Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  While I was in Asia, I made ritual pilgrimages to the Taj Mahal, Pagan and Borobudur; I climbed live volcanoes in the dead of the Javanese night and rode elephants through the jungles of Nepal. I spent nights in an Indonesian hut, where my roommates consisted of two pack rats, a lizard and a family-size cockroach, and other nights in a Mogul palace on a lake, where I sat for hours on the marbled roof, watching the silver of moon on water. In Bali, I witnessed a rare and sumptuous cremation, and in Kyoto, I saw the unearthly Daimonji Festival, when all the town is lit with lanterns to guide departed spirits home. None of this, however, is recorded in the pages that follow, partly because all of it has gone on, and will go on, one hopes, for centuries, and partly because such familiar marvels may be better described by travelers more observant than myself.

  More than such postcard wonders, however, what interested me were the brand-new kinds of exotica thrown up by our synthetic age, the novel cultural hybrids peculiar to the tag end of the twentieth century. “Travel itself,” observes Paul Fussell in Abroad, “even the most commonplace, is an implicit quest for anomaly,” and the most remarkable anomalies in the global village today are surely those created by willy-nilly collisions and collusions between East and West: the local bands in socialist Burma that play note-perfect versions of the Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” in Burmese; the American tenpin bowling alley that is the latest nighttime hot spot in Beijing; the Baskin-Robbins imitation in Hiroshima that sells “vegetable” ice cream in such flavors as mugwort, soy milk, sweet potato and “marron”; or the bespectacled transvestite in Singapore who, when asked to name the best restaurant in a town justly celebrated for its unique combination of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian delicacies, answers, without a moment’s hesitation, “Denny’s.”

  I wanted also, while I was in Asia, to see how America was regarded and reconstituted abroad, to measure the country by the shadow it casts. Much of the world, inevitably, looks to its richest industrial nation for promiscuous images of power and affluence; abroad, as at home, the land of Chuck Bronson and Harold Robbins will always command a greater following than that of Emerson and Terrence Malick. Often, in fact, the America one sees around the globe seems as loud and crass and overweight as the caricatured American tourist. And just as celebrities pander to the images they foster, acting out our dreams of what they ought to be, so America often caters to the world’s image of America, cranking out slick and inexpensive products made almost exclusively for foreign consumption—in Jogjakarta, the cinema that was not showing Rambo offered The Earthling, with Ricky Schroder and William Holden, and Dead and Buried, starring Melody Anderson and James Farentino.

  Yet America also projects a more promising and more hopeful image around the world, as a culture of success stories and of the youthful excesses that may accompany them. Lee Iacocca’s memoirs are devoured far more eagerly from Rio to Riyadh than those of Akio Morita or Giovanni Agnelli, and George Washington is a folk hero in many Asian classrooms in a way that George III will never be. The most popular contemporary American writer in the very different markets of France and West Germany is Charles Bukowski, the disheveled boho laureate of booze and broads in low-life L.A. In the world’s collective popular imagination, America the Beautiful stands next to America the Technicolor Dreamcoast.

  This division in itself is hardly unique: every culture casts conflicting images before the world. We associate India with desperate poverty and maharajah opulence, Britain with punks and patricians. But in the case of America, subject of so many daydreams and ideals, so intensely felt and so eagerly pursued, the contradictions are even more pronounced: for not only is the country’s political power enormous, but it is matched—and sometimes opposed—by its cultural influence. When Reagan speaks, the world listens, yet Springsteen is shouting the opposite message in the other ear. While Congress sends money to the contras, the global village tunes in to Jackson Browne.

  And if the image of America is perplexingly double-edged, the responses it provokes in many parts of the globe are appropriately fork-tongued: with one breath, they shout, “Yankee Go Home,” and with the next, “America Number One!” “In the Third World,” writes Michael Howard, “anti-Americanism is almost a lingua franca.” Yet in the Third World, a hunger for American culture is almost taken for granted, and “making it” often means nothing more than making it to the Land of the Free. The Communist guerrillas in the Philippines fight capitalism while wearing UCLA T-shirts. The Sandinista leaders in Nicaragua wage war against “U.S. Imperialism” while watching prime-time American TV on private satellite dishes. And many whites in South Africa cling to apartheid, yet cannot get enough of Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy and Mr. T.

