My Life with Bob Read online

  It began inauspiciously in Ürümqi. An ethnic Chinese outpost on the Silk Road stretch between Kashgar and Xi’an, Ürümqi is the capital of the western Uighur Autonomous Region, sprawling and industrial and unappealing. The Uighur Autonomous Region is so despised by the Han Chinese, it had served as a place of exile during the more punishing years of Communist rule, and was still populated primarily by Uighurs and Kazakhs, nomadic goatherds of Siberian origin: Muslim, Turkic-language speaking, yurt dwelling. Whenever I looked especially lost in Ürümqi, someone asked if I was Pakistani.

  As soon as I disembarked from my first Chinese domestic carrier (not safe, by the way), I realized I’d made a serious miscalculation. Where was the vaporizing heat? From Heaven Lake’s opening chapter, “Turfan: July in the Desert,” noted, “The only way to remain even tolerably cool in Turfan is to pour cold water on your head and let your hair dry in the air.” This, Seth wrote, “happens in minutes and the process can then be repeated.”

  This was not true, however, in nearby Ürümqi in April, when I arrived from the sweltering summer season of Thailand. Somehow, my brain had processed summer in Thailand as summer everywhere. Though my first moments standing on the austere and gusty tarmac in my cotton fisherman’s pants were jarring, I stuck with the plan and booked a tour to the magnificent-sounding Heaven Lake. Vikram Seth had described it as “an area of such natural beauty that I could live here, content, for a year.” According to my guidebook, it was as if a sliver of Canada had been plunked down in the barren depression of the Taksim desert. It may be slightly cooler there, I reasoned, donning a windbreaker and tucking an extra pair of socks into a knapsack before stowing the rest of my luggage in a locker.

  Heaven Lake certainly seemed like a popular destination. Though there were few tourists at the airport, a throng of guides competed to sign us up for various packages. My little expedition included a Korean football player and a towering former East German border guard. Our guide was a Kazakh dressed in heavy-metal black; he looked about sixteen. The German stared me down and proceeded to interrogate me like a disapproving Stasi officer. “You go on yurt trip as one? Girl alone?”

  “Yup, you?” I blinked back. “All by yourself, I take it?” No one in my group really spoke English, but the three others each knew some Mandarin and carried on a stilted conversation among themselves. I wouldn’t have minded had there been something else to do. But shortly after we arrived at Heaven Lake, the sky dulled into a desolate gray. The horseback ride component of the vacation package ended early, our numb hands unable to manipulate the reins.

  By two o’clock in the afternoon it had grown weirdly dark, especially weird because although it is geographically about four time zones away from Beijing, Ürümqi runs on centralized Beijing time, which meant it was really approximately ten in the morning. The Korean football player squinted at the menacing sky and muttered something in Mandarin; the others nodded solemnly. We lumbered back to the yurt. Feeling betrayed by Vikram Seth, I switched allegiances and picked up the only other book I’d brought with me, Jung Chang’s memoir Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. I sped through the last chapters in the fading light.

  Unfortunately, I went too fast and was left with nothing else to read. My other books were in storage back in Ürümqi because I assumed I wouldn’t have time to read with all the frolicking at Heaven Lake, which at this point was spiked by piercing cold winds. Now I was trapped in the yurt with no reading material, no one to talk to, and I was hungry. A Kazakh woman cooked our promised meals in a suspect chunk of gray lard, animal origin unknown; sluggish bubbles of fat coagulated in the cauldron of water she used to make tea. No Nescafé for me in the morning, thank you! We were each given a hunk of Kazakh bread that, like a teething biscuit, was malleable enough to be chipped off and swallowed only after a protracted suckle and gnaw.

  The others were having fun. The Kazakh rocker whipped out a flask of medicinal-smelling whiskey, and he, the German, and the Korean passed it around, chattering merrily at one another in basic Mandarin, looking askance at me like an intrusive item that had accidentally blown in through the yurt flap. They finally offered some whiskey, but I declined, retreating under a musty pile of ancient blankets. After several hours of repressing my bladder to avoid exploring the outdoor “facilities,” I fell asleep, conquered by the ennui.

