by Val Wang
Back in the restaurant, I finished the last of my noodles, paid, and left.
“Manzou,” the waitress said automatically, as they all did when you left a restaurant. Take it easy.
Coming home, I wove around dark objects in the small courtyard. From the outside, the scene in the lit living room looked so peaceful: Bomu and Xiao Lu were clearing the dishes as Bobo sat in his easy chair watching the same news broadcast that had been on in the restaurant. Chillingly, it was the only show on TV. He looked older and more tired than my dad, as if life had been harder on him. After standing outside for a few minutes, I tiptoed in. My cousin Xiao Peng was nowhere to be seen. The room buzzed with tension.
“Where have you been?” Bobo demanded. His daughter-in-law Xiao Lu averted her eyes in embarrassment for me. A teacher of deaf children, she was quietly empathetic.
“I ate with people from work.”
“You should have called.”
“I know.”
“You let two old people worry about you.”
“Sorry.”
“We told your Nainai we would take good care of you in Beijing,” he said.
Taking care of me. I knew what that meant. Keeping me close to home for the opportunity to scrutinize and then mock me. My amusing behaviors supplied them with a constant stream of entertainment.
Did you see how much she ate at that first meal? We couldn’t believe our eyes. Ha ha ha!
Did you see the big shoes with the hard toes in her room in Tianjin when we went to visit her there? We thought she was living with a boy. Ha ha ha!
Did you hear how much she paid for that coat? Ha ha ha!
The ties that bind, I thought. And gag.
Bobo narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips, and leaned back, and I knew a lecture was coming. His finger came up into the air. “And about this morning, you shouldn’t be so irritable. My comment was just the kind of give-and-take that Chinese people engage in.”
I felt frustrated. Being good made me dishonest but being honest made me insubordinate. It dawned on me: This was how family worked. These strangers, who would have otherwise elbowed me in the face to get on the bus ahead of me, instead picked me up at the airport, took me in, fed me, and gave me a cot to sleep on and a chamber pot to piss in at night. And in exchange, I had to behave. I apologized and sat down to watch TV with them. Bobo softened the blow of his lecture with a piece of flattery, saying he had recently told Nainai how quickly my Chinese was progressing.
The TV news gave way to one of the interminable soap operas they loved watching, this one featuring people in flowing clothing who swished slowly in and out of old houses and galloped around on horses and did pretty much what we do nowadays—feel anguished over betrayal and lost love, go on quests for obscure but valuable treasures, get angry and smash things. At least it wasn’t one of the full-length, one-camera Peking Opera performances that Bobo got glued to for hours. Bobo then called Xiao Peng’s cellphone and told him to come home immediately. I was gratified that someone else in the family was acting worse than I was.
A sooty white kitten tottered in from Xiao Peng’s side of the house and I went over to pet it, happy to feel something warm, soft, and alive under my hand.
During a commercial break, I asked the question that had been on the tip of my tongue since returning to China. “Was the courtyard house at Qianbaihu demolished over the summer?”
Bobo and Bomu both looked up sharply. “Yes,” he said. “Demolished.”
“When?”
“About a month ago.”
“It’s just gone?”
“It’s just gone.” The sword had finally dropped. There was no sadness in the room, only a chill.
“That’s sad.”
“There’s nothing to be done.”
“So I guess Great-Aunt Mabel didn’t get a new courtyard house, huh?”
“No, she did.”
“She did? Where?”
“Near Dongsi.”
“What’s it like?”
“A beautiful, perfectly preserved house. Not like this house, falling apart and split among many families. You don’t see many houses like that in Beijing anymore.”
“And she didn’t let you all live there?”
“No.”
“Who lives there?”
“No one.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
“Didn’t you want to live there?”
Bobo didn’t answer.