  All these contradictions are further exacerbated by one simple but inevitable fact: the disproportion between America’s formidable power around the globe and the much more modest presence of individual Americans abroad. “We think of the United States,” writes Octavio Paz, on behalf of all Latin Americans, “simultaneously, and without contradiction, as Goliath, Polyphemus and Pantagruel.” Yet that daunting weight falls upon the shoulders of the small and decidedly unmythic traveler, tourist or expatriate. Around the world, S. J. Perelman noted, the American occupies “the curious dual role of skinflint and sucker, the usurer bent on exacting his pound of flesh and the hapless pigeon whose poke was a challenge to any smart grifter.” The incongruity applies equally, of course, to the Russians abroad, as it did to the Englishman, the Chinese and all the other imperialists of the past. But in the case of America, at once so ubiquitous and so many-headed throughout the world, the schizophrenia seems especially charged. If Bruce Springsteen is not Reagan, still less is that backpacking social worker from Tacoma. Again and again in my travels, I had been asked, by Greeks, Nicaraguans and Moroccans, how the American government could be such a ruthless bully, while the American people seemed so friendly, good-natured and warm. I went to Asia in part to find out.

  II

  To mention, however faintly, the West’s cultural assault on the East is, inevitably, to draw dangerously close to the fashionable belief that the First World is corrupting the Third. And to accept that AIDS and Rambo are the two great “Western” exports of 1985 is to encourage some all too easy conclusions: that the West’s main contributions to the rest of the world are sex and violence, a cureless disease and a killer cure; that America is exporting nothing but a literal kind of infection and a bloody sort of indoctrination. In place of physical imperialism, we often assert a kind of sentimental colonialism that would replace Rambo myths with Sambo myths and conclude that because the First World feels guilty, the Third World must be innocent—what Pascal Bruckner refers to as “compassion as contempt.”

  This, however, I find simplistic—both because corruption often says most about those who detect it and because the developing world may often have good reason to assent in its own transformation.

  This is not to deny that the First World has indeed inflicted much damage on the Third, especially through the inhuman calculations of geopolitics. If power corrupts, superpowers are super-corrupting, and the past decade alone has seen each of the major powers destroy a self-contained Asian culture by dragging it into the cross fire of the Real World: Tibet was invaded for strategic reasons by the Chinese, and now the dreamed-of Shangri-La is almost lost forever; Afghanistan was overrun by Soviet tanks, and now the Michauds’ photographic record of its fugitive beauties must be subtitled, with appropriate melancholy, “Paradise Lost”; Cambodia, once so gentle a land that cyclo drivers were said to tip their passengers, fell into the sights of Washington and is now just a land of corpses.

  On an individual level too, Western tourists invariably visit destruction on the places they visit, descending in droves on some “authentic Eastern village” until only two things are certain: it is neither Eastern nor authentic. Each passing season (and each passing tourist) brings new developments to the forgotten places of the world—and in a never-never land, every development is a change
for the worse. In search of a lovely simplicity, Westerners saddle the East with complexities; in search of peace, they bring agitation. As soon as Arcadia is seen as a potential commodity, amenities spring up on every side to meet outsiders’ needs, and paradise is not so much lost as remaindered. In Asia alone, Bali, Tahiti, Sri Lanka and Nepal have already been so taken over by Paradise stores, Paradise hotels and Paradise cafés that they sometimes seem less like utopias than packaged imitations of utopia; Ladakh, Tibet and Ko Samui may one day follow. No man, they say, is an island; in the age of international travel, not even an island can remain an island for long.

