Travel by DAR

China II: Imprisoned!

(Author’s Note: Finding myself behind bars for three hours in a rural army outpost in backwoods Tibet -- lost to the world, because the redneck Chinese soldiers themselves had no contact with the outside, and they were deeply offended by the exotic sounds of English emanating from our mouths – provided me with the most frightening moments of my adult life.  So frightening, in fact, that when it came time to write about it, I found that nothing less than slapstick would do.The idea of seeing it as a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road movie was given to me by my dear companion, the great travel writer Everett Potter, hereafter referred to as “Hope” …)

 

          "Hwaogh!" cried the Chinese commander, trying and failing for the fourth time to spark his match against my shoe.

          "Hwaogh?" said I to myself, and wondered for the fourth time which movie we were in.  One of those scary Commie-baiting flicks of the 50's -- "I Was A Prisoner Of  The Red Chinese"?  One of those Korean War-era films showing Iowa-fed farm boys ranting at a water faucet -- "Torture Tactics Of The Yellow Menace"?

          But no.  The commander's war whoop was too evil for those.  Too evil and too ... perfect.

          "Hwaogh!" tried the commander again, and this time his match burst into flame so he could sweep it to his cigarette holder which he held upside down in his most elegant Chinese interrogator fashion.  I had it.  We were in one of those light-hearted Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road movies: "The Road To Lhasa."  In which case, then, the thing for us to do was to strike up a big band number, launch into our throatiest duet, and tap dance our way right out of the barracks.

          Only one hitch:  We were not in a dancing mood. And our Chinese captors were distinctly unamused.

          "Americans," I tried again.  "Journalists.  The two of us are here in Tibet to see how gracious, how inviting, how hospitable is your land ...."

          Nothing.  The eight Chinese soldiers crowding our cell looked more than baffled by my words:  they looked pissed.  He who'd so relentlessly rasped his match against my shoe, fixing me cruelly with a slightly cross-eyed smile, began blowing his ash at me slowly, methodically, from a distance of four inches.  Meanwhile, from the other chair across the cell, my Bob Hope rival smirked at me -- the only thing that ruined his pleasure at seeing me in such a jam was that he was in it, too -- and resumed humming the Tonight Show theme song to himself.  That's how scared he was:  He had regressed to comforting himself with the quintessential modern American lullaby in an unnaturally high voice.

          Truth to tell, both our voices had risen half an octave in the hour since we'd trespassed by accident onto this secret army compound; it was an unconscious vocal response to terror, intended to convince our captors, in some primordial male animal way, of our harmlessness.  But hey, I really wasn't rattled.  I'd been reading up on Tibet; I knew that if it really got rough, we could always do what British explorers of the 1890's did when they were ill-received by the hosts of this Forbidden Land:  take out a sponge and talk to it while it doubled in size with water, or unravel film and have it change color.  Their benighted captors, falling back in amazement before such supernatural occurrences, would send them on their way like demi-gods with expressions of abject homage.

          So: no time like the present.  Smiling confidently, I took out my digital watch, held it up reverently for all to see, then with a swift and mysterious touch tapped it arcanely to make it beep three times.  The commander drew himself back a few inches, blinking.  Then slowly pulled up the blue uniform of his sleeve and tapped his Seiko to transmit the faint but sickening sound of "My Way" from somewhere over the Himalayas.  And resumed grilling me with his sadistic grin while his soldiers yelped like hyenas behind him.

          Assuredly:  a bad moment for the road movie.  Hope and Crosby, dapper rivals thrown together by fate in a secret red army compound in the most remote part of Tibet, clearly needed more than a battle of high tech magic to get out of this one.  They needed an angel of mercy.  But our Dorothy Lamour, the object of our rivalry and the only one who with a single lascivious smile could conceivably save us, hadn't a clue where we'd wandered off to; was in fact back in our tent drinking herself senseless this evening on chung made of barley beer and yak butter tea.

         How far away were we?  We were three miles high on "The Roof Of The World," 100 miles north of Mount Everest on the wrong (Communist) side of the Himalayas, in a country traditionally known to intrepid travelers as the most unwelcoming spot on earth.  Those British explorers of yore who didn't manage to astound their captors?  They'd be forced to sit on a saddle with spikes while their hosts blinded the eyes of the horses beneath them with burning coals.

