SALON

Asia

Thursday, Jan 8, 1998 8:00 PM UTC

In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great

The tale of journalist and filmmaker Michael Wood's journey via Landrover, camel, foot and boat in the path of Alexander the Great.

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By early spring Alexander was ready to go. He had to cross the Hindu Kush, the great rampart of mountains which rises north of Kabul — the “killer of Hindus” as it was called by the Muslim conquerors who came this way in the Middle Ages. This was the great route used by all invaders of the subcontinent. There are about sixteen passes, some up to 5 or 6000 metres in height, but only three have really counted in history. The main one today is the Salang Pass, now a modern road and tunnel used by the Russian convoys on their way up from Termez. The second route is westwards to Bamian, one of the most extraordinary sites in Asia — the Valley of the Great Buddhas. This hauntingly beautiful place, with its gigantic statues carved into the cliffs, was visited by Marco Polo and by the Chinese explorers who came overland to bring back the Buddhist sacred texts from India. But this, and the Salang, were probably barred to Alexander because Bessus had devastated the countryside beyond them all the way to Balkh, the capital of Bactria. Alexander’s intelligence would have informed him that supplying his army was out of the question on those routes. That left him one obvious alternative — the Khawak Pass. This is the eastern route rising up on a gentle gradient. It was used by Tamerlane, Genghis Khan and other invaders of India. This was the route we decided to take.

We prepared for our expedition by renovating the old BBC Landrover and getting hold of a back-up Jeep, with spare axles and tyres (no mean feat in Kabul these days). Then, as the storm-clouds of war gathered over Kabul, with Taliban attacks growing in intensity, we headed north towards Chakrikar and the Panjshir valley to follow once more in Alexander’s footsteps.

At Begram, near Charikar, he founded Alexandria under the Caucasus, with several thousand retired veterans, invalids and press-ganged locals. It is a wide and pleasant plain, 2000 metres up, but sheltered in the lee of the great spurs of the mountains. Fertile and well-watered, the vine and the olive will grow here, some compensation, perhaps, for the men Alexander forced to stay behind. He then continued up the Panjshir valley and into the mountains. The Greeks called these ranges the Caucasus, believing them to be close to the ends of the earth. Here, the army entered mythical space and time: marching under mountains where, so it was said, the Titan Prometheus had been tortured for aeons by Zeus for revealing to humankind the secret of fire and the arts of civilization. Here, as elsewhere with the tales of Hercules and Dionysus, real and mythological history merged in the impressionable mind of the young Alexander.

It took us two days on a very rough road to negotiate the 80 kilometres of the Panjshir valley, driving slowly under great brown ridges which keep the sun off the valley bottoms for the fist two hours of the morning. All along the road we passed ruined Russian gear (this had been one of the main routes by which the Mujahaddin resistance kept up pressure on the invaders). It is a harsh terrain for modern armies, and wrecked APCs (armoured-personnel carriers) lay everywhere. They had met fierce resistance here and, in the end, for all their technological superiority the poor Russian conscripts from Omsk and Tomsk just couldn’t take it. The Macedonians though, like Afghans, were a mountain people, hard as nails. The valley was beautiful: the cold blue water of the river, green gardens and fields, neat brown mud-brick houses, with vivid splashes of colour from the maize and apricots drying on their roofs. And above, the great bare-ribbed mountains.

Alexander’s army must have moved forward only slowly; an immense column miles long; a logistical headache for the high command and for the quartermasters who had to supply and feed them. Even by Landrover it was slow progress, crossing and recrossing the river. The vehicle broke down, ran out of petrol and, at one point, a landslide blocked the route for a night. Then, towards the end of the valley, the stony track began to rise up into the mountains and we passed single lines of travellers on foot and on horseback. Suddenly, it was easy to imagine the Macedonian army stretched out all the way down the Panjshir.

Finally, on the third day, we reached the village of Ao Khawak. It stands at the junction of two fast-flowing mountain rivers. Ahead the path goes up into the mountains of Nuristan, and to the north a rough dirt-track led off towards the Khawak Pass. From there it is about 80 kilometres down into the Pul i Kumri valley. We crossed the Khawak river by a wooden bridge and entered what looks like a nest of brigands and footpads: a huddle of hovels, stables and warehouses of squat stone, timber roofs weighed with heavy stones. There were clusters of dank hostels and smoke-blackened shanties where meals are cooked round the clock for traders and travellers. In the street, there was a great hubbub of activity for, although much of the goods and the people are brought here by truck, this is the jumping-off place for an older kind of travel, by foot and horseback on one of the ancient routes between India and Asia. From here, to get to north Afghanistan, we would have to walk.

In the middle of all this, surrounded by roaring waters and overlooked by the pyramid peak of Deh Parian, we found an open space for hundreds of horses, thin ribby animals with cloth nosebags, wicker panniers, ropes and harnesses. Their drivers are mostly young (old men would not last such a hard life). Wiry young jockeys, thin and sun-blackened, they charge 60,000 Afghanis (about # 12) to take you and your baggage across the mountains. In charge is the redoubtable commander Khalil, a shaggy giant of a man with a long black beard and a gimlet eye. He chose our horses, drivers and arranged for armed guards to accompany us the following day, to ward off the bandits which he said might attack us on the path. We were five strong, Peter, Tim, David, me, and Hanif Sharzat, an Afghan friend and journalist, who had gamely volunteered to be our translator. Hanif speaks Pashto, Farsi, Uzbek, Urdu and Russian, which he reckoned should be enough to talk our way out of the clutches of the various warlords across our path, and get us through to the Afghan-Uzbek border.

We were travelling now only with what we and three horses could carry. Before we set out I experienced another sharp pang of excitement. Once again, as nearly as we could, we were about to experience what the Greeks had gone through, and the sense of treading right in their footsteps was palpable. We had stripped down to essentials: a warm jacket, rucksack, sleeping bag, some emergency food (apples, nuts, and some stony chunks of dried mulberries) and, as always, Arrian and Curtius. We loaded the camera stock-box and the other film gear into rope and cloth panniers, and in the early afternoon our drivers led the horses off over the bridge and up the river valley alongside the rushing torrent. Soon we were into the ravines, then up a narrow dirt path on the first precipitous climb above the river. By three in the afternoon the air was unexpectedly chilly, and the valley bottoms were already in deep shadow as we left Nuristan behind us, the Land of Light, and headed north towards the snowy peaks of the Hindu Kush and, beyond, the fabled Oxus.

That first afternoon, to my surprise, all along the route we saw people — on camels, horses and mules, on foot, too. There were traders, smugglers, refugees, and travellers. We even met some newly-weds, a man with his two wives on horseback, covered from head to foot in billowing robes as their horses gingerly crossed rickety plank bridges and sometimes waded chest-deep through the raging torrent. Sometimes we went up narrow earth paths along towering hillsides over the river gorge, across the face of long stony screes, down which any stumble could have been fatal, but the horses knew the path well. So, I reflected, the Khawak — an ancient route used throughout history — was still a great thoroughfare today. It seemed unbelievable, at first, as I took in the terrain, but the ancient armies were so tough and mobile, that for them this was a serviceable route.

That night we stopped at a cluster of stables and mud-brick dormitories which we shared with our fellow travellers. We ate bread and gruel by oil lamp with the local headman. We were, he told us, the first Westerners to come through since the war with the Russians. During the war the conditions here had been terrible. The people of the Pass had lived in caves by day, emerging only at night to cook and bake their bread. It must have been like that in 329 BC, too: killed if you didn’t give up your precious winter stores to the invaders, killed perhaps even if you did.

Later, as I stretched out on our hostel floor, I turned over the pages of Arrian in the light of a Tilly lamp and reflected once more on the character of Alexander and his men. The Macedonians were inured to war but, even so, the journey was tough. It took the army sixteen days from front-to-tail to get over the Khawak Pass; it was January, bitterly cold at night. For food, they could plunder the winter stores of the locals, but two weeks of food for an army that size runs into several thousand tonnes — and unless they carried it with them they would starve. Reading Arrian in that spot, it also occurred to me that it is virtually the same Afghanistan now. The long vicious war with the Russians has brought them back almost to the same subsistence level. They have got guns now, but otherwise the equation is the same. The same mountains, same harsh climate, same hard people.

Next day we said goodbye to the commander. The situation was tense, with trouble expected ahead, but Khalil had been as good as his word. The local headman left us with two gunmen to hold off bandits reported to be lying ahead in ambush. The path was higher and colder now, the wind more biting. We can guess from the Greeks’ accounts that they, too, found it harder as the land grew more barren. They were into something of a logistical nightmare by now. As we walked on, I found myself trying to make rough calculations: how long does it take an army to march past a single point? Their army could have been spread over 25 kilometres or more. It was for this reason that their crossing of the Khawak had run into a second week; then the supply corps had found it could no longer feed the long line of troops funnelling into the Pass form the Panjshir valley. the army had run out of food.

