Video Night in Kathmandu (2 page)

Everywhere, in fact, dreams of pleasure and profit were stamped “Made in America.” Cities from San Salvador to Singapore turned themselves into bright imitations of Californian, not Parisian or Liverpudlian, suburbs, Garfield, not Tintin, had become the alter ego of millions of Germans and Japanese; and it was not the yen or the Deutschemark that had become the universal currency, but the dollar, even—no, especially—in the Communist bloc. The hymn of the East Side, as well as the West, was still “I Want to Live in America.”

This kind of influence was not by any means stronger or more pervasive in Asia than elsewhere in the developing world. Yet of all the fronts on which the battle was being waged, Asia seemed to be the fiercest and most complex. Asia, after all, had been the site of the world’s most vexed and various colonial struggles, and Asia was also the theater for most of America’s recent military confrontations. Asia was also increasingly mounting a formidable counterattack upon the long-unquestioned economic domination
of the West, and Asia now included three out of four of all the world’s souls. Asia, above all, seemed home to most of history’s oldest and subtlest cultures. How, I wondered, would proud, traditionalist societies founded on a sense of family and community respond to the Fighting Machine’s grunting individualism and back-to-basics primitivism? How would developing nations deal with refugees from affluence, voluntary dropouts from the Promised Land? And what would decorous Buddhists make of the crucifix-swinging Madonna?

Asia also appealed to me because it was unmatched in its heterogeneity; in China, Japan and India alone, the continent had three great traditions as deep as they were diverse. Texts read us as much as we do them, and in the different ways that different cultures responded to forces from the West, I hoped to see something of their different characters and priorities.

Rambo
again proved illustrative. In China, the very showing of the film had advertised a new cultural openness to the West, even as the black-market chicanery it set off betrayed some of the less happy foreign influences streaming in through the open door; ideologically, the movie served both as political propaganda (confirming the Chinese in their belief that the Vietnamese were devious swine) and as a subject for earnest self-criticism, dialectically worked out in the letter columns of the
China Daily.
In India, the movie had been seized upon by the quick-witted moguls of the world’s largest film industry and swiftly redesigned to fit the mythic contours of Indian formula fantasy; yet its heroic success had also set off bouts of typical Indian philosophizing—even a newspaper ad couched its come-on in a kind of marveling rumination: “No sex, no romance, no lady character, yet constantly patronized by Male and Female. The RAMBO syndrome.”

In the Philippines, the movie had passed, like so much American cultural debris, into the very language and mythology of the country, blurring even further the country’s always uncertain division between politics and show biz: onetime Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile was wont to represent himself, on posters and in threats, as a kind of homegrown Rambo. And in Vietnam, to complete the circle, this latest version of the war had, inevitably, become an instrument of propaganda: the Vietnamese accused Ronald Reagan of trying to “Ramboize” the youth of
America, hardly mentioning the more unsettling fact that Rambo was “Reaganizing” the youth of all the world.

AS I DRIFTED
out of the theater where I had seen
Rambo
, and into the warm Indonesian night, only one line from the movie really stayed with me. The hero’s boss, Colonel Trautman, had been discussing the maverick naked ape with the heartless Washington bureaucrat Murdock. “What you choose to call hell,” he had said of his explosive charge, “he calls home.” However inadvertently, that sentence suggested many of the other ideas that first sent me East: that home has nothing to do with hearth, and everything to do with a state of mind; that one man’s home may be his compatriot’s exile; that home is, finally, not the physical place, but the role and the self we choose to occupy.

I went to Asia, then, not only to see Asia, but also to see America, from a different vantage point and with new eyes. I left one kind of home to find another: to discover what resided in me and where I resided most fully, and so to better appreciate—in both senses of the word—the home I had left. The point was made best by one great traveler who saw the world without ever leaving home, and, indeed, created a home that was a world within—Thoreau: “Our journeying is a great-circle sailing.”

