by Pico Iyer
And if the Chinese often looked like tourists in their own country (while foreign tourists had, in some respects, to carry themselves like locals), it was only fitting that the most visible prop in Beijing was also touristic: the two-lens Brownie box camera from the fifties, which every other person seemed to be wielding excitedly while family or friends posed in front of monuments. Three-year-old boys and girls gravely held hands before the Forbidden City poster of Mao as relatives clicked away furiously. A middle-aged woman struck a heroic pose in front of the Great Wall. Whole families arranged themselves next to a well-polished black sedan from the fifties placed by some shrewd entrepreneur in the middle of Tiananmen Square. And groups of men in fat, multicolored ties solemnly arranged themselves like soccer teams in front of watercolored cardboard backdrops of temples and misty valleys, hands on knees and faces severe. In every case, though, the process had an innocent ceremoniousness, a breath-held gravity, far greater, I thought, than what one might find among Kansans at the Lincoln Monument, or Greeks at the ruins of Olympia. In the eye of the camera—and perhaps only in the eye of the camera—the Chinese Everyman could place himself at last in the same frame as his state, his history, even his newfound sense of possibility.
THAT EVENING, AS the relentless pace of the bicycles let up and the light began to fade from the leafy lanes, I dropped in on the city’s only social center for foreigners. A few tables had been set up on the sidewalk, under a decades-old sign that spelled out “International Club” in letters two-feet high. A row of Christmas lights strung out along the roof winked feebly in the dusk. Otherwise, the place was empty.
A couple of minutes after I sat down, however, two epicene young Chinese dawdled up and took their places beside me. One was dressed in skin-tight trousers, the other in a dark blue suit, button-down white shirt and collar-length long hair. The former plunked down a glass of beer before me, the latter placed a cigarette in my mouth. “American Club, Number One,” said one. I nodded. “Break dance!” cried the other. Then he jumped up and began twisting himself around like a spastic. “Disco!” he shouted as he gyrated. “Disco! Break dance!! Disco!!!” cried his friend.
As I looked on, bewildered, one of the androgynes made kissing noises and the other performed an intricate set of hand gestures that seemed to connote plumbing. Then they began turning themselves into human spaghetti again. The next thing I knew, two plump girls, gaudily done up in lipstick, appeared at the table and plopped down on two more chairs. I stared at them incredulous. “Do It to Me One More Time” came scratching over the sound track from a turntable indoors. “Hubba Hubba” came on for the second time that night, and one of the Peter Pans began bouncing and jerking around in his chair, throwing his hands about and bobbing his head in a frenzy. His friend looked over at me for approval. “Disco!” cried the manic contortionist, jerking around like a madman. “Disco!” called his friend. “Break dance!” shouted the loony. “Break dance!” cried his partner. “Disco! Break dance! Disco!” they screamed together. Thus my first night with the new old China.
THE VERY NEXT morning, I went to the airport to catch a 10:15 flight to Chengdu. Upon arrival at the lonely barracks-style hangar, I was informed that the flight was full. I was also told that it was nonexistent. I was also sold a ticket and warned that the plane was running a little behind schedule. Still, said the woman at the tiny hatch that served as a ticket counter, there was a good chance it might leave at 4:30 p.m.
Thus I enjoyed my first taste of the inimitable CAAC, the airline service that had already become one of the great symbols of the New China. For in only a few years of operation, the carrier had already established itself as a kind of Icarus of the modern world, a legendary conqueror of the heavens shrouded in tales of planes that took off but never landed and others that touched down when it was time for lunch; of some hijackings that were “official” and others that were enigmatically not; of stewardesses who emitted frantic shrieks of terror in midflight and jets that had no covers on their overhead compartments, and so sent suitcases raining down on passengers’ heads the minute they took off. “CAAC,” Jimi had quipped darkly. “They serve you right!”