          Far away, in other words.  So far away that the Chinese hillbillies who'd been conscripted to occupy Tibet from Beijing 3000 miles away had regressed nearly to Genghis Khan caricature with fingernails three inches long.  So far away that not only hadn't they a clue who we were or what to do with us, they also didn't much care.  Each army compound was a world to itself up here, enjoying almost no communication with each other and even less with the world outside -- that outside world, remember?  where screaming soldiers did not ignite matches on visiting journalists' shoes.

          Alright, a confession:  I had wanted to be this far away.  I was dating heavily since my divorce at home and a quiet cynicism had begun growing on me.  I'd been running with a nurse a month, and having my fill of progressively weirder earrings ("Don't they have a rosy hue?" asked my last nurse at home, "they're maraschino cherries shellacked from my divorce party").  I wanted to witness a world where people didn't sleep together on their first date, where they didn't cheat at the drop of a hat, engaging in genital warfare ....

  So when this chance to visit one of the world's most aloof peoples presented itself, I jumped.  It seemed logical that 15,000 feet would get me away from the commotion and gritty sexual politics of sea level.  I just hadn't counted on ending up stuck on a Chinese army stool, listening to my rival hum the Tonight Show song with an expression that announced he was holding me fully responsible for falling, falling right through a time warp into Fu Manchu land, never to be seen again.

          I stood up from my chair, stretched luxuriously, made over-sized walking gestures with my feet.  "Thanks for the light, sugar, but we'll be scooting home now."  A high moment for the road movie. The Chinese commander permitted himself a chuckle.  He laughed.  I laughed with him.  We all laughed together, the whole cell aroar with laughter.  Long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples! Then he blew me back down with sounds so persuasive that, though I spoke no Chinese, there was no mistaking what he was saying.  Whoever the hell you are, he was saying with strident yelping noises an inch from my face, have you ever in your life gotten into such deep shit as you have now?

          Well, twice before, actually.  But never quite so perilously stripped of language with which to defend myself. In Northern Ireland once, at gunpoint, I'd had the mother tongue to offer, my Yankee brogue adding an air of earnestness to my protestations of neutrality.  In Mexico another time, with the proverbial Mexican lawman, I could utilize the number of words we had in common to present a viewpoint that may have sounded cockeyed but was at least comprehensible.

With a semblance of speech, I had learned, you're a credible human being; without it, you're cooked.  Here, with the Red Chinese, not one part of the alphabet was from their galaxy. "U.S.A.," "Coca Cola" -- even the international hieroglyphics of physical gesture (which we ethno-centrically call "body English") was totally foreign: gesturing for thirst, for needing a washroom, was more than bewildering to them:  it was affronting.  Stripped of all vestige of communication, I was emasculated:  a cardboard film character with an increasingly soprano voice.  Never before had I seen how language confers three-dimensionality, to say nothing of masculinity.  Nowhere had I been so utterly de-legitimized by its lack.

          And so, here in the cell with one tormentor blowing hot ash at my neck and another proceeding to eyeball my belt size to see how well he'd fit my clothes, and six others

standing around just to enjoy the show, Mr. Hope and Mr. Crosby, not only lost in the clouds but lost to the world, as well, were left each to their own thoughts, awaiting their angel of mercy in whatever guise she might appear, free to rewind the movie back one week and review how they had gotten in this mess -- in silence.

          Day 1.  The three of us, Hope-Crosby-Lamour, free-lance journalists who feel like we've met before in a hundred other movies, drink to our good fortune in our first class compartment high above the gleaming Pacific.  Then when the lovely Miss Lamour goes to the bathroom, Hope and I flip a fen to see who will be spending the 26 hour flight beside her, who will be biding his time behind.  I win, and away we go; it's a distinct advantage, I find, to have her spirited presence next to me at 30,000 feet.  And she is spirited:  As I commandeer a bottle of Remy to butter her up, she tells me with a mischievous smile how she once bit her dentist for drilling carelessly.  I toast her for the warning.

