Resistance (7 page)

Even in Urumchi I felt these first people alive in the air around me, tolerant of my anxieties, my presumptions. I imagined the serenity I felt from contact with them was that serenity without which Korbel would not take me into the Takla Makan.

It was nearly a year before the subject came up again. One night on an amble, Korbel announced that we were going to cross the western end of the desert, that it had all been arranged. He was having camels sent to Aksu from Kashgar in the spring. We would parallel the road with them south to the city of Awat, on the Aksu River, then, leaving roads behind, head straight for a crossing on the Yarkand River, which would be running high with snowmelt. From there, he guessed, it might be a hundred miles or so before we picked up water again on the lower reaches of the Khotan River, flowing north out of the Kunlun Mountains. And from there, in the Tarim Basin, it would be another 150 miles to Khotan itself, a city of sixty thousand midway along the southern leg of the ancient Silk Road. Only about 300 miles, Korbel said, from Aksu to Khotan, a couple of weeks at an easy pace.

No one lived along our proposed route. “You’ll be bored to death. No languages are spoken there,” he joked. Once we left Awat, we would travel to the west of the Khotan riverbed, preserving our privacy by avoiding contact with any travelers who might be using this springtime shortcut across the desert, saving themselves the long turn to the west through Yarkand and Markit, where water was more dependable.

In the university library I dug out a book of landscape terms in Uygur. Over two hundred of them applied only to sand deserts, the one to the north of Urumchi and the Takla Makan to the south. That these uninhabited places of bleak stone and sand should be so highly differentiated by the Uygur took me a little by surprise. Ten or twelve terms applied to the shapes dunes assume as they migrate. Another two dozen or more applied to the inconsistent surfaces of dry riverbeds, suggesting the relative likelihood that water would be found below. Another group of terms referred to different combinations of color in bare rock outcroppings. As some of these terms for color also incorporated references to seasonal weather, I supposed they assumed an understanding that limestone, quartzite, and dolomite were each an expression of something, and that this essence changed over time, subtle as seasons were in the Takla Makan. Yet another set of terms differentiated types of loose sand, not just to distinguish areas of good footing for camels but, simultaneously, to convey something more about prevailing winds and local topography. Together, wind and ground surface sort the grains of sand by size and shape, just as they determine, working together every day, the traveler’s path.

The night before we departed, Korbel showed me a map. I think he meant to reassure me about the route, as I had so many preconceived notions about the dangers. Written across it in Kirghiz in a variety of colored inks were several thousand place names. I’d never seen a map of the Takla Makan in English with more than twenty places named in the desert’s interior. The map was three feet wide and seven feet long, a family heirloom. He was very proud of it.

For the first time in my life, probably, I traveled in silence. When we made camp in the afternoon I wrote in my notebook about the gait of the camels, the changing colors of the sky, and the texture and line of the desert itself. I found the Uygur geographical dictionary indispensable in sorting through complex sensations. It enabled me to write more precisely about a landscape that otherwise might have remained undifferentiated and therefore opaque in my notes. Korbel tended to the camels. He also did all the cooking and, for modesty’s sake, bedded us down in separate tents, which neither of us used, preferring to sleep outside.

Korbel ignored my attempts to converse during the day, so I learned to hold my questions until we made camp. I tried to see what was around me with an eye as discerning, as discriminating, as that of the author of my dictionary. Once south of the Yarkand River it was as if Korbel and I were traveling across the ocean. As far as we could see, the raw back of the earth was a dune field of unnamed escarpments and slopes. And yet, suspecting more, I began to make out some repetitions of scale. I saw that the patterns in the dunes had a kind of rhythm to them, and so I came to appreciate the country ranging away from me smoothly in every direction as staffed notation—B-flats, C-sharps, chord changes, changes in tempo, diminuendos, rising arpeggios, and so on.

I assumed ultimately this music had all of it to do with the coming and going of the wind, its sandpapering and sweeping.

Sometimes Korbel would halt us and the baggage camels and dismount. He would point out a place where people had once made a fire. Or he would hand me up a cobble from a scatter of chert debitage uncovered by the wind, and I would see where blocks for arrow points had been knocked from the core.

