And just as with mourning, there was a period I had to go through (in this case a good solid 24 hours of misery) before I could breathe normally again. How could one compare the loss of a camera to a death or a sudden breakup? Because a sequence of pictures documents a whole world, a coherent fragment of a life that exists outside of the fog and uncertainy of our brains, and being deprived of those images is like being cut off from that whole life. When my parents died, I realized I was completely cut off once and for all from worlds that I know existed vividly in their memories. The cousins, the uncles, the YIddish expressions my grandfather used to use, the addresses of the houses my parents grew up in, the color of their furniture, the names of their neighbors, the prices of the treats they yearned for as children -- my access to that whole world vanished in an instant, like the one-gig memory card that disappeared in the back seat of the taxi that I saw pull away from the Beijing Grand Hotel and turn onto Chang An Avenue toward Tiananmen Square three Saturdays ago.
The thing is, I had been so incredibly careful all throughout the trip. Among those in my group, I was probably the one most likely to go out into the city on my own, exploring in the few hours between scheduled events. And I'd always thought carefully about how I carried my valuables: my money and passport around my neck, my camcorder in a small shoulder bag I'd bought in Shanghai, my brand new digital camera, a Canon Powershot 600, in the zippered pocket of my right pant leg. And I had spent so much time and expended so much thought on what I'd photograph and how I'd do so. Most of those 600+ photos were pretty well edited; many were retaken a few times.
It all started because I wanted to learn about the Indie Rock scene in Beijing for the sake of my son Moses, a big Indie fan. I'd heard that the city had a pretty good rock scene and had read an article in "That's Beijing" about an Indie festival that had just occurred. A few of my younger fellow travelers made a plan to hit a club mentioned in the article. We'd just gotten back from a long day of touring and shopping and an evening at the Beijing opera. I was tired; I almost didn't go. Then there were the instances of real-life foreshadowing. As we left, my roommate, Dave, said, "Ah, I'm not going to bring my camera tonight." But I would, I thought, because I wanted to take photos of the club for my son. Then, when we got into the cab, 20-something Laurel remarked about how Beijing cabs now all offer receipts. "It's a great thing when you leave your cell phone in a cab!" she said. Forget my cellphone, I thought? I'd never done such a thing.
When we got to the tiny, hot club, a singerless trio was playing in a desultory fashion and the small audience seemed to be more focused on catching a breeze than hearing the tunes. One of my fellow travelers was sure we'd already missed the main act. I took a few shots and videotaped the band for a while, and then went out for some fresh(er) air. It was a humid, sultry Beijing night, and I'd really enjoyed the soft, misty look of the illuminated walls of the Forbidden City on the cab ride on the way over. But now it was after 11 and I had made a plan to get up early the next day to tour around the city with a friend, so I thought it was time to go. But I worried about finding a cab on this dark, deserted street. The first one that stopped refused to take me when I told him the address. Then a pedicab driver tried to charge me about 6 times the going rate. Finally, I found a cab to take me back, and as I drove through the quiet streets of Beiiing, I marveled about how lucky I was to be able to get around a great city like this for so little money (the fare was 11 yuan; I tipped him one yuan (which is not customary in China) in a spontaneous gesture of good will, reaching into my zippered right pant leg pocket for the bills before I got out of the cab under the canopy of my five-star hotel. A reflex made me look back at the seat as I walked toward the revolving door. Did I see something metallic and round? Or was that only hindsight? In a moment I was on the other side of the revolving door, finally in the airconditioned lobby, and out of habit I slapped my right pant leg pocket to feel the compact rectangle of my camera. But there was nothing there. Panicked, I began a slow motion lunge through the very slow-moving automatic revolving door. The cab had driven away, but bewildered by the traffic configuration, I didn't know in which direction. I ran up to the attendant and told him in English, "I left something in my taxi--which way did it go?" I was prepared to chase it. Clearly knowing no English, he brought me back through the painfully slowly revolving doors to talk to the desk clerks in the lobby. Suddenly, I remembered something that made me feel more confident. I had thought to take the receipt when I left the cab; surely this would have the taxi number; a simple phone call would put everything to rights. I knew it would be o.k. After some desk clerk jockeying, the one with the best English heard my story and issued explanations to the others in Chinese.
The taxi receipt was scrutinized. Phone calls were made. Recordings were reached. Buttons were pressed. More recordings were reached. New phone numbers were tried. And so on. I don't know how long all this went on, but I know that moments of horror and anxiety always seem to last longer than they actually do.
But still, it took a while for them to finally tell me, with satisfaction, that the taxi driver had been reached. And that he had picked up another fare. And that he had searched the back seat and found nothing.
