I found his guest house at the bottom of an alley beside the river. It
was a small, clean place, cheap and functional, the sort of
establishment that heads the Places to Stay list in a Lonely Planet
guidebook. J. was out so I sat and waited, thumbed through some old
guidebooks and read of J.’s jungle treks in the
guest book. They were ecstatic. Perhaps I should have taken that as a
warning.

J. arrived an hour or so later. He was a stocky man with a winning
smile. What I wanted to achieve was an impossible task in an impossibly
short space of time. He listened and frowned.

“Is it possible?” I asked.

“Of course, it’s possible. It will be hard, but you can do it,” he said
slowly. “We’ll ring some people at the tourist office. You should meet
the head of the department. We should also ring ahead to Pontianak and
tell them you’re coming. Are you a member of the Lion’s Club?”

“The what club?”

“The Lion’s Club. Everybody’s who’s who in Banjarmasin is a member. I
became a member three years ago.”

“No. Would it help if I was?”

“Maybe,” said J. “But you should come along to the monthly meeting
anyway. You’re lucky. It’s tonight. You might make some useful
contacts.”

And so that night, my first in Banjarmasin, my first in Kalimantan,
dressed in the best attire I could cobble together from the crumpled
contents of my backpack, I found myself in a banquet hall surrounded by
Banjarmasin’s worthies.

Now, I’ve never attended a meeting of the Lion’s Club in my own country,
or anywhere else for that matter, and I have no idea what its members
discuss or hold forth on. I still don’t.

The proceedings in
Banjarmasin were carried out in Bahasa, a language I can use to order a
plate of fried rice, find the nearest toilet and buy a beer. The
Banjarmasin Lion’s Club meeting discussed none of these. It lasted a
long time. Being a Muslim chapter of the Lion’s Club, it also eschewed
alcohol. And so I sipped on an orange juice and fidgeted. Studied the
hairs on my arms. Examined the people who sat around me. Crossed my
legs. Uncrossed them. Smiled at J. from time to time. Nodded at the
portly, beaming gentleman sitting across from me.

Then the exotic dancers appeared on stage. The two of them cavorted
through a couple of Indonesian love songs, and then one of them took up
a microphone and broke into an enthusiastic rendition of “Be-Bop-A-Lu-La.”
She clambered offstage and into the audience and danced around us all,
before stopping in front of me and handing me the microphone.

I did the best I could, which is to say I tried to stay in tune. But before she could whisk the microphone away from me, I managed to whisper in Chinese: “You’re Chinese, aren’t you?”

She threw me an incredulous look and danced off.

Shortly after that, it all wound down. The ritual exchange of name
cards took place, promises were made, vague appointments were floated,
and then J. and I found ourselves out in a steamy equatorial night
among the hawkers and becak drivers.

“I need a beer,” I said.

“There’s a place around the corner,” said J.

The place around the corner looked like an ex-pat tavern — without the
ex-pats. No sooner had we stepped in than a shout went up. It was the
dancers surrounded by a group of Indonesian businessmen.

“Come and join us,” they cried out.

“These guys have tons of money,” said the “Be-Bop-A-Lu-La” girl in
Chinese. “They’re paying.”

Her name was Eva. Her colleague was A-mei, a name that is to Chinese
as Jane is to English. More introductions. Our patron, it turned out,
was the portly, beaming gentleman who had sat at my table. He was a
wealthy logging baron and a haji — a Muslim who has made the
ultimate journey, a pilgrimage to Mecca.

It was probably about the time of my third beer that I started to have
doubts about the ecstasy. It was something to do with the novelty of
being in Borneo, being bought beer by a devout Muslim and being offered
a drug I’d never tried by Chinese dancers from Jakarta. Somehow, these
unlikely elements had coalesced in one unique opportunity.

“Where are you going after this?” I asked Eva and A-mei.

“Dancing. There’s a club next door.”

“Are those pills still an offer?”

A-mei handed me a small, white pill and I washed it down with a
mouthful of beer. J. gave me an odd look. He was going to have to be
getting back, he said. I gave him a “you only live once” shrug of
apology.

Inside the club it was dark and loud. I sat with the haji, Eva and A-mei
and some Indonesian businessmen.

“You’ve got to shake your head around like this,” A-mei cried, her head
bobbing so furiously that it seemed the sunglasses perched on
her nose would come flying off any minute. “It makes the effect
stronger!”

But I wasn’t about to start shaking my head around like A-mei, so I sat
quietly nursing a beer and wondering what all the fuss about ecstasy
was.

“Is anything happening?” asked A-mei, a little later.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “I just feel a bit drunk.”

“Have another one.”

I took another one.

