My Life with Bob Page 10

  Despite parting ways with my ostensible traveling companion and making that departure much easier, I soon found good company. Based on title alone, I’d picked up a copy of Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray, the theater director, monologist, and author, and begun reading it on the plane. Whenever I travel, I try to pack at least three times as many books as can be expected to read, so as to always have on hand something that fits my mood at a given moment. I would load these books in my backpack, and then, unless they were truly disappointing, I would haul them back. Reading was so much a part of any journey that I hated to leave my Book of Books out, preferring to watch the accumulation of titles in its pages signal a trip well traveled—it meant I had plenty of time on trains and buses, and good reading lamps in my hotels. But Bob usually didn’t come with me; as soon as I would get home, I copied the titles and authors into his pages, the more, the better. This marked the end of every voyage, making it complete.

  Especially when I chose the right book. It’s hard to describe the intensity of emotion reading Swimming to Cambodia, Gray’s monologue about his experiences playing a small role in the movie The Killing Fields. But it was immediate and all-consuming. Spalding Gray was my first literary crush.

  There was no romance in this fervor, but rather a sense of total and complete identification. True, Spalding Gray was a New England Protestant who’d spent years working in avant-garde theater in Soho, and I was a near-unemployed college grad from Long Island. I didn’t share Gray’s struggles with drinking or his depression or the legacy of a suicidal mother. But I’d never, in reading a personal narrative, felt such a close affinity with a writer; it was as if we viewed the world through a shared lens. I found funny what he found funny and sad what he found sad. When I read him, I felt like I appreciated what he wrote in the way he wanted to be appreciated, and that he would have appreciated that.

  Like me, Spalding was a compulsive narrator. That’s what led to his odd job of monologuing and one-man theater, and to writing his stories down in book form. “Stories seem to fly out of me and stick,” he explained in the preface to Sex and Death to the Age 14. “So I never wonder whether, if a tree falls in the forest, will anyone hear it. Rather, who will tell about it?” He began telling stories in college, when he got into a habit of recounting his day to his fellow employees at the Katharine Gibbs School, where he worked at night. Later, he told them to his girlfriend: “It felt as if I was peeling them off and dropping them in her lap so I could breathe again.” Yes.

  What was so impressive about Spalding’s stories was that he didn’t have to make them up. The events he described actually happened and he hadn’t sought them out. “I saw vivid stories coming at me from the outside,” he explained. Moreover, he was—or at least he came across as—unsparingly honest. Even when he embellished, he did it for dramatic effect and not to make himself come across better. It wasn’t that he didn’t have insecurities—he did, otherwise I never would have been able to relate to him—but his way of overcoming them or at least dealing with them was to storify and share them. He was doing what I only wished I could do.

  Just reading Spalding seemed to magically forge connections to like-minded people. After noticing me reading Swimming to Cambodia over breakfast at the Renakse one morning, a documentary filmmaker staying down the hall asked me to join him for coffee. His previous projects had included work with the makers of The Killing Fields, and now he was making a film about land mines for the PBS series Nova. At the time, Cambodia had one land mine for every seven inhabitants.

  We talked about Swimming to Cambodia and William Shawcross’s Sideshow, which I’d recently read, and then, as if these books gained me passage, he invited me to join him and his friends on a boat they chartered on the Mekong River every Friday afternoon.

  Also on board was Connie, a scholar of ancient Chinese poetry at Lehigh; a stunning American businesswoman named Heather who’d made a fortune in China while simultaneously getting a PhD from MIT; an anthropologist, also named Heather, who’d been working at the Sackler Museum in Beijing; Lindsay, a corporate lawyer from San Francisco who was assisting the Cambodian government to create laws related to women’s issues; an unidentified gray-haired man who spoke with authority about everything from the kooky Vietnamese cult religion Caodaism (subjects of worship: Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-sen, and Winston Churchill) to the origins of the Vietnam War. And there was me.

