stir-fried beef. Music plays faintly from somewhere: a tinny, syncopated tune. There are no blackboards listing banana pancakes.

  The only other people are three young Westerner backpackers at a table with a Lonely Planet China guidebook. The two young women and a man cannot be much older than twenty. The girls wear bracelets from Thailand and leather thong anklets. One is dressed in an Indian skirt. The guy is wearing Tevas and burlap drawstring shorts. They look almost identical to backpackers twenty years ago.

  “So what do you think?” one of the women says to the guy, fidgeting with a digital camera. “Bali or Tibet?” Her English is harshly accented.

  The guy shrugs. “I dunno. When exactly is our flight home to Tel Aviv?”

  Israelis. I mull this over for a moment. It seems chillingly significant. Had I made this up, it would’ve seemed incredible. But here they really are.

  “Excuse me,” I ask, “Do any of you know if there’s actually a proprietor here named Lisa?”

  A voice behind me says crisply, “Yes? Can I help you?”

  I turn around to find an unfamiliar middle-aged Chinese woman in a filmy black T-shirt standing in the doorway.

  “I’m looking for Lisa,” I say.

  “I am Lisa,” the woman says plainly.

  I step back and study her. The Lisa I remember from the Green Lotus Peak Inn was willowy and taller than I was; this woman is barely my height. Her long disheveled hair hangs like wool down her back; her face is sweet but sad-eyed, sallow, and puffy. The Lisa I’d known had had a distinctive mantle of cheekbones; her hair was cut in bangs. She’d had that dewiness, too, that satiny sheen of exuberance and youth. But then again, that was almost twenty years ago. How old is this woman? I continue to stare at her.
It’s impossible to tell.

  For her part, she seems to never have seen me before either. She regards me quizzically.

  “I’m sorry. I think I have the wrong Lisa.” I clear my throat. “Almost twenty years ago,” I feel compelled to explain, “I was here in Yangshuo, traveling with a friend. And my friend, she became very sick, you see?” I point to my head and rotate my index finger in what I hope is now a universal sign for insanity. “And this woman Lisa, she worked in the one restaurant here, and when my friend and I were in trouble, she came to my rescue. She really saved me, and I promised her I’d come back here one day, and I gave—”

  Lisa cuts me off short, her eyes filling with tears. “And you gave me a bracelet,” she says.

  ———

  Years ago, when Claire Van Houten and I set off for China, our futures seemed so horizonless and shining, whereas Lisa’s seemed so preordained and meager. And while Claire and I believed we’d be friends forever, Lisa seemed destined to be no more than a footnote. Now, in her restaurant, Lisa and I throw our arms around each other and weep, shaking our heads in disbelief as the Israelis look on.

  “I was so young then,” she cries. “I did not know anything!”

  “Neither did I. But you saved my life!”

  After we hug and weep some more, after we have Bob take our photograph, after Lisa tells me that she wrote me and I tell her that I never got her letters, after we confess to thinking of each other during Tiananmen Square and September 11, after this great eruption of joyousness and incredulity, Lisa steers us over to a table, dispenses a girl in an apron to look after the customers, and tells us her story in earnest.

  In the past two decades, she has gone from being a young waitress with a pink hair ribbon to one of Yangshuo’s preeminent entrepreneurs. Today she owns and runs two guesthouses and a restaurant, and she and some American business partners are finalizing a development deal for a four-star hotel. When President Bill Clinton came to Yangshuo in the late nineties, Lisa was not only part of the delegation who welcomed him, but the proprietor who served him what he declared to be “the best coffee in Yangshuo.”

  “You had coffee with President Clinton?” I laugh. “Dang! I never got to do that! And I lived in Washington, D.C., for five years.”

  The Lonely Planet China guide now describes Lisa herself as “an institution.” Often, she’s called upon to address both Chinese and foreign business groups. While she and I play catch-up, she gives Bob a draft of a speech that she recently delivered to a visiting American chamber of commerce. In it, she recounts her early days in Yangshuo and explains how she first got the idea to have homesick backpackers teach her to cook Western food.

  “Now everybody here makes banana pancakes,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Now, there is a lot more competition. But back when I started, you know that I was the only one.”

  Today Lisa is also a mother of five. Although I have trouble following this part of her story, it seems that she divorced her first, foreign husband, then married a man chosen for her by her family. She had some biological children and adopted other daughters from nearby villages. “Otherwise, they have no future,” she explains. As if on cue, one of her daughters comes into the restaurant. She looks about fourteen. On her wrist is a brass bangle identical to the one I gave Lisa twenty years ago. We both stare at it. To this day, we confess, we each still have our bracelets locked away in our jewelry boxes.

  Unsurprisingly, Lisa appears wearier than she did two decades ago. The years of serving hot pancakes and cold beer to rowdy, insolent backpackers. Of doggedly making beds, scraping caked grease off the grill, scrubbing toilets, renovating guest rooms, sweeping dust from the floorboards in a country livid with dust. The years of raising children, placating authorities, courting investors. The bookkeeping, the worry: It’s all visible in her eyes.

  I yearn to invite her to Switzerland. Come visit, I want to say. I’ll take you to a spa in the Alps. You can sit in a hot tub outdoors and watch the rising steam swirl and dissolve in the mountain air like condensed milk. You can eat chocolate croissants for breakfast, drink pink wine with lunch. I’ll do the hosting and the cooking for a change.