Through all this hapless mayhem, however, CAAC was said to be solicitous to a fault. One traveler told me how he had once been escorted, with smiling civility, to a seat that consisted of nothing but four bolts on the floor. When he protested, the stewardess, ever anxious to oblige, hurried off to fetch a folding chair and sweetly asked the passengers in the next row back to keep the chair propped up for the duration of the flight. Certainly, the waiting room in which I found myself in Beijing seemed to have been thoughtfully designed on the assumption that it would often have to double as a living room. Canteens of tea were set up to placate the impatient, while along the walls a sign in English announced, more in sorrow than in anger: “Thank you for your visit. Have a nice trip.” On every side, impassive locals were gleefully making the most of facilities that were larger, and probably better, than any they could enjoy at home. Nobody could hear the departure announcements, but nobody really seemed to mind, since nobody really expected to depart. “CAAC,” so the joke had it: “China Airlines, Always Canceled.”
After only seven or eight hours of waiting, however, I suddenly looked up to see the people I had singled out as my flight mates surging toward an exit. Without a moment’s hesitation, I joined the crush and pushed forward onto the tarmac. My first sight of the carrier that was to take me to Chengdu—a rickety 707—did not increase my faith in CAAC. Nor did my survey of the facilities within: airsickness bags, tattered seat covers and just about nothing else.
The minute we took off, however, we were swept up in a whirlwind of hospitality. Three or four stewardesses began moving up and down the aisles, dispensing paper fans to every passenger as a gift. The minute they had finished, they turned around and hurried back, dishing out souvenir plates on which were brushstroked some delicate pastoral. The next thing I knew, they were zipping past again, handing out trays on which were neatly placed a box of orange wafers, a bag of “vegetable fillings” and cartons of lychee juice. I had only just begun to make inroads into these when the energetic ladies sprinted past again, thrusting into already full hands a boxed assortment of dried walnuts. Then, scarcely pausing for breath, they whizzed past once more in a blur, seizing up the remains of the packaged meal and tossing out a few more presents—a toothpaste-and-toothbrush set to some people, a miniature key chain that doubled as a thermometer to others. Finally, lurching around dangerously as the jouncing plane began its tremulous descent, they careered up and down a final time, to pass out sweets and evaluation forms. By the time we had landed in Chengdu, I was thoroughly exhausted.
Yet hardly had I collected my case from the rickety shack that served as a baggage carousel when a young agent from a local travel service appeared before me in the darkness, hand extended; he had been sent, he explained, through the offices of my Beijing colleagues, to give me a ticket to Lhasa and take me to a local hotel. Shaking my hand with vigor, my guide ushered me into a waiting car. Then he jumped into the front seat. As the driver started up, Zheng swiveled around with a reassuring smile. “With its abundant rainfall, fertile soil and tranquil climate,” he began, “Chengdu has been called a ‘Paradise on Earth.’” I pondered this as we bumped along a potholed road past half-completed buildings, open stalls, a five-story Birth Control Center. The Dujiangyan Irrigation System, he commented, was marvelous. Silence again. He had read, Zheng went on, the works of Dickinson and Twain. “Her poems,” he said darkly of the Belle of Amherst, “are very short. Very deep.”
Upon our arrival at the Jinjiang Hotel, Zheng invited me, under his voice, to accompany him early the following morning on an unofficial tour of the Temple of the Marquis Wu. Next morning, sure enough, when I walked outside, there he was, waiting patiently in the early light. How had my stay been? Very nice. “Sausages are marvelous,” he declared with feeling. “The whole place is very pleasant,” I replied, caugh
t up in the spirit of Ping-Pong diplomacy. “Thank you,” he said. “With its abundant rainfall, fertile soil and tranquil climate, Chengdu is often called a ‘Paradise on Earth.’”
A FEW DAYS later, in Lhasa, it came time for me to make my way back to Paradise on Earth. Reserving a seat on a returning plane was simplicity itself, I was assured by fellow travelers: all I had to do was proceed to the local bus station a few days before my departure, locate a foreigners-only booth and track down a CAAC official who could make a reservation. Managing this after only three visits, I even succeeded in securing a reservation. Just before I quit the office, though, I thought it best to ask when the bus for the airport would be leaving.
