Sandra worked for SRI International about ten years ago, not as I do in the Artificial Intelligence Center, but in the management consulting division, but she was interested in the AI business, and had a Ph.D. degree in philosophy, so she hung around the AIC quite a bit, and that's where I met her. We had lunch often, and I helped talk her through her divorce.
The years passed. She left SRI, and eventually became a major player in a business consulting firm in San Francisco. She's a quite brilliant woman. She began to travel a lot in western China and Tibet. She told me often that she had wonderful slides of the Sunday market in the city of Kashgar in far western China, that her son had taken on their trip there shortly after the Tienanmen Square uprising. I wanted very much to see them, but we had a terrible time arranging it. We started trying in 1995, if not the slides then at least dinner. We just missed each other in May 1996 when we were both in Washington. Then in July 1997 we finally saw each other. I ran into her at a gate at Dulles Airport. It turned out we were on the same plane flying from Washington back to San Francisco. I gave up my upgrade, and we sat together and had a wonderful conversation; we never stopped talking. I again renewed my request for a Kashgar slide show, and over the next months we tried to find a time again. Most of her communications were post cards from places like Beijing and Turpan, China, India, Nepal, and the Galapagos Islands, where she went to see a total eclipse of the sun.
Finally in July 1998 I went over to her house and had dinner and the slide show. She said then that she had seen many pictures of western China that had fascinated her, and they all turned out to be in Gansu province. I was planning to spend September and half of October traveling around western China, so she suggested we travel through Gansu together. She had been a rugged traveller in China in the past, so it sounded like fun. I said yes, although given the difficulties we had had before in trying to get together, I didn't really believe it would happen until I saw her at the airport.
She gave me several books, including a book of photographs of Gansu. This later turned out to be significant.
She was an old China hand and a brilliant conversationalist, and I was sure we would have a great time in our week together. We lasted exactly 36 hours.
I was waiting in the Red Carpet Lounge at SFO for my flight at the end of August--United Premier Executives get to do that for international flights even if they are flying coach--and Sandra, flying business, showed up there too. We waited together and chatted amiably, and even excitedly. We were separated by class on the flight to Tokyo, but we waited together in the Red Carpet Lounge there for our connection to Beijing. In Beijing we changed money, went through customs, and caught a taxi into town together. We shared a room--each in our own bed and ``no inappropriate relationship,'' as our President would say. We walked up and down a side street in the evening, past shops weakly lit in the darkness, and traded recent life stories. Mine was especially complicated at this particular time. The next morning we walked to Tienanmen Square and as far as we could into the Forbidden City without paying admission. So this was all very pleasant.
Her plans at this point were to fly from Beijing to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, and takes buses from there down to Xiahe Monastery for several days. I was going to spend a day in Beijing, take a train to Xi'an and stay there for two days, and then take a train to Lanzhou, where she would return to and we would meet.
So we caught a taxi back to the hotel. On the way an incident occurred, very trivial in itself but, for her, foreshadowing coming difficulties and, for me, a vindication of sorts. The taxi was only across a wide avenue from our hotel when the driver waited behind a stalled bus for three changes of the stoplight without changing lanes and whipping around. I decided he was lame and suggested to Sandra we pay the man and hop out and cross the street on foot. Sandra didn't want to, and at the time she thought what an impatient American yahoo tourist I was. She wanted to have this driver wait and take her to the airport. She got her way.
She told me later that I was right in my judgment of him. On the way to the airport he missed the airport exit three times and drove 20 miles out of the way, and she had to run through the terminal to make her plane.
Let's skip now to my first day in Lanzhou. I got off the train from Xi'an around 11 a.m. There were two trains two days later out of Lanzhou to our next stop, Jiayuguan, one at 5:20 A.M. and one at 5:40 P.M. We had both agreed the morning train would be better, because it would allow us to see by daylight the famed Hexi Corridor, route of the Silk Road and of barbarian invasions. I looked around the station, but the lines at the ticket windows were huge, and I didn't know which one to stand in. I went to my hotel. They had a business office of sorts, so I went there to see if they could arrange the morning train. They couldn't; only the afternoon train. So I searched around the neighborhood for the China International Tourist Service (CITS) and eventually found it. A long wait for a woman who spoke English to return from lunch, and then she told me that the morning train originated in Shanghai, and they could only sell tickets for trains that originated here in Lanzhou. They could only sell me tickets to the afternoon train. My last try was to go to the train station itself and brave the lines. But there, as soon as I said ``houtian'' for ``day after tomorrow'', the clerk said ``mei you'', ``don't have''. Tickets for trains become available only the day before.