  Like every tourist, moreover, I found myself spreading corruption even as I decried it. In northern Thailand, I joined a friend in giving hill tribesmen tutorials in the songs of Sam Cooke until a young Thai girl was breaking the silence of the jungle with a piercing refrain of “She was sixteen, too young to love, and I was too young to know.” In China, I gave a local boy eager for some English-language reading matter a copy of the only novel I had on hand—Gore Vidal’s strenuously perverse Duluth. And in a faraway hill station in Burma, a group of cheery black marketeers treated me to tea and I, in return, taught them the words “lesbian” and “skin flicks,” with which they seemed much pleased.

  Yet that in itself betrays some of the paradoxes that haunt our talk of corruption. For often, the denizens of the place we call paradise long for nothing so much as news of that “real paradise” across the seas—the concrete metropolis of skyscrapers and burger joints. And often what we call corruption, they might be inclined to call progress or profit. As tourists, we have reason to hope that the quaint anachronism we have discovered will always remain “unspoiled,” as fixed as a museum piece for our inspection. It is perilous, however, to assume that its inhabitants will long for the same. Indeed, a kind of imperial arrogance underlies the very assumption that the people of the developing world should be happier witnout the TVs and motorbikes that we find so indispensable ourselves. If money does not buy happiness, neither does poverty.

  In other ways too, our laments for lost paradises may really have much more to do with our own state of mind than with the state of the place whose decline we mourn. Whenever we recall the places we have seen, we tend to observe them in the late afternoon glow of nostalgia, after memory, the mind’s great cosmetician, has softened out rough edges, smoothed out imperfections and removed the whole to a lovely abstract distance. Just as a good man, once dead, is remembered as a saint, so a pleasant place, once quit, is recalled as a utopia. Nothing is ever what it used to be.

  IF THE FIRST World is not invariably corrupting the Third, we are sometimes apt to leap to the opposite conclusion: that the Third World, in fact, is hustling the First. As tourists, moreover, we are so bombarded with importunities from a variety of locals—girls who live off their bodies and touts who live off their wits, merchants who use friendship to lure us into their stores and “students” who attach themselves to us in order to improve their English—that we begin to regard ourselves as beleaguered innocents and those we meet as shameless predators.

  To do so, however, is to ignore the great asymmetry that governs every meeting between tourist and local: that we are there by choice and they largely by circumstance; that we are traveling in the spirit of pleasure, adventure and romance, while they are mired in the more urgent business of trying to survive; and that we, often courted by the government, enjoy a kind of unofficial diplomatic immunity, which gives us all the perks of authority and none of the perils of responsibility, while they must stake their hopes on every potential transaction.

  Descending upon native lands quite literally from the heavens, dei ex machinae from an alien world of affluence, we understandably strike many locals in much the same way that movie stars strike us. And just as some of us are wont to accost a celebrity glimpsed by chance at a restaurant, so many people in developing countries may be tempted to do anything and everything possible to come into contact with the free-moving visitors from abroad and their world of distant glamour. They have nothing to lose in approaching a foreigner—at worst, they will merely be insulted or pushed away. And they have everything to gain: a memory, a conversation, an old copy of Paris Match, perhaps even a friendship or a job opportunity. Every foreigner is a messenger from a world of dreams.

  “Do you know Beverly Hills?” I was once asked by a young Burmese boy who had just spent nine months in jail for trying to escape his closed motherland. “Do you know Hollywood? Las Vegas? The Potomac, I think, is very famous. Am I right? Detroit, Michigan, is where they make cars. Ford. General Motors. Chevrolet. Do you know Howard Hughes? There are many Jewish people in New York. Am I right? And also at Time magazine? Am I right?” Tell us about life behind the scenes, we ask the star, and which is the best place in the whole wide world, and what is Liz Taylor really like.

  The touts that accost us are nearly always, to be sure, worldly pragmatists. But they are also, in many cases, wistful dreamers, whose hopes are not so different from the ones our culture encourages: to slough off straitened circumstances and set up a new life and a new self abroad, underwritten by hard work and dedication. American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those who have seen America only in their dreams.