I couldn't believe it. In my mind, I kept replaying the moment I slapped my pocket and looked through the revolving door at my departing taxi. Why hadn't I rushed faster through the door? Why hadn't I screamed? How could this have happened?
After a while I returned to the lobby and got the desk clerks to call back the taxi company and offer a reward. I got them to call the club.
Then I went back to my room and tried to sleep, dreading the moment that Dave would walk in and I'd have to utter the painful truth and thereby make it real. Every time I dozed off into a blissful, carefree snooze, I'd jerk myself awake to recognize the horrible truth.
The next morning, after practically no sleep, I had to steel myself to tell my traveling companions the news. They felt really bad for me, and took lots of photos of me. I moped through the muggy day, feeling it hard to look at anything in China without appraising its photoworthiness. I could hardly eat a thing all day.
That evening, after a fruitless shopping excursion, I came back too late and missed meeting friends for dinner. No one else was around. Finally, at 9:30, I knew I had to eat something but didn't want to go to a restaurant alone or spend a lot of money. So I did something I never do, something against which I preach to my children. Not only did I commit the cardinal sin of eating American food in a foreign country, but I performed the irredeemable sacrilege of buying food from McDonald's, even as I kept a half-read copy of Fast Food Nation in my bookbag.
I made my way alone to the nearby shopping street, full of the glare of neon. As I turned the corner out of the hotel parking lot, a modestly dressed prostitute began following me: "Do you need a lady tonight?" I walked fast but she persisted, walking quickly beside me. I managed to shake her just seconds before bumping into two other women from my group, whom I didn't want to know about either my destination or my recent companion.
When I got back to my room with my beer and my Big Mac, I decided I needed distraction and turned on the TV. Of the three English channels, I couldn't abide CNN or sports, so I found myself watching a National Geographic program which recreated an airplane crash, two days before I was to fly the 9,000 miles home. Only then did the grim ironies of life allow me to smile at my situtaion.
By then, exhausted from a night of no sleep and a day of sightseeing and shopping and mourning, I was able to fall asleep and experience the bliss of ignorance I so badly needed.
But my mourning wasn't complete until the next day, when I took myself through the litany of photos I'd never be able to see or point to in order to explain my experience in China and Tibet. Here are a few of the photos I will not have:
•Me standing in front of the colossal statue of Mao, my hand raised up waving, like his, to an imaginary crowd in People's Square in Chengdu
•Peddlers selling fresh fruit out of twin baskets balanced on a pole across their shoulders
•The tinkers and metalsmiths of Zhonghe city in Lhasa, hammering their metalwork and thrusting it into primitive, white, woodburning furnaces on the street
•The orange-vested, red-flag-wielding traffic "volunteers" at intersections in Chengdu
•The two Chinese men playing Chinese chess while sitting calmly in the middle of the floor of the Chinese market in Lhasa
•The young Tibetan monk on the Barkhor who offered to have his photo taken and then rushed up to see himself on the screen
•The metalworkers in an alley in Lhasa dousing a huge copper Buddha with some sort of chemical solution
•The scores of pilgrims in Tibetan dress spinning prayer wheels, clutching fragrant sandalwood beads as they cirumnambulated a kora
•The sun setting over the Potala Palace in Lhasa, viewed from the roof of a building in the Barkhor my first night in Tibet
•Two crimson clad Tibetan Buddhist nuns sitting outside a holy shrine, studying books.
•Slabs of raw meat hanging in open stalls in the Muslim quarter of Lhasa while proprietors flicked away flies with homemade contraptions made of knotted up plastic bags ties to the ends of sticks.
•The Tibetan monk who prostrated himself as he progressed around the Barkhor, wearing wooden blocks tied to the palms of his hands.
•The apprentice monk at Sera monastery who showed me around the chapel and signed to me what I should look at and which way I should walk
•The glow of a multiple-wicked yak butter lamp
•The picture of the artist who painted my Thangka at his shop in Lhasa
•The workaday green pedicabs of Chengdu and the colorful, fringed pedicabs of Lhasa
•The white exterior window valances in the monasteries in Tibet that undulate gracefully in the mountain breezes
•Chinese men walking arm in arm down the street. Tibetan monks walking arm in arm down the street.
•Tibetan kettles sitting atop solar burners in the monastery courtyards
•Groups of Buddhist monks sitting in a circle on the Barkhor plaza talking on their cellphones.
•The primitive pit toilet at Ganden monastery in a room with no toilet paper, no door, empty windows.
•Prayer flags flying from the outer compound walls of Tibetan village homes, their ornate front doors braced with brass
These and many other photos I remember taking will never perch, framed, on my wall or flash every few minutes on my computer desktop. They will exist only here in these words and in my memory.