          One day-lost-to-the-dateline later (after switching planes in Shanghai) we land in central China.  Hope is in cryptically fine fettle after studying the "Tibetan Book Of The Dead" behind us the whole time.  For Miss Lamour and me, it's been one long Happy Hour; there is nothing for it but to repair to our hotel and try to rest before flying next dawn for Tibet.  Fox-trotting with her down the hallway between Chinese spittoons I say I hope it isn't rude if I confess I find her adorable.  On the contrary, she allows; she never expected to find such fine traveling  companions as Hope and I.  Hmmm.  I walk her to her door.  We hug.  I ask.  She says stash it, Bub.  Hoorah!  I feel so unjaded I tack on another hug, say good night.  When I locate the room I share with Hope, the silence is almost deafening.  Finally there comes a cheerful little voice from Hope's cot.  "Ten bucks she'll be flying home with me," he sings, before puffing out the candle.

          Day 2.  In the darkness before dawn I come to Miss Lamour's door without a shirt for wake-up call.  Despite herself, she looks pleased.  Hope is chipper as ever this morning, whistling to himself as he hails a rickshaw to take us to the airport.  But as we tear through  darkened streets, the three of us are overwhelmed with the energy of this land.  It is like a ride at an amusement park that specializes in visual overkill:  Bambooland!  Even at 5 a.m. the streets are bustling with chickens being butchered, children stooping by breakfast fires on sidewalks, grandmothers careening by on bicycles with fishing poles between their teeth.  In the dark airport, everyone huddles together in the gloam silently sipping glasses of tea ... then up, up for three hours at a 30 degree angle, with the Himalayas down there reflecting their icy splendor off Miss Lamour's shades.  "My, but you have nice peepers," I tell her.  "All the better to see through you with," says Hope behind us, patiently turning the pages of "The Dead."

          Arriving in Tibet it's as though all three of us have been shot with a serenity gun.  There's a fairy tale lag to our movements at this altitude:  We walk with baby steps, turn our heads in slow motion as everything takes on a glaze of enchantment in the thin air.  Greeting us are thousands of tiny sparrows against a sky as earnest blue as the eyes of first love.  But even as I am soaking up this tranquility, an insect I don't recognize nips me with such nastiness that the revery bursts.  "Your welcoming committee," says Hope, with a pleasant smile.

          After an hour of waiting on the tarmac (there is no terminal), our guide comes running up, apologizing that he can not find our car.  Where could it be?  He pulls on his four chin hairs sagely.  He apologizes again, has no idea what to do without a car, how it got misplaced to begin with, where to go in this backward land to procure another one.  He pulls on his chin hairs some more.  In fact, the more pensively he pulls, the less enlightened he seems to become. Tibet is a hardship post, it seems, like Siberia or the Badlands.  People balk.  Taking matters into our own hands, we flag down a mail pick-up truck, ride bareback into the holy city of Lhasa atop 50 sacks of mail.

          Sunset this evening is one of the wonders of the world.  For one thing, it takes place at ten p.m. (due to the enforced hegemony of the Chinese state, all occupied lands are on same time zone as Beijing, a continent away).  I am sitting outside our compound watching the gold-topped jewel of the Potala glisten in the distance, when who should show up but Miss Lamour with a pink wildflower the color of the sky in her hair.  "May I sit down?"  She winds the flower into my lapel and looks up in my eyes.  Maybe it's the thin air.  But as I raise her lips to mine for our first kiss, my heart is thudding like a school boy's.  The Potala seems floating right above us, the wildflower wafting its stuff.

      Now is the moment for both of us to break into song.  But the high notes don't seem high enough up here.  Bidding each other goodnight, I float to my bed feeling gentle and devout both, lighter than a cloud.  Pinned to my pillow is a note in Hope's happy scrawl.

          "Make it twenty bucks," it reads.

          Day 3.  When I awake I don't recognize my hand: The bug bite has swollen it so I can't find the knuckles. Hope sportingly consents to take Miss Lamour for a stroll through the alleyways of Lhasa while I go for the only medicine cure around, in a traditional Tibetan hospital that serves as repository for hundreds of years of arguably the most advanced folk medicine in the world. It's also the first hospital I've ever been in where amid the smells of newly poured concrete and urine (third world, in a nutshell), there are potted flowers everywhere, patients have a direct gaze, and puppies roam the corridors with the least haunted look in Asia (they don't whip or eat dogs here, as they do in other Eastern lands).  Scooping water from a basin that has a human skull in it, a one-eyed doctor proceeds to wash my wound, then dabs black tar-like poison from some local plant on the bite, presses my hand to his heart, and bows respectfully. Somehow I trust:  The swelling will go down in two days.