Ten minutes later, as I stood in the toilets wondering why I had been
standing there so long to no effect, a sinister Chinese mobster, dressed
in black and with a silver, dragon-headed belt, peered over my shoulder.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

He grinned. “You’ve had some of the haul,” he said in a thick Hokkien
accent. “I’m A-Kuan. I brought it in from Amsterdam. Is it good?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been standing here for a long time and nothing’s
happening, so I suppose maybe it is.”

A-Kuan gave me a stern look. “If you have any problems, if anything
happens, just tell them you’re a friend of A-Kuan’s.”

As I left the toilet, there was a tingling in the backs of my legs and
my spine. It was like the sudden anticipation of an unexpected
excitement. I was hearing the music more acutely now, as if some
fine-tuning had been done to my ears. The alcohol in my system was
beating a retreat and something new was rushing in to take its place.

It hit during one of those lulls where the techno-beat ebbs to little
more than a throb. I’d heard it a hundred times before, but it had never
meant anything to me. Now the throb was visceral. And as it returned
like a gathering wave, my back stiffened and what felt like a primeval
rush of pleasure coursed its way from the base of my spine. It was
crystalline and clear. It was shiny, it was brittle. Suddenly I could
reach out and touch the music. It was a cascading waterfall of diamonds.

And then I was dancing with Eva. She shimmied around me and then she
leaned in close and whispered in my ear: “Tonight I will be with you.
Not love. Sex.”

“Yes,” I said.

And we danced. We danced until I seemed to wake. We danced until my
schedule began to haunt me, until guilt began to fray my abandon, until
the drug that had exploded in my spine and struck my brain like a bolt
of lightning had become a familiar friend, until I turned on my heels
and fled out into the night.

Some time, an eternity ago it seemed, I had flown into a strange place
and checked into a hotel. And now, as I stood among the becak drivers,
pimps, street peddlers and beggars pawing at my sleeves, I tried to
recall the hotel’s name. I turned on my heels and walked back into the club.

I threw myself at the mercy of Eva and A-mei.

“You gave me the ecstasy. You’re going to have to look after me now. I
don’t even know where I’m staying.”

“Don’t worry-la,” they cooed.

An hour later I was bumping through the streets of Banjarmasin with Eva
and A-mei in a four-wheel-drive, with A-Kuan at the wheel. We pulled up outside a hotel. It was mine. I climbed out. Eva and A-mei climbed out too. In the lobby the man at the front desk gave me a key. He gave Eva and A-mei a key. I went to the lift and pressed the fifth floor button.

“You’re on the fifth floor too?” said Eva.

I walked down a long corridor, Eva and A-mei behind me, and stopped at
my room. They stopped at the room next door. I looked at them with
bewilderment. They giggled.

“We’re neighbors?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Eva. “Why don’t you come in?”

I stopped opening my door, put my key into my pocket and followed Eva
and A-mei into their room.

It looked as if it had been ransacked. Suitcases with clothes spilling out of them littered the floor. The massive double bed was piled up with jeans, blouses, underwear and cosmetics. The dressing table groaned under the weight of yet more feminine detritus.

“Sit down,” commanded Eva.

I sat down. A-mei disappeared into the bathroom. Eva turned on a Walkman and put headphones on my ears. I sat there and listened to more shiny music. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, but I couldn’t think of a reason to leave. A-mei appeared from the bathroom in a skimpy transparent negligee. Eva stripped and changed into a bathrobe. They slipped into bed.

“No,” I thought. I stumbled to my feet and, mumbling apologies, fled to
my room. I felt out of my depth, confused.

Moments later there was a rapping on my door. It was Eva. She put her
hands around my waist. She guided me to my bed. She flung open her gown.
We fell onto the bed kissing.

I wanted her. The whole night had been leading to this moment, from the
moment I joined her in singing “Be-Bop-A-Lu-La.” But I had a small
problem.

“Kissing no fun,” she complained.

“It’s the ecstasy,” I said.

“Do you prefer A-mei,” whispered Eva.

“No, it’s the drug.”

“I can call her in, if you want.”

“Why would she want to?”

“She’s my friend. If I tell her to do A, she’ll do A; If I tell her to
do B, she’ll do B.”

“It’s useless. It’s the drug. I can’t do anything.”

We writhed on the bed for another 20 minutes while Eva employed an
impressive catalog of tricks designed to arouse me to action. And then
she went. It was a relief. I switched off the lights and fell into a
brief and deep sleep.

I saw her the next morning at 11. I was sitting in the lobby coffee
shop, blurry-eyed, exhausted, in conference with a local tourist
official. Eva and A-mei emerged from the lift with bearers, a caravan of
suitcases and shopping bags. Eva strolled over. The tourism official
noted her arrival with a puzzled look.

“Don’t feel bad-la,” she said to me in English, before switching to
Chinese. “Sometimes I like to be naughty. I wanted to know what it would
be like to be with you.”

