Also on board was Connie, a scholar of ancient Chinese poetry at Lehigh; a stunning American businesswoman named Heather who’d made a fortune in China while simultaneously getting a PhD from MIT; an anthropologist, also named Heather, who’d been working at the Sackler Museum in Beijing; Lindsay, a corporate lawyer from San Francisco who was assisting the Cambodian government to create laws related to women’s issues; an unidentified gray-haired man who spoke with authority about everything from the kooky Vietnamese cult religion Caodaism (subjects of worship: Victor Hugo, Sun Yat-sen, and Winston Churchill) to the origins of the Vietnam War. And there was me.
The first few minutes were awkward as my fellow passengers introduced themselves in terms of their respective achievements. Then they asked what I did and I said something nebulous about working in Thailand. I tried hard to act like a legitimate participant in the conversation until Lindsay the Lawyer challenged me on my first attempt to seem like a grown-up. (“What do you mean exactly by ‘matriarchal’? How is Cambodian society ‘matriarchal’?” “Um, I overheard a tour guide say so?”) I quickly downshifted to thoughtful nods. They may in fact have found me interesting as a Gen Xer living in Thailand, but at the time, I thought they saw me as just a kid.
I tagged along for drinks afterward at the Foreign Correspondents Club, where we were met with a scene straight out of Somerset Maugham, complete with enormous spinning fans on the ceiling and a long wooden bar. Everyone knew everyone else from earlier newspaper stints in Hong Kong or Singapore. Reporters and published academics swarmed the place. By comparison, I had written a few Pamograms and some well-received college papers.
For years, Spalding Gray remained the object of my literary fantasies. The authors I’d been obsessed with as a teenager either had been long dead or were stratospherically out of reach, but Spalding was different. He was alive, and while he was famous in his way, meeting him didn’t feel entirely outside the realm of possibility; our worlds could conceivably coincide off the page. When I moved back to New York and lived in the East Village in the mid-nineties, it seemed fated that I would encounter him on my walk to work.
Part of me couldn’t help but believe that once he knew who I was deep down, he would understand that we were meant to be friends. I think about life the same way, I wanted him to know. I just haven’t done anything with it. I, too, was obsessed with Cambodia. I, too, had spent time on a beach in Thailand. Spalding had been to a meditation retreat and had seen gyrating testicles on the wall when he tried to meditate; I had thought about trying to meditate but hadn’t because I was sure something would have distracted me, though probably not naked balls on the wall. Whatever happened, I’d tell him all about it.
Walking through his Soho neighborhood, I would plot our inevitable encounter, though whatever opening gambit I used (and I played out many in my head), it came across as fumbling and desperate:
“Hey, Spalding—huge fan of your work.”
“Spalding Gray! Sorry to be so direct, but I really think we should be friends. Would you like to have lunch?”
It never happened. I walked through his neighborhood to work for three years and attended every one of his shows in New York. Finally, in 1999, I went to a book signing and made a fawning and garbled confession. He signed my copy of Morning, Noon and Night, “To Pamela, THE STALKER.” When he committed suicide in 2004, I not only missed the books he’d never write and the friendship we’d never know, I’d lost a kindred spirit.
During my two weeks in Cambodia, Spalding was still very much alive. He accompanied me to Siem Reap, where I otherwise had the deserted temples of Angor Wat to myself; this was before the temples were overrun with tour buses. When I had to run out of a temple to escape a local maintenance worker who had used an obscene gesture to suggest we fornicate in the soggy ruins, Spalding did the kindness of turning the episode into an amusing anecdote.
His wry humor lent levity and perspective to everything. I felt his presence when I foolishly paid a teenage boy to take me to the gruesome Killing Fields on the back of his motorbike (it’s not as if there were cabs) and as I walked through the muddy, bone-ridden site. His wise, sardonic, yet deeply empathetic voice described everything I saw, inflecting my own. With Spalding by my side, even the darkest excursions became immeasurably richer and more droll. He was what every travel writer should be—a companion.
But the opposite can happen with a narrator, as I learned on a monthlong trip to Vietnam, another side trip I made while living in Thailand. Bookwise, I thought I had come ready. My Book of Books bore the telltale signs that peppered its pages before any trip: title after title about somewhere else. I’d gotten a brand-new updated Lonely Planet Vietnam and sped my way through a series of war-lit titles: Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Le Ly Hayslip’s harrowing memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and its follow-up, Child of War, Woman of Peace. I felt terrible about America’s role in the Vietnam War, and even though I hadn’t been around at the time, I was ready to make penance for all of it.
After paying my dues during a harrowing visit to the Museum of American War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh City, I moved on from the war into contemporary travelogue. Unfortunately, in doing so, I chose the wrong book, Justin Wintle’s Romancing Vietnam. Wintle, a dyspeptic, Oxford-educated British journalist, also wanted to leave the war behind; he’d spent three months traveling the country in an attempt to uncover what he deemed the real Vietnam—its treatment of artists, its religious sects, its political heritage—but not surprisingly, the tightly controlled government rebuffed his reportorial efforts.
Most books and movies about Vietnam (The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now), Wintle complained, came from a distinctly American point of view. They didn’t take into account the experiences of the people whose war they were in. Even when these movies criticized the war or the United States, he wrote, Vietnam was just a “testing ground where all the hallowed shibboleths of America are blown apart.” This was the kind of anti-American critique that might have been palatable coming from other Americans; coming from a smug Brit like Wintle it was intolerable.