Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  And through it all, the high-tech, open-market, westward-looking New China seemed to have a much clearer sense of the system it was abandoning than of the one it sought. As the government moved into the unknown, advancing by trial and error, stretching Marxism further and further without knowing quite where it was heading or when to stop, a quarter of the world’s people were being turned around and around so dizzily that nobody was sure where anything stood. In the New China, money was still regarded as the source of all evil; but it was also now a source of much pride. One official slogan enjoined, “To Get Rich Is Glorious,” while another exhorted, “Sacrifice for Socialism.” One day Deng Xiaoping happily declared, “Capitalism cannot harm us,” and two months later he warned of the necessity of “combating the corrosive influence of capitalist ideas.” The government reveled in its embarrassment of riches, even as it betrayed its embarrassment about riches. One day Maoism was enjoined, and the next day Me-ism, and the next day both, and the next day neither. Nobody knew anymore what was right, or what was wrong, or even what was left; the door, it seemed, was swinging wildly on its hinges.

  I could only wonder what would happen when the honeymoon ended. Again and again in its history, after all, the long-xenophobic country had begun to open its door to the world, and then, in a frenzy of anxiety, had slammed it shut. In the mid-nineteenth century, the alien Manchu Dynasty had been rocked by a sudden rush of nationalism among the puritanical Taiping rebels, and 20 million people had died by the time China was returned to the Chinese. In 1897, the Emperor Guang Xu had encouraged Western commerce under the slogan “Chinese learning for the essence, Western learning for the application,” only to provoke the Boxers into a fury of hatred indiscriminately aimed at all foreigners. Fifty years ago, Chiang Kai-shek’s policies of free enterprise had prompted one American senator to predict that Shanghai would be “built up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City,” before they were reversed, with a terrible vengeance, by Maoism. Even with the blood of the Cultural Revolution still fresh, Deng’s own reformist policy had already touched off a savage backlash, as conservatives began raising the cry of “spiritual pollution” and banning everything from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

  It seemed only a matter of time before an even more violent reversal erupted. Not long before I arrived, China had lost a soccer match to Hong Kong, and its supporters had gone berserk. What was most chilling about their bloodcurdling riot, though, was that the fans had chosen to direct their rage not at their team, or at their opponents, or even at the referees, but simply, and irrationally, at any foreigners they could find. They had smashed cameras, stomped on cars, crushed glasses. During my own trip, I had seen and heard about several fistfights between tourists and locals, a phenomenon unknown to me in all the rest of my travels. And by the time I got home, as the anti-reformist movement picked up momentum, pictures of my Californian host in Beijing were suddenly splashed across the world’s front pages. Why? He had, I read, been evicted from China for growing too friendly with some local students.

  ON MY FINAL day in China, Joe and Wu took me to see the area that had moved deepest into a deracinated future—the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen. As soon as we crossed the fifty-four-mile-long border that separates the land of plenty from the rest of the country, we were definitely in another world. Shacks gave way to four-story homes, open fields to office towers. Esso signs sprouted up along the roads, and Cal Tex logos. Construction cranes jerked spasmodically over the skyline, hovering over buildings that lay under scaffolds like eggs half hatched. Not long ago, explained Joe, the sleepy fishing village had had a population of 20,000; now it was sixteen times that size.

  In the beautifully landscaped area of Shekhou, we walked around rows of smart white condos, with red-tiled roofs, lined up, as if in La Jolla or Cassis, against a deep blue waterway. The trim little gardens exuded the surface-deep good health of a bright new singles complex somewhere in the Sunbelt. Every one of these units cost $20,000, explained Joe, and most of their residents were Japanese businessmen. “The Japanese tried to conquer us with arms, and they failed,” he said. “Now they have managed to conquer us with trade.”