I would watch Korbel as he rode, and would recall the businessman apparent in him at the market, the fastidious way he folded his clothes in the laundry room, his exasperation behind the wheel of his smoking Lada in Urumchi traffic. And now I saw him as the
dashkalem,
the caravan master, the “undisturbable and surpassing eye” leading us over the country.

A week into the trip Korbel told me I was riding well, no trouble at all for him, so we would detour a little to the east, toward an oasis called Tongguzbasti. We would soon pick up a very old route, he told me, one that ran between the Khotan, which we had by then gained, and another riverbed, the Keriya. Along the way we would see something.

That evening we crested the ridge of a dune and I was suddenly confronted with an abandoned oasis. How Korbel had navigated the sand sea to this spot, what clues he had used, I was not able to understand even when he explained. While we sat the camels on the ridge he unfurled his map. The place was called Yogpar. All that remained was the low wall of a four-square structure with two gate-less portals, east and west. The courtyard and its well were under eight feet of sand.

Korbel said the fort dated to the time of the T’ang dynasty (deferring to my Western sense of how historical time is kept), but that it was built over walls erected during the Shang dynasty, in the second millennium before Christ. And those walls had been constructed with stones cut here before the founding of Ur, the great Sumerian city on the Euphrates. Before that, he said, he did not know, though perhaps he didn’t wish to say.

Standing within the swamped walls of Yogpar, with the warm air still against my face, the stone and sand lit by a crescent moon and uncountable stars bristling in the depths of a lapis sky, I felt that same peace-to-the-bone I’d known in grasslands in the Bogda Shan. I imagined Yogpar with another name, perhaps when it, too, was a grassland, and that people traveling with dogs had thrown up skin tents here in the sea of grass against the chill of the night.

Over dinner I tried to describe for Korbel some of the Western theory of human evolution. He nodded appreciatively but also as if my ideas might be the rivals of his own, and that his ideas, also, might be hard to grasp.

“My ancestors have been sleeping all across the Takla Makan for ten thousand years,” Korbel offered. “Everywhere around us, out there and within these walls, my ancestors are sleeping. And yet, they are awake. They are the ones who keep us safe. Our agreement with them is we will provide, and they in turn will watch over us. In the morning, then, we must leave behind a little food, a little bit of our water.”

I said all right, and when he did not continue I wrote in my journal for a while.

“Can you feel them, my ancestors?” he asked, sitting by in the dark.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“They are waiting. One day, I believe, they will speak—and then everything will change. No matter what language you speak, you will understand their meaning. You won’t find water so easily after that, nor someone for your heart to fasten itself to.”

I put water on the burner for tea, to let Korbel know I knew he was troubled, but also that I was grateful for this trip, for all we had seen so far. He took his tea with him when he went to check the camels. I loved the way he ran his hands over them. They were his confidants.

I was in love with him, of course, but he also represented to me a kind of man I wanted to know more about. He was as much at ease with the flow of time here as he was in Urumchi. I don’t mean he was as adept at carving a new nose plug for one of the camels as he was at a computer keyboard, but that he did not seem to have a century. Depending on the context, his was a twelfth- or a twenty-firstcentury face. He was so little committed to the material world that I didn’t doubt he could have stepped straight into the Takla Makan of a thousand years ago with no apprehension. Wherever he was he was alert to his surroundings, a habit my own culture had long since dispensed with in order to move more quickly.

He told me once that he’d been to New York, with a trade mission of some sort. He’d stayed on an extra week to have time to walk through the Fulton Fish Market and to watch the great tidal surges and currents at Spuyten Duyvil and the Battery. One evening a falcon landed on the ledge outside his hotel room window. The window was open and the bird watched him, unperturbed. He said it reminded him of some lines in a poem by Rumi, in which a perfect falcon lands on a man’s shoulder in a seed market “for no reason.”

He stood a moment with me when he returned.

“I believe our technologies, Elizabeth, these machines we now live with, are evolving, to use your word, faster than our emotions can accommodate.”

He headed for bed, but I was curious.

“Do you mean, in the face of it all, in the face of everything changing, a whole way of life gone in a generation, that we have become numb?”