I have gone into all this detail to show you the trouble I went to to get the morning train. This also becomes significant.
So I spent the rest of the day going around Lanzhou. Chinese cities are by and large ugly. Uniform modern, recently and not very well built buildings of five or six stories faced with white tile, now soiled. No aesthetic touches. I have heard it said that every city in China has exactly one good photograph and you have to find the right spot to stand in to take it. There is some truth in this. But I never found the right spot for Lanzhou. I went to their mediocre regional museum and climbed up to a modern pagoda with a view of the polluted city. These were the only sights mentioned in the guidebook. I mention all this because it too becomes significant.
Sandra was planning to return to Lanzhou the next day, midday. I was going to spend the day, from early morning on, at the Buddhist temple of Binglingsi, several hours out into the countryside from Lanzhou. Then we would meet in the evening, and take the train the next morning.
But as I was lying on my bed in my hotel room, the phone rang. It was Sandra. She was in the lobby. She had managed to catch the last bus of the day into Lanzhou.
I was deliriously happy to see her. I had been, frankly, lonely for much of the last week. We went off to Food Alley and got a dinner of noodles together and traded stories of our adventures. I will only relate one of hers, because of its relevance to later events.
She had arrived in the town of Linxia on her way back from Xiahe, intending to spend the night there. But a man grabbed her and pulled her onto his bus for Lanzhou. She decided she might as well. But after they were underway, he came back to her and demanded more money because she was a foreigner. She is slight and blonde, and does not look as formidable as she can be. This time, however, she was not formidable. She does not speak or understand any Chinese--as she puts it, she only knows five words and two of them are ``xie xie'' (``thank you'')--so she showed him 10 yuan, then 20, then 30, then 40, but he kept refusing, indicating it was not enough. (Ten yuan is $1.20.) She had no more 10-yuan notes than that, so next she gave him a 100-yuan note, expecting 50 yuan in change. But the man lit up when he got it, and returned to the front of the bus, bragging loudly to the driver that he had got 100 yuan from the American. A pall fell over the entire bus, in embarassment at what he had done. She followed him to the front and demanded her change, but to no avail. She imagined pulling him off the bus in Lanzhou and complaining about his scam, but he got off halfway along, and the loss was final.
I didn't say so, but I was sure I could have avoided the loss. In fact, later in my trip, on a bus from Guelin to Yangshuo, I refused the ticket taker's demand for 10 yuan extra for my suitcase and my daypack, and I held my ground. Of course, in part, this was because I wanted to prove to myself I was a better traveller than Sandra.
Sandra and I shared a room again that night in Lanzhou. We went to bed early because we had to get up early for our trip to Binglingsi.
The next day we worked well together, through several difficult incidents. I had arranged a taxi to pick us up at 6:30 that morning, but by 6:50 he had not shown up, so we went out onto the street to hail a taxi. A yellow minibus stopped, and we got in. But it was rickety, the door wouldn't close completely, and the driver thought the solution to the language problem was to shout in my ear. We couldn't immagine putting up with this all day. Just then we saw a good taxi turn into the hotel driveway and decided it must be the taxi I had arranged, so we jumped out.
It wasn't, but it was a good cab, and we got a good price from him. But we were a bit leery because he had another man in the front seat with him. Right behind him was another good cab with only the driver, and he said he'd give us the same price. We decided to go with him.
The first driver, however, objected. He yelled at the second driver and yelled at me. When I tried to get in the second cab, he grabbed my daypack and tried to pull it away. I had to pry his fingers loose. I told him it was because he had two people in his cab, so he went back there and angrily ejected his friend. That gave us the chance to get in and get away. But as we were about to make a left turn out of the hotel driveway, the first driver, still raging, pulled past us on the left and made a right turn right in front of us.