The quarter masters asked for permission to start killing the pack animals, but there was no wood on the bare hills to make cooking fires, and they were reduced to eating the flesh raw. This they did, but to offset illness, says Arrian, they used the juice of a plant which grew on the mountains, apparently to chew with the meat. Historians have often wondered about this tale. Tall story? Propaganda? Perhaps. But the army doctors would have been trained in the use of herbal medicines — this is still the basis of the Yunnani medicine, practiced in Afghanistan by the hakims who, as I have already mentioned, claim descent from the doctors who went with Alexander. In the event, we only had to ask our horse-handlers to find the answer. There, on the Khawak, grew a plant which fitted the bill. Arrian called it sylphion; we know it as asafoetida — a resin obtained from the roots of plants of the genus Ferula. It grows in the spring and is widely used as medicine. In the Middle Ages it was produced in bulk and sold in the bazaars of Merv and Bukhara. Even during the Russian occupation, we were told, the guerrillas used it to heal wounds and cure stomach upsets. The Greeks had not been telling fairy tales.

We stopped at midday in rarefied air at a subterranean stone-roofed chai-stop where the horsemen took food and the horses grazed on the thin grass. Smoke curled from a cairn of stones over the roof, recalling the Greek story of Afghan houses so bedded down in rocks that only smoke from chimneys showed where they were. We ate hot coarse bread and drank green tea flavoured with cardamoms; someone brought some grapes washed in the icy blue stream below the path. Inside, under a smoke-blackened brick vault, was an ancient samovar, a rice-steamer and various teapots. Along the wall, there was a crowd of turbaned men with bandoliers and guns. In the air was the sweet resinous smell of firewood. On hearing why we were there, an old man told a story that many Greeks had died on Alexander’s passage through the Pass, and that a circle of stones with tattered flags on the way to the top marked the graves of his troops.

We pushed on up the long slope, as the wind started to course down between the hills. Sixteen kilometres up from Ao Khawak, at a little under 4000 metres, we reached the summit. In thin air and a chill wind, we were surrounded by snow streaked peaks with creamy white clouds coming over the tops. The last few metres drew us on to see the view the Greeks had seen all those years before. Again, there was that eerie feeling of standing on the very spot where Alexander had stood. He knew at that moment he had got through, that his gamble had paid off. The Pass had been undefended. Below us, the road snaked down, still sunlit towards northern Afghanistan and the Oxus, beyond which lay the great plains of central Asia.

“Nothing put him off,” said Arrian. “Starvation, the freezing cold, nothing — he just kept coming on and on. And in the end his enemies were struck with fear and amazement.”

Standing shivering on the top of the Khawak Pass, it was easy for us to see why. Once again Alexander had shown that left any chance he would take it. As we set off we met a group of Tajiks and Uzbeks coming up from Cental Asia. The way was clear, the highwaymen had been chased off. “Get a move on and you’ll be in Anderab by nightfall,” one said.

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INTO BACTRIA

For Alexander, the way to Bactria lay open. He could now rest and recuperate in the fertile valleys around Kunduz while the tail of his exhausted and starving army filtered through. These lands are particularly fertile. The great traveller Ibn Battuta, when he crossed the Khawak in 1333, stopped here for forty days, and speaks of their “fine pastures and herbage.” We rested at Pul i Kumri with the hospitable local warlord, an Ismaeli Shia. It was an unlikely meeting in such a place and time. Jaffar went to school in Harrow and once delivered pizzas in Detroit. He and his clan have protected their valleys from the war around them, and from the passage of armies, while Afghanistan has fallen back into its ancient regional divisions. Such warlords seem to be affectionately regarded by their people, but they inhabit a strange world. Some I have met mix intermittent bursts of warfare with prodigious drinking sessions on Russian vodka and Johnny Walker, enlivened by Tajik girls and the latest CDs from the West. I guessed the Macedonians were no different. In his villa Jaffar showed me antiquities, a great Greek inscription from a nearby site, medieval bronzes from Balkh, Greek coins from lost cities on the Oxus. His, I suspect, was a world not unlike that of 330 BC, a time of shifting allegiances as local hard men try to keep their position like the satraps of old. Back in Alexander’s day, however, the difference was that the outside power — Alexander’s power — was so overwhelming nobody could resist him.

After a few days of Jaffar’s hospitality, we decided to push on. As we set out to head north once more, I experienced a sudden sharp taste of anxiety. Jaffar’s tanks were rumbling through the streets belching black oily diesel smoke and the wind was whipping up fierce eddies of dust as they began to move their forces towards the mountain passes we had just crossed. On BBC World Service radio we heard that the Taliban were closing in on Kabul. We were besieged by ever-present thoughts of war; so much of Afghan history has been — and still is — foreign invasion and civil struggle. Once the Russians had been beaten, no one seemed to care any more if the land was torn to pieces. So the cycle of history comes round. Poor Afghanistan.

We had hired a battered Russian pick-up to make the run north to the Oxus. It had no rear windows, which made it pleasantly draughty by day when the sun scorches, but freezing by night. We were also beset by all the usual worries about breaking down as we headed on in Alexander’s footsteps.

As soon as Alexander’s army had recovered from the crossing of the Khawak, he moved quickly towards the Oxus river, which divides present-day Afghanistan from the former Soviet Central Asia. Following in his track through northern Afghanistan, you go through a string of fertile valleys between barren ranges of hills; then enter huge gorges which lead down to the Oxus plain.

That nightfall we came to Tashkurgan, the Greek Aornos, to find the town shattered by war. The ancient citadel, with its great mud-brick castle which stood over lush orchards, had been pounded to bits in the fighting; the lovely wooden souk, and the bazaar whose ceiling had been delightfully inlaid with blue Chinese porcelain bowls, had been levelled; the old town was a wasteland of devastated mud-brick buildings. This was no time to explore. The town is held by Hisbe Islami who have been known to kidnap Westerners and seize their gear — especially cameras. Suddenly our driver muttered urgently that we should get out of the place. We attempted to, but, unbelievably, we broke down on the outskirts just by an armed post. Providence intervened. At that moment the muezzin sang out the call for Friday prayers and our potential captors melted away, just as a dust-storm whirled down the street and hid us from prying eyes. Five minutes tinkering under the bonnet by torchlight and we were on the road again. After a couple of more hours huddled in cold bumpy darkness, we entered Mazar. We had made it across Afghanistan from Kabul to the north. Given the fact that we were only five people, and unarmed at that, it seemed an achievement. At the UN rest-house, a kindly diplomat gave us half a crate of Turkish beer and we had a quiet celebration.

More Michael Wood.

Thursday, Dec 18, 1997 8:00 PM UTC

Won Ton Lust

In this excerpt from his new book, 'Won Ton Lust,' John Krich discovers an edible legend in Chengdu, China.

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“When you go to Beijing, you see how small a rank you hold. When you travel to Canton, you realize how little money you’ve got. But when you come to Chengdu, you find out how big is your appetite.”

With this contemporary proverb, a sharp-talking deputy from the Sichuan People’s Congress welcomes us to “The Storehouse of Heaven.” The capital of China’s “bread basket” province for a thousand years, Chengdu is less recognizable to Western ears than its home-cooked, chili-laced specialties like twice-cooked pork, tea-smoked duck, dan dan noodles, and ma po dofu. It’s said that travel, near or far, is always the shortcut to finding out who we are. But what sort of persons would fly to the western limits of Han China in a whining old Tupelov-154 just to sample a storied bowl of quivering bean curd, most likely too peppery for ingestion?

Apparently, we are Very Important People. Thanks to a well-placed friend in Beijing, we’re met and led through the airport mobs to a black Nissan limo with siren and bubble-top light. Our lead blocker, Mr. Xie, is no sluggish party hack. His chubby cheeks, button nose, and deep-set eyes instantly suggest an impish koala. His full head of coarse hair stands at attention in uncombed swirls, leaving the impression that he’s just got out of bed. Draped uneasily over a buttoned vest, Mr. Xie’s standard-issue black, double-breasted jacket serves as a kind of shawl for his broad shoulders.

As our limo weaves around horse carts and tractors through a rain-speckled night, our front-seat barker fairly blows a steady stream of chatter in Sichuan’s clipped and choppy dialect. This beer-bellied Buddhist’s implacable self-confidence has not been the slightest bit sapped by twenty-eight years as a People’s Liberation Army soldier stationed in Tibet border posts. By the time we’re nearing the center of this heartland hub of six million, we’ve heard all about Mr. Xie’s fluency in Russian and Tibetan, and extensive knowledge of Chinese medicine, including the various uses of pig bones.

“As a chef I’ve mastered at least sixty local dishes. I can teach you the best technique for deep meditation and people say I’m the best fortuneteller. Did you know that Chairman Mao himself used the I Ch’ing to find his safe hideout in Yenan?” As modern as he is traditional, Mr. Xie adds, “By the way, can I facilitate you in any form of economic investment?”

Mei and I can only glance at one another in amazement. What does this guy eat for breakfast? Who put the life force known as ch’i in his Cheerios? Or is this our first sampling of Sichuan’s self-proclaimed “red pepper spirit”? Instead of depositing us in the usual musty banquet hall, Mr. Xie has our limo pull up alongside a mangy row of white-tiled, open-air stalls. At a four-table affair bathed in butcher-shop pink fluorescence, Mr. Xie barks instructions to several kids in white caps nearly as charcoal-smudged as their cheeks. The woks fire up and by the time you can say cornstarch, we have Sichuan’s signature dishes laid before us: soft bean curd drowned in oil and a dollop of minced pork, hot-and-sour duck’s blood soup, hand-twisted noodles flecked with pickled cabbage, and last but hardly least, my obligatory fish-flavored shredded pork. This first rendition in the land of its birth, tangy and decidedly fishless, sears my tongue toward Nirvana. Mr. Xie beams with pride. After five minutes in Chengdu, I’m already “finding out the size of my appetite.”