          Back on the street my compatriots have vanished inside the Jokhang Temple.  Slipping through the fogbank of incense smoke, I enter this most holy spot myself and, in its cramped mud-floored quarters, rub shoulders with barefoot grandfathers who have genuflected here from 800 miles away, pint-sized pilgrims from the Gobi Desert wielding thermoses of yak butter to pour onto the flames, spaced-out lamas (the resident priests) gumming big balls of barley meal within their sunken cheeks.  For hours I wander through the backwards of the temple amid the sound of chanting, the beating of drums, the rancid smell of hundreds of years of yak butter, until Hope appears behind a brass prayer wheel, spinning it nonchalantly with one hand.

          "See here, twinkle-toes," clucks he, "do you really think you can be faithful to her? I mean, you're a womanizer, a roue of the first degree.  It's possible you may even be worse than me."

          "I have a good idea," I say. "Let's cut to tomorrow on that note."

          Day 4.  Our guide has located a car.  We are now free to move about the Tibetan landscape in a 1926 Willys-Knight, with our guide at the wheel and the three of us in the rumble seat. At the end of a morning's ride we find ourselves in a village whose inhabitants have never seen Yanks before.  From out of smoke-filled black tents, from inside adobe huts with brightly colored awnings fluttering in the breeze, dozens of kids swarm.  I show them my hand which has now fully healed except for a becoming scar; they extend their hands, too, in a miming ritual that seems to have some sort of religious significance.  As the crowd grows to 200 around me, I see out of the corner of my eye Hope leading Miss Lamour back to the rumble seat, and mutter to myself: "What a masher that guy is."  And lo, with primitive linguistic devotion the entire swarm of kids around me mimic my sound:  "What a masher that guy is."  Soon my whole side of the village takes up the cry:  "What a masher that guy is."  Wizened old women wrapped in yak skins  gaze skywards as their lips utter the prayer:  "What a masher." Fierce young warriors with knobs of turquoise in their noses bellow their new war cry:  "What a masher."  Meanwhile, from  hundreds of Tibetan voices newly gathered to form a rival contingent around Hope's rumble seat, chants the reply:  "All's fair in love and war, love and war, love and war."

          That night back in Lhasa at a banquet thrown by the Vice President of Tibet, my past seems to have followed me here in the form of the VP's comely daughter.  She is quite simply the most beautiful 20 year old Chinese woman I've ever laid eyes on, with ruby red lips and one missing tooth that adds to her allure.  As luck would have it, she seems determined to be in our movie, communicating with roguish smiles whose charm grows in proportion to the number of maoties speeding their way to my head.  Waitresses click past on taps carrying platters of wind-blown yak meat, while the VP yaks on and on with toasts to his youth when he was a budding astronomer before the state drafted him into politics.  After a while he invites us all to walk under the canopy of stars, and under cover of darkness while Daddy-o points out the Big Dipper, daughter pinches the back of my neck!  She plucks at my pocket!  Giggling like a grade school girl, she drags me away from the others, leads me to a hiding place that's covered three inches deep with peanut shells.  This is her clubhouse under the stars, it seems, and she rebelliously lights a cigarette.

          "What's the pitch, sister?" say I.

          Smiling, she stabs my hand to her bosom.  "Number One At Love," she replies.  It is her only English.

          By way of farewell, twenty minutes later, she hands me one of her father's personal business cards, but not before printing on its reverse side the impression of her two ruby-red lips, and sticking it in my back pocket with a nice comradely pat.  "Whew, must have been the altitude," I tell myself, slipping back inside the banquet hall unnoticed. Because I really don't want to be unfaithful to Miss Lamour, whom I'm growing to admire more each day.  In fact, as I rise to toast her ("to our cheerful companion, without whose fun-loving smile our trip would be devoid of interest"), I think with a pang that there's nothing like being unfaithful to appreciate someone more than ever.  The patina of innocence makes the victim look heartrendingly lovely, and so even-keeled with trust that despite myself I feel my eyes grow moist.

          "Could it be," says Hope, noting the dumb expression on my face, "this rake's falling in love?"

          Day 5.  Why are there several quart bottles of the intoxicant and pain-killer chung at our breakfast table on this, our last day in Lhasa?  We ask the cook, who turns out to be our guide's sister.  "Ah," she says, pulling her chin hairs not pensively but with lots of pity.  "Because today you make overland journey to most remote spot of Tibet."