  The first few minutes were awkward as my fellow passengers introduced themselves in terms of their respective achievements. Then they asked what I did and I said something nebulous about working in Thailand. I tried hard to act like a legitimate participant in the conversation until Lindsay the Lawyer challenged me on my first attempt to seem like a grown-up. (“What do you mean exactly by ‘matriarchal’? How is Cambodian society ‘matriarchal’?” “Um, I overheard a tour guide say so?”) I quickly downshifted to thoughtful nods. They may in fact have found me interesting as a Gen Xer living in Thailand, but at the time, I thought they saw me as just a kid.

  I tagged along for drinks afterward at the Foreign Correspondents Club, where we were met with a scene straight out of Somerset Maugham, complete with enormous spinning fans on the ceiling and a long wooden bar. Everyone knew everyone else from earlier newspaper stints in Hong Kong or Singapore. Reporters and published academics swarmed the place. By comparison, I had written a few Pamograms and some well-received college papers.

  For years, Spalding Gray remained the object of my literary fantasies. The authors I’d been obsessed with as a teenager either had been long dead or were stratospherically out of reach, but Spalding was different. He was alive, and while he was famous in his way, meeting him didn’t feel entirely outside the realm of possibility; our worlds could conceivably coincide off the page. When I moved back to New York and lived in the East Village in the mid-nineties, it seemed fated that I would encounter him on my walk to work.

  Part of me couldn’t help but believe that once he knew who I was deep down, he would understand that we were meant to be friends. I think about life the same way, I wanted him to know. I just haven’t done anything with it. I, too, was obsessed with Cambodia. I, too, had spent time on a beach in Thailand. Spalding had been to a meditation retreat and had seen gyrating testicles on the wall when he tried to meditate; I had thought about trying to meditate but hadn’t because I was sure something would have distracted me, though probably not naked balls on the wall. Whatever happened, I’d tell him all about it.

  Walking through his Soho neighborhood, I would plot our inevitable encounter, though whatever opening gambit I used (and I played out many in my head), it came across as fumbling and desperate:

  “Hey, Spalding—huge fan of your work.”

  “Spalding Gray! Sorry to be so direct, but I really think we should be friends. Would you like to have lunch?”

  It never happened. I walked through his neighborhood to work for three years and attended every one of his shows in New York. Finally, in 1999, I went to a book signing and made a fawning and garbled confession. He signed my copy of Morning, Noon and Night, “To Pamela, THE STALKER.” When he committed suicide in 2004, I not only missed the books he’d never write and the friendship we’d never know, I’d lost a kindred spirit.

  During my two weeks in Cambodia, Spalding was still very much alive. He accompanied me to Siem Reap, where I otherwise had the deserted temples of Angor Wat to myself; this was before the temples were overrun with tour buses. When I had to run out of a temple to escape a local maintenance worker who had used an obscene gesture to suggest we fornicate in the soggy ruins, Spalding did the kindness of turning the episode into an amusing anecdote.

  His wry humor lent levity and perspective to everything. I felt his presence when I foolishly paid a teenage boy to take me to the gruesome Killing Fields on the back of his motorbike (it’s not as if there were cabs) and as I walked through the muddy, bone-ridden site. His wise, sardonic, yet deeply empathetic voice described everything I saw, infl
ecting my own. With Spalding by my side, even the darkest excursions became immeasurably richer and more droll. He was what every travel writer should be—a companion.

  But the opposite can happen with a narrator, as I learned on a monthlong trip to Vietnam, another side trip I made while living in Thailand. Bookwise, I thought I had come ready. My Book of Books bore the telltale signs that peppered its pages before any trip: title after title about somewhere else. I’d gotten a brand-new updated Lonely Planet Vietnam and sped my way through a series of war-lit titles: Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Le Ly Hayslip’s harrowing memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and its follow-up, Child of War, Woman of Peace. I felt terrible about America’s role in the Vietnam War, and even though I hadn’t been around at the time, I was ready to make penance for all of it.