“I mean that the speeding bus goes flying off the mountain road.”

We bedded down in the soft, cold sand, apart from each other but within the ancient enclosure. Its low walls, barely a foot high, formed a berth, a surround against the farther dark.

I thought to tell Korbel, maybe in the morning, about a shallow cave called Teshik-Tash in the gorge of the Zautolosh River, in Uzbekistan, far to the west of our camp. Sixty-five thousand years ago, Neandertal hunters buried one of their children there, laying the body out carefully and encircling it with five or six pairs of ibex horns, which suggested to many, when the site was discovered, that the animals were its guardians. Scientists later sent the Mousterian child’s bones to a museum in England. The ibex horns were put in a box and shipped somewhere else.

Who can know, now, what these people wished the ibexes to protect the child from? Was it the scavenging of a cave hyena or something less imaginable and more dire?

Before I slept I stood atop the stone arch of the west gate and watched the wind flickering on the star-bitten edges of the dunes. But for the cold stone beneath my feet, all I could name were the constellations, my ancestors’ arrangement of the stars.

Elizabeth Wangfu, translator, author,
Conquest: A Study of the International
Use of American English,
member,
Interasian Trade Organization, on
leaving Kashgar, Xinjiang, China

Laguna de Bay in A-Sharp

I have come to believe in my own goodwill. But do not confuse me with Mother Teresa, as I have to confess I once did. I don’t have the energy she had and I don’t have her gift. And really, in the time I am thinking back on, the turning point, few outside my small neighborhood knew me, had even heard of me. I didn’t then, nor do I now, know the will of the Divine, or even what ordinary men and women are to do beyond courtesy toward one another, you understand, real acts of charity, and also upholding the civic virtues in our very modern world. To serve, to vote. You can choose.

In university I quickly chose African history as my major; but an opportunity arose to go to Chad during one of the famines, so I went and never came back. I couldn’t comprehend the devastation. I did not understand misery until I peeked into the shabby tents to find no possessions, until one day I thought to move a body, stick limbs covered with skin and one strip of cotton, the bauble of the head. I could find no family, no friend, no one to lay claim. I did not know where to carry it. I stayed in that camp for a year. I could have stayed for ten.

God, I suppose, wanted those bodies.

It was not the evidence of slow starvation in that first camp that took such fierce hold of me, that so outraged me, but the indifference I encountered all around it. I grew up thinking hate the opposite of love, but it is indifference that is the opposite of love. In Chad, no one had even a piece of paper to write down the names of the dead. Not a twig to heat water. Not a match to light the twig. Oh yes, you could say that some man or woman, this group or that in government, was to blame; and, of course, relief food was sometimes delivered to the wrong homes in N’Djamena, where, let us say, it fed the household pets of the wealthy; and yes, of course, what the television journalists from Europe and North America spent on their desert wardrobes, on sunscreen and cosmetics and their hair, would have bought us enough millet to feed a camp of one thousand for a week, would have paid for fifty truckloads of water. And certainly visitors took more food than they left. But this is ordinary selfishness. It is simple-mindedness, the industry of charity at work. This is not evil.

This oblivion was not the problem.

It was the shape of the indifference, the failure to love. This absence will take anyone down after a while, in any corner of the world. So, the television cameraman who, out of his own pocket, shipped us two crates of food from Andalusia when he got home; or the bureaucrat who came down from N’Djamena with no entourage, no announcement, only a truckful of briquettes he had picked up somewhere, who brought his own pots and pans and cooked for a day in the equatorial sun—these men engaged the impossible paradoxes of the famine camps, understood the choices the street beggars have. Their love was imperfect, but they were willing to acknowledge their complicity. I remember thinking at the time that they were with us.

As I saw it then, indifference began by accommodating the impulse to affix blame. It grew out of the need to separate oneself from the brutality one witnessed. It was the need, for expediency’s sake, to make the suffering an abstraction. I still see it this way. It was one of the things that did not change over the years.

