Beijing Payback

by Daniel Nieh

  “Yŏu shíhòu nǐ xuǎnzé shŏuduàn, yŏushíhòu shŏuduàn xuǎn nǐ—Sometimes you choose the means, sometimes the means choose you,” Dad would say. I raise the hammer above my head. Gregoire was right. I do have the easy part.

  23

  After I smashed Gregoire’s hand, we finished the joint and most of the baijiu together. Filled with relief and elated on adrenaline, we laughed like hyenas. Gregoire regaled us with some choice stories from his days and nights in Yulia Three’s clothing. We also gave him a short version of what we were up to in Beijing. Gregoire said he didn’t know much about Ouyang, but he’d heard a story about Zhao: that he’d planted a mole in an American tech joint venture and sold proprietary algorithms to a Chinese competitor. This theft of intellectual property had lent Zhao a mythical status, and now foreign companies were constantly on the lookout for his spies.

  Once Gregoire’s hand had turned purple and swollen up nicely, we helped him take some photos with his SLR. Then we split a cab and dropped him off at the hospital on our way back to the hutong. By that time he had declared us all brothers for life. He also promised to publish whatever we dug up on Ouyang and Zhao.

  I wake up from another groggy, jet-lagged nap to the sound of the Nokia vibrating and dancing across the little table beside my bed. Another call from the same number ending in 8998—I refuse it and put the phone back on silent. Then I shower in the bathroom across the hall, running the water cold for a few minutes at the end to clear the baijiu and hashish haze from my head. Arms crossed, head bowed forward, I let the frigid torrent pound the muscles between my spine and scapulae, cool the tension held there. Back at SDSU I had a habit of spending an hour or two each week at the Athletic Center, where even benchwarmers like me were treated like blue-ribbon ponies. One of the work-study premeds would hook a TENS machine up to my left shoulder, which has a history of popping out, while another would massage my calves and ply me for details about Andre’s love life.

  I wonder what sort of injuries Sun has accrued during his service to Happy Year and what sort of treatment he got for them, what perils he faced in China while Dad and I were in the States, pretending my next game was the most important thing in the world. As for me, well, as you say in basketball, I could execute the play. Violence, that’s what Dad meant, and not the play kind. Until today, I had been led through the violence by Sun, spending most of my time crouched on the ground while he put on his hard hat and went to work. But Gregoire had slid the hammer to me—Vaughn, Victor, the guy speaking English with him. I could’ve let Sun do it, but I didn’t, and not just because Sun had done his share. There was more to it: an exhilaration. Before it was over I heard myself screaming—matching Gregoire’s shrieks of pain, but also releasing something from my insides, something ugly. And now that it’s out, I feel better. I feel almost good. But I also feel insane.

  Ai has pretty good water pressure down here.

  I’m sitting with a towel wrapped around my waist, making a frame with my forearms around a glass of water on the kitchen table, when Wei comes down the stairs and through the vault-like door.

  “Hello,” she says in English. She’s dressed differently from this morning: black zip-up hoodie, black cargo pants, black boots. With the exception of some uncooperative bangs, her hair is gathered in a messy bun. She lowers herself into a chair across from me.

  “Sun is running some errands.” She switches back to Mandarin. “You two will meet Feder at one tonight. At Velvet. He told me to tell you that Feder will give you what you want.”

  “Thanks. What’s Old Ai up to?”

  “He’s at a charity auction.”

  For the first time I notice a second pair of eyes looking at me. “My God, what is that?”

  “You mean Xiaofang?” Wei reaches up with both hands and gingerly lifts the tiny white and brown creature out of the hood of her sweatshirt. “He is a lazy monkey.”

  “A what?”

  Xiaofang has bandy limbs, stubby little round ears, and oversize, weirdly human hands. He looks like the fruit of a union between a lemur and a Furby. The teardrop shape of the brown fur around his enormous round eyes gives him a look of perpetual surprise and vulnerability. He’s holding his arms straight out in front of him, like a zombie or a slow-dancing schoolgirl, and his mouth seems to be frozen into a gleeful grin. He’s staring at me.