  After paying my dues during a harrowing visit to the Museum of American War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh City, I moved on from the war into contemporary travelogue. Unfortunately, in doing so, I chose the wrong book, Justin Wintle’s Romancing Vietnam. Wintle, a dyspeptic, Oxford-educated British journalist, also wanted to leave the war behind; he’d spent three months traveling the country in an attempt to uncover what he deemed the real Vietnam—its treatment of artists, its religious sects, its political heritage—but not surprisingly, the tightly controlled government rebuffed his reportorial efforts.

  Most books and movies about Vietnam (The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now), Wintle complained, came from a distinctly American point of view. They didn’t take into account the experiences of the people whose war they were in. Even when these movies criticized the war or the United States, he wrote, Vietnam was just a “testing ground where all the hallowed shibboleths of America are blown apart.” This was the kind of anti-American critique that might have been palatable coming from other Americans; coming from a smug Brit like Wintle it was intolerable.

  Wintle’s attitude didn’t improve. Despite his stated intent to get at the real Vietnam, on the page at least, he was chauvinistic and, for a journalist, oddly incurious. As one reader noted in an Amazon review, “What we get … reads at times like the memoirs of a fraternity boy: drinking, beautiful women, more drinking, more beautiful women.” It felt like imitation Redmond O’Hanlon, without the fine prose and sense of humor. At one point, when offered female “companionship,” Wintle triumphantly crowed, “Eat your heart out, Betty Friedan. A right gobsmack for Madame Greer.”

  This was my traveling companion. His snide voice infiltrated my own, sullying the landscape with his cynicism, making me feel like yet another ugly American and, worse, one in the company of an elitist Englishman. I’d landed in Ho Chi Minh City during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration, a month after the United States lifted its embargo, which in travelers’ terms was already too late. Those who were there a month earlier earned bragging rights for being there before. By the time I arrived, outdated “Lift the Embargo Now” T-shirts were being sold at a steep discount. “Sucker!” Wintle chortled from inside my backpack.

  It still felt like an exciting moment in history. The International Herald Tribune had been aglow for weeks with reports of banks opening branches in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Coca-Cola posters were everywhere. Noting a photo of one of the new Vietnam Citibanks, I brought along less cash than usual. I would travel on the cheap and if worse came to worst, I reasoned, “I’ll just use an ATM.”

  Besides, it always feels good to spend less. Some people travel on a budget out of necessity, but others do it for sport. The two inevitably seem to merge, as need becomes a virtue in and of itself; you feel good being cheap even while sleeping on concrete beds and riding third-class makes you feel like crap. Travelers compare their exploits according to how long they’ve made it and on how little. As anyone who has backpacked knows, he who spends less money is the better person.

  This is easier to do if you’re a man and can safely conk out anywhere. Wintle could sleep wherever and with whomever he wanted. Not I. One evening, I arrived at the beach resort Nha Trang with a group of art historians after barreling with them across hundreds of miles of cratered roads to check out some Cham ruins they were into and save myself the bus fare. As soon as the driver stopped the car in town, they trooped off to their comfy hotel, a place that even took reservations. “Bye!” they called out, happily anticipating the resort’s beachfront amenities.

  I, on the other hand, had budgeted ten dollars for my lodgings and had no reservation. It was honeymoon season in Vietnam and every place was full. Somehow, I wound up on the back of a local teenager’s motorcycle; he was determined to resolve my situation and I didn’t have the luxury of questioning his motive. We crisscrossed the city searching for a place that would let in a single foreign woman; many hotels refused on principle. Finally, he found me lodgings in a roadside cabin I wasn’t sure was a hotel at all. The doors to the room closed barn style, and to “lock” them, you had to lift an enormous plank off the floor and drive it through two handles on either side.

  Fifteen minutes after I’d changed into pajamas, the plank trembled at a knock on the door. The “helpful” teenager was back to collect his reward. It took a lot of pleading about my husband and small children at home and my honor, and finally, just begging to make him go away. What was I going to do, call the police? Needless to say, there was no phone in the room.

