Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  “Aren’t you afraid of being punished for speaking out?”

  “If we don’t say anything, no one will do anything,” said a woman who had been sitting quietly. “That’s the one drawback of Beijing people: We are afraid of rocking the boat. This is not the Cultural Revolution anymore.” Nonetheless, she refused to let me use her name in the story, though the others were bolder.

  This was the first time I had seen the Old Beijing at war with the new Beijing, and it seemed like a cultural revolution of sorts to me. Angry grannies were the ones rocking the boat while nouveau riche bar owners spouted ancient wisdom about fate. Beijing was topsy-turvy.

  We stayed in the apartment for almost two hours listening to the same stories told over and over again, hostages to unstoppable windup toys. My limited Chinese skills did not include how to politely end a conversation; I always had to wait for others to initiate the elaborate ritual. But having gotten my story, all my tension melted away and I sat in a glowing haze that verged on the postcoital. I imagined tossing the petition onto Sue’s desk with a casual “there’s your story” élan. I wished someone would offer me a cigarette but instead they kept pouring tea, so we kept nodding until they dismissed us.

  Chapter Five

  Miss, You’re Not a Beijinger, Are You?

  As I was checking the proofs of City Edition before it went to press, I saw a classified ad for a rental. (“One bedroom, furnished, great location. 2000 rmb/month. Call Constantine at 13-7555-3334.”) I called immediately and a man with an Australian accent told me he was giving up his big dream of trying to sell bread makers to the Chinese people and moving back home. His landlords were nice and he wanted to find new tenants for them.

  “Give it a few years,” I reassured him. “They’ll be clamoring for bread makers.”

  He told me the apartment was on a road just off of the East Third Ring Road. Beijing is laid out concentrically like an onion with the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in the center. Kublai Khan built the original walled city in the thirteenth century as an earthly mirror of the heavenly order, laying out the streets according to rules dictated in an ancient book of cosmological rules. The city was situated on a strict north-south axis with the imperial palace placed at the cross of the axes, symbolizing the contact point between heaven and earth. The east-west axis is now the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the palace the tourist destination known as the Forbidden City, and the streets around it the old city of hutongs and courtyard houses where my relatives lived. Chairman Mao had demolished the old city wall and made it into the Second Ring Road. Outside of that was modern Beijing. Then came the Third Ring Road. Then this apartment, which I went to go see.

  The narrow road the building was on felt just beyond the edge of the universe. One of the shops just outside the gate was a sex shop. But the apartment had four walls, a ceiling and a floor, a flush toilet, and hot water. I paid Constantine for the newly installed metal security door as well as for the price of the classified ad (he was indignant that I’d nabbed the ad before it was published), and the apartment was mine. His bad fortune was my good fortune. It was the first sign that the city wanted me to stay.

  When I told Bobo and Bomu that I was moving out, I could see they were relieved. It had been a long month for all of us.

  “You’re living alone?” asked Bobo.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want a roommate?” asked Bomu.

  “No.”

  “Be careful. If people know a woman is living alone, they’ll wait for her to come home at night,” said Bobo.

  “And then?”

  “I read it in the newspaper.”

  “How much are you paying?” asked Bomu. I hesitated, almost dividing the number in half as I routinely did when they asked their favorite question. But who cared anymore?

  “Two thousand.” About two hundred and fifty dollars.

  “Two thousand! Out by the Third Ring Road? You’re getting swindled because you’re a foreigner,” she said, her reproachful tone meant for both me and my landlords. People living in the old city still thought of that area as the countryside, which it had been just ten years before. There was also a touch of glee in her voice. “Why don’t you pay us that much and you can live here?”

  “Live here?” Was she joking?

  “We’ll even give you our bedroom,” Bomu said. We laughed and I told her no thanks. Though our relationship had improved since Great-Aunt Mabel’s intervention, we weren’t really meant to live together. George Burns was right: Happiness was having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city. And the old city and the area outside the Third Ring Road were as far apart as two cities.

  • • •

  A week before I was scheduled to move out of my family’s house, Max came into my office to tell me he had a story for me. He was dressed that day as the Cosmopolitan Gentleman in an immaculately tailored Sun Yat-sen suit and black ankle boots that I had overheard him telling someone earlier were pure Italian leather.

  I dreaded the hard news story he was going to fling my way, but today I was in for a pleasant surprise. He said a friend of his was at the end of filming a documentary about Li Yang, a Chinese entrepreneur who staged mass public events designed to teach people English, a program he called Crazy English. Max said Li Yang had made hundreds of People’s Liberation Army soldiers march along the Great Wall screaming slogans like “I LOVE ENGLISH!” in unison. His friend had just called and told him Li Yang was having an event tonight, which he’d be filming. Max wanted me to go and write an article about Crazy English. To find out more, I should call his friend, Zhang Yuan.