Fancier isn’t necessarily better in the city with China’s liveliest street life. And this People’s Deputy isn’t in it for the luxury, either. Applying his formidable zealousness to the task of finding a bargain for two “humble writers,” Mr. Xie escorts us to a backpackers’ hotel where teenagers snooze with their heads on the reception counter. So much for free board in some cushy state dacha! This hotel lobby is unadorned but for the obligatory bank of clocks set to numerous time zones, all of them wrong. It’s a bad sign when the mattress in our room has no sheets and we’re relieved that none of the lights switch on. But Mr. Xie’s face is too mischievous to ever lose face. “Come on! My friend is the manager at a much better place!”

We hightail it to a high-rise VIP suite hung with gold lami curtains in what must be the Mildew Wing. The red carpet treatment would work better if the carpet weren’t covered with black blotches. We wonder if the heaps of tea leaves have been left in the toilet for us to read our touring futures. Then we’re refused the room for failing to show a marriage license, until Mei reaches for her U.S. passport — that worldwide license to get away with anything!

“When the sun comes out in Sichuan,” Mr. Xie warns us, “all the dogs begin to bark.” In the perpetually shrouded winter clamminess, Mei and I can hardly see the humongous statue of a saluting Chairman Mao, alabaster in his pea coat, rising above one end of the People’s Road. Like all Chinese cities, Chengdu’s population consists of millions more than you’d imagine and millions less than it seems when you’re trying to get anywhere. The usual waves of weary bicyclists churn past this month’s massive display of Party exhortation, “Fight Bravely Three Years to Make Chengdu Model Hygienic City!”

Fortunately, the ruled boulevards give way to an unhygienic chaos. Chengdu’s wooden two-story houses look almost Elizabethan with their boxy overhangs and variations of exposed beam and thatching. Sichuan’s famed bounty is showcased by a sidewalk abundance of straw baskets and bamboo bird cages, delicate stacks of budding eggplant, flowers and tobacco, fans and paper cuttings and bonsai trees. Workers hand grind sesame oils in giant woks; old men puff on long-stemmed bamboo pipes. Kung fu epics are projected in converted, flap-covered teahouses — the only cinemas in the world where the seats are made of bamboo.

China finally looks the way foreigners have always imagined it. Along every riverbank, temple courtyard or bamboo grove, there’s another teahouse. These are hardly sites for contemplation, but sprawling, noisy affairs where all age groups compete to stretch perpetually stained cups of soaked green tea leaves with composting piles of chewed pumpkin seeds laid beside cigarette butts. On every sidewalk, too, outdoor loungers stick skewers of frog thighs, pig livers and baby sparrows into a sludgy, week-old broth that’s divided into spicy and nonspicy sections like the symbol for yin and yang. I’ve been led to believe that the real popularity of the Sichuan hot pot is due to the opium that’s added to addict customers. But Mr. Xie will assure us that any opium in the broth is just the non-narcotic flower known as the keke. Yet another of my Oriental fantasies shot to hell.

Mei and I prefer to stop within the calm portals of an immense, luridly painted-up model of a Qing Dynasty mansion that’s topped with a huge neon sign saying, “Chengdu Snack City.” Around a reflecting pool lined with covered pavilions, a dozen or so restaurants have been grouped together in government-sponsored competition. We get dizzy choosing among the trays of saucer-sized platters loaded with variants of noodle dough soaked in degrees of chili oil. Lounging on silk pillows under eaves covered with fiery dragons, we plow through as many as twenty-four dishes. Slippery folds of wun tun with little or no stuffing look like albino goldfish slithering in a truly red sea. No asterisks or printed peppers warn us of impending spiciness. There are no menus here and every snack is hot stuff.

Now my tongue has a true out-of-mouth experience. Or am I in heaven? Chengdu’s much-extolled ma la numbness is provided by generous garnishes of ground fagara, a half-sweet and half-deadly peppercorn that was imported along the trade routes some six hundred years back. Judging by its ubiquitous presence atop every dish, it’s difficult to imagine what the Sichuan diet might have included before that. According to Chinese medicine, the inner yang fires stoked by the pepper counteracts outer humidity and dampness. And the relative prosperity of the peasants has always made this a province with fewer distinctions between down-home and palace foods. Every dish tastes tugged from the earth.

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“The four seas and the eight horizons all gathered into one cloud,” wrote the seventh-century poet Du Fu, whose recreated cottage is Chengdu’s leading tourist site. “You can’t tell an ox coming from a horse going, or the muddy Ching from clear Wei.”

Neither can Mei or I on our way to one of the shrines of Chinese cuisine. Suddenly, our taxi’s engine starts racing inexplicably. The driver pulls over with a shrug. “Overheated,” he tells Mei. Just coincidentally, there’s a motorcycle rickshaw waiting on the spot. As soon as we’ve transferred into the carriage, the taxi pulls away, good as new. Two fares to get us three blocks.

Open to a busy, tree-lined boulevard, Chengdu’s Chen Ma Po Dofu Restaurant is dimly lit at noon, with rotating ceiling fans, an old oak bar, a blackboard on which specialties have been scrawled in white chalk and a monstrous charnel house of a kitchen. The level of noise and excessive rudeness of the waitresses augur well. This is the direct descendant of the roadhouse run by Mrs. Chen, a widow with facial scars from a childhood disease who became a legend through her ma po dofu, now appearing on menus throughout the planet but rarely translated in its full meaning of “pockmarked grandma’s tofu.” Transcending a life of toil following the accidental death of her husband in 1901, she created her signature dish by combining the products of a neighboring lamb butcher and bean-curd maker. Was it back at San Francisco’s Hunan Restaurant that I first got hooked on this curious combination of crumbly custard topped with an Oriental ragu?

I can hardly wait to poke my sticks into the original. But impersonal state management and three moves from the original site have done little to maintain quality. The grand creation itself is served in a green plastic bowl that looks to have been recycled a million or two times. This ma po dofu is pretty much like other versions I’ll have in Sichuan: a buttery slab of fresh curd plopped deep into red chili oil, topped with a dollop of pork meat, and garnished with numbing peppercorns. A meal in itself, as they say, without any of the West’s frivolous scallions or peas.

I try to snap a quick photo back in the kitchen, but an aproned bouncer shoos me out, squawking as though I’m a corporate spy on a raid for Duncan Hines ma po mix. When Mei asks for some tea to rinse down the heat, the answer is Mei you. Pronounced like “mayo,” that phrase was the trademark response to all queries during the Mao era, meaning, “We don’t have any!” Mei is scandalized. Imagine a Chinese restaurant with no tea!

We get better service, and a heaped plate of smoked duck, from a former center of anti-Kuomintang activities that came to be called the Rat Hole Restaurant. And where will the ginger trail lead us tonight? Our stomachs, our eyes, our hearts demand an answer. Eating is more than necessity, it’s the essential adventure, the quest that must be fulfilled most often and therefore offers the surest route to surprise.

Mei keeps asking for a restaurant called Rong Le Yuan and ends up getting pointed down darkened streets reduced to wreckers’ rubble. With her accent, the locals think we’re looking for a playground. So we settle for a private room in a new hot pot palace where a typically scrambled English brochure “invites gentle persons of all ranks to descend.” It is here that I discover my new Sichuanese favorite, the killer shui zhu ro pian — hunks of steamed pork atop a crunchy variant of cabbage all drenched in chili oil.

Afterward, we poke our heads through hanging beads into a nightspot set glamorously beneath a circular highway rotary. The Casablanca Bar features a torch singer who mumbles her way through the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” The waitresses ruin the effect of their leopard-skin miniskirts by standing at attention like choir girls with gloved hands clasped together. The real entertainment comes from a back booth where a drunk “unit leader” is haranguing and slapping around a blubbering underling. The other patrons try not to look, but we can’t help peeking at this spectacle of obeisance. The less dominant man presents first one side of his face to be chastised, then the other.

“Jesus said to turn the other cheek,” Mei whispers. “But here, the god is money.” When a Tibetan monk swathed in gold robes exits a nearby cabaret with a glazed grin, we’re enticed to pay an exorbitant fee for glasses of lemon tea while the “live fashion show” is replaced by a Madonna video. Apparently, Chengdu hasn’t quite got the hang of Western decadence.

For an Eastern touch, Mr. Xie transports us to the Da Fuo, or Big Buddha, carved out of the river cliff to a height of seventy-one meters. Sitting like some beatific lumberjack, hands firmly on its knees, this rather goofy, square-jawed Da Fuo appears to be waiting for the next helping of dofu. Recently, a peasant from Guangdong came up with the remarkable discovery that the entire bluff itself forms the supine body of an even more gigantic Buddha — with a pagoda erected right where a phallus should rise. Shouldn’t a Buddha be contentedly flaccid? This prophet who laughs at the world can be taken home in the form of a battery-powered, rubber doughboy. “Ha-ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho!” goes this zen Santa each time it rocks from side to side in our satchels. The thing sounds just like Mr. Xie.