So many questions raced through my mind. Why didn’t Great-Aunt Mabel let them live in the perfectly preserved courtyard house? Why did they live in only half of this house? Why did the old house no longer have a bathroom? Where was Nainai’s old house? Why had Bobo’s and Bomu’s opinions of courtyard houses changed this year? Now it was Old people don’t have the energy for old houses. An apartment would be so warm, so convenient, no need to burn coal for heat, no coal dust everywhere.
I glanced over at Bobo engrossed in the TV. He had such good posture and I wondered briefly if he was less than thrilled to be hosting his slouchy, moody, nosy American relative. I wished I could tell him that I sympathized with them more than they knew, having myself experienced Great-Aunt Mabel’s slippery real estate tactics. I stopped asking questions.
Bobo and Bomu did not return the favor. I listed their odd queries in my journal. Are we going to bother you with the TV on? Why do you have so much stuff? Do you want to sleep in the birdcage?
Eventually we heard the outer door slam shut and saw Xiao Peng slink down the corridor to his quarter of the house. Bobo and Bomu sent waves of disapproval after him, combined with relief. I looked at my watch, my mom’s old Gruen, which said it was just after nine o’clock. The watch that had linked her to America now linked my journey to hers. Bobo and Bomu finally shut off the TV and went to sleep.
A week after my altercation with Bobo, I came home to find him on the phone. When he hung up he told me he had just gotten off the phone with Great-Aunt Mabel in Seattle. Though she and Nainai had left China more than fifty years before, Bobo, ever the dutiful nephew, still kept in touch with them.
“She explained that your insubordinate behavior is normal for an American child and that American children naturally rebel against restrictions. She said the more restrictions you make, the more they rebel.”
He looked befuddled by this logic.
“It’s true!” I said. “Your rules are far too strict.”
“Your Nainai will be very mad at us if something happens to you.”
“I’ll tell her it wasn’t your fault. She knows what I’m like.”
After the phone call they loosened their grip on me; I was permitted to come home late as long as I called so they could flip the small wooden flap on the inside of the front door of the courtyard that let the whole house know someone was coming home late and not to bolt the door from the inside.
Chapter Three
Like Extras Late for a Take
On Saturday, Xiao Peng asked me if I wanted to ride bikes to Tiananmen Square. We’d been sitting around doing what Chinese families do so well together: absolutely nothing. He’d asked in an offhand way, as if half expecting me to say no. My ears perked up like a dog’s at the jingle of a leash.
“I could,” I said, trying to act nonchalant. His question surprised me. Xiao Peng and I had been watching each other since I moved in. He reminded me of a character from Beijing Bastards. As far as I could see, he didn’t drink or swear or go to rock concerts, but there was something about him reminiscent of the hooligans in the film: the same untouchably bored air, the same monosyllabic responses dropped from the corner of his mouth, the same inability to find value in anything. Plus, though nobody in my family particularly looked like anyone else, he was the spitting image of my uncle who “did business” in Jakarta: wide face; porcine nose; skeptical, h
eavily lidded eyes. From what my parents said, Xiao Peng was starting to “do business” too, importing air conditioners or something, and even owned a car, a red Citroën. I instantly felt as if I knew him and sensed how hard he would be to impress. He played it cool; I followed suit. Just because you’re my cousin, we each seemed to be saying, doesn’t mean I have to like you.
I scrutinized the old framed family photos that leaned against the books in the bookshelf, searching the boy for clues to the man. Our dads had grown up together in Beijing but their fates had forked in 1949, and though Xiao Peng and I had ended up in different places, we were similar in certain ways. Xiao Peng was the baby of the family, like me, and was plopped front and center in the photos, looking slim with a wavy head of hair and a sweet face. He was now, as Bobo and Bomu did not hesitate to tell him, getting fat. His belly was pushing outward, his baby face ballooning, his eyes shrinking to beady dots. Plus how cool could you be if you were almost thirty and, though married, still lived with your parents who still called you “Little Peng” and still called your cellphone when you were out at night to tell you to come home?