  “Zhang Yuan?” I said in disbelief.

  “He’s a filmmaker,” said Max.

  “The one who made Beijing Bastards?”

  “Yes. He’s an old friend of mine. So is Cui Jian, the rock star.” Max wrote down Zhang Yuan’s cellphone number for me. I stared at the ten random digits incredulously, as if I had just been handed the combination to an unbreakable safe.

  I put off calling until Jade and I had finished lunch and I used the pay phone in the restaurant, dialing quickly before I chickened out. The low, rushed voice on the other end of the phone told me to meet him out front of Beijing Radio Station that night. Jade came with me to take photos.

  Later that evening, our small red cab pulled through the tall metal gates and stopped in front of an imposing sand-colored building with lit red characters spelling out BEIJING RADIO STATION. The night air was still and the only people in sight were a small group of men standing next to large boxes of equipment. Zhang Yuan was tall and slightly squidgy with a short Afro topping his head. He turned to greet me, briefly but with warmth, his bright eyes taking me in. And just like that, I met Zhang Yuan.

  We went into the building, and as he shot Li Yang taping a special radio program, I took notes. Li told listeners about his latest project to make a crowd of one hundred thousand students scream in unison, “Learning English is not mental brainwork! It is physical work, to make your tongue muscle international!” as they squiggled their hands in the air. When the radio show was over, we switched places. As I interviewed Li, Zhang Yuan shot me for his documentary.

  Li looked like a classic nerd in rectangular wire-rimmed glasses and a trim pompadour. I listened as he told his story about growing up shy in Lanzhou and about the life-changing day when he went into an empty field to scream English vocabulary words at the top of his lungs. Phenomenal test scores and a career as an inspirational speaker followed. For him, inspiration starts with a dressing down. “I want kids today to feel ashamed, to feel pressure, to feel a crisis falling down on their heads. Chinese students are too shy. And China is too weak. The only way for them to learn English and for China to enter the world is to scream.” He had a plan for world domination starting with one thousand model families that would master one thousand English sentences. Eventually tens of t
housands of families would be using Crazy School Bag, drinking Crazy Cola, Crazy Mineral Water, Crazy Beer. Li leaned in to say, “They will be studying on my Internet, buying the refrigerator I suggest. I will be their godfather.”

  I faced Li Yang, silently wondering how this nerdy man was going to achieve his megalomaniacal dreams, but I could feel the eye of Zhang Yuan’s camera on me.

  After the event, we all—Zhang Yuan, his crew, Li Yang, Jade, and I—squeezed into Li’s Volkswagen Santana to go eat dinner. I was sandwiched in the backseat, almost sitting on Zhang Yuan’s lap. As we drove through dark, unfamiliar streets, I told them about the past month of living with my relatives in a courtyard house without a shower.

  “But you have nothing to worry about,” I assured them. “I managed to get a shower yesterday.”

  “You just showered, Zhenluo!” Zhang Yuan said, using my personal name impudently stripped of my family name, a practice reserved for close friends. “No wonder you smell so fresh!” His voice was deep and warm and slightly nasal, and I could feel his breath on my cheek. I looked at his face, inches away. Was he mocking me? Flirting with me?

  At dinner he sat next to me and continued in this jesting vein throughout the loud night of eating and drinking. To my surprise, he was nothing like the disaffected characters in his films and instead was the most charming and ebullient Chinese person I had ever met, with an ability to connect instantly with people, or at least with me. He seemed genuinely interested in hearing my stories about getting to know my long-lost relatives, but at the same time, his voice had a tease in it, like a line with a hook perpetually at the end of it, trying to reach me. The air at dinner was charged—Li Yang had the attention of a famous film director and a foreign journalist, Zhang Yuan and I had a good story on our hands and an oblique flirtation, and I was closing in on the future I’d dreamed of for so long. Talk zinged around the room like crazed bats and while Jade bantered easily, I struggled to keep up. I must have been easy to tease. Zhang Yuan said that he had a child on the way, and from that, I presumed the existence of a wife. His inaccessibility only increased his appeal.

  “I was interviewed the other day by this journalist, this sour woman with glasses . . . ,” Li Yang started saying, then saw me and apologized in embarrassment. I suddenly felt like the ugly duckling. I thought there was some sex appeal in the gap between my front teeth, my androgyny, and my skinniness. Except that in China, all the women were skinnier than me, none had short hair, and anyone who could afford them wore contacts.

  “I like women who wear glasses,” Zhang Yuan said with a funny crook in his voice, before taking my number.

  Later that night at home with my relatives, I told Xiao Peng that I had had dinner with his friend Zhang Yuan. He gave me an odd, unreadable look but said nothing.

  • • •

  There was one last thing I had to do before I moved out. I waited until Bobo and Bomu took their afternoon nap one Saturday and I set out for a walk. Though I knew what I would find, I went anyhow, the way you go to a funeral to confirm for your heart what your mind already knows.