Of course, the main reason we’ve come to the grimy river junction of Leshan is for a luncheon laid on by local officials. Our table has been loaded down with such perks as stir-fried venison, deep-fried swallows, and boiled, whole turtle. Every second bite, we have to stand for toasts with fiery rice wines. I have no idea what our provincial hosts could possibly want from us in return, though one bigwig with oddly hazel eyes pulls Mei aside for information about getting a cousin into an American dental college. This food is given for the sake of showing what one can give. Enforced by Confucian ritual or Communist pecking order, that’s the highest value in China.

“We have no mother and no father,” declares Mr. Xie as he eats and drinks everyone else under the table. “The People’s Congress is our family!”

Sounds like the Masons, but I doubt whether their meetings end in a private room made of sparkly foam walls, equipped with the latest karaoke system and projection TV. Mr. Xie is a born ham who joins Mei in a duet of rousing folk tunes from fifties’ propaganda films about Chinese army conquests. Tibet’s greatest hits. The accompanying “music videos” consist of ruddy-cheeked nomads strolling happily amidst herds of yak.

We don’t get in touch with the true spirit of Sichuan until the wife of a local carpet exporter suggests that we have supper with her father-in-law. “He’s something of a food expert,” she tells Mei, in what turns out to be quite an understatement. Whatever his profession, this occupant’s service to the nation has gained him the biggest apartment I’ve entered in all of China, complete with parquet floors and a solarium. Though his business card is too small to hold all his titles, Mr. Liao Bokang could be anyone’s archetypal bow-tie-wearing daddy. With his squared-off crew cut, bottle-thick glasses and salesman’s smile, this Chairman of the Sichuan Political Association reminds me of a Chinese Ozzie (as in Harriet). Like many Sichuanese, this former underground fighter and government official is a tiny bundle of energy. Unassuming and highly practical, he embodies the best characteristics found in Sichuan’s greatest political officer, China’s number one “capitalist roader.”

“In 1950, when Deng Xiaoping came to Chongqing and became the local secretary, he saw a bean flour noodle stand,” Liao Bokang says of his mentor. “Since he had left the region when he was ten, he missed the food from his childhood so much that he went to try some. When the chief of the Security Police tried to stop him for security reasons, Deng said that the safest thing is to go where no one expects you to go, to eat what no one expects you to eat.” The wit and wisdom of our supreme leader, according to Liao Bokang.

Once, Comrade Liao supervised the construction of the first bridge across the Yangtze River. Now he directs drivers, servants, and children with the unshakable confidence that is part of the product of China’s unquestioned respect for age. The only query that leaves him stumped is where to find “the one restaurant to present you with the best of Sichuan.” Like Mei and I, Comrade Liao is torn between authentic greasy spoons and elaborate, if less tasty, banquet houses. He settles somewhat grudgingly on Longchaoshou, generally acknowledged as Chengdu’s premier dining house. We’re whisked there in his black limo, then led through a ground-floor noodle house reeking of disinfectant. A table of honor is waiting for us in more exclusive surroundings, beside a traditional Chinese orchestra. As we’re seated, Liao Bokang declares, “Food is the point where the material meets the spiritual.”

Especially meals like this. Over the next two hours, we will sample eight cold dishes, five variants of dumplings in hot oil, chicken and pork over sizzling rice, chicken with peanuts and chilis, a whole fish, and of course, twice-cooked pork. In this version, the strips of meat are fatty and baconlike from the salty cure of a concentrated bean paste. Instead of cabbage, these are tossed in crunchy, hollow shoots of young garlic.

“There’s the dish that won a hundred million hearts!” Liao Bokang swears with his broad grin, speaking for the entire populace of Sichuan. “And it must be made only with bean paste from Pi Country!”

Mr. Liao tries to slow himself with the proverb, “When you eat, you shouldn’t speak.” But he clearly doesn’t believe it. “Still, words cannot convey the best dishes, the true feelings in life,” he waxes, turning coyly toward his demure and more wizened wife. “To say ‘I love you’ to someone, that’s too easy.”

Still waiting for those words after fifty years, the blushing Mrs. Liao tries to hush him up by joking, “Just tell them about the food!’

Pouring out his heart, the old man explains how everything essential to Chinese culture is connected to eating. After all, “Min yi shi wei tian.” Liao Bokang is the first of a hundred sages worldwide who cite this scripture from Confucius. Translations range anywhere from “People consider food uppermost” to “Daily fare is as high as heaven for the common man.”

“But don’t ask Confucius for the answers,” Liao Bokang cautions. “He died two thousand years ago!” Better that I should ask him about the origin of dian xin (dim sum in Cantonese). “These snacks are called ‘treasures to touch the heart’ because they derive from buns which were easy for soldiers to carry when they left home. During the wars of the Sung Dynasty, these foods were the only reminders of beloved places for men far from home.”

His home province has taken their food highly spiced ever since traders brought the chili from India, because “we’re in the center of China, and that means everything here has to be more intense.” To him, pepper represents the “characteristic of our present time. To do things faster. It’s like disco in music.” But he corrects the general belief that kung pao chicken comes from the Chinese words “to explode.” In fact, the dish was invented by one General Gung Bao, a renaissance man who was both gourmet and dam-builder, a master chef and the executioner of the Empress Ci Xi’s favorite eunuch. As for the reason the meat is so lean in the centerpiece of tea-smoked duck, “That’s because in Sichuan, to get our birds to market, we make them run a marathon.”

With emphatic hand gestures, and a big smile that undercuts all seriousness, Mr. Liao illustrates how our tea cups are narrowed at the base to ensure an even circulation of leaves. To him, “Chopsticks are a perfect example of physics, an application of the lever and the supporting point.”

In China, the ultimate reference point is always food. Even Liao Bokang’s description of the planet’s cultural divide is based on eating. “In the world, one third of the people use chopsticks, one third use forks, and one third use their hands.” So he’s able to flatter me with the assessment that, “This makes you a one-hundred-percent man.”

Liao Bokang is an inexhaustible fount of the Chinese beliefs that Mao’s fevered crusades had sought to banish. “Just keep a big heart and your health in balance,” he advises, dabbing his mouth with his napkin to suggest that the food orgy is nearly finished. “Try to look at everything that happens from the heights of history.”

Which is how this one-time revolutionary can finish out his life surrounded by a table’s worth of relatives who dote on his every pronouncement. But this contented cadre envies my work. Offering the best definition of travel, Liao Bokang confesses, “How I’d love to see what one hasn’t seen, to hear what one hasn’t heard, to taste what one hasn’t tasted.”

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John Krich has been covering China for 20 years, most recently as the Asian Wall St Journal's main food/sports/culture writer. He's the author of "El Beisbol," "Won Ton Lust" and other literary travelogues. More John Krich.

Monday, Dec 15, 1997 8:00 PM UTC

The expat's guide to Tokyo

Inside tips on pursuing business and pleasure in Tokyo without breaking the budget.

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Most business travelers don’t know that in Tokyo it’s possible to find a free tour guide, book a reasonably priced hotel room and get paid to eat a meal. By following a few tips, you can find travel to the capital — whether for business or pleasure — unexpectedly affordable.

If you’re coming to town for an extended stay, you should know about a week-long air-and-hotel package that offers a tremendous value, a deal that was unthinkable two years ago, when the dollar was trading at only 80 yen. Both Airport Travel (800-310-5549) and Travis Pacific (800-227-4352) are offering one-week stays in Tokyo with round-trip flights from the U.S. on Singapore Airlines and accommodations at the Tokyo Hilton for $999. A half-day tour of Tokyo is included as well.

If you’re not traveling on a package deal, of course, you’re on your own getting from the airport to downtown. What are the options? Well, you can always take a taxi — but even if you’re getting reimbursed, $200 for 40 miles of traffic seems excessive. The NEX (Narita Express) train is faster and a ticket costs only about $25. (All figures in this article are calculated using an exchange rate of 125 yen to $1.) The slower Keisei line costs even less. Another option that is slightly cheaper than NEX is the Limousine Bus. While it might take a little longer than the train, the big advantage of the bus is door-to-door service from Narita Airport to most major hotels.

One of those hotels, the Keio Plaza Inter-Continental, offers business travelers an especially good deal. Members of the hotel’s “Executive International Club” can take advantage of guaranteed U.S. dollar rates starting at $190 for a single room. Membership offers a variety of other perks, including full American breakfast, health club passes and extended check-out time. And if you want to take a client out for drinks, the Keio’s second-floor “Let’s Bar” offers a budget-friendly happy hour special: Between 5 and 7 p.m. weekdays, all drinks are 600 yen (about $5).

Other Tokyo hotels such as the Okura, Tokyu and Four Seasons also have membership clubs and offer special rates and package deals. In addition, prices at the Prince chain are always good. Rates start at 13,000 yen (about $104) per night at the Sunshine City Prince and 14,500 ($116) for a room at the Shinjuku Prince.

In your travels around Tokyo, taxis should be avoided, except for short jaunts. The subway is faster and much cheaper, and the new automatic fare cards make it even easier to navigate the extensive train system. If you’re in need of help, most ticket-takers can offer rudimentary guidance, or look for stations marked “Information” in the main subway stops. Of course, many passersby can also speak English and will be happy to help a lost traveler.