          And getting there, we soon find out, is the bumpi-est dirt road in the world.  Our guide, so diminutive before, symbolizes Chinese domination as he blasts his way through rocky barley fields hour after hour, forging rivers, honking his way through crowds of moon-eyed yaks as we jounce along in the rumble seat clutching our supply of chung.  At an 18,000 foot pass our eyes go bloodshot; in the Himalayan head-wind our skin feels as leathery and villous as the few grass blades trying to survive.  Hope, however, cheers up considerably when he notices that I'm seated over the tire, launching into a story about a friend of his back home who developed testicular cancer from riding around with no shocks.

          When after nightfall we finally hoist our tent in what's got to be the most desolate corner of the globe, Miss Lamour, ever the peacemaker, suggests Hope and I take a walk to settle our dispute.  "Go, iron things out," says she.  I would rather die, and Hope would rather read "The Book Of The Dead," but to please her I push Hope through the tent flaps. As Miss Lamour stays behind starting in on the chung to settle her jangled nerves, we wander out into the night and soon are so deeply engaged in repartee that we fail to notice how far we've strayed. Barbed wire, secret warning signs in strange exclamatory code; we notice nothing as deeper and deeper we riposte.  Until we're nabbed.  Two armed hicks bark in panic and glee as they march us, single file, deep inside the secret army base.  From barrack to barrack we are led, picking up more bewildered officers at each stop, until our entourage reaches the door of a cell that's got the nasty look of eternity all over it.  Is this it?  The end of the reel?  Are Hope and Crosby helpless to do anything but sit through the credits on their behinds?

          "Oh, but wait."  With a sudden flash of memory I reached into my back pocket, pulled out something crispy white.  Hot dog -- it was the business card of our host last night, the Vice President of this god-forsaken land.  "Here, sugarbreath, see the swells we hang out with," I said with a polite little smile to the commander.  "Yakkety yak you commie rat."

           There followed one of the most amazing transformations I have ever in my life seen.  Over his cruel elegant features a wave of humility seemed to pass.  He blinked.  He nodded.  His lips began quivering in a wide welcoming smile. Not only did he actually turn his cigarette holder rightside up, he also offered us the entire pack of smokes, tapping out cigarettes into our laps as behind him his lackeys began giggling with apology as they passed the VP's lip-imprinted business card from hand to hand.  For the first time in two hours, Hope stopped humming "The Tonight Show" to marvel. "I wouldn't believe this if I weren't seeing it," said he, his voice dropping note by note.

          What sort of modern-day demi-gods did they take us for?  Did it matter?  Whatever supernatural powers we were imagined to possess, they were sufficiently divine to have somehow conjured for us a ruby-red open-mouthed kiss print on the personal business card of the Vice President of Tibet. The soldier measuring my pectorals retreated two giant steps, flattened his hair, and nodded back and forth between us with a smile as docile and yes, as gracious, as the Chinese had always shown themselves to be -- the flip side of all their menace.  And as we nodded and smiled back, soaking up all those spiritual vibes that told us freedom was on its way,  the notion did not escape me -- hwaogh! -- that even on the roof of the world, infidelity can sometimes save your skin; a cynical notion if ever there was one, and just the kind I had come here to shake.  But there was no shirking the un-spiritual truth:  The angel of mercy can sometimes be summoned through the act of cheating.

          A truth whose worth was not lost on Hope, either. For no sooner were we freed with lots of tender handshaking all around -- our hosts bowing and scraping enough to please the most demanding of deities -- as soon, I say, as we had melted back into the night whence we had come, he wasted no time hoofing back to the tent to tell Miss Lamour in what manner we'd been saved.  "Must have been the altitude, my foot," said she to me, or words to that effect, and the rest, as they say, is cinematic history. They waltzed home arm in arm o'er the Pacific.  Me?  Back in top hat and tails, I'm off to the races again with my latest nurse who wears earrings with a nice blackish green patina made from her ex-husband's gallstones.  Telling everyone I scarred my hand slugging my way out of the commie clinches, I recently treated myself to a remote control wristwatch that can turn on lights in my apartment when I'm still coming up the elevator, can call a rescue squad of taxi cabs from half a block away.  Breathe deeply, I keep telling myself.  With or without Hope, I'm at sea level.