  I first met Maung-Maung as I stumbled off a sixteen-hour third-class overnight train from Rangoon to Mandalay. He was standing outside the station, waiting to pick up tourists; a scrawny fellow in his late twenties, with a sailor’s cap, a beard, a torn white shirt above his longyi and an open, rough-hewn face—a typical tout, in short. Beside him stood his bicycle trishaw. On one side was painted the legend “My Life”; on the other, “B.Sc. (Maths).”

  We haggled for a few minutes. Then Maung-Maung smilingly persuaded me to part with a somewhat inflated fare—twenty cents—for the trip across town, and together we began cruising through the wide, sunny boulevards of the city of kings. As we set off, we began to exchange the usual questions—age, place of birth, marital status and education—and before long we found that our answers often jibed. Soon, indeed, the conversation was proceeding swimmingly. A little while into our talk, my driver, while carefully steering his trishaw with one hand, sank the other into his pocket and handed back to me a piece of jade. I admired it dutifully, then extended it back in his direction. “No,” he said. “This is present.”

  Where, I instantly wondered, was the catch—was he framing me, or bribing me, or cunningly putting me in his debt? What was the small print? What did he want?

  “I want you,” said Maung-Maung, “to have something so you can always remember me. Also, so you can always have happy memories of Mandalay.” I did not know how to respond. “You see,” he went on, “if I love other people, they will love me. It is like Newton’s law, or Archimedes.”

  This was not what I had expected. “I think,” he added, “it is always good to apply physics to life.”

  That I did not doubt. But still I was somewhat taken aback. “Did you study physics at school?”

  “No, I study physics in college. You see, I am graduate from University of Mandalay—B.Sc. Mathematics.” He waved with pride at the inscription on the side of his trishaw.

  “And you completed all your studies?”

  “Yes. B.Sc. Mathematics.”

  “Then why are you working in this kind of job?”

  “Other jobs are difficult. You see, here in Burma, a teacher earns only two hundred fifty kyats [$30] in a month. Managing director has only one thousand kyats [$125]. Even President makes only four thousand kyats [$500]. For me, I do not make much money. But in this job, I can meet tourist and improve my English. Experience, I believe, is the best teacher.”

  “But surely you could earn much more just by driving a horse cart?”

  “I am Buddhist,” Maung-Maung reminded me gently, as he went pedaling calmly through the streets. “I do not want to inflict harm on any living creature. If I hit horse in this life, in next life I come back as horse.”

  “S
o”—I was still skeptical—“you live off tourists instead?”

  “Yes,” he said, turning around to give me a smile. My irony, it seems, was wasted. “Until two years ago, in my village in Shan States, I had never seen a tourist.”

  “Never?”

  “Only in movies.” Again he smiled back at me.

  I was still trying to puzzle out why a university graduate would be content with such a humble job when Maung-Maung, as he pedaled, reached into the basket perched in front of his handlebars and pulled out a thick leather book. Looking ahead as he steered, he handed it back to me to read. Reluctantly, I opened it, bracing myself for porno postcards or other illicit souvenirs. Inside, however, was nothing but a series of black-and-white snapshots. Every one of them had been painstakingly annotated in English: “My Headmaster,” “My Monk,” “My Brothers and Sisters,” “My Friend’s Girlfriend.” And his own girlfriend? “I had picture before. But after she broke my heart, and fall in love with other people, I tear it out.”

  At the very back of his book, in textbook English, Maung-Maung had carefully inscribed the principles by which he lived.

  1) Abstain from violence.

  2) Abstain from illicit sexual intercourse.

  3) Abstain from intoxicants of all kinds.

  4) Always be helpful.

  5) Always be kind.

  “It must be hard,” I said dryly, “to stick to all these rules.”

  “Yes. It is not always easy,” he confessed. “But I must try. If people ask me for food, my monk tell me, I must always give them money. But if they want money for playing cards, I must give them no help. My monk also explain I must always give forgiveness—even to people who hurt me. If you put air into volleyball and throw it against wall, it bounces back. But if you do not put in air, what happens? It collapses against wall.”