His two older sisters had flown the coop for L.A. before I’d come to China. Bobo and Bomu spoke proudly of Sister Number One, who had gone boldly to America, helped Sister Number Two emigrate, and was on her way toward earning an accounting degree. At one point, they said, her visa had been about to expire, so she simply married an older Chinese man with a green card. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders,” Bomu said. I paged through a custom-made calendar she’d sent back: January was a group photo of the sisters with Great-Aunt Mabel, April was her posing windblown by the water somewhere (I noticed she had a good and beautiful head), and November was sad-looking singleton Sister Number Two dressed in autumnal colors sitting glumly with some ducks by a lake.
I wondered what Xiao Peng saw when he looked at me. Yet another American cousin, coming to teach English, learn Chinese, “find her roots,” and then leave. There had been others in my family before me and I wanted to tell him that I was different. The whole point of moving far away from home was to leave my past behind and to do the things I somehow couldn’t at home. Write. Make movies. Preferably a novel that would be an instant cult classic among the downtown cognoscenti and/or a gritty lo-fi documentary that would make me the darling of the indie film world. These were fragile, vaguely embarrassing dreams, never to be spoken aloud lest their spell be broken.
Xiao Peng biked swiftly through the hutongs and I wobbled along behind him. The traffic was chaotic: Bikes went the wrong way, swerved without notice, crossed in front of honking cars with inches to spare. Carts piled high with cabbages or pineapples careened by at full tilt. Nothing shielded me from the chaos around me. When I tested the brakes, they shuddered loudly but barely slowed the Flying Pigeon bicycle. Xiao Peng never hit the brakes and I scurried after him like a cat following a ball of yarn as it unraveled. If I lost him, the hutongs would collapse into short bits of string, all looking about the same, none leading anywhere.
Suddenly, we turned onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace. The avenue was as wide and flat as an airport runway and I felt ejected from my private world into the bright light of day. Xiao Peng and I rode side by side in the wide bike lane in a flotilla of other bikes, the air cool against our faces. Beijing was in the heart of its most beautiful season, autumn, when the city appears exactly as it does in my dreams: glowing with grainy golden light, crisp with the faint tang of coal soot in the air. The closer we got to the square, the more orderly the traffic became, as if we were entering the government’s fantasy of how life in the country was supposed to run. Soldiers in olive uniforms stationed at intervals told us where to go and where not to.
Dusk was approaching and we arrived at the square just as it was emptying of people. Only a few lingered to pose and take pictures.
Tiananmen Square is one of the largest squares in the world and is flanked by immense buildings: the Great Hall of the People to the west, the Museum of the Chinese Revolution to the east, and Mao’s mausoleum to the south. So much had happened here. I had seen the pictures. Mao waving from the rostrum of the Tiananmen Gate in 1949. Girls screaming and waving Little Red Books during the Cultural Revolution. Student democracy protesters camping out in the square in 1989, dancing to music by China’s first rock star, Cui Jian, in their shaggy, almost chic bowl cuts and huge glasses, never knowing what was coming to them. A place this big begged for grand, heroic, delusional gestures. Xiao Peng and I glided across the smooth surface and I felt a rush of pleasure. I was released from myself, reduced to a simple and happy character in a corny patriotic play. He told me it was illegal to ride bikes on the square. We were breaking the law together. I felt almost close to him.
We rode up to the flagpole at the north end of the square, where a crowd was pressing against the white railing that separated the square from the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Across the avenue was Tiananmen Gate hung with Mao’s portrait. Traffic had been stopped in both directions on the broad avenue. The scene was hushed with expectation. We hurriedly joined the crowd like extras late for a take, and we waited.
“What are we waiting for?” I finally asked.
“Flag-lowering ceremony,” said Xiao Peng. “Can you see?”
“Not really. There are too many people.”
“These people are not Beijingers,” said Xiao Peng, his eyes flicking languidly over the crowd. I got it. Beijingers were too cool to hang out on Tiananmen Square. These were mostly farmers from the countryside who had made the pilgrimage to the heart of China to bask in the greatness of their country.