  Throughout the entire episode, I felt perversely guilty. Had I led him on? As far as I was concerned, Americans had pretty much fucked Vietnam over for decades, and I was just one more insult to the nation’s dignity. Perhaps accepting hotel assistance from a stray teen was a clear sexual advance. In any case, he’d done me a favor and gotten nothing in return, not even a tip.

  And, of course, there was Justin Wintle, siding with the teenager. As often happens with a travel book, the narrator—his opinions, his prejudices, his particular way of viewing things—seeps into your experience. “Serves you right,” Wintle said. Maybe I was just another clueless American.

  By the time I reached Hanoi, then still a car-and-motorcycle-free city where legions of rickety bicycles elegantly wove past one another across massive roundabouts, never colliding, I was out of cash. I’d had to take an impromptu flight from Danang to the north to avoid the bandits then rampant on the overnight train up the coast.

  It was time to hit one of those shiny new American bank branches.

  There was only one problem. When I finally tracked down the Hanoi Citibank, it was a cubicle in a near-empty office. “Oh no,” a solitary clerk said, generously mortified on my behalf. “We’re not offering banking services yet. It’s just for show right now.” He smiled. “Someday!”

  I had no money left. I was alone in northern Vietnam. At the kind of establishments I could afford, credit cards were not accepted, and there was no way to pay one off anyway. There was no American Express office. There was no American embassy. In a scene I never would have fathomed my senior year in college, I found myself begging from table to table in a café dominated by European and Israeli tourists, trying not to look like a hippie-dippie backpacking American fool even though I bore all the signs: I was wearing sandals and a pair of faded Thai cotton fisherman’s pants. My backpack was grubby, and my hair unwashed. Justin Wintle mocked me as a stupid Yank from inside Romancing Vietnam. But Spalding, thank goodness, understood. One day, he assured me, this would be funny.

  CHAPTER 11

  Wild Swans

  Inspirational Reading

  Books provoke many reactions (laughter, tears, annoyance, disgust, envy, awe) and stir all kinds of responses (efforts to better oneself, motivation to visit a new city or cook something difficult or vow never to pick up a book by the same author again). But only once did a book get me to starve myself.

  It wasn’t even a diet book, and I wasn’t actually trying to lose weight. But I did go almost entirely without food for four weeks and lost twenty pounds in the process. I felt like I was starving during every moment of
every one of those days.

  I did it because I was inspired.

  This happened in 1994 in China, where I was backpacking solo for six weeks under the aegis of my father, who never would have gone himself. Having watched Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor at least six times too many, he sent me there in his stead with a thousand-dollar birthday gift earmarked for the trip and instructions to bring him back a spittoon.

  A long trip was in the works, but not to China. With the school term in Thailand at an end, and a month spent training at a Thai massage school over, I had hoped to island hop through Indonesia for six weeks. Fellow travelers had scoffed at my first idea of going to India—“You need at least six months there, otherwise don’t bother.” But my father made clear there would be no thousand dollars for either of these countries, much as he loved The Year of Living Dangerously and A Passage to India. If I wanted the money, it would have to be China—and bring back that spittoon.

  I, too, had seen The Last Emperor. But I chose as my inspiration a little book called From Heaven Lake, by Vikram Seth, the author of the massive novel A Suitable Boy. After studying at Nanjing University in the early eighties, Seth had traveled overland across China, through Tibet, and back home to New Delhi and then written a backpacking travelogue about his adventures. It would be fun to follow him, or at least to trace his path along the Chinese portion of the Silk Road. With the bonus from my dad, if I budgeted carefully, I could last six weeks on fifteen dollars a day.

  Throughout my year in Thailand, I had discovered the pleasures of reading about the places where you actually were; before living in Asia, I’d tended to read about the faraway—even when I was far away, perversely reading about Iowa, for example, while in France. Only now did I realize that if you read about where you were physically, you might get more out of it. I discovered a whole number of travelogues—not only Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia, but also Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo, Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu, Alexander Frater’s Chasing the Monsoon—whose authors’ daring filled me with awe and determination. I could never do what they’d done (once again my solitary female status counted against me), but I desperately wanted to and I was certainly going to try. This trip to China would be my chance.