  “I think in English you say ‘slow loris.’ Ai gave him to me. He buys them from poachers in Indonesia. They’re worth quite a bit on the black market.”

  “Because they’re insanely cute?”

  “He is, isn’t he?” She sets Xiaofang on the table on his little butt and tickles him under one of his outstretched arms. He tilts his head up and beams at her. “Partially because they’re cute, but mainly because they’re believed to have all sorts of magical powers. Like they can see ghosts. And the meat is an aphrodisiac.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “I know. They’re going to go extinct.”

  “What else does Ai buy from poachers?”

  “Everything. The worst things you can imagine. Ivory. Rhinoceros horn. They grind it up and snort it. Do you want to feed him a lychee?” She steps into the kitchen to find a lychee while Xiaofang takes my fingers into his hands one by one and smells them. When I hold out the lychee to him, he accepts it with both mitts and tries to put the whole thing in his mouth at once. Once he’s done working his way through it with his hands, tongue, and tiny teeth, he stretches his arms out again and looks up at me with an even huger smile than before.

  “I think he likes you,” says Wei.

  “I think I’d take a bullet for him,” I say, and the three of us laugh a little. Then I say, “Hey, also, I apologize. For flirting. This morning.”

  She looks down at the table, traces a drop of water around with a fingertip. “Reading people is part of my job. I spend most of my time with people who work with Old Ai. Everyone I meet has an agenda, a game, a secret. So when I first saw you last night, I was struck by how sincere you seemed, how innocent. I can look through most people, but not you. Because it’s all right there.”

  She smiles the little smile to herself.

  “Sun is pretty frank,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes. “He is, but for him, that’s just another advantage. With you, it’s obvious right away that you come from another world. So I was chiding you for treating me how everyone else does. But I’m the one who should apologize. I wasn’t angry at you. Really I was upset about something else.”

  She looks down, away.

  “A work thing?”

  She nods. “It wasn’t actually my day off.”

  The implication of this statement fills the silence for a moment.

  “It’s not like this all the time.” She tonelessly addresses the table. “Many days I’m more like Ai’s assistant, doing administrative tasks or what have you.”

  “But not today,” I say.

  She looks up at me with a different smile, a sad one. She lifts her shoulders up to her ears and lets them drop, and I’m certain that she is indeed the most beautiful person to walk the earth. Xiaofang has curled up into a ball on the table and appears to be sleeping.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She lets out a stream of breath, buzzing her lips and floating her bangs into the air.

  “There was this man I had to see. He was disgusting,” she says. “On the outside and on the inside. Especially on the inside.”

  “Why did you have to do it?”

  “I’m not sure. Sometimes I’m supposed to extract some specific information. In those cases I know a little bit more. But a lot of times it’s just to make a video. You know, for insurance or blackmail. This guy was government. Maybe Ai needs his permission to do something.”

  “So you have a hidden camera?”

  “I have a few.”

  “Ah.” Silence settles in again. I imagine things, then realize that she knows I’m imagining things, then hate that feeling.

  �
�Can’t you quit? Find some other job?”

  “You don’t understand. Ai found me in a horrible place. And if it weren’t for him, I would have died in that place. I was very young. He gave me a safe home, an education, a living. I owe everything to him.”

  “But for how long? If he really cared about you, he would want you to have your own life.”

  “He does care about me. I asked him before. He becomes upset because he knows I am unhappy. And he says, ‘Not now, Young Wei. Soon, but not now.’ The same thing your dad said to Sun for years. Ai worshipped Old Li, he learned everything from him. He’s a good boss, too. He takes care of me. I doubt I could do much better on the job market. You don’t know about China. People are not protected from their bosses here. And all the bosses are men. A pretty girl from a poor background—well, maybe she isn’t looking for sex, but sex will find her.”

  “America isn’t so different.”

  “I don’t know. Men here are used to treating women a certain way.”

  “But Ai never?”