  Along the main shopping streets of Shenzhen, revelers and shoppers drifted among a Computerland store, an International Arcade and a forty-nine-story building, the tallest in China. We stopped for a snack in an ice-cream parlor decorated with a poster of Brooke Shields. Boxes of Froot Loops crowded the local air-conditioned supermarket, Debussy was playing in a record store, the bookshop was filled with English textbooks given Confucian tags (“Words are words, but seeing is believing”). Not far away was a branch of Citibank, a country club, signs that exhorted “Time Is Money!” Even taxis, so notoriously difficult to find everywhere else in China, were here in abundance, and mini-buses too, one of which took us to the zone’s latest amusement park, which came equipped with a roller coaster, a pagoda, a plush restaurant served by waitresses in cheongsams and a hotel with a lake beside it. Admission to the complex was 30 yuan, two weeks’ wages for the typical peasant; in Shenzhen, however, one could pay in Hong Kong dollars. Indeed, if Guangzhou looked like a mirror image of Hong Kong, Shenzhen was effectively just a superior Hong Kong; most of the vacationers here had come over from the Crown Colony in order to make the most of splashy stores, high-tech offers, bright playgrounds even glitzier than those at home.

  By the end of the day, all three of us were thoroughly exhausted. For thirty-six hours, we had been whirled and spun through the bright lights and frantic development of the New China as if through some furious washing machine. Now, on the way back to Guangzhou, we mostly kept quiet, alone with our thoughts. I looked out of the window to where the future was rolling in through the dark. Wu lost himself in a magazine, putting it down only once, to ask me, with quiet earnestness, “What do you think of sexual license?” Joe sat where he was, collecting his thoughts. Once he leaned forward to ask me if I knew Orianna Fallaci. Later, as we rolled ahead, he leaned forward again in the half-dark carriage and softly recited in its entirety “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

  It was almost midnight when we finished our farewell cup of tea at the White Swan, but the night around us was electric. As he took in the full splendor of the grand hotel—the waterfall, the sparkle, the bright lights on the water—Joe sat back and delivered himself of his final assessment. “When I was young,” he began, “I wanted to change the government. I joined a hunger strike at college and I protested and I wanted to overturn everything. Now I see that it is better to develop, to work for oneself. I can see that evolution is better than revolution.”

  True enough, I said. But was he not alarmed by some of the influences pouring in through the open door? Did he not fear that the New China might spin out of control or else be spun back by reactionary forces? Might not the shy, age-old romance between China and the West turn suddenly into something more desperate and more violent?

  He thought for a while, and then answered softly. Yes, he said, there was often much room for misunderstanding. These days, many old people looked to their roots, while many young people looked to the West. The two could no longer see eye to eye. They could not even speak the same language. Many young children, for example, used the English phrase “bye-bye.” Their grandmothers, however, assumed that they were using the Mandarin phrase bai bai, meaning “bring your hands together and bow.” Mistaking friendliness for insolence, the old women slapped the children, and the children decided never to be so friendly again. Still, said Joe, soon such problems would hardly matter: by the time he became a grandfather, the government’s single-child policy would mean that many Chinese would not even know the word for “aunt.” They would not understand what a “cousin” was. They might not even remember the meaning of “brother.”

  In any case, he concluded, everyone knew that everything in China was cyclical. “We tell Deng, ‘Once you lose, you will be like Mao. Mao organized great reforms, and people called him
a hero. Now the same people curse him.’ I say to him, ‘Deng, one day there will be a second Deng.’”

  With that, Joe and Wu accompanied me to the hotel’s electric doors and we said goodbye. Silently, the doors slid apart, and my friends walked out into the dazzled Western night. Silently, behind them, the doors once more slid shut.

  THE PHILIPPINES

  Born in the U.S.A.

  IT WAS MY first night in Asia. I made my way from Bangkok’s airport to the lobby of the Oriental Hotel, where I had agreed to meet my English schoolfriend, Louis. A few minutes later, he swept in with a flourish, clad in a moth-eaten tropical suit fit only for some ancient tale of Maugham’s and accompanied by Mike, a Canadian he had met earlier that day.

  “Hey,” said Mike, a veteran of the city, “I know a great place to eat.”

  I imagined some smoky opium den, dim under the light of a single swinging light bulb, thick with the back-door intrigue of wizened men at dirty wooden tables.