At the end of the business day, a good way to get rid of stress
is by plunging into a traditional Japanese bath. The Jakotsu baths
in the wonderfully old-fashioned Asakusa area of Tokyo have indoor and outdoor pools, as well as a rock garden and
waterfall. A plunge into the past is cheap too — less than $5. (For information within Tokyo, call 3841-8645; from outside Tokyo, add the prefix 03.)

If you’re shy about getting naked with the natives, there are other things
to do, many of them free or surprisingly inexpensive. The Edo Tokyo museum
(03-3626-9974) is a huge complex that chronicles the city’s history
between the years 1603 and 1868. Admission is $4 and there’s a taped
guided tour available at no additional cost. For a frothy diversion, visit
the Suntory Beer Plant (0423-60-9591) in Fuchu — about 20 minutes by subway from downtown Tokyo — for free tours and beer
sampling. Window-shopping illuminates another side of Japan. Try walking the streets of the Ginza for mind-boggling department store displays; Shibuya for specialty boutiques; or the aforementioned Asakusa for temples and traditional shops.

For an inside look at a traditional sport, visit a sumo
training session. Tickets to the wrestling matches themselves are expensive and hard to come by,
but visits to the Kasugano (03-3631-1871) or Azumazeki (03-3625-0033)
sumo stables are free. Before you go, have your hotel concierge call
to make sure the wrestlers are in town. And while you’re at the
stables, remember that no photographs are allowed — and that excessive noise bothers the big guys. You wouldn’t want to get on a sumotori-san’s wrong side.

A more conventional way to get up close and personal with the Japanese is to arrange a free guide through the Tokyo Metropolitan Student Goodwill Guide
Club (03-3201-3331). The Home Visit Program is another terrific complimentary
service that arranges for foreign visitors to spend a few hours in a
Japanese home. A little advance planning is required in this case: You have to apply in
person 24 hours or, preferably, two days in advance at the Tokyo
Information Center (First Basement Floor, Tokyo International Forum,
3-5-1, Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku). Highly recommended. In Tokyo, call 3201-3331 for details.

Of course, road warriors do not live by window-shopping and people-meeting alone. Sometimes you have to eat. When it’s time for a meal, here are a few tips. Look for a teishoku (pronounced TAY-sho-ku); this is a set menu meal with drink, side dishes, entree and dessert all
included. Most restaurants offer them, and they are always the best deal. Department store restaurants
are generally not too expensive and usually have plastic food displays in
their windows, great for pointing and ordering.

Many Japanese hotels also have surprisingly good and affordable buffets and set
menus available. The Palace Hotel buffet lunch in its Swan
restaurant starts at 3,000 yen ($24) for lunch and 4,000 ($32) for
dinner. The elegant Park Hyatt Hotel has a set menu Japanese lunch in
the gorgeous Kozue restaurant for 3,700 ($30). A set dinner at the
hotel’s Girandole is about the same. The Top of Ginza, at the Ginza
Dai-Ichi Hotel, offers buffets that cost about $16 for lunch and $38 for
dinner.

Big eaters can take advantage of all-you-can-eat restaurants such as
Sutamina Taro (03-3604-9689) in Adachi. For around $20 diners can stuff
themselves with sushi, grilled beef, rice curry, salad, cake and drinks.
If you really want to impress your colleagues, show your sutamina by taking on one of Tokyo’s eating contests: The
Ramen Koshin restaurant (03-3412-2531) challenges diners to eat a jumbo
bowl of ramen in 30 minutes. This $20 ramen is big enough for 4 people —
but if you finish it, it’s free. If you can put away two big bowls, you get 30,000
yen ($240 bucks!).

The Japan National Tourist Organization offers a wealth of free information on cost-cutting and culture-exploring in Tokyo. For an extensive list of inexpensive restaurants, and a rich range of other tips, visit the JNTO Web site.

If you live in the United States or Canada, you may also want to contact the following regional JNTO offices:

One Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 1250

New York, NY 10020

(212) 757-5640

jntonyc@interport.net

401 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 770

Chicago, IL 60611

(312) 222-0874

jntochi@mcs.net

360 Post Street, Suite 601

San Francisco, CA 94108

(415) 989-7140

sfjnto@aol.com

624 S. Grand Avenue, Suite 1611

Los Angeles, CA 90017

(213) 623-1952

jntolax@interramp.com

165 University Avenue

Toronto, Ontario M5H 3B8

(416) 366-7140

TorontoJNTO@Inforamp.net

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Mary Beth Maslowski has lived, worked and traveled extensively in Japan for the past eight years. She recently moved to Berlin. More Mary Beth Maslowski.

Monday, Dec 1, 1997 8:00 PM UTC

Newsreal: America's Asian “Berlin Wall” has crumbled

Thanks largely to American Cold War politics, Asia has been fed a steady diet of undemocratic regimes and corrupt leaders. No wonder the current economic turmoil has been such a shock to their systems.

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“Everything is going to be fine.” That’s the message that President Clinton has been urgently attempting to convey about the economic turmoil engulfing Asia. But is it? Last week, the 18-nation Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation summit endorsed a $78 billion International Monetary Fund rescue plan that will likely mean severe austerity for a number of economically troubled Asian nations.

Meanwhile, economic analysts have been at pains to assure us that Japan is not on the verge of an economic meltdown, despite the closing of the country’s fourth-largest brokerage firm, Yamaichi Securities, and what appears to be a rather shaky banking system.

Salon spoke with Patrick Smith, author of the critically acclaimed “Japan: A Reinterpretation” published by Pantheon Books earlier this year. Smith, a former correspondent in Asia for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and the New Yorker says Asia’s current turmoil is not temporary, and may be the beginning of a seismic regional shift that could take years to play itself out.

At last week’s APEC summit, President Clinton referred to the turmoil in Asia as “a few little glitches” and then later seemed to be more serious about its implications. Which assessment do you think is the correct one?

I think it’s a fundamental shift. It represents what the writer Robert Shaplen would have called “the turning of the wheel.” Put another way, our Berlin Wall in Asia has fallen. It was a wall not made out of bricks but out of corrupt forms of capitalism and papier-mbchi democracies. Their leaders existed under glass for 50 years. They thought they were political leaders. They were not. They were redistributors of wealth and corruption and money changers, basically. And they were our clients; they were our satellites, with all that implied. What’s happening now is that globalization has come to Asia, and the party’s over.

How badly is the party going to end? There’s talk of a new domino theory in Asia, in which the cycle of currency devaluations, bankruptcies and austerity measures sap the political strength of the countries involved. Is it that serious?

Yes, it is. The deal in Asia was always implicit: You get plenty to eat — an attractive thing to Asians because poverty was so endemic for so many centuries — and we run things. You don’t get democracy, but you get a big bank account. That was the social contract. The problem was, to keep the deal going, high growth has to be maintained at all costs. During a recession, the public works projects in Malaysia and these countries were just flabbergasting. They pulled out all the stops because everybody had to work, everybody had to have a rising income, no matter whether the growth rate came from manufacturing, trade or public works spending. Now that the equilibrium that had to be maintained between political peace and economic growth is breaking down. The question now is: Where are these guys going to run to?

And where do you think that will be?

It’s hard to predict. These economies are not going down the tubes, but they’re going to have to absorb a lot of shock. One of the most important questions is political leadership. The way we ran Asia during the Cold War was not conducive to producing qualified leaders. Stability was the first priority, not democracy. Basically our attitude was that good, solid anti-communist thugs would do just fine. Look at (Indonesian President) Suharto. He’s had to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bail-out, but he’s not too pleased about it. He has the banks of his sons and daughters to think about.

You’re saying the implications are more political than economic.

Yes. Over the long term, these countries will emerge from this either more authentically democratic, instead of just pretend-democratic, or they will be pronouncedly more authoritarian. And America will have a lot to answer for. I’m not one of these people that says it’s all America’s fault, but looking at this clearly and with a decent regard for history, a lot of this can be placed at our doorstep. A lot more than we’re talking about in our newspapers, that’s for sure.

Is Japan one of the dominoes?

No, it has much too much money in the bank. Japan is wealthy beyond
what we can imagine. The postal savings system there has something like $800 billion in it. At the same time, Japan is a quintessential case of what I’m talking about. There’s a leadership vacuum because we never encouraged leadership to develop
after the war. You can’t go on like that forever.

Do you think Japan will try to export its way out of economic
troubles and send a lot more goods America’s way?

It’s already started to do that, and who can blame them? And we
started all that after the war. We put a few strategic industries back together, we reconstructed the Ministry of Trade and Industry and said, “Here, export. It will make you strong.” Since then, every recession has seen the Japanese export their way out it. They
are going to report a trade surplus with the United States worth $65 billion this year. That’s a big number.

Meanwhile, America’s trade gap gets ever wider. Are we going to see more friction between the U.S. and Japan?

We already are. In Vancouver, Clinton had a meeting with
(Japanese Prime Minister) Hashimoto and really barked at him. “Stop exporting and raise domestic demand,” he said. But that’s not very
realistic. The Japanese already consume their asses off. A friend of mine in Tokyo who was working for British Petroleum had a perfectly functioning Sony Trinitron color TV in his living room. He found it in a garbage heap at the end of the block. I think we assume an elasticity of demand in Japan that simply isn’t there. They are closer to the limits of their consumption than we understand.