To travel across the globe simply to locate the facilities of the place one has quit would, of course, be an elaborate exercise in perversity. Only those who travel for business, and nothing more, would really wish to ask the questions addressed by Anne Tyler’s Accidental Tourist: “What restaurants in Tokyo offered Sweet ’n Low? Did Amsterdam have a McDonald’s? Did Mexico City have a Taco Bell? Did any place in Rome serve Chef Boyardee ravioli? Other travelers hoped to discover distinctive local wines; Macon’s readers searched for pasteurized and homogenized milk.” Pasteurized and homogenized cultures are not what take us abroad. Yet, at the same time, many a traveler knows that the Temple of the Golden Arches and the Palace of the Burger King never seem so appealing as when one is searching for a regular meal in the back streets of Kyoto. And Father
Time
never seems so authoritative, or so agreeably familiar, as when one is yearning for news in the mountains of Tibet.

If the great horror of traveling is that the foreign can come to seem drearily familiar, the happy surprise of traveling is that the
familiar can come to seem wondrously exotic. Abroad, we are not ourselves; and as the normal and the novel are transposed, the very things that we might shun at home are touched with the glamour of the exotic. I had never seen, or wished to see, a Burt Reynolds movie until I found myself stuck in a miserable guesthouse in Bandar Sari Begawan; I had never been to a Dunkin’ Donuts parlor until I decided to treat myself after a hard day’s work in Bangkok. I enjoyed my first ever Yorkie bar in Surabaya (and my second there too, a few minutes later). And my first experience of the Emmy Awards came in the darkened lobby of a run-down hotel in Singapore, where the ceremonies were annotated, with beery profanities, by a gang of tattooed European and Australian sailors who broke off from their lusty commentary only when a French or Filipina trollop drifted barefoot through the room and out into the monsoony night.

While I was in Asia, I made ritual pilgrimages to the Taj Mahal, Pagan and Borobudur; I climbed live volcanoes in the dead of the Javanese night and rode elephants through the jungles of Nepal. I spent nights in an Indonesian hut, where my roommates consisted of two pack rats, a lizard and a family-size cockroach, and other nights in a Mogul palace on a lake, where I sat for hours on the marbled roof, watching the silver of moon on water. In Bali, I witnessed a rare and sumptuous cremation, and in Kyoto, I saw the unearthly Daimonji Festival, when all the town is lit with lanterns to guide departed spirits home. None of this, however, is recorded in the pages that follow, partly because all of it has gone on, and will go on, one hopes, for centuries, and partly because such familiar marvels may be better described by travelers more observant than myself.

More than such postcard wonders, however, what interested me were the brand-new kinds of exotica thrown up by our synthetic age, the novel cultural hybrids peculiar to the tag end of the twentieth century. “Travel itself,” observes Paul Fussell in
Abroad
, “even the most commonplace, is an implicit quest for anomaly,” and the most remarkable anomalies in the global village today are surely those created by willy-nilly collisions and collusions between East and West: the local bands in socialist Burma that play note-perfect versions of the Doors’ “L.A. Woman,” in Burmese; the American tenpin bowling alley that is the latest nighttime hot spot in Beijing; the Baskin-Robbins
imitation in Hiroshima that sells “vegetable” ice cream in such flavors as mugwort, soy milk, sweet potato and “marron”; or the bespectacled transvestite in Singapore who, when asked to name the best restaurant in a town justly celebrated for its unique combination of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian delicacies, answers, without a moment’s hesitation, “Denny’s.”

I wanted also, while I was in Asia, to see how America was regarded and reconstituted abroad, to measure the country by the shadow it casts. Much of the world, inevitably, looks to its richest industrial nation for promiscuous images of power and affluence; abroad, as at home, the land of Chuck Bronson and Harold Robbins will always command a greater following than that of Emerson and Terrence Malick. Often, in fact, the America one sees around the globe seems as loud and crass and overweight as the caricatured American tourist. And just as celebrities pander to the images they foster, acting out our dreams of what they ought to be, so America often caters to the world’s image of America, cranking out slick and inexpensive products made almost exclusively for foreign consumption—in Jogjakarta, the cinema that was not showing
Rambo
offered
The Earthling
, with Ricky Schroder and William Holden, and
Dead and Buried
, starring Melody Anderson and James Farentino.