At least he was gone after that. Or so we thought. A couple of blocks later, there he was again, right behind us, riding our bumper, and then he pulled around us and cut us off with less than an inch to spare. He angled across in front of us and slammed on his brakes, blocking the whole narrow street diagonally. We managed to pull around him on the sidewalk and some other cars did too, leaving him and the traffic jam he had caused behind. Then we really were rid of him.
It was about a two-hour drive through beautiful countryside, with grain from newly harvested fields piled in loess village coutryards, to the reservoir, on the other side of which was Binglingsi. We were surrounded by touts with photos of boats. We consulted and picked the best looking one and bargained him down to 300 yuan, round trip.
An hour across the reservoir and up the muddy Huang He (the Yellow River) and we reached a Utah-like area of sharp spires and narrow canyons, and finally docked at the temple. Binglingsi is a huge Buddha, 90 feet high, carved into the cliff and flanked by 183 caves excavated into the cliff, with painted interiors, extending far above the Buddha.
There was a difficulty, however. In China there are always difficulties. Half the cliff was covered with scaffolding, and we were not allowed into any but a few caves near the entrance. In particular, they would not let us see the famous Caves 169 and 172. Sandra objected vociferously, and eventually they did give us permission, for 200 yuan apiece ($24). I'm told in China difficulties can always be solved with enough money, but I'm too cheap to have much personal experience in that regard.
We climbed up six or seven steep, ladder-like flights of wooden stairs on the face of the cliff and along a catwalk to the caves. In general, I'm not fond of Buddhist art. In Confucian art, the men always have a look of being engaged with the world--curious or determined--whereas in Buddhist art the Buddhas are expressionless and disengaged. In Cave 169, that was certainly true of the central Buddhas in each picture. But the other figures exhibited the full range of human attitudes and character traits. They really were magnificent.
Back down on the ground, Sandra and I gave each other high fives for our success.
Then we hired a tuk-tuk and bounced back along a narrow canyon several miles to a wonderful Tibetan Buddhist temple. Sandra made an incense offering.
Our next adventure came when we boarded the boat again. The price had gone up from 300 yuan to 350 yuan. I was furious at this implicit threat to abandon us on the far side of the lake. I summoned up the little Chinese I knew and said, ``Lai hui, san bai yuan; lai, ling yuan.'' (``Round trip, 300 yuan; one-way, zero yuan.'') And I looked over at the boats that had recently arrived with other tourists, as though I were about to go over and negotiate with them. He argued, but we both ignored him, and finally he took us back.
So it was a good day together. We had passed through beautiful countryside and seen one of China's most remarkable ancient sights. We had had the high of overcoming several serious difficulties, proving our toughness as travellers. Things looked good for our week of travel together.
Then everything fell apart.
It was 3:30 in the afternoon when we got back to town. I pointed out to Sandra that we still had time to take this afternoon's train to Jiayuguan, if we wanted to. She said no, she wanted to go back to the hotel and take a bath and go out to Food Alley for a good Mongolian barbecue. That was okay with me.
We had the taxi driver drop us at the train station, and there we waited in line to buy tickets for the next morning's train. I asked the clerk for that train in my Chinese and showed her a slip of paper on which I had written the particulars in Chinese characters. When she gave me the tickets, I walked away with a feeling of triumph.
Then I looked at the ticket. It was for the next afternoon's train. I went back to the head of the line and told the clerk she had given me the wrong ticket. I wanted the morning train. ``Mei you,'' she said. ``Don't have.''
I had wanted to spend a relaxed evening in Lanzhou with Sandra, but I certainly did not want to spend another entire day in this ugly town. I told Sandra this, and I suggested again that we take this afternoon's train, if we could, since the next morning's seemed to be impossible.
Now my impression at the time was that she agreed with this. But to be honest, I cannot remember any specific utterance in which she said she agreed.
There was a window with no line. I went to it. The clerk changed the tickets without any fuss.
For the next hour we had too much to do for me to notice anything of an interactional nature. We rushed back to the hotel, packed up, checked out of the hotel, and rushed back to the station.
As we got out of the taxi at the station, I said, ``Why don't I watch our suitcases and you go get us some food.''