My mother was born in May Pen, Jamaica, but grew up with her physician parents in Back Bay Boston. She met my Brahmin father at Harvard, on his way to becoming an influential and high-powered attorney, a position she would achieve a few years after him. Looking back, I have to admire the way they defeated or just passed around the scrutiny and curiosity they attracted as a well-to-do mixed-race couple. My two brothers and I, on the other hand, felt challenged by our situation. We became confrontational—bullies. We had down pat all the sixties rhetoric of indictment. The three of us argued often about who the culprits actually were. Complacent middle-class blacks? Racist white aristocrats? I’m embarrassed to recall it.

When I was twenty and in the famine camps, I was certain I was coming close to identifying an enemy. I wrote many letters of accusation and indignation to governments and institutions like the International Monetary Fund. But in this haranguing frame of mind I only added to the burden of those around me. I saw my way as the way of the lover, and I was certain it was the only and true way. I thought I was an emissary of God. I was the emissary of myself, of course.

A year in Chad and I grew so disaffected I became almost violent. My position was righteousness. Anger was my food. (Many young samaritans go through this. Your valor and ethics in these days are less endearing to people than you believe.) I returned to North America behaving as if no one else had ever been to Africa. Like an underappreciated man facing a typhoon alone, I labored to establish a Médecins Sans Frontières of my own. I expounded and moralized with institutions to get them to help me reduce suffering in the world. My plans were as grandiose as my ambition. Believing I was a visionary, I disdained the time-consuming work of describing, for these potential donors, exactly what I would do. I left the details to people enthralled with my imagination.

I always kept human suffering in the realm of abstraction back then, thinking if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to function. I affected a roguish demeanor and, hoping to recruit them to my cause, I sought out old friends at school. I accepted any request to speak.

In those early years I could not understand why women did not fall deeply in love with me, why they were not taken with my compassion for the world, attracted to my knowledge of foreign cultures, my sophisticated politics. It was, of course, because there was no room for them, though quite some time would pass before this became clear to me.

Then I met Minty. At the time I was working for the International Red Cross, mostly as a disaster-relief camp manager, traveling in that particular year from Venezuela to Cameroon to Pakistan and Irian Jaya, having failed in a two-year effort just before that to revamp field operations for the World Health Organization. Minty was a Christianized Dinka from Sudan, very tall, very black, very musical. In my view, initially, he did not sufficiently appreciate the intellectual and social strengths, the savviness I believed I brought to the work he and I did. But it was that he was just tolerating me.

Minty had lived with war nearly all his life. His body bore the ritual scarring of his initiation and the scars of a bystander to violence. He had lost three fingers in a bus bombing and an ear when he walked into a firefight in an alley in Juba. I thought he was not a serious enough man to be considered a professional in our work. Too often with him it was battery-powered music or impromptu dance. It never seemed the right thing. But in those days I thought gravity was the key to all our success.

I met Minty in Addis Ababa, where he was an assistant to the camp manager, and then worked with him later in Sri Lanka; but I did not get to know him until we traveled to Paris together. He took me to Cirque du Soleil and to some jazz clubs in Montmartre. He got to know a different kind of people in a strange place than I did, people more at ease in their skins, people like the musicians and the trapeze artists who were after some erotic moment in which sensitivity and action fit perfectly together. Minty, striking up conversations and traveling with half the luggage I thought essential, opened up my life on that trip. Compared to him, I had been very crudely in pursuit of what life offered.

It was with Minty that I quit trying to know and began trying to be, is one way to put it. It was with Minty that I came to understand that you cannot eliminate evil through reorganization. “You think like a commando,” he told me once. “With you it is always strategic this and tactical that. We are not at war, my friend.” And then he’d laugh.

Laughter—that was something I had entirely missed, to find hilarity inside the grotesque. It did not come overnight, the transformation this insight precipitated. Indeed, in the beginning I thought something had been taken away from me. And then I worried that my urge to laugh was actually a sign of indifference or madness. If the suffering is so funny, I would wonder, why do we bother with compassion? You can see, possibly, that I was almost getting it. When I lay awake at night I would try to remember, for example, whether Job had ever laughed.

That was a long time ago, years when I felt the world was tipping over and that only I and a few others were keeping it from breaking completely apart. Minty died of hepatitis B in the same month my oldest brother was killed fighting alongside Cuban soldiers in Angola. I am not ashamed to say I missed Minty more. He made his life up out of almost nothing. No appetite, no idea seemed to possess him. My brother was a reminder of a family where each sibling was the aggressive missionary of his own truth, and no one of us wanted to be the other’s convert.