“Five-thirty.”
“Five-thirty?”
The official nodded.
“Isn’t that a little late, if the plane leaves at eight?” The bus trip to the airport, I recalled, took a good two hours.
He looked at me angrily. “Five-thirty in afternoon.”
This took a moment or two to register.
“You mean the afternoon before?”
He nodded sullenly.
“You mean five-thirty in the afternoon for the plane the next morning?” He nodded.
“That is to say, the bus leaves almost fifteen hours before the flight?”
This time he hardly bothered to nod.
“So we spend the night at the airport?”
At that point, he stalked away.
By 4:45 on the appointed day, the small bus station courtyard was already crowded with five dust-smeared buses, six times as many people as could fit on them and ten times as many as could fit on any CAAC plane. Tibetans in cowboy hats crouched on their haunches, wrinkled old women with turquoise braids stood fierce guard over Sharp radios. On the other side of the square, Chinese soldiers perched on boxes containing Sony TVs (“This Side Up” invariably reading upside down). The minute it was 5:00, all foreigners were guided with a frantic urgency to a special booth in order to get tickets for foreigners-only seats, and the whole dusty caravan began pulling out. Any tourist who arrived at the appointed hour of 5:30 must have found his stay in Lhasa extended by several days.
And so we bounced out of town, honking shepherds off the road, passing the curious gazes of weathered peasants working in the fields, bumping across the long, icy plateaus of Tibet, the mountains beside us sharpened by the gathering darkness, the cold lakes lit up by the dying sun. Foreigners in their reserved seats were squeezed between dribbling babies, runny-nosed urchins, champion expectorators and old nomads on the far side of death. Mauve-cheeked ladies sat in the aisles, impassively breast-feeding babies. Every few minutes, they were all brusquely pushed aside as the bus lurched to a halt and a herd of passengers scrambled out to relieve themselves.
Roughly two hours into this on-again, off-again progress, the bus bounced at last into an area that looked vaguely familiar. The airport! I looked around eagerly for signs of a makeshift inn. Seeing none, I grimly began steeling myself for a night of torment at the hands and feet of stampeding children (their only charm, I imagined, their ignorance of “Jingle Bells”). The other foreigners looked equally glum. “Keep your eyes open for the Holiday Inn!” cried one in a flight of antic bitterness.
And then, when least we expected it, the bus turned a corner, and there before us stood a gleaming rebuke to all our doubts: a spanking-new building with an airy lobby, bright modern lighting, a smart wooden desk guarded by uniformed employees. We were not alone in our appreciation. Hardly had the bus driver turned off the ignition than the Tibetan passengers and Chinese soldiers began throwing themselves headlong out of the vehicle like Kurosawa warriors storming a castle. Exercising skills refined at every rest stop, they stampeded off in the general direction of the desk, pushing each other to the floor, throwing elbows as they cleared their path, shouting, squabbling, shoving, spitting. Safely protected on the far side of the barricade, the hotel authorities serenely extended forms into the air. These the racing hordes grabbed and began filling out with desperate speed. The minute they were finished, the enthusiastic guests fought their way to the next line, where they handed in their forms and received others in return. These too they filled in speedily, before rushing off to another queue where they were assigned their rooms. In a fourth line, they paid up.
Thirty minutes later, I struggled out of the fracas and began walking down a carpeted corridor. Then, suddenly, I realized that I had no key. Throwing myself back into the press, I wormed my way again to the front of the line. “My key, please,” I called out to a receptionist. She returned my gaze steadily; guests were not allowed keys. And if I wished to enter my room? “Doorkeeper,” she said shortly, and went back to flinging out forms.
Wriggling out through shouts and shoves, I shuffled off, a little gloomily, in the direction of my room. The corridor was empty. I peered into some official rooms. They too were desolate. I went up to the second floor. The doorkeeper was nowhere to be seen. I tried the third floor. Silence. Then I returned to the first corridor. By now, it was considerably less empty—more and more guests were finding themselves in the same predicament as myself. The only solution, I decided, was to remain as fixed as a statue outside my door. The mountain would have to come to Mahomet.
