Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  He learned Chinese quickly. The Peace Corps gave us two and a half months of intensive training upon arrival, and after that we could hire tutors if we wished. But the best strategy was simply to wander around, talking to people in the street. Goettig had the ideal personality for this routine: he was patient and curious and tireless. He was also, as the Chinese like to say, a very good drinker. He learned to open beer bottles with his teeth, the way rural people do in Sichuan.

  One autumn, he journeyed to Xinjiang, a wild region in China’s far west. He camped alone in the Tian Shan Mountains, and while hiking off trail, he clambered over some rocks and was bitten on the finger by a snake. First the finger swelled, then the hand. It took four hours to make it back to Ürümqi, the provincial capital. By then, the swelling had spread to his arm, and the pain was excruciating. He found a public phone and called the Peace Corps medical officer in Chengdu. She recognized the symptoms: it sounded like a tissue-dissolving venomous snake, and he needed to get to a hospital, fast.

  He asked bystanders for directions, and a young Chinese woman offered to help. She spoke perfect English, which was unusual in such a remote place, and she was dressed in a bright-orange sleeveless sweater that hung loose from her upper body like a bell. At the time, Goettig thought that the woman seemed slightly strange, but he wasn’t in a position to worry about it. She escorted him to the hospital, where doctors sliced open the bitten finger. They had some traditional Chinese medicine; Goettig figured it was a good sign that the box showed a picture of a snake. The doctors used a mortar and pestle to grind up the pills, and then they shoved the powdered tablets directly into the wound.

  The swelling continued to spread. Goettig’s arm turned purple at the joints, where the venom was rupturing capillaries. By evening he realized that the woman in the orange sweater was completely insane. She had brought her luggage to the hospital; she refused to leave his side; she told everybody that she was his official translator. She wouldn’t answer any personal questions—Goettig still had no idea how she had learned English. Whenever he asked her name, she responded, “My name is . . . Friend.” Every time she said this, it sounded creepier, until Goettig finally gave up on the questions. She spent the night in a chair at the foot of his bed. The next day, the doctors cut open the hand three times to shove more powder inside. The pain was intense, but at least Goettig was able to persuade some nurses to kick the crazy woman out. After the third day the swelling began to subside. He stayed in the hospital for a week; he was so broke that the Peace Corps medical officer had to wire money to cover the bill, which was less than $150. His hand recovered fully. He never saw the woman in the orange sweater again.

  A solitary bowler was hammering the pins when we checked out of the Ulanqab Hotel. At the entrance for Highway 110, the local government had erected a sign with changeable numbers, like the scoreboard at Fenway Park:

  AS OF THIS MONTH

  THIS STRETCH OF ROAD

  HAS HAD 65 ACCIDENTS AND 31 FATALITIES

  Yesterday’s storm had passed, but the temperature was still in the teens. From Jining to Hohhot the highway crossed empty steppe—low, snow-covered hills where the wind howled. We passed Liberation trucks that were stopped dead on the road; their fuel lines had frozen, probably because of water in their tanks. After fifteen miles, we crested a hill and saw a line of hundreds of vehicles stretching all the way to the horizon: trucks, sedans, Jeeps. Nobody was moving, and everybody was honking; an orchestra of horns howled into the wind. Never had I imagined that a traffic jam could occur in such a desolate place.

  We parked the Cherokee and continued on foot to the gridlock, where drivers explained what had happened. It all started with a few trucks whose fuel lines had frozen. Other motorists began to pass them on the two-lane road, and occasionally they encountered a stubborn oncoming car. Drivers faced off, honking, while the line of vehicles grew behind them; eventually it became impossible to move in either direction. Some had tried to go off-road, and usually they made it fifty yards before getting stuck. Men in loafers slipped in the snow, trying to dig out cars with their bare hands. There was no sign of police. Meanwhile, truckers had crawled beneath their vehicles, where they lit road flares and held them up to the frozen fuel lines. The tableau had a certain beauty: the stark snow-covered steppes, the endless line of vehicles, the orange fires dancing beneath blue Liberation trucks.

  “You should go up there and get a picture of those truckers,” Goettig said.

  “You should get a picture,” I said. “I’m not getting anywhere near those guys.”

  At last, here on the unmarked Mongolian plains, we had crossed the shadowy line that divides Strange from Stupid. We watched the flares for a while and then took the back roads to Hohhot. The moment we arrived the Cherokee’s starter failed; we push-started the thing and made it to a garage. The mechanic chain-smoked State Guest cigarettes the whole time he worked on the engine, but after Highway 110 it seemed as harmless as a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

  They said the hardest thing about the Peace Corps was going home. Near the end of our two years, the organization held a pre-departure conference. They handed out job-search materials, and they talked about how we might feel when we got back to America and people said things like “I didn’t know they still have the Peace Corps!” A few volunteers took the foreign-service exam. One of them got halfway through and couldn’t take it seriously; for the essay section he wrote about how his worldview had been influenced by the film Air Force One. The others passed the exam but failed the interview. Over the years, I came to know more volunteers who also took the exam, and they tended to be befuddled by the process—virtually nothing they had learned in the field seemed relevant.