She replied, ``Why don't I carry my own suitcase, and buy food for myself.''
I was stunned. I had thought we were working so well together, manipulating the gears of the Chinese infrastructure. It was if suddenly the Good Sandra had turned into the Bad Sandra.
She went off to the grocery store next to the station, and I went off to the same grocery store. She stood at one counter picking out items and I stood at another. Then she moved over to mine and I moved over to hers. I paid first and left, went into the crowded waiting room and fought my way to near the front. I found a seat there and saved the one next to me for her.
But when the gate was opened, she had not shown up yet. I gave the room one last scan, and then followed the crowds to board the train. Ten minutes later, just as the train was about to pull out of the station, she strolled onto our car and took the seat next to me, insisting on the window seat since that's what her ticket said. While I had been in the waiting room, she had stopped off at a sidewalk restaurant for a quick bowl of noodles.
Her behavior toward me during the trip ranged from civil to icy.
Chinese trains have three classes--soft sleeper, which costs as much as an airplane; hard sleeper, which is comfortable, reasonably priced, and perfectly adequate; and hard seat, which when it gets crowded can be grueling indeed. Later I spent some time on a crowded, all-night hard seat car, and people were sprawled in the most improbable positions. A man slept on the floor to allow his wife to spread across two seats. Strangers' heads flopped on their neighbors' shoulders. Outstretched legs blocked the aisles. People camped out in the spaces between cars.
I had only been able to get hard seat tickets. So there we were.
Shortly after we started a dour People's Liberation Army soldier came by and stared at us sternly. He signalled that we should get our bags and follow him. We looked puzzled. He put his two palms together and tilted his head to indicate sleep. He would get us hard sleeper berths.
We lugged our luggage after him through two cars, and he deposited us in front of the desk of some sort of functionary. Eventually, we realized this is where you can buy upgrades, if a berth is available. For the next hour, I stood at the front of a pressing crowd, being ignored, believing it was because I was a foreigner, getting madder and madder, trying to calm myself by saying, ``This is why I'm doing this trip now and not when I'm 70,'' while a uniformed woman reached around me for money from the Chinese and gave them tickets.
During this time, Sandra was standing out of the crowd, between the cars, guarding our suitcases and fuming--for all I could tell afterwards, fuming at me.
Finally, when she had served everyone in the crowd, the clerk closed down her desk, signalled me to wait, and walked off toward the hard sleeper cars. I then realized that all those other people had bought unreserved hard seats, and were now paying for whatever they could get. I was not in competition with them at all. The woman returned fifteen minutes later, took our money, and led us several cars away to empty berths in adjacent compartments.
Our interaction that evening was pleasant enough without actually being friendly.
I slept reasonably well. The lights came on at 6:45 the next morning, and everyone got up, including, eventually, me. We made a stop in a town called Qing Shui, and I found it on my aeronautic map of the region. Sandra was already up. I asked her if she wanted to see where we were on the map. She said curtly, ``No.'' I took that as an announcement that I was still dealing with the Bad Sandra.
A little later I saw snowcapped peaks behind the first range of mountains, and I told Sandra about them. ``I've been watching them,'' she said icily.
A little later I saw my first Bactrian, two-humped camel, pulling a cart. My first impulse was to tell Sandra. But I stifled it, predicting her reaction to be boredom bordering on hostility.
A little later she asked if I knew where we were. I replied: ``Yes.''
In Jiayuguan I let her choose the hotel. In the taxi on the way there, Sandra said, ``There must be a pony somewhere in this pile of shit.''
When I didn't respond, she said, ``You must not know that story.''
``I know the story,'' I said. ``I just don't see its relevance.''
We got a suite together in the old, Soviet wing of the hotel. She had been talking all morning about wanting to take a bath, and I wanted to shower too. But when we got to our room and I asked who should go first, she said angrily, ``You go ahead. There's no time for me.'' There was no talking her into going first. She went out to the bank instead.
I went downstairs before her and was trying to find out what a fair price for a taxi all day would be. But before they could tell me, Sandra walked past me out the door, and I had to join her. So I went out ignorant, set up to be cheated.
