This is an aside, but my brother Tom, the Catholic missionary, married a Chinese girl, and when her relatives came to visit us in Milwaukee they got out of his car, took a look around at what is by American standards a pretty big city, and remarked—looking quaintly pleased—that it was “just like the provinces” in China.
Kaohsiung is a sprawling commercial city, although nothing compared to cities on the mainland I’ve seen. There is no discernible rhyme or reason to it, and we walked from our hostel until we found a bar—it took all of two blocks—where we bought cheap, badly filtered Chinese cigarettes and cheap domestic beer. It is highly possible to get nice things in Taiwan, but I think we both wanted a sleazy experience in keeping with the smoggy and crowded Kaohsiung atmosphere. Every Taiwanese, his sister, and his cat owns a motorcycle. There were six motorcycles parked outside the bar—presumably because there’s slightly more room than in China, where the bicycle is preferred.
We had two days to ourselves and we were pondering what to do with them. We’d gotten to like each other well enough that we planned to stick together. The sight of the temple had cured Pickett of his spiritual aspirations vis-à-vis Taiwan and now he wasn’t sure about seeing more temples. There were some nice ones in the mountains, I told him. I had once waited for several hours outside a combined liquor store and poultry farm to hitch a ride on a flatbed truck to a mountain temple. He wasn’t so sure about that, either, so I asked if he had ever seen Taroko Gorge. Of course he hadn’t seen Taroko; it was his first time in Taiwan; but I was drunk. “You have to see Taroko,” I said. “It’s gorges.” I think I stole that pun off a bumper sticker. Taroko Gorge is Taiwan’s national park, closer to Taipei at the northern end of the island than to Kaohsiung in the south. It’s four hours by bus from Kaohsiung, no longer than from New York to Boston. After we saw it, I told him, we could do the rounds in Taipei; I’d look up friends there and we’d have a grand old time. This struck both of us as a sound plan, although at that point buying two motorcycles and driving them into the sea might have seemed like a sound plan.
After that Pickett struck up an acquaintance with a local girl who may or may not have been a prostitute. Now, I’m no pickup artist, wasn’t even when I was young—residual Catholic guilt, I suppose—but it’s not like I objected. She looked young (no interest in fifteen-year-old girls?), but let’s be honest—who can tell? They went off somewhere, and I made my way unsteadily back to the hostel. I’ve picked up snatches of poetry in my time, and one of them came back to me then:
There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me but I
Refused to come inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope in my old age.
I stayed up, getting sober and smoking off the balcony. I called a friend in New York and told him how the journalism had gone: for him it was almost noon. Pickett came back at past three in the morning looking drawn and confused. Although I was jocular about it, he wouldn’t talk about what had happened. He had money the next day, so I figured at least he hadn’t been robbed. I guessed it would always remain a mystery.
When it got light we hopped a cab to the station and got on the bus to Taroko.
My fondness for Taiwan might be due to the fact that my first vacation there was the first real vacation of my life. On assignment I had worked constantly—I had a real work ethic then—in the middle of grimy, noisy, sometimes dangerous situations, and I drank more heavily so that half the time I was all business, the other half nothing at all. Before that I had grown up in Milwaukee and New York, natureless cities of great industry. So I remember that first bus ride from Kaohsiung to Taroko Gorge. The road goes straight up the seaside cliffs, under arches of natural granite, and the bright blue Taiwanese sea is enough to kill the breath in you. The size of those cliffs is incredible and on a clear day there is no dividing line between the blue sea and blue sky and it looks like the mouth of God. And seven years later, it was just the way I remembered it.
To me, after that prelude, the gorge itself was somewhat of a letdown. But how could it have lived up to my expectations? The first time that ride along the edge of the sea felt like the antechamber to some other world. We just never got there.
Of course to my companion, of San Francisco, a gorgeous seaside drive was nothing new.
Pickett was surprisingly uninterested in my old war stories. He didn’t ask about the time I had photographed a family of alleged drug dealers lying in their blood, shot at their breakfast table by the Nigerian police. In his presence I felt younger and probably acted it, so we talked about drugs, and the Doors, and Graham Greene. Pickett was a great reader and a graduate of Bard College. We joked that to find another drinker in the journalistic profession was no great providence, another reader more so.
He was newly enthusiastic about books I hardly remembered reading; also about ideas I knew to be ill-advised.
“One day, man, hell, maybe when this job’s over, I’m’a go to Jamaica, smoke it up with the Rastas.” Noticing the incredulous look I gave him, he quickly amended, “Look at you there, sittin’ lookin’ at me like I just listened to one Marley record. I got friends went there, they say the grass’s so strong—”
“Damn right,” I said. “It’s so strong it fucking paralyzes you. That’s when you say something dumb and it gives them the excuse to shoot you in the head.”
“The hell you mean—? The Rastas ain’t gonna shoot me. Whatever happened to One Love?”
“I don’t know what happened to it. But they shoot tourists now, and that’s a fact. Take it from me, I wouldn’t go there without a very reliable local guide.”
I’d heard as much, although it had been years since I’d smoked.
You started to see the signs for Taroko long before you got there. This heightened that unbearable anticipation I’d felt the first time, along with a directional sign that read—I swear to God—to the “promised land.” I don’t know if this referred to Taroko or to some other place. In any case the whole area was a bit strange. There kept being bigger and bigger cliffs, and you wondered, is this Taroko now …?
But as I said, when you got there it was a letdown. The bus let us off nowhere in particular, by a rest stop, the other tourists wandered off, and Pickett looked around blinking.
“We here?”
I nodded. “We here.”
“Big rocks,” he said, as if to humor me.
We weren’t yet in the gorge proper; there were still the mountains on either side of us. The gorge itself only substituted sheer rock for the foliage.
“Big rocks,” I said.
He began to unpack his camera. “I bet I could get some good shots here. Maybe sell ’em someplace else …”
“Or just put them in with the piece. We can say we took them at the temple; they’ll never know.”
“Hah. Yeah. Dumb fucks.”
“Dumb fuckin’ fucks. Howie,” that was my current editor, “thinks all East Asia is just one big jungle around a temple. And Tokyo.”
We were both a bit vague with our hangovers, in the bright sunlight all of a sudden.
We lit up Double Lucky cigarettes from the bright red cartons. Double, lucky, and red, all the constituent elements of Chinese culture. It crossed my mind that the Chinese emphasis on luck was just about as far from Buddhism as you could get, even further than Christianity. At least they both had an element of providence. But there it went with the skillful means