  The next morning, I furrowed my way out from under the six-blanket igloo I’d erected around my shivering form and opened the yurt flap to escape the whiskey-sweat cloud of human bodies and find a hole to pee in. I couldn’t believe what I saw, or, rather, didn’t see. Outside the yurt was a total whiteout. Several feet of snow had already piled on the ground. We were in the middle of a blizzard.

  Panicked, I woke up my hungover yurtmates. The German urged us to ride out the storm, which seemed to work for the football player and the Kazakh rocker, already reaching for the whiskey. The thought of another twenty-four hours in the yurt without food, coffee, water, conversation, or reading material was inconceivable, and I pleaded immediate departure. For a while, it seemed majority would rule, but eventually they cracked. Once I had their reluctant shrugs of assent, I wasted no time pulling on my windbreaker. I shamelessly accepted a flimsy acrylic scarf from the female Kazakh host, who surveyed my unseasonable attire pityingly, and we bolted out into the snow. The roads were impassable.

  It was a fourteen-mile hike down the mountain to the nearest village, then another mile through deep Kazakh mud to get to the tour guide’s winter house, made of concrete. It turned out the Kazakhs weren’t stupid enough to live in mountain yurts during the winter, which in fact extends into June. The solitary yurt we’d stayed in was there only for those tourists fool enough to wander into the desert during low season. No wonder there’d been such competition for Heaven Lake customers.

  A vague enmity seemed to have descended on the group, they likely resenting me for the forced trudge. The Korean, the German, the Kazakh, and I barely exchanged words as we stomped our way through the snow. The hike felt endless, though it lasted only a few hours. In the travelogue version of my trip, I would have been appreciating the snowy bluffs and relishing the international company.

  Instead, I thought about the book I’d finished in the yurt. The true story of three generations of women suffering through China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Wild Swans begins with the author’s grandmother, concubine to a Manchurian warlord. Chang’s mother was a high official in the Communist Party who was eventually denounced, and Chang herself became a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution before renouncing communism and moving to London, where she became a professor at the School of Asian Studies. Each of these three women had endured more trauma in any given three-week period than I had in the span of twenty-three coddled American years.

  But what really got me was when Jung Chang, along with the rest of China’s city youth, roughly 15 million people altogether, was expelled from her school and forced to do hard labor in the countryside because, as Mao put it, “Peasants have dirty hands and cowshit-sodden feet, but they are much cleaner than intellectuals.” Even more grueling than the carrying of heavy buckets of water from wells, the husking of grain for food, the aggressive goats guarding the outdoor toilets, was the intellectual deprivation that wore on Chang. “I had an urge to write, and kept on writing with an imaginary pen,” she recalled. “While I was spreading manure in the paddy fields … I would polish long passages in my mind.”

  There was no writing; there were no books. “I longed for something to read,” Chang recalled. “But apart from the four volumes of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong, all I discovered in the house was a dictionary. Everything else had been burned.” Per one of Mao’s aphorisms, “The more books you read, the more stupid you become.” Boredom, Chang discovered, “was as exhausting as backbreaking labor.”

  Meanwhile, I couldn’t even endure the boredom of one bookless, conversation-free evening in a tourist yurt. As I’d lain in the dusty stench the night before, an idea
insinuated itself into my head. Chang’s tale of woe had greatly moved me, and yet to what end? Could I truly grasp her misery? What did I—could I possibly—know about it? In my Western ease, I’d never experienced the test of real deprivation and the joy of relief. I would never know that kind of emotion firsthand, and that itself felt like a deprivation. How could you become a strong and appreciative person if you’d never had an obstacle to toughen you up?

