Gilman - Undress me in the Temple of Heaven: a memoir

Take Me Home, Country Roads

Words and music by John Denver, Bill Danoff, and Taffy Nivert

Copyright 1971; Renewed 1999 Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc. (ASCAP), Dimensional Music Of 1091 (ASCAP), Anna Kate Deutschendorf, Zachary Deutschendorf, and Jesse Belle Denver for the U.S.A.

All Rights for Dimensional Music Of 1091, Anna Kate Deutschendorf and Zachary

Deutschendorf Administered by Cherry Lane Music Publishing Company, Inc. (ASCAP)

All Rights for Jesse Belle Denver Administered by WB Music Corp. (ASCAP)

All Rights for the World excluding the United States Administered by Cherry Lane Music

Publishing Company, Inc.

International copyright secured. All Rights Reserved.

Copyright 2009 by Susan Jane Gilman

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Grand Central Publishing

Hachette Book Group

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New York, NY 10017

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First eBook Edition: March 2009

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ISBN: 978-0-446-54468-9

Also by Susan Jane Gilman

Kiss My Tiara

Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress

for

Bob Stefanski

my Beloved, my fellow traveler, my North Star

THIS IS A TRUE STORY, recounted as accurately as possible and corroborated by notes I took at the time and by others who were present. However, given the sensitive nature of what unfolded and the conditions under which many of the people in this story continue to live, I have changed the names of almost everyone unless given their permission. I have also altered distinguishing characteristics of several peoplemost notably of my friend Claire Van Houten and her familyto the extent of rendering them unrecognizable. It is my intention to protect their identity and privacy.

Ive also spelled some Mandarin words the way they sounded to me at the time rather than as theyre actually written.

Except for these alterations, this remains a work of nonfiction. All these events happened, and the people are real. God knows, I couldnt make this up.

Susan Jane Gilman

To become wise, one must wish to have certain experiences and run, as it were, into their gaping jaws. This is, of course, very dangerous; many a wise man has been swallowed.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Two Air Signs are fun to watch, like trapeze artists at the circus Since Librans can never make up their minds, and Geminis are continually changing theirs, its hard to know what to predict will happen in an association between them.

Linda GoodmansLove Signs

NO ONE ELSE seemed concerned when our plane took a nosedive. We banked sharply to the left, then plunged toward what looked like a tongue depressor, a tiny spit of land jutting into a titanium sea.

Our tray tables in their upright positions, our carry-ons stashed in the overhead bins, the plastic seat frames rattled violently. Below us, the earth went haywire. And yet the flight attendants remained placid at their stations. One of them was even leafing throughwas that a golf magazine? The other picked at her cuticles. The plane continued plummeting. I gripped the armrests. Dear God, we are all about to die with a splat! Across the aisle from me, a businessman tossed his newspaper aside and yawned.

The cabin rang with the high-pitched whistle of deceleration. Wow, check it out. Claire leaned across me. Beyond the little oblong window, gargantuan mountains rose up wildly in the twilight; a phalanx of apartment buildings suddenly appeared. High-rises seemed to be lining the runway, providing some sort of sadistic buffer between our 747 and the peaks. They were so close, I thought I could see light fixtures silhouetted in their windows, clotheslines jiggling on their balconies. On the other side of the plane was the bay. If we didnt land precisely, wed careen into either the mountains or the sea.

Its like Scylla and Charybdis down there, Claire laughed, spooling the cord from her headphones around her Walkman. She had majored in philosophy, so she tended to view the world through a prism of Greek mythology and nineteenth-century German depressives. The cabin began filling with the smell of sewage, jet fuel, rotting fish. Seeing my distress, she squeezed my arm. Oh, sweetie. Relax. Its all part of the adventure.

There was a screaming roar; my heart went staccato in my chest. I flashed miserably on my teary-eyed parents, on my little brother back in Manhattan listening to all the record albums Id left behind. A ribbon of asphalt swelled beneath the plane. I shut my eyes and braced myself for impact. The fuselage seemed to tear through a membrane. Everything convulsed, then shuddered, then released with an ear-splitting squeal.

We stopped. For an instant, there was silence.

Ladies and gentlemen, the pilot said cheerily over the loudspeaker, welcome to Kai Tak Airport. The passengers applauded politely. Id never heard people applaud a landing beforethough to be fair, this was only the third time in my life Id ever been on an airplane. As we taxied toward the gate, I exhaled and imagined that they were really clapping for Claire and me. Our arrival was momentous. It was unbelievable to me that wed actually pulled it off. We were now truly here, on the other side of the earth. All that remained was for us to step out onto the glistening tarmac and into the gloriousness of our lives.

In 1986, my classmate Claire Van Houten and I decided to backpack around the world for a year. Neither of us had ever traveled independently before or been to a country where we couldnt speak the language. The farthest west Id ever been, in fact, was Cleveland. Nonetheless, the two of us became convinced that we should not only embark on an epic journey, but begin someplace incredibly daunting and remote where none of our friends had ever set foot before. And so we decided to kick off our adventure in the Peoples Republic of China. At that point, Communist China had been open to independent backpackers for about all of ten minutes.

The summer after our graduation from college, wed purchased around-the-world airline tickets, which began with a flight from New York to Hong Kong that September. By slowly plane-hopping around the waistline of the planet, wed figured wed circumnavigate the globe in exactly a year, returning just in time for my student loans to come due.

We had no idea, of course, of how complicated the world could be, or of our place in it, or of just how much trouble we were in for. We didnt even comprehend what it would feel like to lug water purifiers, sleeping bags, and leaden pairs of hiking boots around the globe. All wed thought was: Hey, lets be Odysseus. Lets be Byron. Lets be Don Quixote, Huck Finn, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into oneexcept with lip gloss. Lets conquer the fucking world.

As we alighted from the gangway, Claire pirouetted. Oh my God! Were in Hong Kong! Can you be-lieve it?

We each gave a trilling, girlish squealno doubt exactly as Odysseus wouldve doneand sashayed through passport control. We hadnt even reached the baggage claim, however, before I got a massive nosebleed.