But their economy remains highly regulated. It’s still difficult to get American companies and American goods into the country.

They’ve been cranking out the exports for a long
time, and by their experience, it hasn’t exactly been an abject failure. They think, “The Americans are groaning? Well, hey,
they’ve been doing that for nearly 30 years. We know how to keep them in line. We’ll just keep talking and keep the ball in the air.” So it’s difficult to expect overnight change.

What will it take for Japan to change?

None of the changes that we want to take place will
happen before there is a greater measure of democracy, and the
Japanese citizenry are able and informed enough to turn people out of office, to make choices politically and to manifest those choices publicly. That’s not a short-term process. The (ruling) LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) is not going to take itself out of office because it judges it best for Japan. The bureaucracy is not going
to write new regulations and reduce its power. This comes down to popular preferences, and until they get the mechanisms to organize and articulate those preferences politically, Japan is going to be a problem nation.

Overall, how do you see Asia’s economic turmoil affecting the U.S.?

Through markets, mostly. There’ll be more Asian exports, and they’re going to be cheaper. And the Asians are going to be buying less from Japan and less from us. Already economic
forecasters are predicting that three-quarters of a point could be shaved off the U.S. growth rate in 1998 because the Asians aren’t going to be buying. That could be a big problem.

Is there an upside?

Yes. I think many Asian companies could begin to move away from
management styles and ownership philosophies that were based on family relationships — a kind of pre-modern management, if you will. There could be more room for mergers and acquisitions, joint venture partnerships, shared equity and all those other 20th century ideas that even good, solid companies in Asia didn’t want to have anything to do with. All those Confucian management practices could go, and that might be a good thing for American companies. On the equity side? Obviously, these markets are right down in the
basement now. A moment will surely arrive when it’s time to buy stock.

Following on the domino theory analogy, is there light at the end of the economic turmoil tunnel for Asia?

It could go either way. Some other things have been unleashed here that are going to ripple through the economies and the politics of the region for a very long time. My point is that Asia can’t stand still any longer. There are a lot of transitions coming. There could be a lot of violence.

But let’s go
back to where we began. Our Berlin Wall has fallen. There’s no more coddling these economies. They make mistakes; they pay for them. They’re going into a different world, and they’re going to have to decide: authority or democracy, primitive or modern, global or not. It will be an interesting period.

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Jonathan Broder is Salon's Washington correspondent. More Jonathan Broder.

Tuesday, Jul 22, 1997 6:50 PM UTC

Don't get off the elephant!

Exploring the hill tribes and opium fields of northern Thailand on foot sounded like a great adventure. It wasn't.

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the idea had been, at the outset, to ride elephants around northern Thailand. Take in some temples. Visit a few villages. Dip a toe into the hilly jungle. Do, in other words, the tourist’s Thailand. But somehow, after a day in Chiang Mai, the plan changed. That smart, civilized and sober concept was lost in the tropical heat, humidity and licentiousness — and what emerged instead was hard to define. We would do something that tourists don’t do. Our Golden Triangle, we decided, would be the real Golden Triangle. Elephants. Hill tribes. Guns. Opium. Rice paddies. And jungle.
From air-conditioned hotel rooms in Chiang Mai it seemed like a good idea.

Chiang Mai, a city of 156,000 in Northern Thailand, is where MTV stops. MTV Asia blares in Hong Kong high-rises and Bangkok brothels, in Kuala Lumpur discos and Macau casinos, but Chiang Mai is beyond the reach of the Asianet satellite that broadcasts MTV. And when MTV Asia — Japanese idol singers, Indian heavy metal bands, Kylie Minogue and all — isn’t on the tube, you really feel remote. (There is something reassuring about a VJ, any VJ, even if he speaks half in Chinese and his name is Woo.) Where MTV ends, the Golden Triangle begins.

it was the introduction of the opium poppy for cultivation by British and French merchants in the mid-19th century that changed Chiang Mai from a prosperous center for Theravada Buddhism to the booming economic heart of northern Thailand. Before 1800, opium smoking in Burma, Laos and Thailand, the three countries whose border regions make up the Golden Triangle, had been virtually unheard of. By 1930 there were 6,441 government-regulated opium dens. The Kingdom of Siam, Thailand’s predecessor state, earned 14 percent of its tax revenues through its 972 licensed opium dens. While Chiang Mai had once been a center for pottery, weaving, silver work and woodcarving, it now became the destination point for hundreds of mule caravans hauling the bulk of the Golden Triangle’s annual production of 3,000 tons of opium.
As demand for refined opium products like heroin and morphine has increased in Asia and the West, the economics of the Golden Triangle, which produces 73 percent of the world’s opium, have become ever more intertwined with the poppy plant. A succession of local warlords, some with CIA backing because of their staunch anti-communist stances, have ruled the region and fought for control of its rich harvest. Thai generals, Shan rebels, communist guerrillas and exiled Kuomintang (Nationalist Chinese) commanders have all, at one time, sought and controlled a large piece of the opium action. The business of opium is so immense — heroin generates $2 million a day on the streets of New York alone — that its windfall has financed wars and toppled governments. (In 1990 the United States government indicted Shan rebel leader, opium warlord and Chiang Mai local Khun Sa as an international drug trafficker, labeling him “the self-proclaimed king of opium.”) Alfred W. McCoy wrote in “The Politics of Heroin”: “This illicit traffic allows opium and heroin traders at all levels enormous incomes that they can use to purchase enough protection to survive any attempt at suppression.”

“If you go up there it will become clear,” a junior officer in the Thai military explained to David, my photographer traveling companion, and me, pointing to the verdant mountain ranges that loom above Chiang Mai. “Generals and governments come and go; opium is the real king of these hills.”
So our idea was to go into the hills. Sure, we would ride elephants and gaze at ruins, but what we were looking for was something else. I hate saying it because it sounds so stupid now, but we wanted adventure.
We hired two Karen tribesmen as guides. We bought hiking boots. We took malaria pills. We innovated ways to lighten our packs. We consulted maps. We planned a six-day route up through Mae Hong Sa and down along the Burmese border and then back into civilization.
We should have listened to the sunburned, brain-dead, weed-thin American in the lobby of the Chiang Mai Orchid Hotel who had been in the jungle outside Chiang Mai for six months and had come to town for some air-conditioning. Upon hearing of our plan, he asked, “What kind of idiots would want to do something like that?”

From the godlike perspective of looking down on a topographical map, a 2,000-foot hill looks manageable. The green that indicates higher ground seems invitingly lush after all the white and brown that indicate the lower elevations. In reality, when you are humping up it on a mud trail with no switchbacks, a 2,000-foot hill is a monster of a mountain, slick, unforgiving and treacherous. Many of Thailand’s northern mountains — they are mountains, despite what the guidebooks and locals say — don’t have well-beaten, clearly marked tracks. Instead, you have to claw your way up pig runs or seldom-used paths through thick undergrowth teeming with leaches and ticks. It’s bad jungle, with the climate changing every 30 minutes from pelting rain to blistering sun and the mud making for unsure footing.
Within six hours of being dropped off by a jeep at the end of the loneliest dirt road I’ve ever seen, we were enmeshed in the lush green vegetation, banana stalks, giant bamboo, royal palms and thorny licorice. We hadn’t known it would be like this. We hadn’t considered that with steep mountains and quintuple-canopy jungle in a dozen shades of green and rainbowed crystal waterfalls came exhaustion and thirst and confusion and wishing to hell we had stuck to the original plan. The simple plan. The tourist’s plan. There were nice, organized, enjoyable treks for tourists where one can ride elephants, stay in clean villages, do a little rafting. Who were we to buck the system?
All the estimates we, and our Karen guides Perm and Sarbom, had made back in our Chiang Mai hotel rooms of the time it would take between villages were wrong. For example, we had estimated four hours between Sadaeng and Mae Dat La. It took closer to seven. And that was seven bad hours of going up and down mountains, slogging up waist-deep rivers and tip-toeing to keep our balance along the muddy edges of rice paddies. The Karen tribesmen maybe could have done it in four. Maybe. We had our doubts.
“I thought there was a trail,” David shouted as we waited for Sarbom to hack through thick brush with his machete. “There’s supposed to be a fucking trail.”
“This is a trail,” Perm explained (Sarbom didn’t speak English), “a not-used-much trail.”

It’s the downhills that kill. Uphill was horrible, but downhill in the mud and mossy rocks was deadly. And by the second day, I felt like my knees were running out of cartilage, that nothing was cushioning the impact of bone against bone and each downhill step was somehow degenerative or permanently debilitating. I was being punished for the aplomb of walking into the jungle and just assuming everything would be all right. And while we were fatigued, our native guides were still going strong and carrying all our luggage. (We would hire, over the course of the trek, four porters, a pony, elephants and a Lisu opium trader named Sook.)
It was midway through the third day when, as David was verging on heat stroke and my right knee simply stopped working and poisonous blue snakes made their first appearance on the trail (they liked the rain) and it was getting dark fast and we were still hours away from the nearest village and even Perm, our guide who had taken on a sort of Daniel Boone-meets-Bruce Lee heroic quality in our eyes, said that finding the way in the dark would be impossible, that it dawned on us that maybe we were in serious trouble, that maybe we had made a terrible mistake, the kind of mistake people die from. And if something were to happen to us, who would ever know? A few Hmong tribesmen on their way out to hunt? A couple of Lisu merchants? A Chinese opium buyer making his rounds? There were no roads. No planes in the sky to spot us. We would simply vanish. Fallen off a cliff. Bit by a snake. Shot by a drunk tribesman. There were so many ways.
“This is bad,” we were mumbling as we descended another killer downhill. “This is so, so bad.”
And we were out of water.