  As grueling as it was, the test of the fourteen-mile trek felt like child’s play next to the Chang family’s miseries. Suffer! Suffer, you unappreciative slob, I scolded myself as I trudged along, as if my rebukes would rid me of a fundamental complacency. How can you complain about one measly little hike next to the Long March and the Cultural Revolution? Lazy, easy, weak … lazy, easy, weak, I repeated to myself, the winds howling through my flimsy fisherman’s pants. Suffer, suffer.

  By the time we got to the guide’s village house and I’d scraped the mud off my canvas sneakers, they were stained crimson with blood. I took off both pairs of what were now deep red-stained socks, and as pain replaced the numbness and my feet swelled before me, I realized my sneakers had been destroyed and my feet along with them. I walked with a crippled gait for days.

  But none of this mattered. If anything, it needed to happen. I’d hatched a plan during that trek, something I came to call the Denial Regime. My bloody feet would be an inaugural crusade wound. I photographed my soaked red socks to mark the moment.

  The kernel of the Denial Regime had taken shape as I’d watched the Kazakh host cook our lardy, unappealing dinner the night before, knowing I wasn’t going to eat a bite of what she made. No matter how hungry, I decided to suffer through it. This got me to thinking. What would happen if you caused yourself to suffer, just to know what it was like?

  One of those chronically hungry people who gobbles down candy throughout the day, I have the metabolism and related disposition of a toddler: cranky when unfed. This weakness could be put to use. For the rest of my stay in China, I decided, I would make myself go hungry. Hadn’t I moved to Asia in order to challenge myself? Confronting oversize water bugs and a little loneliness didn’t necessarily accomplish that.

  My self-styled Denial Regime would allow for one small portion of white rice or plain bread a day, a daily vitamin supplement, and a cup of clear soup every few days. I would take it one day at a time, relishing the deprivation, putting off that one portion of starch—Nope, no eating until at least twelve o’clock. No, make it twelve thirty!—until I could no longer bear it. I would do this for the rest of my time in China. Others might dread different deprivations, like no showering or no sex, but for me, the prospect of food restriction was the most dreadful. Far worse, I had to admit, than having no books.

  If Jung Chang and millions of other Chinese people could live through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, then certainly it was possible to get through a day without stuffing my face. Every time I felt a pang of hunger, I reprimanded myself, thinking about Jung Chang and repeating my adopted mantra: Deny, deny.

  It was awful. The hunger never went away for any meaningful amount of time, as in more than ten minutes. Yet the ability to thwart it felt empowering. I felt cleaner, purer, tougher. I’ve never had an eating disorder, but during those weeks, part of me could disturbingly understand the draw, and the danger. The constant effort only hardened my determination. I felt like a warrior.

  The bonus challenge was to make myself focus on the sights I saw during the day and the books I read at night despite the gnawing growls. (Bob bears the marks of this period with a series of easy-to-swallow mass market paperbacks: Michael Crichton’s Congo, Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.) Despite these accompanying efforts at self-care, about a week into the Denial Regime, I came down with a sinus infection. Luckily, the sparse language appendix of my outdated Lonely Planet guidebook, which lacked such essentials as “I’m late!” and “Could you please keep it down?” included the phrase wo sher bing (“I am sick”). It was remarkably effective. No free hotel rooms, you say? Wo sher bing, and suddenly a room materialized. The bank teller decides to break for noodles the moment when you walk in? Wo sher bing elicited a reluctant compliance.

  The effect of wo sher bing was so decisive it seemed to carry more weight than just “I’m sick,” something more like “I’m pregnant” or “I have cancer.” Whatever its implied meaning, wo sher bing transformed all my interactions with the Chinese people. One time, I wo sher bing’ed a troop of cadres on the train and was forced to ingest copious amounts of unidentified Chinese medicine, inducing a fifteen-hour nap. On another train ride, my sickness persuaded my cabinmates to go to sleep early, allowing me to escape the usual chain-smoking fluorescent banter that pervaded second-class night trains into the wee hours. On yet another ride, a well-dressed man removed a small gadget from his pocket, which he opened, gently tapped, and handed to me.