Sure enough, a little later, a grumpy-looking lady with an enormous jangle of keys waddled down the corridor toward me. In a matter of minutes, she had located my key and, grimacing as she did so, had thrown open my door. There, to my astonishment, stood two tidy twin beds, a TV set, a bright modern reading lamp, a separate bathroom, a thermos of tea attended by two cups. Beside each bed was a pair of slippers.
I hurried inside and pressed the TV button. Nothing. Muttering angrily, the dungeon keeper shouldered me aside and pressed another button. As if by magic, the screen filled with static. I pressed each one of the channel buttons in turn: static, static and more static. A little disappointed, I turned to the lamp and pushed a button on its base. Again, a curse escaped the woman: impatiently, she pointed inside the lamp. No bulb. Next, I put my finger on the thermos for hot tea: not surprisingly, it had been chilled by the Himalayan breezes blowing through the open window. The cups beside it were filled to the brim with dirty water, or something a good deal worse.
My enthusiasm was beginning to subside a little when I heard a commotion in the corridor. I turned around to see a bearded young Frenchman, gesticulating animatedly to a beaming Japanese man with a goatee. Absorbed in their chatter, the two strolled inside, glancing only briefly at the number on the door. Then they stopped. Then they looked around the room, checked the number again, looked at each other, looked at me, looked at the truculent attendant. She stared back at me impassively. The Japanese man giggled. The Frenchman cried out something excitable. The three of us compared slips: sure enough, each of us had been assigned to the same single room.
We presented this evidence to the attendant. With a lackadaisical shrug, she summoned the Japanese man out into the corridor and, after another prolonged struggle with the keys, admitted him into the room next door. While she did so, his pretty young wife shot us a sorrowful smile as she was led down the corridor by another attendant on her way to a room that she would doubtless be sharing with some wild Tibetan mountain woman and a Panasonic.
As our jailer trudged off, with a satisfied grunt, to deal with other of her prisoners, the Frenchman and I gazed at each other in befuddlement. Then, with all the trepidation of a babysitter in a horror movie, I inched into the bathroom. There was a toilet there, but it could have been mistaken for a sewer. There was a naked wire strung across the room at neck level, perfect for decapitation. There were some dirty old towels hanging from the wire. There were taps in the sink, but no water inside them.
The sandals, however, worked perfectly.
“C’est très bizarre, non?” I said as I emerged. “Mais non,” cried the Frenchman, throwing up his hands wildly. “Au Black Coffee Hôtel à Chengdu, c’est plus bizarre.” This I did not doubt. Alrea
dy I had heard a great deal about this infamous place, an unrenovated air-raid shelter that now served as a $1.50-a-night bordello where beds were laid out in the windowless corridors and guests could reach the bathroom only by crawling through a hatch. In the lobby of this now legendary underground haunt, a rock-and-roll band serenaded drunken couples, while well-fed sixteen-year-old girls spread themselves languorously out on couches. Keys, of course, were strictly forbidden. “Une fois,” began my roommate, “je devais attendre trente minutes parce que la gardienne lavait ses mains.”
Sobered by that cautionary tale, we decided to minimize our comings and goings, as well as to synchronize them. Since it was now dinnertime, we quickly put this policy to the test, ventured out into the corridor in search of the dining room, sticking as close to one another as members of a chain gang. As we edged through the winding hallways, we found them crowded with other guests waiting to be admitted to their rooms. Finally, after many curses and collisions, we arrived at a huge assembly hall of a dining room. A sweet-faced girl was seated at a desk outside. She directed our attention to a piece of paper that said “Airpot Hotel.” Below that curious inscription were eight rows of Chinese characters. We stared at the list for a while in despair, and then the girl smiled back her understanding and motioned us to follow her into the kitchen. Proudly, she pointed to a bowl of chicken and a bowl of vegetables. And what could we have to drink? “Yes,” she said, smiling brightly. “Beer.”