We made Nao Lao Dum, a Lisu village somewhere along the Burmese border, as the sun shot orange and blue streaks through nimbus clouds in a dramatic last stand before surrendering behind a craggy mountain. Sai Pu Dong, the village headman, was between 25 and 60. It was impossible to narrow his age any more based on looks alone. His face was mottled and scarred, but his arms and legs remained sinewy and tight-skinned. When he smiled, he flashed teeth bright red from betel nut chewing.
Naked children stared at us as we staggered in after climbing the terraced rice paddy, they mobbed us as we wended up the trail into the village, and as the headman greeted us the crowd of children and women swelled to about 50, all just drop-jawed staring at the spectacle that had wandered into their village.
There were no roads to Nao Lao Dum, only footpaths so narrow that if you didn’t know they were there you would miss them. Where there are no roads there are no police and no schools and no bureaucracy and no missionaries. No law. And certainly no toilets. Call me a wuss, but it’s hard taking a crap when 30 kids are giggling watching you squat. And it’s not that you’re crapping that’s so funny, it’s you, just being foreign and wearing sunglasses or a red shirt. Utterly shocking. It wouldn’t matter to them if you were taking a crap or assembling Stinger missiles, it’s you they’re fascinated by.
Headman’s elephant grass hut wobbled precariously on stilts. Wide gaps had been intentionally left between floorboards so any grain of rice that didn’t end up in your mouth fell through the floor to the ground below for the pigs, chickens and cows who made an awful racket down there jockeying for scraps.
A crowd of men were gathered around a cooking fire in Headman’s hut. The women and children skulked at the periphery of the orange glow, their shadowy features catching the flickering light for a moment and then vanishing as the flames shifted in the draft. The place was better in the dark. You couldn’t see all the cow turds and pig shit and fleas and garbage. You couldn’t see what was floating around in your water, even after it was boiled.
“When was the last time you had foreigners here?” I asked.
“Two opium harvests ago.” Headman answered as one of his wives spooned something into a bowl for me. “Eat.”
It would have been rude to refuse. “What is it?”
“Pork,” I was told.
The Lisu men were digging in.
“It’s cooked?” I asked.
Headman nodded.
I took a bite, chewed and swallowed. It was fatty and cold.
“After we cook it,” Headman explained to me through Perm, “we soak the meat in the raw blood and guts for flavor.”

Opium was the opiate of the masses. Opium served the same purpose for the hill tribes as the cocktail after work does for Manhattan’s work force. No matter how poor the village, no matter how destitute the inhabitants, every male over the age of 18 owned a well-crafted glass-bowled opium pipe, a gas or oil lamp for heating opium, crushed aspirin for mixing with opium to eliminate headaches, several thin steel sticks and pokers for heating the opium and reaming the pipes, a small pillow or smooth bench for laying his head upon and, probably, some opium. Even if the kids were naked and they ate rice mixed with barley for dinner, dad had an opium pipe. Even if they couldn’t afford a candle to light their hut, dad had an oil lamp for heating his opium.
After the cooking, eating and cleaning, the men broke out their pipes and went to work with their oil lamps heating the opium and mixing it with aspirin powder. (Aspirin powder was the only Western medicine they had and it never occurred to them to use it for anything besides cutting opium.) Once the paste was heated and mixed it was rolled between the palms into cylinders and then broken off piece by piece to smoke. The reason one must lie down to smoke — and hence the evolution of the opium den — is that it takes one hand to hold the opium, and one to direct the foot-long pipe so that the opium is close to the flame but not directly burned by it. Unless your head is down near the ground, you can’t see how close the flame is to the pipe.
It takes five pipes to get high. Seven to begin to drift away. And between 10 and 20 and you don’t feel any more of your pain. Your knees feel strong. Your stomach cramps are suddenly gone. And you’re not hungry anymore. The hill tribes smoke it because it is the best thing they have in otherwise tough, hardscrabble lives. Take opium away and replace it with what? Corn? That’s what the Thai government tried to do. Once you’re up in these hills you see why that will never work. Corn, as useful as it is for making whiskey, doesn’t get one away from it all for a few hours.
The dozens of children gazing at us, the mangy dog next to me scratching violently, the fleas biting me, the leach stings, the raw pork, the dirty water, suddenly it was all tolerable and didn’t seem so horrible. But then nothing seems horrible when you’re on the pipe and that’s why opium will always be king of these hills.

We were five now — David the photographer, Perm, Sarbom, Sook the opium merchant and me, plus a pony we had bought for 8,000 baht ($160) from a Lisu tribeswoman. But the gray pony, once we loaded our gear in baskets and slung the baskets on his back, proved to be slower than we had thought. Still, it was good not carrying anything — not that David and I were carrying anything, anyway; we had long ago given our packs to Perm, Sarbom and Sook. Sook was 4-foot-10, weighed about 115 pounds and had small, cruel features and an expression that conveyed total indifference, to you, to his own well-being, to the world. He was a certified opium addict who broke the rule of drug dealers the world over: He got high off his own supply. It took Sook 35 pipes to catch a buzz. He smoked three times day, including first thing in the morning. And after he smoked he could carry a 50-pound backpack through 10 miles of bad jungle and not feel a thing. He was ageless, his growth stunted from opium and his expression childlike in its emptiness. But he had a never-ending supply of opium, so wherever we brought him we were warmly welcomed by the locals; he was a good guy to have around.
We marched knee-deep up a rocky stream, Sarbom behind us keeping the pony walking by shooting rocks at its ass with a slingshot. (Slingshots are immensely popular in these mountains. It is the child’s first toy.) Perm led us out of the stream and up another muddy trail that offered about as much traction as a hill of frozen yogurt. As we climbed, the familiar noises of Sarbom’s snapping slingshot, the flustering of the pony, the bird calls and the gibbon shrieks were suddenly interrupted by a sharp cracking sound and then a rapid succession of breaks and whizzes in nearby bushes.
The smell of smoke.
Perm, Sarbom and Sook dropped to the ground. David and I stood and stared at each other for a moment before realizing what was happening. We were being shot at. We hit the mud. I hurriedly unbuttoned my pants and pissed while lying in the mud.
Perm shouted something in Karen.
A child’s voice answered. We were being shot at by children.
There followed a long exchange during which we assured the children firing at us at that we were not interested in stealing their prized bulls or confiscating their opium. And nor were we Nationalist Chinese (KMT) troops looking to extort opium. The KMT had been through here recently and had forced the villagers to give up the bulk of their opium and a few ponies. These KMT units were relics of Chiang Kai Shek’s defeated 3rd and 5th Nationalist Armies, which had crossed in 1949 from China’s Yunan province into Burma and then kept moving south to northern Thailand, where, with the tacit cooperation of the Thai government and weapons from Taiwan and the United States, they had established fully militarized bases. The KMT these days was nothing like the efficient heroin-exporting machine it had been in the 1960s, when thousand-mule caravans guarded by hundreds of armed troops plied these mountains, but they were still a considerable, well-armed and dangerous presence. With their American-made M-14s and AR-16s — compared to the local tribes’ cheap Chinese imitations of 19th century British muskets — the KMT were still among the top opium buyers and refiners.
“We are tourists,” we assured them. If only that were true, if only we had done some sedate nature walk with a pack of healthy Germans and Swedes, a few hours of hiking, some food, plenty of water, clean villages and real trails. That would be the life. There are hundreds of companies offering that kind of safe, touristy trip, and if you’re ever in Chiang Mai and get the urge to head into the hills, do it the easy way. Don’t be stupid and get shot at.
Our attackers turned out to be one 8-year-old child with a Chinese-made musket taller than he was. He emerged from behind a thorny licorice plant onto the trail about 20 feet ahead of us, smiling widely. He wore a blue wool cap and a T-shirt on which was a tattered silk-screen of Paul Molitor, a baseball player now with the Minnesota Twins but pictured in the silk-screen with his original team, the Milwaukee Brewers.
“What the fuck is this?” I demanded of Perm as I buttoned up my pants. “Who the fuck would shoot at us?”
And then focusing my anger on Perm because he was the only guide who spoke English, “And who would take us to a place like this?”
Wide-eyed, dirty-faced Paul Molitor spoke quickly.
Perm translated: “He wasn’t trying to hit us.”
Paul Molitor spoke again.
“And he says he will take us into town and introduce us to his headman.”
“What’s the big deal about a headman?” I asked. “We’ve met plenty of headmen.”
“Special headman,” Perm assured me. “Powerful headman. Headman of all headmen.”

