The summer of 2005, I was twenty-four and running a punk bar in Wuhan, the biggest city in central China. During the school year, the place was packed with expats and local kids who came to see shows and mingle. There was something darkly utopian about it—moshing and chain-smoking mixed with the innocence of flirting and practicing languages. But by June all the revellers had left town. Most nights, I sat alone behind the bar until 4 A.M., drinking cocktails of my own invention from a limited supply of Western liquor.

Wuhan is notorious for hot, humid summers. Several nights a week, my neighborhood lost power. I had to drench my bedsheet in cold water, wrap it around myself, and lie down on the tile floor if I was going to sleep at all. I didn’t have an Internet hookup, and it was often impossible to reach anyone back in New York over the phone. I should probably mention that, in addition to cigarettes and alcohol, I was subsisting on a daily diet of one melon slice and four hours of exercise. This was all I knew how to do to try to make myself feel alive.

One morning, I walked around the corner to a dirt road lined with small shops, where you could find Popsicles, concrete mix, puppies, prostitutes, and the latest pirated DVDs. I went into an herbalist’s den, and asked for a tea “to wake me up.” The herbalist, an old man, got off his stool and peered into my eyes. He got closer to me than anyone had been in months. I wanted him to hold me, rock me gently in his arms, feed me tinctures that would soothe my nerves and crystallize my vision, tell me that I would soon be in the cool and easy swing of things. Instead, he sold me a prepackaged health tea and warned that I should quit drinking iced beverages. “Or else you’ll die,” he insisted.

“That’s O.K.,” I said, then paid and left.

I walked to an Internet café up the road. My anxiety at this time was both vague and maddening. It fed on itself, and spat out words for me to obsess over. That day, I sat down at a computer and Googled “death.” The first photos I saw were of mummified corpses—bodies shrunken, masklike faces gaping in silent horror. Then I found Victorian postmortem portraits—children propped up in chairs, perfect posture, only their dry eyes and lolling heads revealing the difference between strict obedience and extinction. Why preserve the dead, I wondered. What did these people know about life that I didn’t? Could I find it if I kept looking?

Most American news sites were blocked in China, but that afternoon I found scores of personal blogs devoted to dead-people pics. Some were carefully curated, with stories alongside the photos. Others were sloppy aggregates from around the Web. A man who’d jumped off the top level of a parking garage lay on the ground like a pile of clothes. Marilyn Monroe’s bloated face rested on an autopsy table. Hangings, car accidents, gunshot wounds to the head. I looked around the Internet café to see if anyone was watching me: no. The other patrons were all teen-age boys, eating junk food and watching clips of sex scenes from romantic movies like “The Lover.” They sat and stared, as though their souls had left their bodies and entered the bodies on their screens. I suppose I was doing the same thing, a tourist in the underworld. I felt distinctly alive as a voyeur. The revulsion got my heart racing, my blood pumping. “Click here for chainsaw accidents.” I did. Click, gasp, rush, sigh.

I visited the Internet café every day that summer. I found the sites I liked best and looked at the same photos over and over again, as though I were visiting old friends. The photo I remember best showed an old man who had sat dead and undiscovered so long that his skin had fused with the plaid fabric of his armchair. A half-eaten piece of toast remained on his TV tray. A cuckoo clock on the wall. Floral drapes. This photo, a portrait of solitude, moved me to tears.

By the end of the summer, I’d saved enough money to buy a plane ticket back home. I returned to my family and friends, and sobered up. Over time, my need to view the dead on a daily basis subsided. Still, when I’m feeling uninspired or self-pitying or numb or dumb or confused, I pick up my old habit. The other day, I found myself clicking through pictures of people drowning—first staged photos of actors playing dead, then real corpses washed ashore. Among them, I saw one that was different: a man being pulled out of the water alive, gasping, eyes wide, face wrenched in panic and disbelief. He had made it back to the land of the living. He looked as if he had just been born. ♦