Minty had nothing to sell.

These were the long middle years of reassessment for me. I quit the Red Cross and, for reasons I cannot entirely understand even now, entered Union Theological Seminary in New York. I had been raised Roman Catholic but had drifted far from that practice. For me, Christianity operated like an irascible and reactionary parent. It didn’t want to make the acquaintance of anyone outside its own neighborhood; it didn’t want to face overpopulation if that would mean contraception or abortion; and it threw its hands up over the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez and the process theology of John Cobb and Thomas Berry. Talk of the rewards of the earth set it to drumming its fingers on the table, impatient as it was for the rewards of heaven.

Christianity as a philosophy, however, also vigorously championed the ideals I had so ferociously embraced as a youth—compassion, forgiveness, spiritual ecstasy. At the seminary I kept my distance from the rituals of Christianity, but I read closely the work of spiritual scholars like Elaine Pagels and Leonardo Boff and novelists like Shūsaku Endō and Graham Greene. I was trying to penetrate to the roots of what I might claim as my own: the meaning of sacrifice, the passion of the historical Jesus.

I took with me the question of a passionate altruism and a nonreligious devotion to the Divine, but put the seminary, with what I felt were its detachments from the world, behind me.

I went to San Francisco, where a friend from college living in the East Bay needed a house sitter. I spent my nights in a few clubs in Oakland where the music was very good, some jazz trios right up there with the ones Minty and I heard on our first trip to Paris, and during the day I gravitated toward the Oakland docks. I was feeding the romance of shipping out, and when my friend returned, I did. I sailed with containerized cargo for Inchon, three hours before sunrise on a cold, wet night, with no plan but to keep going.

Ships’ crews are rough and cynical. It’s another sort of destitution than I’d known, the men victims neither of famine nor war but caught in travail nevertheless. Employed for globalization, meant to escort and guard an accumulation of goods they are not permitted to touch. They have all the attributes of the marginalized: despair masked by detachment, self-hatred masked by humor, capitulation masked by shows of defiance. In the ports theirs is a search for bliss and unconsciousness, an escape from memory.

I tried to meet eye to eye and shake hands with all my crewmates, especially those who did not trust me, which were most. I worked hard, I listened, I didn’t take unreasonable offense, and insofar as I understood, gave none. The old virtues. When we were in port I bought local recordings of local music for our shipboard music library. I bought local food and cooked aboard the ship for whoever wanted a change. I got some of my watch away from the port and out into the countryside to see people working with not very much—a worldwide way of makeshift life as amazing to the eye as a desert river in high flood. Also, for the first time in perhaps five or six years, I began to visit hospices again, to see if I could recomprehend charity, about which I had once been so ruthless. The ships I came to feel comfortable in mostly worked the East China and South China seas—Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Haiphong, Shanghai. In those cities I got to know some of the hospice workers and through them witnessed, once again, the physical damage caused by the humiliations of industrial manufacturing, the Western plan to create wealth.

I wished in my reveries to be like Minty, free of any need to judge, acting as a vessel of forgiveness and joy; but it was these very things that formed a final barrier for me. I withheld my joy if I wasn’t sure of my company. I judged and brooded. And I prayed to Minty as though he were a saint.

There was no single event in the rhythm of doing physical work, riding out the storms, and gazing to sea, no apocalyptic moment of change, but one day I realized I no longer had any desire to be recognized. This one thing, not having to be singled out for adulation, was the beginning of a new awareness. I might put it this way: I was no longer afraid of immersion in the unvarnished world. I no longer needed to be regarded as a man with campaign ribbons from the most just of human wars. Or even to be recognized as a smart fellow. All I needed to do now was to reduce somewhat the level of suffering where I encountered it, to moderate the levels of cruelty to which so many remained inured. I still wanted such people—the indifferent—to be held accountable. I wanted someone to entreat with them and subject them to the spirit of the law. But mine was no longer the voice to do it. I had no more plans for reorganization and reconstruction. I had nothing, anymore, to sell.