“Billy Bong will see you now,” a thin Karen warrior dressed in a thickly woven V-neck tunic told us. From his mouth dangled an unlit teak tobacco pipe.
We took off our shoes and climbed the ladder to the tin-roofed hut that stood a whole story higher than any other hut in the village. The hut had wooden windows. The hut had doors. The hut had separate rooms. There was an outhouse in back. This Billy Bong lived in a palace.
All the windows of the innermost chamber were shuttered and the only light in the room emanated from two candles stuck to empty condensed milk cans. Billy Bong was little more than skin and bones beneath an orange, flowing, V-neck tunic and trousers. He lay with his eyes closed and his head resting on a shiny black stone slab. His opium pipe lay on a small, gray and black carpet before him. He opened his eyes as we entered. His high cheek bones, drawn skin and strong jaw gave him a dissipated look. He did not look cruel but rather exhausted. He smiled. He said something to Paul Molitor, who had entered ahead of them, and Paul Molitor spoke rapidly back.
“Why don’t you go home?” Billy Bong said, looking at our eyes.
“We want to,” I said. “As soon as possible, as soon as we can get out, to a road or something, somewhere where we can be picked up.”
“There is a village one day from here, through the village runs a river, down the river there is a road. There are jeeps there.”
“Then that’s where we want to go.”
He began heating opium on the oil lamp. “The village is five mountains away.”
We sighed.
“But I can get you there in five hours. No walking.”
“How?”
Then we heard an animal call like a distorted, amplified amateur trumpet blast and turned and beheld through the doorway an armed Karen warrior seated atop the immense, dinosaurlike head of a five-ton cow elephant. Behind her were five more elephants, standing in a broken line along a trail up the hill from Billy Bong’s hut.
“My elephants will take you,” said Billy Bong as he lit his pipe.
Billy Bong, Headman among Headmen of the Black Karen, was the supreme tribal leader in these parts. Billy Bong (his real name was Ba Pu Long, but he insisted Westerners call him Billy Bong) had five wives and 22 children whose names ranged from Ee Pa (literal translation: First Girl) to Ee Pa Pa (twenty-second girl). As Supreme Headman he was in charge of the local opium production, and of keeping KMT and Shan hands off of that opium, and Billy Bong wanted to expand.
“No more Khun Sa,” Billy Bong said of the indicted warlord. “No more KMT. The Karen people must take charge of their own opium. Karen people will rule these hills. Tell them that where you are from.”

We climbed onto Billy Bong’s elephants from the deck of his hut, stepping between the elephant’s eyes and then sitting cautiously on the wooden benches strapped to the elephant’s backs. Billy Bong had informed us he always traveled by elephant, and it is a magnificent way to travel. Elephants are sure-footed, steady if a bit stubborn, and capable of climbing steeper hills than ponies. (We gave Billy Bong our pony in gratitude.) The only things to watch out for are branches and the occasional showers of dirt elephants throw over their shoulders. Their guides keep them moving with slingshots and monosyllabic commands. (Elephants will only listen to one master at a time. When an elephant is sold — in these mountains the price is between 200,000 and 400,000 baht, or $8,000 to $16,000 — the new master must spend a month together with the former master handling the elephant before the elephant will listen to the new owner’s commands.) They are smart, temperamental animals who spend 20 hours a day eating. And they were our saviors.
We got out. On the back of the elephants who took us over the mountains, the ride a relief for sore legs and battered egos. Riding on their backs above the jungle, so that our heads scraped the bottom of the canopy, made the drenching rains and blistering sun seem not so bad. As they climbed up the mud tracks, their immense flat feet finding traction where there would appear to be none and their trunks rooting out bamboo from the side of the trail, as we rose higher and higher to the top of a mountain, they were taking us to heaven. This was ecstasy, to ride and not walk, to be carried and not to carry, to be above the jungle and not in it, to be safe and not threatened.
After the elephants, rafting down the Nam Mae Yuam river was easy — no walking, just poling along the bottom during slow parts and keeping balanced during rapids, but nothing as tough as those mountains. All the bad part of what we had been through began to seem not so bad as it became clearer we would make it out with only partially torn ligaments and severe dysentery and eye infections and leach scars and maybe a stomach amoeba or two, but we would make it.
Yes, it became obvious we would be OK, and that realization makes you happy when you’ve been through a rough spot. For just a moment, you are relieved. And then, instantly, your worldly concerns return. All those cares that seemed trivial as you were dehydrating in the jungle or dousing leaches with Deat or worrying about being shot, all those cares return suddenly and you think about money and cars and girlfriends and all the civilization you left behind and how you will be fine, you will go home and you will take all that up again. And you think that maybe what matters more than everything that happened out there in the jungle is keeping up on your credit card bills and changing the oil every 3,000 miles.
I don’t know. My knees are still fucked up.

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Karl Taro Greenfeld is a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University. He is the author of "Speed Tribes" and a contributor to Vogue, Details, the New York Times Magazine, Wired and other publications. He has written for Wanderlust on Ibiza and exploring northern Thailand by foot. More Karl Taro Greenfeld.

Friday, May 2, 1997 7:00 PM UTC

Be all that you can be

In the military, that means rape and pillage at will -- and in your own ranks.

By

what? Soldiers of the United States Armed Forces hurt people? They stick pins into recruits’ bare chests?

They force women to have sex?

The blizzard of “sexual misconduct” charges at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and the conviction this week of Staff Sgt. Delmar G. Simpson on 18 counts of rape have elicited a chorus of “Shocked, shocked!” responses from the press and the military itself. Simpson’s rape conviction, said the New York Times, has “raised questions about whether the military is, as it is supposed to be, a haven of discipline and safety or whether it has deteriorated into a dangerous place in which women are afraid of male superiors.”

Guess what. The military is supposed to humiliate, intimidate and instill fear into people. Electrical engineering, weather forecasting, Being All You Can Be — nice, but beside the point. Meteorology is what warriors do when there’s no interesting killing to occupy them. Violence is the military’s job.

And masculine violence is the military’s creed.

Just before the Persian Gulf War, George Bush had been worrying about “the manhood thing.” Saddam Hussein showed up, and (not to oversimplify) $44 billion and an estimated 200,000 deaths later, the cartoonist Oliphant stopped drawing the president with a purse.

When there’s no enemy around, the manhood thing still needs cultivating, so soldiers utilize one another. A student of mine, a former Marine, wrote a piece describing in lascivious detail the infamous “wings”-pinning rituals, and suggesting in so many words that if some little sissies wanted to whine about sadism in the Marines, well, they didn’t understand the Marines, and nobody was asking them to join the Marines. “That’s how Marines bond,” the student quoted an obviously admired officer. “A Marine doesn’t flinch from pain. He acts like a man.”

This student is a woman, by the way. Now that women are in the military, they act like men too. In fact, a not insignificant number of female recruits agree with a Navy woman who told me, of the women reporting sexual harassment in the military, “Those girls just can’t hack it. I can’t stand people who can’t hack it.”

The Aberdeenians, according to the New York Times, were doing it in buses, barracks and “the public game-and-television room,” and with folks of all ranks. Has bringing women in contributed to an atmosphere of sexual license — nay, mayhem — on the bases?

Not really. The Trojans were well known for their soldierly trysts. In “Coming Out Under Fire,” historian Alan Berube describes World War II’s off-base bars and onshore flophouses as hopping with homosexual hanky-panky. Now that the sexes have come together, so to speak, it makes sense that they’d continue carrying on. In that sense, Tailhook, far from being a “deterioration” in military values, merely followed in the grand tradition. As did our beer-spewing boys who assaulted those three Japanese schoolgirls in Okinawa. And Staff Sgt. Simpson is no exception.

All these recent scandals add up to good news and bad. The good news is that because women are gaining some influence in it, the military, like every other sector of American life, is finally taking “sexual misconduct” seriously.

The bad news is that to the military, it’s all “sexual misconduct.” Rape and harassment or adultery and sodomy performed by willing parties: It’s all the same. Only “fraternization” — when an officer does it with an enlisted — makes any of the above worse, as in the case of Simpson, some of whose sexual appetites seem to have been shared by his partners, but all of whose partners were trainees.

Why is the military unable to tell the difference between sex and violence? At the risk of tautology, I offer: Because it’s the military.

A strictly hierarchical institution, committed to forcefully inflicting submission on people and nations, cannot conceive of human relations outside domination. Equally, an institution dedicated to guarding the helpless woman and child cannot conceive of a female person outside victimization. Add to that a sexual-political climate obsessed with assigning the “predator” and “prey” labels in every ambiguous sexual situation. What you come up with is an impossible blurring of lines that makes all sex between two unmarried people in the military bad; if one is of higher rank, it’s rape.

But why should consensual sex between people of unequal social or physical power ipso facto be rape — unless, like anti-porn feminist Andrea Dworkin, you believe that all heterosexual sex is rape? Inequality, we may be reminded, can sometimes be a chosen pleasure. As a lesbian private appreciatively told me while describing the loss of her cherry to her commanding officer, “Boy, was she commanding.”

You won’t rid the military of sexist violence until it stops finding violence sexy and lovemaking dishonorable. Until, in other words, it stops loving war, on which day the military will no longer be the military.

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Judith Levine is a journalist and author of four books, most recently "Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping." More Judith Levine.

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