I asked the first driver how much to see the fort and the Great Wall, Jiayuguan's two sites, and he said 180 yuan. I was tempted to go on the meter, so I turned to Sandra and asked if she thought we should. She said, ``I can't make a decision if I don't even know what he's asking.'' And then, before I could answer, ``In fact, why don't I just get my own taxi.''
``Okay,'' I said. And then I said, ``Fuck you,'' as I walked away.
It was a harsh thing to say. But I felt she had been saying the same to me for the last fifteen hours, although in more clever ways.
I went down the line of taxis until I found a driver who would take me for 100 yuan.
We followed about a quarter mile behind Sandra's taxi, out to the Jiayuguan Fortress. At the fortress, our paths didn't intersect, although once as I was on the top of the inner wall, I saw her below walking across the courtyard. She was just getting into her taxi as I exited the fortress, but I stopped for an ice cream bar and fell farther behind.
When I got to the Great Wall (its reconstructed, supposed western end), she was walking up to the highest tower several hundred meters ahead of me. There was no catching up - the weather was hot, the altitude was high, the wall was steep, and I was out of condition. But I knew we'd meet; there was only one way up and down. At the next to the last tower, she was there, standing in the shade of the high part of the parapet. I was puffing, sweating, and gasping for air. I said, ``Did you know Jiayuguan is 7600 feet in altitude?'' She said, ``It's easier going down.'' She had already been to the top.
The next major stop on the standard tour was on the other side of town, the ``Xinchang Wei-Jin Art Gallery'', 1500-year-old miniature paintings of daily life in a tomb beneath a mound on the desert. But before going there, I had my driver look for another ancient site--he showed me something, but I'm not sure what--and then he stopped for gas and groceries in town. So as we drove out the long straight narrow road to the site, we saw Sandra's taxi returning from it. The drivers honked, but Sandra and I did not wave.
I had the driver drop me off at the bus station. I bought a ticket for Dunhuang the following day. Only one ticket. I couldn't see Sandra and me continuing to travel together. We couldn't even communicate well enough to split the cost of a cab.
When I returned to our hotel room, Sandra was not there. Gradually it dawned on me that neither was her luggage. She had up and left, lock, stock and barrel. I looked around for a message, but there was none. I speculated on where she had gone--left for Dunhuang on the afternoon bus, returned by train to an earlier town in Gansu she felt she had missed by traveling with me, moved to another hotel,
Then I recalled she owed me, I figured, $240, for expenses so far on this trip. E-mail when we got home was not necessarily an option, because she had said she was just about to switch to another job, maybe in Hong Kong, maybe in Melbourne.
So that was the end of the friendship. We had had difficulties getting together over the years, but when we did, it was the Good Sandra and we had wonderful conversations. It was the Good Sandra as we planned the trip to Gansu together, and the night we spent in Beijing, and the glorious day in Binglingsi. But suddenly at the train station in Lanzhou she turned into the Bad Sandra, and the trip together was doomed.
I wondered how the other men in her life had dealt with the Bad Sandra. Did they buckle under and lick her toes? Did they ignore her until the Good Sandra reappeared? Did they try to coax her out of it? But I usually respond to anger, the kind of anger that denies communcation, with greater anger, and we got into an escalating spiral that ended with the end of a friendship.
I suspected the real issue was that she felt she was losing control of her trip, that it was going too fast, and that I was too much in charge. She tried to retake control of her own trip by closing me out of it, and she succeeded. The trip was all hers now.
Not all friends can travel well together.
I didn't see her the rest of the day.
The next morning I went to the bus station, and Sandra showed up ten minutes later. She had merely moved to her own hotel room. I asked her if she wanted to meet for dinner tonight at Charlie's Cafe in Dunhuang. I said I was asking her for a date. ``That's sweet,'' she said. She accepted.
On the bus ride to Dunhuang, across brown gravel desert with bare eroded mountains in the distance, I mostly talked with the bus's five other foreign travellers.
At the Dunhuang bus station I caught Sandra's suitcase for her as it was tossed off the top of the bus. While I was waiting for my own, she went off to buy her bus ticket for Golmud for two days hence. I went and stood in line behind her to buy a ticket for the same bus, and she was at pains to insist to the clerk that we were not together.