  “Now, never.”

  “Oh.”

  “At the beginning, he did. When he first took me, I thought he wanted me to be his wife or his mistress. But he already had both. When he slept with me, it was only to teach me certain things. It turns out his wife and mistress are very knowledgeable women,” she says.

  “It’s not right to talk about it like this. You talk about all this stuff like it’s completely normal.”

  “Xiaozhou, it is completely normal,” she says, looking up from the table and meeting my gaze frankly. Her face is devoid of expression and I see her young age in it, the life she’s learned, the walls she’s built inside herself in order to survive.

  “How do you do it?” I ask her.

  She does a hapless shrug I’m sure she picked up from Sun, or the other way around.

  “We all have our burdens,” she says pointedly. Then she switches to English. “Isn’t it so, Victor?”

  I look away, feeling my eyes moisten and my face get hot. “I’m fine,” I mutter.

  “Anyone could tell you’re not fine,” she says. “It’s okay to feel awful when your father dies.”

  “It’s not that.” I look back into her open face, then down at my hands. “I mean, sure I feel awful. But this last week—finding out all these things about him—it’s like all along I was living in a world I didn’t know anything about. It was all built on this rotten foundation. But I didn’t know—how could I have known, right? Well, fuck that. Now I want to know everything.”

  As I say these things, I feel the pain grow and throb, and a void within me howls with great arctic winds of disillusionment. I push away from the table and retreat to Ai’s tropical fish tank. A piece of the ocean. Angelfish. Clown fish. Tiger prawn. I try to put myself in Dad’s shoes back at the Deep Blue Sea in Hong Kong. I see my past as his dream of the future: a clean and light place, one he had never seen except on the silver screen. A place made out of car washes, golf courses, Starbuckses. What would I do in order to get there: Draw a clear line? Extinguish a few endangered species? Adopt an orphan and mold him into a weapon? I learned that no such place existed. But Dad had passed his fish-tank vision to Ai, along with his father-savior-master routine.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and imagine how much fun it would be to free the tropical fish from their perfect little prison by smashing it with a hammer.

  “Xiaozhou?” Wei puts a hand on my arm. “I was going to go someplace. Do you want to come with me?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  I open my eyes; I look at her. The secret smile is back on her face.

  “Just say yes.”

  “Okay, yes.”

  She returns to Mandarin.

  “Put your clothes on. Hurry; we have to be back in time for your other date.”

  An overnight frost has begun to dust the tops of the cinder-block walls that line the hutongs, and I’m fighting shivers in my SDSU Athletics pullover. Wei’s got the hood of her sweatshirt pulled down over her forehead, the partial concealment lending yet more allure to the exquisite hint of her face that remains visible. Rusted bicycles, laundry lines, and piles of anonymous detritus skirt the narrow alleyways. There’s an occasional parked car, too, the nicer ones with squares of plywood leaned against the wheel wells to protect the hubcaps from errant traffic. Everything is gray except for Wei’s face and lips, which catch the ambient light reflecting down off the gray sky and shine porcelain and ruby.

  She speaks without looking at me, her breath escaping into the icy night in plumes of vapor. “I don’t know what Sun’s told you,” she says. “But you might be better off leaving these people alone. Ouyang—he’s a brute; he doesn’t care who he hurts. And Zhao—he’d relish hurting you. He hated your father, and he hates Ai, too.”

  She tells me about Zhao’s sense of inferiority to Dad and Ai, how he envied their ease with people and resented their willingness to be led by him. As Zhao saw it, he made all the hard decisions while they tagged along, reaping the benefits. He particularly took exception to their attempts to slip into the appearance of decency. Zhao saw them as treasonous posers, particularly Dad, who had crossed sides in more ways than one. In contrast, Zhao began to justify his own criminality as patriotic.

