I was in Bombay on January 17, 1991, sitting in the Indian Airlines office in the financial district, when I heard the first rumors of bombs falling on Baghdad. My mission was to make last-minute ticket changes while my traveling companion, a fellow American, went to Bombay's Victoria Terminus to book us on that evening's eastbound train to Aurangabad. We had decided to change our itinerary, which was rather loose to begin with, in order to do the "tourist thing" and see the famous Hindu caves at Ellora and Ajanta. We were not quite at the midway point of our half-year trek across Asia.
Everyone in the ticket-office waiting area--mostly Brits, Americans, andAustralians--was trying to make sense of the spotty reports relayed by thosewho'd caught snippets of CNN in a hotel lobby. Somebody said that a major groundoffensive was under way and that a column of U.S. armor was moving toward theIraqi capital, which was being heavily bombarded. (Only the bombardment, ofcourse, proved to be factual.) Looking around, reading the body language of myfellow Westerners, I felt a visceral shock of recognition: I was 22 years old and10,000 miles from home, and my country was at war.
When I arrived at Victoria Terminus, that relic of old British Bombay, to meetmy friend, it was like something out of David Lean. Only the costumes hadchanged. I'd been on the subcontinent for two and a half months, yet it was asthough I'd just disembarked--everything was strange, alien, subtly threatening.There was the sheer mass of humanity in the cavernous space of the station, theanarchy of sound and movement, the faces of myriad complexions pressing in fromall sides, the eyes that fixed you in their sights, locked on, and then passedby. How many of them, I wondered, were Muslim?
My friend and I made visual contact through the crowd. He was standing nearthe entrance to the platforms, like a neon sign in the dusk. I walked up to him,and there we stood, facing each other with our high-tech backpacks and ourstate-of-the-art hiking shoes, our money belts around our waists, and our guilty,pale, anxious faces.
"The war has started," I said.
"I know," he replied. And that was all that either of us could think to sayfor what seemed a very long time.
What was I doing in Bombay in January 1991? I wasn't an expat; Iwasn't a student; I wasn't in uniform, corporate or military, or working for anorganization; I wasn't out to save the world or anyone's soul (except, perhaps,my own). No, I was merely one of the many privileged young people born in thesixties or early seventies (I was born in annus horribilis 1968) who, after completing college--and finding little of interest in the financial centers and suburban office parks of late-twentieth-century America--acquired the necessary visas and shots, purchased round-the-world airfare and several Lonely Planet guidebooks, donned backpacks and flannel shirts, and ventured out into the world, preferably as far "off the beaten path" and as far from Christendom as possible. A crusade in reverse, we marched forth to lose what religion we had and be conquered.
Of course, we were hardly the first cohort of young Americans andEuropeans to travel in non-Western lands. As with sex, drugs, and rock and roll,the baby boomers had beaten us to Shangri-la, and by 1990 the shops of Kathmandu,Delhi, and Bangkok were full of the Beats, the Beatles, and suchspiritual-countercultural precursors as Huxley, Isherwood, and Watts.
And yet one thing, in hindsight, seems clear. We met these places and peoplesat a moment of profound global transition: just after the Berlin Wall fell andthe Tiananmen students were crushed, yet before Yeltsin climbed on his tank,before Sarajevo exploded into war, before Clinton rode out of Arkansas, beforeRwanda descended into hell, before the Web was more than a twinkle in a hacker'seye, before Nasdaq became a household word, before chaos erupted on the streetsof Seattle. And before bin Laden brought jihad to America.
What's more, although we knew we weren't the first generation of expensivelyeducated Westerners to follow an urge and a vogue eastward, we sensed that wewere the first to do so in such numbers--and the first to take global travel forgranted. This may help to explain why some of us (myself included) were sopainfully self-conscious, aware of our status as uninvited guests, acutelysensitive under the gaze of the anonymous non-Western other. Wherever we went, bythe early 1990s the West and its popular culture--our popular culture--were fastencroaching upon traditional local cultures. Granted, in the antiglobalizationera, this is hardly news. But it was news to us then. We were among the firstyoung Westerners to witness this phenomenon, on the ground, as it acceleratedaround the world, sweeping into places like Nepal and India and SoutheastAsia--even the remotest corners of China. One of the things we invariably heardfrom the older travelers or expats we met in Asia was that we should have seenKathmandu, or Varanasi, or the beaches of southern Thailand, before "thetourists" arrived.
