I Stand Corrected (18 page)

Grain has remained a dietary mainstay in China since Mao declared it so with the Great Leap Forward, a hideously misnamed campaign wherein thirty million people starved to death in an eight-year period. That human disaster was the result of the failed attempt at a nationwide communal agricultural production dictated by Mao’s blind insistence that crop output would soar by appropriating private land for the purpose of forming farming communes, much like the one to which Mr. Han’s parents were inducted.

Convinced that large reserves of grain would be the nation’s security, Mao turned as much of the land as possible
over to rice, wheat, and millet. Wild birds, considered poachers of grain, were ordered killed, and to make room for more cropland, hillsides were deforested, fruit trees were cut down, and ponds were filled in. Destruction of grasslands caused the soil erosion that is one of the many reasons for China’s current urban pollution.

Mao’s manic belief in grain was matched only by his obsession with the pig, an animal that nourishes itself with what it can scavenge and produces a nonstop supply of fertilizer for the crops. So prevalent is pork in China that the Chinese use their word for meat,
rou
, to mean pork unless otherwise specified.

The Chinese believe that eating specific animal parts contributes to human health. They are convinced, for example, that consuming fish eyes maintains ocular health. More ethereal properties are attributed to certain animals and are ascribed literal representations.

For the Chinese, the turtle is a symbol of wisdom, endurance, and long life, and it is thought that by eating turtles, one is granted those same benefits. It came as no surprise to me that turtles were sold in the Nanjing market. Indeed, I have seen turtles sold in Chinatown markets throughout the world.

It is possible that turtles, with a lineage extending back at least 230 million years, preceded dinosaurs. Their physical appearance has changed remarkably little since the original model. Because their hearts don’t require a regular beat—and can be turned off and on at will—turtles have managed the enviable feat of slowing the aging process. I was especially pleased to learn that female turtles don’t reach sexual maturity until their forties or fifties. Since turtles’ shells are, in effect, the bones of the rib cage turned inside out, turtles cannot crawl out of them. They are deliberate-moving and very friendly looking creatures that can grow quite large—large enough to take up the entire width of a bathtub. I know this for a fact.

“HE’S IN THE BATHTUB,” was six-year-old Gilliam’s greeting when I returned home from the office one night.

At the time, we were living in L.A., and there were only two “he’s” under our roof. One was standing in front of me, and the other took showers.

Aware of my husband’s improvisational approach to parenthood and reminding myself that they had been left to their own devices the entire day—a school holiday—I realized as Gilliam took my hand to lead me to the bathroom that anything was possible.

Sitting in enough water to be reassured he was not entirely out of his element was a turtle so large that, had it not been alive in our bathroom, it could have been on taxidermic display at any number of natural history museums.

He stretched his stringy neck to its longest possible reach and moved his wizened face slowly from side to side. With his unblinking, upwardly tilted gaze, he must have seen that I was even more confused than he was. The only question that came from my open mouth would repeat itself throughout my son’s early childhood:

“Where’s your father?”

“Papa has gone to the store for dinner,” said Gilliam. “Isn’t he beautiful?”

“Yes … and what a surprise he is,” was all I had a chance to say before I heard the garage door open and W. come in through the kitchen.

“Welcome home, my dear. I assume you’ve been introduced to the new member of our household.”

“We’ve met.…”

“He’s a beauty, isn’t he?”

“Where in God’s name did he come from?”

“He was meant to be lunch. Luckily for him, I happened to ask if the turtle soup was fresh,” said W., uncorking a bottle of wine.

From this information, I assumed they had gone to L.A.’s Chinatown.

“Wonderful little restaurant,” reported W. “No menu … two or three selections,… and when I asked about the turtle soup, the owner suggested that we see for ourselves. Gilly took
one look at the turtles stacked in a wooden barrel and insisted we save one of them.”

Elvira, the young nanny who lived with us during the week, listened politely to that evening’s one-topic conversation. Refraining from expressing her opinion, she sat in quiet dignity, no doubt asking herself whether our benign eccentricities had taken a dangerous turn.

“He’ll be a great addition to the koi pond,” suggested W., referring to ours in the gardened courtyard behind the house.

“What will we feed him?” I asked.

“From the look of him, I’d say anything that happens to cross his path,” said W, prompting me to inquire if anyone had seen our cat recently.

“Strawberries,” suggested Gilliam. “He’ll eat strawberries.”

“It’s not likely the turtle would enjoy strawberries, sweetheart,” I said.

“You’re wrong,” Gilliam insisted. “Remember the one in the book? He loved strawberries.”

“I don’t remember that book,” I had to admit.

It was only when Gilliam began to describe the story’s characters that I realized he was referring to Gerald Durrell’s account of his childhood in Corfu.

“Honey, that was a fairly small tortoise. This is a turtle—one that’s apparently been on a regime of steroids.”

“We need to start somewhere,” Gilliam said.

“The boy has a point,” suggested W.

“You do realize how odd all of this is, don’t you?” I asked my husband.

“I think it’s perfectly reasonable,” insisted W.

I was sure reason would have disagreed, but I got into the car after dinner and drove to a grocery in Beverly Hills that stayed open late so that I could buy strawberries for a shockingly large turtle rescued by my son that afternoon from becoming soup stock in L.A.’s Chinatown.

There are few universal truths to which I can personally attest: one is that turtles go wild for strawberries. Certainly the turtle in our bathtub did that night, as did each of the ten
turtles rescued from Chinatowns in the various other cities in which we lived during that period. A single lucky turtle was bought each year and released into whatever nature could be found in the city we happened to be living in that particular year. It was an annual rite known as the Turtle Release.