She reached into her bag and produced a notebook. She scrawled a phone
number on a sheet of paper, tore it out and handed it to me.

“If you ever come to Jakarta, you can ring me,” she said.

And then she was gone, pausing to wave as she sashayed out of the hotel
with her friend A-Mei.

“I went to the Lion’s Club meeting last night,” I explained to the
tourism official. “She was one of the dancers.”

Chinese, like Japanese, are all for tours. Every self-respecting tourist attraction has its hierarchy of sights, its hoary accretion of wide-eyed lore and its filing-cabinet litany of statistics. Alone or in the wrong hands you might end up just looking in happy wonderment, but that would never do. Chinese like to come away from their holidays the better for them. We came to Mount Lushan to name the parts: the inspiration-seekers who had toiled up its slopes, the great and mighty (Chiang Kaishek among them) who had vacationed on its cool, mist-shrouded ridges, the makers and shakers (Mao Tsetung for one) who had drunk tea and debated China’s unending national problems in its villas. We had come to see Lushan’s pen-and-ink landscapes, its roiling cloudscapes, from the exact appointed vantage points that landscapes and clouds should be seen. We had come to get the facts.

They came thick and fast. We were group No. 28, and our guide, a young local woman in a no-nonsense red suit and armed with a shiny gold megaphone, provided committee-like statistics of every bridge we trundled over, the crops we passed by, the weather that drizzled miserably on us. “Lushan has an average winter temperature of 1.9 degrees,” she announced as we rolled over a 79-meter-long bridge built in 1987. “You will note the peasants in the fields to your right planting rice. The average rice harvest in Jiangxi province …”

Wang slept through the high-decibel, statistical assault like a baby. But at Lushan he was tapped awake. It was time for introductions. Wang was “Zhejiang friend.” A timidly smiling gentlemen dressed in a shabby business suit, the washing instructions sewn onto the right cuff, was “Shanghai friend.” A fresh-faced young couple who looked recently married were “Shandong friends.” The sour, pinch-faced, cadre-like young man with acne that no one spoke to was “Hubei friend.” I was “English friend.”

Our first stop was the People’s Hall. It was here in 1959 that Mao made a bellicose defense of his disastrous Great Leap Forward even as peasants across China starved. His portrait presided over the hall, which milled with the faithful, most of them dressed in uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army. The auditorium was full of numbered chairs. On the stage were four more chairs identical to those provided for the audience. Historical significance notwithstanding, there is only so long I can look at a hall full of chairs. I drifted upstairs, where I found a photo gallery of Communist Party bigwigs at play — Liu Shaoqi playing checkers with an unnamed minion, Mao at rest.

I was gazing at Mao, that aged infant, Mickey Mouse ears of hair at his temples, trying to imagine the man behind the mask with a party of army officers, when Wang bounded up beside me.

“What a load of bullshit!” he cried.

“Well …” I said, momentarily speechless. “It depends on your politics, I suppose.” The officers gave Wang a sharp look. He shrugged and sauntered off. The army officers stared daggers at his retreating back.

At Dragon Fountain Lake we had a tree to look at. It was a towering object, a cedar of some description, I guessed, and we stood before it in a small huddle, our necks craning heavenward, while our guide adumbrated its height, its age, the circumference of its trunk, its estimated number of needles; she listed the poets who had girded it in metaphor, the painters who had seized its essence with a few deft brush strokes. More tour groups arrived and formed patient queues behind us.

My mind, I’m afraid, temporarily stood easy under the assault of so much arboreal trivia, and when it snapped back to attention, I discovered the guide had been telling us that we were on our own for the next one and a half hours. She had, it seemed, been giving us detailed instructions about which path to take in order to get back to the minibus in time. I trudged off with the others, but she could tell I hadn’t been listening.

“English friend!” she cried in a reproachful squeal through the megaphone. Approximately 100 heads turned. “Do you know where you’re going?”

“Not really,” I called back. “Don’t worry. I’ll just follow group No. 28. Wherever they go, I’ll go.”

“Well, don’t get lost and hold us up.”

Remember, I muttered to myself, no more tours. I cast around for Wang, but he was nowhere in sight, so I tagged along behind Shanghai friend. In the event, there was no need. The approach to Dragon Fountain Lake involved clambering down a steep flight of stairs. At the bottom was a pond and a concrete yellow dragon. A feeble fount of water dribbled from its jaws. A queue formed for photographs. When the photo session was over, we trooped back up the stairs to the minibus. To lose yourself on such an adventure, I concluded, could only be achieved by a desperate plunge into the undergrowth.

At the next stop, I didn’t even leave the minibus. The guide promised wonderful views, but the mist outside was so heavy you might have carved it up and exported it to wherever in the world they are crying out for more mist. My fellow tourists trooped out in a plaintive chorus: “Aren’t you coming? It’s going to be very beautiful.”

