The next morning, I furrowed my way out from under the six-blanket igloo I’d erected around my shivering form and opened the yurt flap to escape the whiskey-sweat cloud of human bodies and find a hole to pee in. I couldn’t believe what I saw, or, rather, didn’t see. Outside the yurt was a total whiteout. Several feet of snow had already piled on the ground. We were in the middle of a blizzard.
Panicked, I woke up my hungover yurtmates. The German urged us to ride out the storm, which seemed to work for the football player and the Kazakh rocker, already reaching for the whiskey. The thought of another twenty-four hours in the yurt without food, coffee, water, conversation, or reading material was inconceivable, and I pleaded immediate departure. For a while, it seemed majority would rule, but eventually they cracked. Once I had their reluctant shrugs of assent, I wasted no time pulling on my windbreaker. I shamelessly accepted a flimsy acrylic scarf from the female Kazakh host, who surveyed my unseasonable attire pityingly, and we bolted out into the snow. The roads were impassable.
It was a fourteen-mile hike down the mountain to the nearest village, then another mile through deep Kazakh mud to get to the tour guide’s winter house, made of concrete. It turned out the Kazakhs weren’t stupid enough to live in mountain yurts during the winter, which in fact extends into June. The solitary yurt we’d stayed in was there only for those tourists fool enough to wander into the desert during low season. No wonder there’d been such competition for Heaven Lake customers.
A vague enmity seemed to have descended on the group, they likely resenting me for the forced trudge. The Korean, the German, the Kazakh, and I barely exchanged words as we stomped our way through the snow. The hike felt endless, though it lasted only a few hours. In the travelogue version of my trip, I would have been appreciating the snowy bluffs and relishing the international company.
Instead, I thought about the book I’d finished in the yurt. The true story of three generations of women suffering through China’s tumultuous twentieth century, Wild Swans begins with the author’s grandmother, concubine to a Manchurian warlord. Chang’s mother was a high official in the Communist Party who was eventually denounced, and Chang herself became a Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution before renouncing communism and moving to London, where she became a professor at the School of Asian Studies. Each of these three women had endured more trauma in any given three-week period than I had in the span of twenty-three coddled American years.
But what really got me was when Jung Chang, along with the rest of China’s city youth, roughly 15 million people altogether, was expelled from her school and forced to do hard labor in the countryside because, as Mao put it, “Peasants have dirty hands and cowshit-sodden feet, but they are much cleaner than intellectuals.” Even more grueling than the carrying of heavy buckets of water from wells, the husking of grain for food, the aggressive goats guarding the outdoor toilets, was the intellectual deprivation that wore on Chang. “I had an urge to write, and kept on writing with an imaginary pen,” she recalled. “While I was spreading manure in the paddy fields … I would polish long passages in my mind.”
There was no writing; there were no books. “I longed for something to read,” Chang recalled. “But apart from the four volumes of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong, all I discovered in the house was a dictionary. Everything else had been burned.” Per one of Mao’s aphorisms, “The more books you read, the more stupid you become.” Boredom, Chang discovered, “was as exhausting as backbreaking labor.”
Meanwhile, I couldn’t even endure the boredom of one bookless, conversation-free evening in a tourist yurt. As I’d lain in the dusty stench the night before, an idea insinuated itself into my head. Chang’s tale of woe had greatly moved me, and yet to what end? Could I truly grasp her misery? What did I—could I possibly—know about it? In my Western ease, I’d never experienced the test of real deprivation and the joy of relief. I would never know that kind of emotion firsthand, and that itself felt like a deprivation. How could you become a strong and appreciative person if you’d never had an obstacle to toughen you up?
As grueling as it was, the test of the fourteen-mile trek felt like child’s play next to the Chang family’s miseries. Suffer! Suffer, you unappreciative slob, I scolded myself as I trudged along, as if my rebukes would rid me of a fundamental complacency. How can you complain about one measly little hike next to the Long March and the Cultural Revolution? Lazy, easy, weak … lazy, easy, weak, I repeated to myself, the winds howling through my flimsy fisherman’s pants. Suffer, suffer.
By the time we got to the guide’s village house and I’d scraped the mud off my canvas sneakers, they were stained crimson with blood. I took off both pairs of what were now deep red-stained socks, and as pain replaced the numbness and my feet swelled before me, I realized my sneakers had been destroyed and my feet along with them. I walked with a crippled gait for days.
But none of this mattered. If anything, it needed to happen. I’d hatched a plan during that trek, something I came to call the Denial Regime. My bloody feet would be an inaugural crusade wound. I photographed my soaked red socks to mark the moment.
The kernel of the Denial Regime had taken shape as I’d watched the Kazakh host cook our lardy, unappealing dinner the night before, knowing I wasn’t going to eat a bite of what she made. No matter how hungry, I decided to suffer through it. This got me to thinking. What would happen if you caused yourself to suffer, just to know what it was like?
One of those chronically hungry people who gobbles down candy throughout the day, I have the metabolism and related disposition of a toddler: cranky when unfed. This weakness could be put to use. For the rest of my stay in China, I decided, I would make myself go hungry. Hadn’t I moved to Asia in order to challenge myself? Confronting oversize water bugs and a little loneliness didn’t necessarily accomplish that.
My self-styled Denial Regime would allow for one small portion of white rice or plain bread a day, a daily vitamin supplement, and a cup of clear soup every few days. I would take it one day at a time, relishing the deprivation, putting off that one portion of starch—Nope, no eating until at least twelve o’clock. No, make it twelve thirty!—until I could no longer bear it. I would do this for the rest of my time in China. Others might dread different deprivations, like no showering or no sex, but for me, the prospect of food restriction was the most dreadful. Far worse, I had to admit, than having no books.