  From the beginning, the Peace Corps had been described as a type of foreign aid, but another goal had been to produce Americans with knowledge about the outside world. It was intended to influence national policy—the organization had been inspired in part by the 1958 book The Ugly American, which criticized a top-down approach to foreign affairs. At some level, I came away with a deep faith in the transformative power of the Peace Corps; everybody I knew had been changed forever by the experience. But these changes were of the sort that generally made people less likely to work for the government. Volunteers tended to be individualists to begin with, and few were ambitious in the traditional sense. Once abroad, they learned to live with a degree of chaos, which made it hard to believe in the possibility of sweeping change. The vast majority of former volunteers would have opposed the American adventure in Iraq, because their own experiences had taught them how many things can go wrong with even the simplest job. But their opinions had virtually no impact on national policy, because they didn’t tend to be in positions of influence.

  Many of my peers in China eventually became teachers. It was partly because we had been educational volunteers, but it also had to do with the skills we developed—the flexibility, the sense of humor, the willingness to handle anything a student could throw at you. A few became writers and journalists; some went to graduate school. Others continued to wander, and Goettig stayed in China for years. During summer, he worked for the Peace Corps, training new volunteers, and the rest of the time he picked up odd jobs: writing freelance newspaper stories, working part-time as a translator and researcher. Periodically he came through Beijing and slept on my couch for a week. The term of Peace Corps service is lifetime when it comes to guests. Sometimes I had three or four staying in my apartment, all of them big Midwesterners drinking Yanjing beer and laughing about old times.

  In the southwestern city of Kunming, Goettig opened a bar with a Chinese partner. They found space in an old bomb shelter; the lease explicitly stated that they had to abandon the premises if China went to war. They had two pool tables and a stage for bands. Not long after they opened, there was a bad knife fight—one of the bartenders got stabbed multiple times, and part of a lung had to be removed. The bar didn’t have much business, and Goettig and his partner ba
rely scraped together enough money to cover the medical bills. They had named the place the Speakeasy.

  The year after we drove across northern China, Goettig finally returned to the United States. He was thirty years old, and nearly broke. He went back to southwestern Minnesota, but he couldn’t imagine living there again; after a month he caught a Greyhound bus heading south. Some other former volunteers were living in Starkville, Mississippi; they let Goettig crash in their home and found him a job teaching English to foreign students at Mississippi State. It paid $24,000 for the school year. When Goettig looked into teacher-certification programs, he realized that they took almost as long as law school. He bought some books about the LSAT exam, studied on his own, and scored off the charts. The next time I saw him, he was living on Riverside Drive, studying at Columbia Law School. In his spare time he did Chinese-language research for Human Rights Watch. Eventually, he became editor-in-chief of Columbia’s Journal of Asian Law. He wore a certain expression I recognized from China—slightly stunned, a little overwhelmed, completely out of his element. He had no idea where this was going, but he was happy to hang on for the ride.

  At the end of the drive, we followed Highway 215 to the Tibetan Plateau. The two-lane road was flanked by high desert landscapes of rock and dirt, punctuated by highway safety propaganda. Along one stretch, the government had perched a wrecked car on spindly ten-foot poles beside the road. The vehicle had been smashed beyond recognition; the front end was crumpled flat and the remains of a door dangled in strips of steel. Words had been painted across the back: “Four People Died.” It was like some gruesome version of a children’s treat—a Carsicle. Another sign presented the speed limit like options on a menu:

  40 KM/HR IS THE SAFEST

  80 KM/HR IS DANGEROUS

  100 KM/HR IS BOUND FOR THE HOSPITAL

  The road climbed steeply to the border of Qinghai Province. We passed slow-moving Liberation trucks, their engines whining; my altimeter read nearly twelve thousand feet. For 150 miles we saw almost no sign of human habitation. There were no gas stations or restaurants or shops; the first town we passed had been recently razed. Roofless walls stood stark on the plateau, lonely as the traces of some lost empire.

  In Qinghai, Goettig’s left eye began to act up. First it watered and then it hurt; he sat in the passenger’s seat, rubbing his face with his fist. We crossed another twelve-thousand-foot pass and descended to Qinghai Lake. It’s the largest lake in China, more than two hundred miles in circumference and blue as a sapphire. We camped on the banks of the salt lake, pitching my tent on a finger of land. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever visited in China, but by now Goettig could hardly see a thing.

  The next morning he lay in the tent, moaning. He had taken out his contact lenses, but the pain had increased; he asked how many hours it would be to Xining, the provincial capital. “It hurts like hell,” he said. “It just keeps burning.”

  I asked if there was anything I could do.