I saw the red flag with the yellow stars going down and then the crowd straining to see. Xiao Peng held my bike steady and told me to stand on the frame and I realized then that he had brought me here especially to see the ceremony, which happened every day at sunset. I saw glimpses of olive-clad soldiers saluting and then goose-stepping their way across the avenue, their boots clacking in perfect unison. They marched the flag under Mao and into the Forbidden City to rest until sunrise the next day, when the ritual would happen in reverse. The crowd was still and silent, and I shared their sense of awe tinged with fear. Once the soldiers disappeared from view, the lights changed to green, and with a single crisp arm movement from the soldier on the traffic mound, cars began moving again and the crowd broke apart. The magic moment was over. We returned to our private concerns. Where to go next? What to eat for dinner?
Xiao Peng and I rode back down the avenue, returning home. We asked each other questions and tried to impress each other with the answers. I wanted to know what he did for a living, but because I sensed that no one in the family was very proud of him, I stuck to safe questions.
“Do we still have relatives in Anhui?” Though Nainai acted like a snobbish Beijinger, her family had actually migrated there several generations before. Now that I was in China, I figured I should find out more about my family.
“Yeah, we do. In Hefei City,” he said with a sly smile. “Do you want to meet them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It sounded like a trap. “Have you?”
“They came up to Beijing once,” he said. “Asking for money.”
His eyes narrowed to see my reaction and he added, “Do you still want to meet them? I can give you their number.” He flashed his old mischievous smile, as if to say, You have no idea what you’re getting into. For a moment, I glimpsed them out there: the Hefei relatives who had less than our Beijing relatives, who were hungry, badly clad, with leathery faces full of suffering, and, no doubt, these city relatives had poor relations in the countryside who came looking for them, asking for money. They unfolded before my eyes like paper flowers in water, thirsty and terrifying, the rural nightmare of the snobbish urbanite. Xiao Peng had gotten me. I could only laugh.
“No thanks,” I said. He took a sudden turn into the alleyways. “Don’t you ever get lost in these hutongs?”
“Really? You know them?” I asked. I said their names like an incantation: “Zhang Yuan? Wu Wenguang? Shi Jian?” Was he actually one of them? Did he sell air conditioners just to make ends meet?
“Yes, they were my classmates at the film academy.”
That made sense. They did all seem like versions of the same person, someone who had come of age in the heady 1980s, a time of idealism when China was opening to the world that came to a brutal end with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. That was when they’d all gotten so cynical. Now nobody in society talked politics anymore—everyone just wanted to make money.
“I really want to meet them,” I said. “Can you introduce me?”
“Sure.”
“I want to make a documentary about them,” I blurted out.
“You want to make films?” he asked, looking surprised. I had surprised myself too by telling him.
“Yeah, that’s what I want to do.”
“You can stay here for a year or two and then go to film school in the States,” he said enviously.
“Film school’s expensive,” I said. “I don’t think my parents would pay for it.”
Just as I’d planned, I could just document the filmmakers while I lived here. It seemed my cousin was going to lead me straight to them. Things were suddenly marvelous. I was biking through the hutongs with my cousin, talking about meeting underground filmmakers. We understood each other better than our parents ever could. Crucial puzzle pieces seemed to be falling effortlessly into place.
Xiao Peng owed me one. When I lived in Tianjin the year before, he had hatched an intricate plan with his friend to get visas to America by submitting a “business invitation” from one of Bobo’s ex-students, a photocopy of my American passport, and, well, that was about it. Another similarity between us was that the places where we had grown up somehow came to feel like prisons and the grass seemed greener on the other side. The difference was that I was free to jump the fence while he wasn’t. So I’d lent him my passport despite reservations about getting mixed up in the situation. In any case, I was sure that his two older sisters overstaying their visas had doomed his application. My hunch was right but I hoped that he remembered my favor because I was ready to call it in.