  “He’s nothing more than a crook, but he likes to pretend he’s some kind of great servant to China,” Wei says in her matter-of-fact voice. “You see, Ouyang didn’t care to become respectable, but I think Zhao would have liked to. He’s intelligent, but everybody despises him, even Dong, and he knows it. So he decided that Ai and Li were hypocrites, playing the saint at his expense. Probably nothing would please him more than to harm you, because you are the embodiment of Old Li’s escape from his world.”

  She turns to me and smiles the secret smile again.

  “You are still innocent,” she says. “If you can stay that way, and stay alive in the United States, out of his reach, perhaps that would spite your father’s enemies more than anything you can accomplish here.”

  Innocent? I don’t feel innocent, but perhaps an innocent person wouldn’t. Images flash through my mind: Gregoire’s purple hand, Ouyang’s thugs ambling through Velvet, Dad pinching fish food into his tank back in San Dimas.

  “Are you telling me this because Ai told you to encourage me to leave?” I ask.

  Wei turns forward again, her eyes tracing the red tile roofs of the buildings along the hutongs. We pass a squat, foul-smelling brick structure with a sign in English: PUDLIC TOILET. Briefly, I wonder if my grandmother ever cleaned it.

  “He doesn’t have to tell me what he wants. I just know,” she says. “But I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it. So if Ai happens to agree with me, and your best interest coincides with his, does that make me wrong?”

  Trying to make sense of that makes my brain hurt. I doubt Wei thinks that I’d flee back to the States after following Dad’s trail this far. So why bother to warn me, if not because Ai has obliged her to?

  “Maybe you agree with him too often,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond, keeps walking a pace or two ahead of me, her gaze now tilted down at the lane, and I worry that I’ve crossed another hidden line, tripped another defense mechanism.

  “Tell me again where we’re going,” I say, just to break the silence. The nonsensical name of the place has an antiquated sound to it, so I ask what it means.

  “Yúgōngyíshān—The Foolish Old Man Moves the Mountains,” Wei says. “It’s an ancient parable about a house with two mountains in front of it. The foolish old man who lives in the house decides to move the mountains somewhere else so people can come and go from his house more easily. He and his son and grandson pick up their shovels and get to work.

  “A wise old man comes along and tells them that the mountains are far too large to move. He says that the foolish old man is so old and weak that he couldn’t even destroy a blade o
f grass on the mountain, let alone move the whole thing.”

  “The wise old man sounds like a jerk,” I say.

  Wei continues without acknowledging my commentary. “The foolish old man replies that he has a son and a grandson, and they will have sons and grandsons of their own. ‘My descendants go on and on without end,’ he says, ‘and the mountains are not growing any taller. So why should I worry about not being able to move them?’

  “The old man and his family continued to shovel away at the mountains day after day. The lord of the heavens took notice of the foolish old man and was moved by his zeal. So he sent two immortal giants to carry away the mountains on their backs.”

  “So the moral of the story is what?” I ask. “Dream an impossible dream and God will take your side?”

  “I think it’s more like: people are not always the way they seem. Or maybe: being foolish can be better than being wise.” Wei shrugs. “It’s just a story.”

  “And this bar is named after it?”

  “Yes. Yugongyishan. It’s not a bar so much as a place to see live music.”

  We come to the end of a hutong and arrive T-boned to a real street, one with sidewalks and lanes. Yugongyishan, just around the corner, has a traditional stone facade framed by a big red gateway and two massive stone lions, but after we pay our thirty yuan each to get in, it reveals itself to be like underground music venues the world over: bad light, bad noise, no real decor, and a smattering of smoky hipsters skulking around in clumps. Some of them, lurching around the dance floor like zombies, are clearly wasted on more than baijiu. I glance around, wondering who’s selling K-zǎi. How did Jules describe it? You get totally destroyed, your life fades away. I could get behind that right now.

  Wei disappears for a minute and then reappears with two bottles of Yanjing beer. She puts one in my hand.

  “You like this music?” I ask.

  She shakes her head and smiles: I can’t hear you. There are three skinny-jeaned Chinese punk boys mauling two guitars and a drum kit on the stage. I lean in close to her and repeat my question in a whisper-shout.