Everywhere we went, in other words, we saw ourselves reflected back atus--which, of course, destroyed the "purity" and "authenticity" of whatever itwas we had sought in the first place. (As if these places were ever pure to beginwith--or as if we knew what they were supposed to be pure of.) This gave rise toa particular form of self-loathing--and a particular feeling toward the societyand culture from which we came--that I suspect is related to the currentantiglobalization movement and, indeed, to the ambivalence of some on the lefttoward the latest East-West war.
Just before I left for Asia in the fall of 1990, I came upon abook by Paul Fussell titled Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars, which had been published a decade earlier. Fussell can be an incisive cultural critic, and what he had to say about the postmodern condition of travel--or, more properly, tourism--as contrasted with travel in earlier eras, was devastating to the pretensions of a twenty-something globetrotting imperialist.
"Before tourism there was travel," Fussell wrote, "and before travel therewas exploration... . I am assuming that travel is now impossible and that tourismis all we have left." This sad state of affairs, in Fussell's formulation, givesrise to a peculiar modern type--the "anti-tourist"--who suffers from a "uniquelymodern form of self-contempt." As Fussell explained,
It is hard to be a snob and a tourist at the same time. A wayto combine both roles is to become an anti-tourist. Despite the suffering heundergoes, the anti-tourist is not to be confused with the traveler: his motiveis not inquiry but self-protection and vanity. . . . The anti-tourist's persuasionthat he is really a traveler instead of a tourist is both a symptom and a causeof what the British journalist Alan Brien has designated tourist angst, defined as "a gnawing suspicion that after all . . . you are still a tourist like every other tourist." . . . But the anti-tourist deludes only himself. We are all tourists now, and there is no escape.
Unlike Fussell's literary travelers of the 1920s and 1930s--Graham Greene,D.H. Lawrence, Christopher Isherwood, and W.H. Auden, to name a few--who didn'thave a global tourist industry, much less a global culture industry, to definethemselves against, the Gen X backpackers of the nineties were a generation ofanti-tourists. Our motive, the serious among us told ourselves, was inquiry--intocultures, religions, and philosophies we'd read about in college courses. Ourmethod was the open-ended, low-budget itinerary. Our modus operandi was thestudied indifference to Western, neocolonial expectations of comfort, cuisine,sanitation, and the conventional acquisition of cultural artifacts (otherwiseknown as souvenirs), even photographs. We were the touristic equivalent of the"independent" and "alternative" in nineties pop culture, clinging to acollective, commercially packaged, angst-ridden cliché.
And if our mode of inquiry made us connoisseurs of Thai stick smoked in $1-a-day bamboo bungalows ($2 a day for beachfront), or of strippers dancing toWestern pop in Hong Kong yuppie nightclubs, it came with the territory. One wasdrawn to the East not just by some intellectual curiosity or wanderlust but by the promise of pleasure and intoxication, both sensual and spiritual.
"Neither puritanism nor sensuality was ever unique to East or West," IanBuruma points out in his essay collection The Missionary and the Libertine, "yet, on the whole, it is for the latter that Westerners have looked East." Yet the relationship between East and West, Buruma reminds us, is never one-dimensional; it has always been characterized by a mutual attraction and repulsion, seduction and destruction. For Buruma's generation, the Vietnam War was the complicating prism through which their visions of the East had to pass. He writes:
"Saigon . . . shit," the first two words of Francis FordCoppola's Apocalypse Now, summed up the ancient view of the East as a wicked swamp of iniquity, waiting to suck Westerners into its rotting depths. Saigon was glamorous and corrupt, destroyed by the white man, and destroyer of white men. It might have been shit, but it was seductive shit.