  A few minutes later, a doorman admitted us to a super-luxury hotel, and Mike led us down a sweeping staircase, past a sparkling arcade of jewelry stores and through a pair of heavy wooden doors. Inside was an enormous room, done up to look like a plush red-carpet New England steak house. Every table in the place sported a tidy red cloth, a candle and a glittery setting of silverware. There must have been sixty or more of these nicely done-up tables in all. And every single one of them was empty. Across the length and breadth of the entire cavernous space, not a single person was to be seen, but one: a wiry, middle-aged Asian in a tuxedo, greasy hair combed unhappily across his forehead. Seated on a stool atop a modest stage, he had an electric guitar in his arms and a large black box at his side.

  As we walked into the empty room, he suddenly came to life. “Hello, my friends.” He perked up smoothly. “Good evening, and welcome.” He tilted the mike in our direction. “My name is George, I come from the Philippines and I’m here to entertain you.” With that, he turned around and flipped a few switches on his box. Moments later, as we took our seats, the soothing beat of a synthesizer and bass tangoed through the vast and empty chamber, and George oozed his way into “My Way.”

  Fighting back thoughts of Mikicide, Louis and I pored in gloomy silence over the menu. As we contemplated the selection—there was pizza, pizza or more pizza—our irrepressible serenader concluded a highly emotional rendition of “Feelings.” A few minutes later, as our house specials were brought out from the microwave, he eased his way into “Strangers in the Night.”

  Seven more of these heartfelt dirges drifted through the echoing room as we munched into our cardboard. Finally, Louis pushed back his chair with an air of decisiveness and turned to the stage. “Hey!” he shouted out in the precious silence between songs. “El Paso.” Our host looked back at us in perplexity. He frowned with concentration. For many moments, there was an uncertain silence. Then, face brightening, he called back hopefully, “Marty Robbins?”

  “Yeaah!”

  At that, the singer turned around to his mike, pushed a few buttons and twirled a few knobs. Out came the unmistakable, horseshoe-clopping rhythm of “Out in the West Texas town of El Paso …” written by Marty Robbins, made famous by the Grateful Dead. At that, Louis—former page to Queen Elizabeth II and flower of the British aristocracy—let out a wild yodel, tore off his jacket and raced onstage. Making him welcome with a smile, George pushed the mike in his direction, and, faces close together, the two of them launched into an exuberant rendition of “El Paso.”

  The minute they had brought the song to a rousing conclusion, Louis called out, “Casey Jones.” George made a few adjustments on his machine, and then the grinning pair broke into an inimitable duet on that one too. Once that was done, they roared into Merle Haggard’s “Branded Man,” and then the Dead’s “Mama Tried,” and then Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Louis sweating and red-faced by now, George as satin-smooth as ever. Every time Louis shouted out a title, George pushed a few buttons, and out came the pound and throb of the familiar chords. And so, for forty astonishing minutes, before a spellbound audience of two in the finest pizza parlor in Bangkok, George, the pride of Manila, and Old Etonian Louis chimed their way irresistibly through heartbreaking tunes of love and lone-someness on the great open highways of the West.

  THUS WAS I initiated into the joys of Filipino music. And thus I absorbed one of the Orient’s great truths: that the Filipinos are its omnipresent, always smiling troubadours. Master of every American gesture, conversant with every Western song, polished and ebullient all at once, the Filipino plays minstrel to the entire continent.

  Any tourist passing through the five-star palaces of the East is likely, indeed, to be serenaded at every step by Filipino crooners and songstresses. “Sultry Filipina Angel Joy Salinas” was playing at the Shangri-La in Bangkok when I was in town, while guests of the Hilton were invited to “lend an ear to three delightful and talented Filipina girls who comprise the Candy Bars.” In Hong Kong, the Meridien, the Hong Kong Hotel and the Lee Gardens all boasted Filipino acts, as did the Hyatt and the Holiday Inn. “Special requests from guests are welcomed by most of the bands,” explained the local tourist paper, “and it is very hard to catch them out with one they don’t know.” In the tiny East Malaysian port of Labuan, the only serious hotel in town “proudly presents … the Music Makers, direct from the Philippines.” Even Beijing swung at night to Filipino rhythms: Los Magnificos were appearing at the Jianguo Hotel and some of their compatriots at the Great Wall Hotel.