Yet America also projects a more promising and more hopeful image around the world, as a culture of success stories and of the youthful excesses that may accompany them. Lee Iacocca’s memoirs are devoured far more eagerly from Rio to Riyadh than those of Akio Morita or Giovanni Agnelli, and George Washington is a folk hero in many Asian classrooms in a way that George III will never be. The most popular contemporary American writer in the very different markets of France and West Germany is Charles Bukowski, the disheveled boho laureate of booze and broads in low-life L.A. In the world’s collective popular imagination, America the Beautiful stands next to America the Technicolor Dreamcoast.

This division in itself is hardly unique: every culture casts conflicting images before the world. We associate India with desperate poverty and maharajah opulence, Britain with punks and patricians. But in the case of America, subject of so many daydreams and ideals, so intensely felt and so eagerly pursued, the contradictions are even more pronounced: for not only is the
country’s political power enormous, but it is matched—and sometimes opposed—by its cultural influence. When Reagan speaks, the world listens, yet Springsteen is shouting the opposite message in the other ear. While Congress sends money to the contras, the global village tunes in to Jackson Browne.

And if the image of America is perplexingly double-edged, the responses it provokes in many parts of the globe are appropriately fork-tongued: with one breath, they shout, “Yankee Go Home,” and with the next, “America Number One!” “In the Third World,” writes Michael Howard, “anti-Americanism is almost a
lingua franca.”
Yet in the Third World, a hunger for American culture is almost taken for granted, and “making it” often means nothing more than making it to the Land of the Free. The Communist guerrillas in the Philippines fight capitalism while wearing UCLA T-shirts. The Sandinista leaders in Nicaragua wage war against “U.S. Imperialism” while watching prime-time American TV on private satellite dishes. And many whites in South Africa cling to apartheid, yet cannot get enough of Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy and Mr. T.

All these contradictions are further exacerbated by one simple but inevitable fact: the disproportion between America’s formidable power around the globe and the much more modest presence of individual Americans abroad. “We think of the United States,” writes Octavio Paz, on behalf of all Latin Americans, “simultaneously, and without contradiction, as Goliath, Polyphemus and Pantagruel.” Yet that daunting weight falls upon the shoulders of the small and decidedly unmythic traveler, tourist or expatriate. Around the world, S. J. Perelman noted, the American occupies “the curious dual role of skinflint and sucker, the usurer bent on exacting his pound of flesh and the hapless pigeon whose poke was a challenge to any smart grifter.” The incongruity applies equally, of course, to the Russians abroad, as it did to the Englishman, the Chinese and all the other imperialists of the past. But in the case of America, at once so ubiquitous and so many-headed throughout the world, the schizophrenia seems especially charged. If Bruce Springsteen is not Reagan, still less is that backpacking social worker from Tacoma. Again and again in my travels, I had been asked, by Greeks, Nicaraguans and Moroccans, how the American government could be such a
ruthless bully, while the American people seemed so friendly, good-natured and warm. I went to Asia in part to find out.

To mention, however faintly, the West’s cultural assault on the East is, inevitably, to draw dangerously close to the fashionable belief that the First World is corrupting the Third. And to accept that AIDS and Rambo are the two great “Western” exports of 1985 is to encourage some all too easy conclusions: that the West’s main contributions to the rest of the world are sex and violence, a cureless disease and a killer cure; that America is exporting nothing but a literal kind of infection and a bloody sort of indoctrination. In place of physical imperialism, we often assert a kind of sentimental colonialism that would replace Rambo myths with Sambo myths and conclude that because the First World feels guilty, the Third World must be innocent—what Pascal Bruckner refers to as “compassion as contempt.”

This, however, I find simplistic—both because corruption often says most about those who detect it and because the developing world may often have good reason to assent in its own transformation.

This is not to deny that the First World has indeed inflicted much damage on the Third, especially through the inhuman calculations of geopolitics. If power corrupts, superpowers are super-corrupting, and the past decade alone has seen each of the major powers destroy a self-contained Asian culture by dragging it into the cross fire of the Real World: Tibet was invaded for strategic reasons by the Chinese, and now the dreamed-of Shangri-La is almost lost forever; Afghanistan was overrun by Soviet tanks, and now the Michauds’ photographic record of its fugitive beauties must be subtitled, with appropriate melancholy, “Paradise Lost”; Cambodia, once so gentle a land that cyclo drivers were said to tip their passengers, fell into the sights of Washington and is now just a land of corpses.