THERE WAS NO window of opportunity for the Turtle Release in Nanjing. Gilliam was with his friends for the day, and we were returning to Beijing that night. Making our departure fraught was a problem checking out of the hotel.

I had taken advantage of the modern convenience of the hotel safe and had stored my passport there. When the time came to retrieve it, the safe would not open. It required two hours and a crew of five to blast through the adjoining wall and into the safe. The deafening explosion left our ears ringing. My passport was returned to me still smoldering from gunpowder burns.

PART EIGHT
Getting from One Place to the Other

If you want to know about the road ahead, ask someone who has come back.
—
Chinese proverb

O
btaining a passport in China has only recently become routine.

In 1994, the government allowed travelers access to non-Asian countries in a “planned, organized, and controlled manner.” Since more and more Chinese travel abroad as part of organized tours, my editor requested I write a separate chapter on the logistics of longer journeys.

Why and how one takes a journey is inextricably linked to one’s circumstances and age. Taken when I was very young and on my own, my first trip entailed enough planning to slip away from an attentive grown-up charged with my care. I must have considered the possibility of a long journey because I brought a loaf of bread. The milkman forced my journey to its premature conclusion when—spotting me walking purposely down the road—he returned me to my keeper.

Only now do I wonder what prompted me, at the age of five, to forfeit my childhood familiarity of place for the unpredictability of the unfamiliar. There was nothing in my life from which to run away, nor had there been a confrontation that morning that might have provoked me to punish the offending adult by leveraging worry over my disappearance. I can’t say why I set off for a discovery, but it was urged on by a curiosity about what was being offered beyond the driveway, and like any journey, it required me to put my trust in Providence.

Writing travel tips for the Chinese fifty years later, I suggested that unexpected things can happen during a trip. My advice began with what to do before leaving on one. I was especially alert to the matter of passports and visas, so much so that I asked the editor to highlight the passage “Be sure that your passport is in order and that you have the proper visa to enter the country to which you are traveling.” I had a personal reason for providing this advice.

IT TAKES REMARKABLY little to convince me to visit a place I’ve not yet been. A four-line passage written by Kipling was reason enough for a trip to Burma, a country now known as Myanmar.

Built before Lord Buddha died around 483
B.C.
, the Shwedagon Pagoda is a 326-foot gold-gilded stupa on a hill overlooking the banks of a river in Burma. Kipling’s description of it reverberated with such figurative and literary appeal that I suggested to W. we see it for ourselves.

At the time, Burma’s constitution was suspended by a military junta.

“Let me ask you a question,” said Jonathan after hearing my plans. “Do you have a death wish? Because I have to tell you, you’re playing it out in a weirdly global way.”

Jonathan is an investigative journalist so inclined toward suspicion that his desk area is referred to by colleagues as the grassy knoll. It is best to be direct with him; anything less encourages more of his questions.

“The pagoda we want to see happens to be located in a country with a history of internal struggle,” I told him.

“ ‘Internal struggle’? ‘Protracted warfare’ comes closer to describing its history,” he suggested.

It was difficult to argue his point; at the time I decided to make the trip with W., the closest Burma had come to any semblance of stability was during its golden age in the eleventh century. Its last royal dynastic era was spent invading—or being invaded by—neighboring countries, until the English put an end to the warring by doing it better. The British eventually acceded to Burma’s demands for independence, but internal disputes and political divisions challenged a democratic process. Things went from bad to worse.

That’s where I came in—or, more accurately, where I did not.

W. decided to spend more time in Burma than I could afford out of the office; he left a week before I was to arrive. Chaos ensued when, at the last moment, the Burmese Embassy in Washington embargoed my passport without approving a visa. Both were returned in a frayed manila envelope that looked as if it had made the trip to Asia in my stead.

A single word derailed my chances of Burma.

“Publisher” was what I had written where the application asked for my profession. “Cartoonist” was how W. filled in his blank space—an obscure word with a vague enough definition to pass. At the last possible moment, I was denied access to a country in which W. had already been welcomed and was now waiting for me to arrive. The absurdity of our situation was a legacy of Orwell, who’d worked as a colonial policeman in Burma and would later write about his experiences.

Today’s telecommunications make the most remote location instantly available. Back then the only means of communication was a landline, and there was virtually no time left before our scheduled rendezvous in Burma. I frantically tried locating W. When, finally, I was able to speak to him, the crackling static left our phone conversations pockmarked with missing words. “Can you … in India?” I asked. “I’ve looked on the map, and Madras has the closest airport.… I’ll … next Wednesday.”

Anxieties were allayed once we were able to realign our coordinates, but after hanging up the phone, I felt physically drained and terribly alone. I tried to remember previous times I’d been purposely kept from where I wanted, or needed, to be. The closest I’d come to rejection on the grounds of an arbitrary rule was when I was turned away at the door to a private club in New York where the publishing company I was running was holding a sales conference. Unfortunately, no one on the company’s all-male sales staff was alert to the fact that my gender was not welcome at the club.

Had I arrived at the door with a communicable disease, I might have been greeted with more hospitality. Furious personnel—put off by the need to deal with an unexpected and unpleasant situation—isolated me in a remote corner of the lobby while they consulted the management. Thirty minutes later, I was allowed to walk a few yards beyond the area in which I’d been sequestered and into the room where my colleagues had also been kept waiting.