  Natural charmers, the Filipinos had long, I discovered, been masters of every aspect of Asia’s “hospitality business.” As early as 1950, Norman Lewis had found a Filipino band beguiling Saigon with its version of “September in the Rain,” and by now at least 3,000 Filipinos were playing the music circuit in Japan alone. In 1984, another 35,000 young ladies from the Philippines had entered Japan to work in other, less cheerful corners of the entertainment trade. And one day, when I opened up the Jakarta Post, I read that a local nightclub with the improbably cosmopolitan name of “Shamrock Copacabana” had been found guilty of smuggling in a foreign entertainer. The contraband performer was, of course, a female and, of course, a Filipina, and the article concluded with the curiously uninflected explanation—Muslim tact applied to Muslim tastes, perhaps—that foreign entertainers were always popular “because they could satisfy more customers by revealing their bodies during performances.”

  It was only natural, a school friend in Hong Kong informed me, that the Filipinos flourished as entertainers. They were blessed, after all, with a colorful sense of fiesta exuberance, a rare blend of Asian grace and Latin fire; they were also, he added, an uncommonly friendly and outgoing bunch—emotional, reckless, high-spirited. The Filipinos were the happiest people in all the world.

  II

  It was raining when I arrived in Manila, and dark. Smiling prettily, two girls at the airport desk led me to a bus and, as I entered, the driver greeted me with a twinkle. A few minutes later, he threaded his way through narrow streets and dropped me off at a small pension in the tourist belt of Ermita. I hurried inside through the downpour. The place was full, the family at the desk reported—but why not try another inn just around the corner?

  Picking up my case, I wandered out into the dark street and began walking. The rain was coming down hard, but there was no way of staying dry under the awnings; the sidewalks were crowded with sleeping bodies. Women and babies were huddled on the stoops of storefronts, men were bundled up in doorways. Neon, half blurred by the rain, winked busily over shabby bars. “Hello, daddy!” short-skirted girls called out from open doors. “Hon, you want good time?” I reached an intersection and waited for the light to change. I give you girl, said a passerby softly, I give you hotel.

  A couple of minutes later, I arrived at the recommended pension, dripping and disoriented, happy to accept whatever was available. A man led me up a creaking staircase. On the wall was a painting of the bleeding J
esus, and in the narrow corridor, a black-light portrait of a Bambi-eyed and huge-breasted topless Filipina. There were no locks on the door of my room, no sheets on the bed. Nothing, in fact, but a dirty mattress on which some previous occupant had scrawled: “I love you. Love R.S.” A few inches away was a heart that said “Sheila.” There was no water in the bathroom.

  I did not care to pass much time in this melancholy dump and so, as soon as I had dropped off my things, I went out again into the streets. Finding my way to Mabini, one of the two main drags in Ermita, I began wandering through the rain. A man started walking rapidly by my side, offering to change dollars. A little girl clutched plaintively at my sleeve. At corners, lit up by the neon, tattered groups of people were gathered in clumps to sleep or to beg. I walked past VD clinics, rickety money changer’s shacks, discount travel agents, run-down bars and nightclubs.

  At last, I came to the Hobbit House, which I had heard of as the most interesting folk club in Manila. The dark room was almost empty. A middle-aged man played mournful jazz piano on a small stage, accompanied by a teenage boy on bass. Every other person in the place—the waiters, the bartenders, a sprinkling of customers—was a dwarf.

  As soon as I sat down, one of the tiny waiters hobbled up to me, his small shoes heavy on the bare floor. Smiling his hello, he took my order. Then a waitress emerged from the darkness, shuffling along in three-inch steps and hoisting herself up onto a chair next to mine. She greeted me with a sweet smile, and we fell into conversation. Did she have any brothers and sisters? “Two,” she answered with a sad smile. “But they big. I only one small.”