  “Do you need to see a physician?” the screen inquired politely. I leapt on this portable translator with joy, tapping in a detailed response about my symptoms. But the machine had limitations. No matter what message was typed in and no matter what its translation into Chinese, the screen glowed back the same kind query: “Do you need to see a physician?” This, alas, was all the tight-lipped device had to say.

  A few people tried to engage me in deeper conversation, to no avail. Not many people spoke English in these small Silk Road towns. Perhaps they were asking for something basic like my destination and when I couldn’t respond were as astounded that I didn’t speak Mandarin as Americans are when a tourist here doesn’t know the rudiments of English. I’d shake my head dumbly until someone would inevitably say with exasperation, “Ting butong.” Everyone else seemed to agree this was the case, regarding me sadly and repeating, “Ting butong.”

  I started to preempt them. Someone would look at me with an expectant air after saying what I imagined was a question and I’d just admit straight out, “Ting butong.”

  “Ting butong,” my conversation partner would confirm, satisfied. “Ting butong!” another person would chime in, and they’d lean back and smile ruefully. When I took Mandarin classes years later at NYU I learned a rough translation: “Listens, does not hear.” It meant, in short, “She doesn’t get it.”

  Everywhere, I didn’t get it. Project Spittoon was a total wash. Don’t ask why, but I thought a spittoon was a long tube through which people spat. Thinking back on the many idiotic attempts I made to find one, gesticulating moronically over flutes and similarly shaped items in market after market, makes me blush. (A spittoon looks, in fact, more like a vase.) “Seriously, Pammy?!” my father groaned when I came back empty-handed.

  Backpacking in remote western China in 1994, I was frequently the only tourist in town, and not just the only tourist but also the only white woman by herself and the only white woman by herself wearing inappropriate summer attire and not speaking a word of Chinese, looking sick and tired and hungry as a lost dog. I was obviously some kind of maniac. Every time I sat down constituted a major public event. Staring squads formed. People pointed. Once, as I rested by a public fountain reading, a young man, egged on by onlookers, came forward, reached out, and touched my bare arm before dashing off with a nervous giggle. I stood out in China like a piece from the wrong puzzle.

  Watching rickety old men and boxy and bejowled women perform tai chi at the crack of dawn, squat on sidewalks for hours, and pedal profoundly broken bicycles uphill, I felt outdone. I knew that my Denial Regime, demanding though it was, failed to measure up to the physical and psychological challenges the Chinese people had overcome since 1949—and surely well before then, too. But in my own hungry little way, I had to prove that I could endure as well. I spent hours looking forward to my daily bowl of rice, savoring each painstakingly pinched chopstickful, lamenting any wayward grain that plummeted haplessly to the floor. I appreciated every single bite and I appreciated how long I could manage until
the next bowl.

  The Denial Regime lasted for twenty-eight days, each day recorded in my agenda (Denial 1, Denial 2, Denial 3…) like a kind of anti-Bob, listing life’s deprivations as Bob chronicled life’s gains. The end came two weeks short of my six-week ambition. After a full day exploring the Forbidden City in Beijing, I was assaulted by the godly aroma of hot dan dan noodles topped with fresh cilantro from a stand just outside the city gates. I inhaled the chili and wheaty noodle scent until my brain lit on fire, torching all other thoughts.

  “Enough of this madness,” I said to myself, abandoning my private revolution. I rushed the noodle stand in a kind of half-wild, semieuphoric state and dove in, barely bothering with chopsticks. It tasted fantastic.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Secret History

  Solitary Reading

  Reading for the most part is a solitary downtime activity, yet feels like one that can be done all the time, no matter how many people are around. You can will yourself to be alone in a book regardless of circumstance. I for one read when I sit down and I read when I wait and I read while I walk; occasionally I read while I walk into things. I read when I spot a scenic view with a bench (not the point, I know) and to avoid surroundings that are less than appealing. There is something especially enjoyable about reading on trains and on planes and in coffee shops, where the gesture constitutes a futile cultural rebuke to everyone else’s tablet or smartphone. They never notice.