If Jung Chang and millions of other Chinese people could live through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, then certainly it was possible to get through a day without stuffing my face. Every time I felt a pang of hunger, I reprimanded myself, thinking about Jung Chang and repeating my adopted mantra: Deny, deny.
It was awful. The hunger never went away for any meaningful amount of time, as in more than ten minutes. Yet the ability to thwart it felt empowering. I felt cleaner, purer, tougher. I’ve never had an eating disorder, but during those weeks, part of me could disturbingly understand the draw, and the danger. The constant effort only hardened my determination. I felt like a warrior.
The bonus challenge was to make myself focus on the sights I saw during the day and the books I read at night despite the gnawing growls. (Bob bears the marks of this period with a series of easy-to-swallow mass market paperbacks: Michael Crichton’s Congo, Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.) Despite these accompanying efforts at self-care, about a week into the Denial Regime, I came down with a sinus infection. Luckily, the sparse language appendix of my outdated Lonely Planet guidebook, which lacked such essentials as “I’m late!” and “Could you please keep it down?” included the phrase wo sher bing (“I am sick”). It was remarkably effective. No free hotel rooms, you say? Wo sher bing, and suddenly a room materialized. The bank teller decides to break for noodles the moment when you walk in? Wo sher bing elicited a reluctant compliance.
The effect of wo sher bing was so decisive it seemed to carry more weight than just “I’m sick,” something more like “I’m pregnant” or “I have cancer.” Whatever its implied meaning, wo sher bing transformed all my interactions with the Chinese people. One time, I wo sher bing’ed a troop of cadres on the train and was forced to ingest copious amounts of unidentified Chinese medicine, inducing a fifteen-hour nap. On another train ride, my sickness persuaded my cabinmates to go to sleep early, allowing me to escape the usual chain-smoking fluorescent banter that pervaded second-class night trains into the wee hours. On yet another ride, a well-dressed man removed a small gadget from his pocket, which he opened, gently tapped, and handed to me.
“Do you need to see a physician?” the screen inquired politely. I leapt on this portable translator with joy, tapping in a detailed response about my symptoms. But the machine had limitations. No matter what message was typed in and no matter what its translation into Chinese, the screen glowed back the same kind query: “Do you need to see a physician?” This, alas, was all the tight-lipped device had to say.
A few people tried to engage me in deeper conversation, to no avail. Not many people spoke English in these small Silk Road towns. Perhaps they were asking for something basic like my destination and when I couldn’t respond were as astounded that I didn’t speak Mandarin as Americans are when a tourist here doesn’t know the rudiments of English. I’d shake my head dumbly until someone would inevitably say with exasperation, “Ting butong.” Everyone else seemed to agree this was the case, regarding me sadly and repeating, “Ting butong.”
I started to preempt them. Someone would look at me with an expectant air after saying what I imagined was a question and I’d just admit straight out, “Ting butong.”
“Ting butong,” my conversation partner would confirm, satisfied. “Ting butong!” another person would chime in, and they’d lean back and smile ruefully. When I took Mandarin classes years later at NYU I learned a rough translation: “Listens, does not hear.” It meant, in short, “She doesn’t get it.”
Everywhere, I didn’t get it. Project Spittoon was a total wash. Don’t ask why, but I thought a spittoon was a long tube through which people spat. Thinking back on the many idiotic attempts I made to find one, gesticulating moronically over flutes and similarly shaped items in market after market, makes me blush. (A spittoon looks, in fact, more like a vase.) “Seriously, Pammy?!” my father groaned when I came back empty-handed.
Backpacking in remote western China in 1994, I was frequently the only tourist in town, and not just the only tourist but also the only white woman by herself and the only white woman by herself wearing inappropriate summer attire and not speaking a word of Chinese, looking sick and tired and hungry as a lost dog. I was obviously some kind of maniac. Every time I sat down constituted a major public event. Staring squads formed. People pointed. Once, as I rested by a public fountain reading, a young man, egged on by onlookers, came forward, reached out, and touched my bare arm before dashing off with a nervous giggle. I stood out in China like a piece from the wrong puzzle.
Watching rickety old men and boxy and bejowled women perform tai chi at the crack of dawn, squat on sidewalks for hours, and pedal profoundly broken bicycles uphill, I felt outdone. I knew that my Denial Regime, demanding though it was, failed to measure up to the physical and psychological challenges the Chinese people had overcome since 1949—and surely well before then, too. But in my own hungry little way, I had to prove that I could endure as well. I spent hours looking forward to my daily bowl of rice, savoring each painstakingly pinched chopstickful, lamenting any wayward grain that plummeted haplessly to the floor. I appreciated every single bite and I appreciated how long I could manage until the next bowl.
The Denial Regime lasted for twenty-eight days, each day recorded in my agenda (Denial 1, Denial 2, Denial 3…) like a kind of anti-Bob, listing life’s deprivations as Bob chronicled life’s gains. The end came two weeks short of my six-week ambition. After a full day exploring the Forbidden City in Beijing, I was assaulted by the godly aroma of hot dan dan noodles topped with fresh cilantro from a stand just outside the city gates. I inhaled the chili and wheaty noodle scent until my brain lit on fire, torching all other thoughts.
“Enough of this madness,” I said to myself, abandoning my private revolution. I rushed the noodle stand in a kind of half-wild, semieuphoric state and dove in, barely bothering with chopsticks. It tasted fantastic.
CHAPTER 12
The Secret History
Solitary Reading