  But in 2005, the Chinese government still prohibits its citizens from traveling independently. Only tour groups are allowed to journey to approved countries with guides.

  Looking at Lisa this time, I am acutely aware of my privileges and freedoms. The inequality, the gaping expanse of it between us, feels shameful and wretched.

  For a moment, there is an awkward silence. We reach across the table and squeeze each other’s hands.

  “I told you I’d come back,” I say softly. It’s all I can think to say.

  Lisa smiles, her face still radiant with kindness.

  “This time let’s stay in touch, okay?” I add.

  She nods and hands me a business card. “It is so much easier now,” she says. “Here. I have e-mail.”

  ———

  Just before sundown, Bob and I board a bus back to Guilin. The bus station, of course, is now bigger than it was two decades ago and even more chaotic. But the route through the karsts is the same. There are only so many ways, it seems, to navigate your way around the mountains.

  The bus lurches forward. I stare out at the shifting light, at the ghostly peaks turning cobalt in the evening, and think of Claire nineteen years ago, so beautiful and full of promise, screaming at the bus driver to stop, then disembarking somewhere along this very road. Now, she is even farther away than this—lost to the world—and I have no idea where.

  What really happened to her during those seven weeks in China? The only thing I know now that I didn’t know then is this: Some of those malaria pills we were taking in 1986 were later proven to cause hallucinations.

  Sometimes, of course, it all seems like a fever dream—the fireworks exploding over Shanghai, our furious pedaling through the violet smog of Beijing, the public toilets, the sizzling chicken bones, the stench, the duplicitous bureaucrats. Trevor conversing with his tattoos out of loneliness and feeling me up on the balcony. Cynthia trading on the black market with her precious seven- and eleven-year-old boys. Jonnie insisting that we could arrange citizenship for him at the American embassy. The drunken singing tourists eating snakes in Guilin. Eckehardt appearing like a phantom in the middle of the rice fields, having not spoken to a soul in days, weeks, months? The Communist operatives in their stiff Western clothes, speaking stilted English—weren’t we all a little deranged, really? And look at this country and mine, the psychoses that have seized them—both then and now. Look at this world today.

  As the sky grows darker, I am no longer riding a bus beside my husband through the karsts of Guangxi. I am leaning over a railing on a turbulent ship in the East China Sea. Claire is in the cabin behind me, smoothing out her sleeping bag, and so is Jonnie, smiling desperately in the pale gold light as he plays the same song of love over and over, and Gunter is there, too, meeting his opera singer near the bow. Me, I am letting the salted wind tear through my hair beneath a vortex of infinite stars. I am listening as a young Chinese man sings “Country roads, take me home,” his voice wistful, the notes rising plaintively over the thrash of the waves, and I stand there with him, forever hopeful and young, yearning for a place far away that we can never go to, where we can never, ever, return.

  Acknowledgments

  SEVERAL PEOPLE WERE invaluable to me while writing this book. I owe them my eternal gratitude and, in some cases, a bottle of South Korean tranquilizers.

  I bow before Eckehardt Grimm for not only coming to my rescue two decades ago, but for reading this twenty years later when I showed up on his doorstep in Germany. Ecke, thank you for your excellent memory, your enduring friendship, your profound kindness, and your permission to use your real, incredible name. Danke.

  Sandy Fenton deserves a medal of honor—not only for her unbelievable altruism, but also for making sure I’d gotten this right years after our last contact, and for letting me use
her name as well. Thank you, O Great Canadian, for remaining as funny, spirited, and indomitable as ever.

  To Cynthia, Warren, and Anthony Lukens for their inspiration decades ago and their approval moments before press time.

  To Lisa Li in Yangshuo: Xie xie ni.

  I raise a glass to my first editor, Amy Einhorn, for her continued faith in me and for launching this project in all its messiness.

  A whole case of champagne, meanwhile, goes to my current editor, Les Pockell, who from day one brought inexhaustible vision, intelligence, and enthusiasm to this book. Ditto for Grand Central Publishing’s Celia Johnson, who read this repeatedly with unflagging interest. Both deserve a Nobel Prize in the yet-to-be-established field of “Humoring and Reassuring High-Maintenance Authors.”

  To my agent, Irene Skolnick, for taking my late-night phone calls and for years of emotional as well as professional support, and to Vida Engstrand, who went beyond all proofreading duties, giving me tons of feedback and talking me through hitting the Send button.

  To my cohort and twin, Marc Acito, for his wise counsel, wit, and structural expertise, and to Floyd Sklaver for indulging us both.

  To my beautiful cousin Joan Stern for brainstorming and cheering me on. To Stefanie Weiss for her reading, encouragement, and humor. To Susie and Gray Walker for their enduring interest and help in reconstructing Hong Kong in the 1980s. To Eric Messinger and Rebecca Tayne for the cookies. To Maureen McSherry and Desa Sealy Ruffin for their sympathy and support. To Lisa and Doug Grandstaff for their sushi, sympathy, and photography. To my brother, John Seeger Gilman, for artistic advice.

  To the staff at Grand Central Publishing, who continue to promote and believe in my work.

  To “Claire Van Houten” and “Jonnie”—wherever they are. To Jonnie, thank you for all your immense kindness and hospitality that I did not deserve twenty years ago. To Claire, thank you for insisting I not give in to fear, for opening up the world for me, for giving me my life. I wish things had turned out differently; I’ll always be grateful to you.