  “Maybe we’ll have to find an eye doctor in Xining,” he said. It occurred to me that this was the most ominous sentence I’d heard in about six thousand miles. The eye would eventually recover, and he later learned that the problem had been caused by his contacts. In Kunming, a friend had told him that a local shop was selling Johnson & Johnson lenses for half the usual price—a great deal, so Goettig stocked up. It turned out that the contacts were counterfeit. That became a new rule: when in Kunming, don’t buy contact lenses on sale. China was full of lessons; we were still learning every day. Don’t hike off trail in Xinjiang. Don’t shop for Strange Stones in a bad part of Hebei. Don’t hang out with people who light flares under stalled trucks. Driving along the lake, we passed another Carsicle, although Goettig’s eyes were watering so badly he couldn’t see it. He wept all the way across Qinghai—he wept along the salt lake’s barren banks, and he wept past the stranded Carsicle, and he wept through the long descent from the roof of the world.

  All Due Respect

  One of the foremost experts on Japanese organized crime is Jake Adelstein, who grew up on a farm in Missouri, worked as the only American on the crime beat for Japan’s largest newspaper, and currently lives in central Tokyo under police protection. Japanese police protection means that the cops make daily visits to Adelstein’s home, where they leave yellow notes pinned to the front gate that say, “There was nothing out of the ordinary.” The notes feature the Tokyo police mascot, Pipo-kun, a smiling cartoon figure with big mouse ears and an antenna jutting out of its forehead. Some people in town have trouble taking Adelstein seriously. They dismiss him as a crank, a paranoid foreigner who talks obsessively about death threats from the gangsters known as yakuza. Others react with suspicion; a number of people in Japan claim that his journalism is a front for CIA work. There are Web sites that claim he is a Mossad agent. Adelstein does little to dismiss such rumors, apart from maintaining an image so flamboyant that it would shame any actual agency man. He’s in his early forties, and he wears a trench coat and a porkpie hat, and he chain-smokes clove cigarettes from Indonesia. For a while, he dyed his hair bright red, claiming that this disguise would foil would-be assassins. He employs a bodyguard who doubles as a chauffeur, an ex-yakuza who cut off his pinky finger years ago as a gesture of apology to a gang superior. Adelstein says he needs a Mercedes and a nine-fingered driver in order to avoid the subway, where a hit man might shove him in front of a train.

  Japan is not a dangerous country. Each year, approximately one murder is committed for every two hundred thousand people. This is among the lowest rates in the world, on a par with Iceland and Switzerland; the odds of being murdered in the United States are ten times higher. In Japan, it’s a crime to own a gun, another crime to own a bullet, and a third crime to pull the trigger: three charges before you even think about a target. Yakuza are notoriously bad shots because practice is hard to come by, but somehow they have gained enormous influence. The police estimate that there are nearly eighty thousand members of yakuza organizations, whereas in America the Mafia had only five thousand in its heyday. The economic collapse of the 1990s is sometimes called “the yakuza recession,” because organized crime played such a significant role.

  “I can’t think of a similar major civilized country where you have this kind of criminal influence,” an American lawyer who handles risk assessment on behalf of a major financial firm told me recently, in Tokyo. He has a background in intelligence, and extensive experience reviewing potential investments to make sure they aren’t connected to organized crime. “Every month, we turn away about a dozen companies that want to do business with us, because they have ties to the yakuza,” he said. He told me that during the crash of 2008 Lehman Brothers lost $350 million in bad loans to yakuza front companies, while Citibank lost more than $700 million.

  The lawyer didn’t want me to use his name or identify his firm. “If you do this job correctly, and you’re identifying bad guys and preventing business, then you’re at risk,” he said. He was familiar with Adelstein’s work, and he noted that Adelstein took a completely different approach. “Jake has got a high profile,” he said. “That’s his style.” He laughed about the clove cigarettes and the porkpie hat, but then he said, “If I were to learn that he was murdered this evening it wouldn’t surprise me.”

  Adelstein and I both grew up in Columbia, Missouri, and although I met him only a few times, he was the kind of kid that you don’t forget. Back then, his name was Josh, and he was tall and thin, with an elongated face that seemed slightly lopsided. He was so cross-eyed that he had to have corrective surgery. Even after the procedure, his expression remained slightly off-kilter, and you could never tell exactly what he was looking at. Years later, he was given a diagnosis of Marfan syndrome, a rare disorder of connective tissue that often causes serious problems for the eyes, the heart, and other major organs. But as a boy he simply seemed odd. His vision and coordination were so poor that he didn’t get a driver’s license, an essential possession f
or any high school male in mid-Missouri, and he had to have classmates chauffeur him around town. He loved theater, which also qualified as a rare disorder in a sports-mad school; he was part of a circle that referred to itself as “the drama fags.” Girls didn’t have much use for him. The jocks teased and bullied him until a teacher suggested that he take up martial arts. Karate led to a freshman-year course in Japanese at the University of Missouri, which went well until Josh fell down an elevator shaft while working at a local bookstore. Even this was a sort of distinction—there aren’t all that many elevators in Columbia, Missouri. Josh spent a week in the hospital with a bad head injury, and although he recovered, he couldn’t remember any Japanese. But the head trauma also erased many memories of high school, so it may have been a good trade. He could always learn Japanese again.