Wang returned about three minutes later. He stamped into the bus shaking his head in disgust. “That was a lot of fun. You can’t see a thing in this weather.”

The rest of the group were close on his heels. In the summer season, the guide explained, the views truly were very beautiful; this probably wasn’t the best time to come to Lushan.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

We stopped for lunch. I’m not sure how it happened but somehow I
ended up
in one restaurant with Wang, and the rest of the group ended up in the
restaurant next door. He ordered an omelet peppered with tiny fish; I
ordered a pork and eggplant casserole.

“Know how much this omelet costs?” asked Wang.

“No.”

“Thirty yuan.”

“That’s an expensive omelet,” I said. “Perhaps they used extra eggs.”

“You can buy a dozen of them for 10 yuan at the market.” Wang
picked one
of the little fish out of the omelet and held it in the air with his
chopsticks. “It’s these little fish that are the problem. Any idea what they
are?”

“Just looks like a little fish to me.” I didn’t know the Chinese
word for
minnow, and I doubt that’s what it was anyway.

The waiter wandered over and sat down at our table. “Are you here
traveling
or here for a conference?” he asked.

“Well, we’re here for a meeting with Chairman Mao,” I said, “but he
hasn’t
showed. Any idea where he is?”

The waiter grinned.

“Ha!” said Wang. “Fuck your mother. Mao Tsetung, he fucked us over for
30 years. The Communist Party is still fucking us over.” He smiled.
“You’re OK. I’ve never talked to a foreigner before. Have some omelet.” He
gestured at the omelet with his chopsticks. “You can call me Wang.”

I gave him my Chinese name. I ate some omelet and little fish; he
ate some
eggplant and pork.

“You know what I think?” said Wang. “It’s fate that brought us
together.
Yes, fate. Here’s me, a bumpkin from Zhejiang — yes, that’s what you should
call me: Zhejiang bumpkin — and here I am eating a meal and speaking Chinese
with a foreigner. It’s fate, that’s what it is.”

The idea that fate had brought me together with Wang — to what end? — was a
slightly disturbing one, but I know too that the Chinese have no truck with
the random, with chance. “You know,” I said, “China’s so big most Chinese
don’t get much chance to meet a foreigner.”

“No, it’s fate, that’s what it is.” Wang helped himself to a mouthful
of my
eggplant. “You’re from England. That’s a rich country. Do you have human rights over there?”

“Well …” I began.

“Fucked if we do over here.”

The waiter, who had been listening in, got up and left.

Wang then insisted on paying for my meal. I tried to pay my way,
but it was
hopeless, and in the end I simply thanked him.

“Fate brought us together,” he said with a solemn nod.

Our next stop was Dragon Head Cliff, a spectacular vantage point.
Clouds
lapped at our feet like a steaming tide. A craggy islet of rock rose in the
near distance, a lone fir perched impossibly on its summit. Shadowy cliffs
stood shoulder to shoulder in the distance. It was a scene that looked as if
it had been conjured into existence by a Chinese brush.

The guide droned out the inevitable roll call of artists, but
before she
had finished Wang began to become agitated. He waved his arms outward at a
distant row of cliffs, and the guide faltered in her monologue.

“It’s ridiculous!” said Wang. “We’re all standing here, because this is
where we’re supposed to stand. But if someone had decided we had to stand
over there, we’d be standing over there.”

A shocked hush fell over the group.

Wang appealed to me with his eyes. “Wouldn’t we?” he demanded. The
guide glared at me. I said nothing. The guide coughed and resumed her speech. Wang
shrugged and stomped off.

He was waiting for me on the next ridge. He gestured helplessly out
at the
scene before us.

“They say it’s amazing. I’ll tell you what’s amazing, when a person can
start with nothing and make a pile of money. That’s amazing.”

“Well, perhaps,” I said carefully, “when you’ve got a pile of
money, you’ll
want to do something with it. See amazing things maybe.”

He scowled. “Maybe. But the only people in this country with money
are the
Party and their hangers-on.”

The guide, her gold megaphone held aloft, was heading our way.
Helplessly,
to change the topic, I said, “Here she comes.”

“The ugly bitch.”

We drove back into Jiujiang, the town in which we had started.
There were no more statistics. Everybody nodded off. We dropped Wang off at
the train station, where we had picked him up. He scrambled out of the
minibus and lit up a cigarette. He took a few steps and then turned and
waved. It was a half-hearted, diffident effort, and halfway through he gave
up. He shrugged and turned away.

The terrible thing was, he was right in his way — about Mao, about
the Party, about the absurdity of our neatly organized sightseeing expedition. He
was an outsider and I was a foreigner, which amounted to the same thing. My
mouth opened. I wanted to call out, “I’m sorry!” But he was disappearing
into the heaving scrum of the train station. Then he was gone.