I mentioned to her that she owed me $240. She said she didn't believe it was that much, and anyway she didn't have it. It looked like trouble ahead.
That evening Charlie's Cafe was closed, so we went to Shirley's Restaurant across the street, and got kunbao chicken and Szechuan beef.
First we did the arithmetic. She had me on two counts. I had forgotten to divide by 2, and then I subtracted the 180 yuan she had paid for last night's hotel before rather than after dividing by 2. When I said I wanted cash, she said she didn't have it, and besides, since most of it was hotel bills I had paid on my credit card, she would be acting as my bank. I had to agree with her on that. So I said she could send me a check.
She said she would send the check as soon as I returned her books on Gansu province. Otherwise I would have no incentive to return them. I was of course outraged that she would suspect me of wanting to steal her books, and eventually I called her a despicable person for it.
Then she launched into her story of victimhood. She was losing $300 on air tickets and had made numerous changes in her itinerary for the sake of traveling with me. But she had wanted a slow-paced, relaxing vacation, and I wanted to race ahead. I had disregarded her wishes when I bought the train tickets in Lanzhou. I was self-centered and did only what I wanted to do--a charge I have heard from enough other people to distress me.
I had no way of keeping up with her dazzling verbal pyrotechnics during this diatribe, or even of hinting at it in this description. But after she was finished, I asked if there was any way we could have predicted this disaster, and used that to launch into my Good Sandra-Bad Sandra theory, the best I could do for a counterattack. I asked how other men in her life had dealt with the Bad Sandra; she didn't know what I was talking about. Then I summarized the whole episode with the coda: ``We both like to be in control of our own destinies too much to travel well together.'' She neither agreed nor disagreed. I said I was sorry that all this had destroyed what I had always thought of as a good friendship.
A bit of silence. Then she catalogued the things she had liked about me, and I responded in kind.
Then we ordered another beer, relaxed, and talked with each other as we had in the past. She recommended things to see in Turpan and Delhi. We laughed about how the China International Tourist Service's primary function is extortion. We debated the optimal time to see a country, as its bureaucracy declines and its tourist traffic increases.
We walked together down to my hotel and we hugged as she boarded a pedicab for her hotel.
Our trip was already planned, so we were going to be in the same places, regardless. The next morning I hopped on a minibus for 10 yuan to Mogao Caves. Sandra and I were both on the morning's only English-speaking tour. She had reserved a taxi for the day for 200 yuan. In the evening, we went together to the Singing Sand Mountains for a ride on a Bactrian camel. The next day we were on the same bus to Golmud. She was in the window seat, I had the aisle. In Golmud, there was only one hotel, but we stayed in different wings.
Sandra was heading back east from Golmud; I was heading south to Tibet. So we didn't see much of each other in Golmud.
The next day at noon we had our last little adventure together. I was in the lobby with two young Japanese travellers, trying to arrange a bus trip to Lhasa. Sandra came down to check out before going to catch the 2:30 train. In Chinese hotels you have to pay a 10 yuan deposit for a room key that you never receive (the concierge for the floor opens your door), and you are given a receipt, a dirty little scrap of paper. To get the deposit back you have to return your receipt. Sandra had lost hers. She was complaining loudly to the hotel clerks, demanding her deposit back. She said she deserved a discount anyway, since nothing in the room worked--no lights, no hot water. I resisted intervening for as long as I could, but it just looked like too much fun. So I finally leapt to her aid. The argument was with a tall, slender, rule-governed man who spoke excellent English. He remembered taking Sandra's deposit, but refused to return it without the receipt. Regulations. I tried arguments placing blame on the hotel. No dent. I said he was stealing from tourists. No dent. Finally, Sandra gave up, so I did too. She remembered the Lonely Planet guide calling the staff at this hotel ``surly'', so I found the passage in the book and looked up the word in my Chinese-English dictionary, and I went up to show it to him. ``I'm not surly,'' he said in a surly manner.
Sandra and I hugged goodbye and she went off to the train station.
She got back to America before I did, and her check was waiting for me when I got there. I mailed her books to her my first day back. I haven't seen her since then, although I have gotten post cards from her from Timbuktu, and from Iran where she had gone to witness a total eclipse of the sun.