For those of us who met the East in the early nineties, Vietnam had long sincegone Hollywood. I'll never forget watching Oliver Stone's Platoon during my freshman year with a troop of my dorm mates. We stumbled out of the theater, speechless, unable to assimilate the idea that 18- and 19-year-olds just two decades removed from us could have been subjected to that kind of shit--nothing seductive about it. Yet for us, it was only a movie. The experience of Vietnam was utterly alien to us, inassimilable--the past as past, and as spectacle. When we approached Asia, it was another East, a less dangerous East, a less conflicted East. Politically, morally, far less was at stake--for us, at least. Or so it seemed until that day in January 1991.
Even then, for some I encountered along the way, there appearedto be little at stake at all. In late March 1991, I spent several days in the ancient Bai village of Dali, at the foot of the Cang Shan Mountains in Yunnan,China's far southwestern province. With its picturesque location, its busstation, and its prominent write-up in the latest edition of the LonelyPlanet guide to China, Dali was another remote Asian town turned backpackers' haven. The central hangout in Dali was Jim's Peace Café, where enlightened Westerners could eat muesli with yogurt and fruit for breakfast and linger for hours inhaling precious American tobacco smoke (Marlboro being a valuable currency and an ostentatious status symbol among the Chinese). The small, dimly lit "café" offered six tables and walls covered with maps, postcards, and stickers from all over Europe, America, and Australia. Jim was a young guy, Chinese, doing his best to cater to Western tastes. In addition to the muesli and yogurt, there were several types of pizza on the menu, along with the requisite french-fried potatoes.
Jim's was (and may still be, for all I know) a crossroads of what I came tothink of as the Muesli Trail--and the epitome of the Lonely Planet generation's contradictions. It wasn't McDonald's; it was the anti-McDonald's, the flip side, and every bit as much the symbol of Western encroachment, ignorance, and arrogance. And yet, there was the English-speaking Jim (whose urban educated parents were exiled to Dali for "re-education" during the Cultural Revolution), who wouldn't have traded his commerce with the outside world, economic and cultural, for anything. Meanwhile, the people of Dali graciously accepted our presence, going about their lives with only the occasional furtive glance over their shoulders at the approaching juggernaut of history. What choice did they have?
January 17, 1991, had all the trappings of a defining moment. There inthat Bombay train station, I assumed that Americans my age were going to learnsomething of war (whether or not we served in uniform--and I was acutely awarethat I did not), and that this knowledge would shape us as it had shaped allwartime generations. But then, almost as quickly as it had materialized, thisfeeling vanished. The Gulf War, and the recession that followed, now seemed anaberration in an otherwise happy progress toward a borderless, frictionlessworld. For many of us, the defining moment would come four years later, whenNetscape went public.
But for me, at least, the Gulf War was also the beginning of the end of mybudding romance with the East. My hopes of bridging cultures and collapsingdistances, my easy, unearned faith in the ability of experience and knowledgealone--my experience and knowledge, freshly acquired--to transcend difference,were dashed against the grim reality of "us" and "them." It was no longerpossible to pretend that such categories were meaningless. "We" were America andthe West, with all the benefits and baggage that that entailed. "They," forbetter and worse, were not.
On September 11, 2001, as I witnessed the events on CNN, I felt a sickeningsense, a dawning realization, of some deeply rooted connection between my memoryof that day in Bombay when the bombs started falling and the scenes in Manhattanand at the Pentagon. What started in January 1991 had never ended. Mygeneration's war, if that's what this was, had merely been on a 10-year hiatus.
September 11 has already come to mean many things to many people. One thing itconfirmed for me is that the gaze we felt upon us once, in those Easternlongitudes, has only intensified--has, in many places, turned from curiosity tofear and from fear to menace. To face this honestly means confronting the part weplayed in the unfolding drama and abandoning whatever comforts and conceits wemay have assumed from our cosmopolitan vantage point between worlds. Far frominnocent, no matter how sincerely curious we may have been, the fact is that wewere globalization's vanguard, its shock troops, its goateed expeditionary force.
Fussell was right. We are all tourists. No amount of curiosity orself-consciousness, no postured self-doubt, can mitigate our complicity in thetragedy of our time: the failure of communication and understanding across theEast-West divide. "Only connect," said another, earlier tourist, E.M. Forster.If only it were so easy.