  I hustled through the hutongs, past low purplish-gray walls, which are the outer hides of the courtyard houses. Gray walls, then an open red door, a small shop hung with strips of tiny shampoo packets and stacked with cigarettes, broken bicycles leaning against walls, an old woman waddling at an unbelievably slow and steady pace, like a tortoise imbued with ancient knowledge withheld from us moderns. Most people in the old city were napping, it seemed, and the usual clang and push of the hutongs was gone. A flock of dark birds cut a swooping arc through the gray sky, the whistles attached to their legs emitting an eerie, inexplicable call like the wind wailing through an amplifier. The mournful sound seemed the very essence of Old Beijing.

  People don’t rush around like they do in America. You’ll love it there. I wanted to trust Nainai—Beijing was her city and she did after all live in a place called Leisure World—but she obviously had a mistaken idea of who I really was. I actually liked rushing around, liked charging nervously down the hutong as if it were a street in New York, as if there were somewhere really important I had to be. I wore my only fall jacket: a puffy polyester Windbreaker in bright safety orange with wide shoulders and a tiny waist, sealed shut with a bold asymmetrical zipper and cheerfully festooned with three or four tiny zippered pockets of various sizes. A friend in New York had pressed the jacket on me, saying it made me look like the Bionic Woman, but I didn’t feel very bionic in the gray hutongs of Beijing, only garish and out of place.

  Bobo told me Nainai had been the xiaohua’r, the school beauty, and I imagined a young and beautiful version of the Nainai I knew strolling in this very hutong. These gray houses were the exact same houses she had gazed at, this air the same air she had breathed, albeit less noxiously polluted. It wasn’t hard to imagine her here in the people I saw on the street: a baby in a big bamboo stroller, one of a herd of schoolgirls giggling over some secret thing, a young woman holding hands with a young man. Her presence was palpable in the hutong as if all the years between us had collapsed. Suddenly I felt my body crisscross straight through hers like one water drop passing through another. Her city, my city. Goose bumps stippled my arms.

  I crossed Naoshikou Dajie and found myself walking through a clear, flat expanse of rubble that had been Bobo and Bomu’s old neighborhood. When I’d lived there last year, no landmarks or street signs had remained and I’d navigated my way home through the bombed-out neighborhood solely by the curves the hutongs made on the ground. I retraced those familiar curves now, meeting no one along the way. Even the children who had played in the heaps of stones and wood were gone. I came to what had been their front door.

  Poof! The house had vanished, leaving only a scattering of gray stones and the apple tree, its leafless arms lifted in a lonely and bewildered pose. The pain I came to experience stabbed me, clean as a knife between the ribs. The demolition had flayed off the walls of the house, laying bare our most intimate spaces for the whole world to see. Vaguely able to discern the outline of the walls, I rebuilt the house in my mind: Here was the courtyard that surrounded the apple tree, here the living room, the kitchen, the room I had stayed in when I visited. But the house was slowly fading into thin air with each moment that passed.

  I was ready to cry, but I knew better than to make a scene in public, especially over a house I had lived in for only a week. How very Chinese-American of me to feel sappy about a past I had been told about in a fairy tale and, worse yet, to kind of enjoy the feeling. How did my relatives feel? They had lived here for more than fifty years.

  I didn’t linger long in the rubble. I walked north to the Avenue of Eternal Peace where the new office building had recently risen, all silvery and modern. It looked peculiar and out of place, not unlike myself, I suppose, and forced on me a nostalgia for what used to be here: a jagged row of one-story restaurants and shops, smells of buns steaming and oil frying, noisy, pushy crowds of shoppers, nothing special at the time. Now fewer people passed by and there were no sounds but the inane roar and beep of cars passing on the wide avenue. Bobo and Bomu’s demolished neighborhood was hidden behind the building and the knife in my ribs twisted suddenly: The house was really gone. Within the year, the ruins would be cleared and paved over, the apple tree gone forever, and the land my family had lived on for so long would be a parking lot for this building. A parking lot. Could it be any more clichéd? I took out my journal and vindictively wrote down the name of the building: the Beijing International Financial Center.

  I sat down by the entrance to an underpass and watched the fountains for the building being tested. Plumes bobbed up and down with frustrated jerks. I picked at a splitting seam on the sleeve of my orange jacket and pulled out some fluffy white ticking. As I let it fly away on the wind, I felt an unexpected stab of belonging to the house. Standing before this monstrous building with its vacant eyes, I wanted to tell the story of
our houses. Who else would?

  I thought of all the gossip about my family’s courtyard houses I’d gathered in the past few weeks, mostly in the afternoons when Bobo napped and Bomu swept in circles, the air sparkling with dust motes. She told me that of course they had wanted to live in Great-Aunt Mabel’s pristine new courtyard house, but when it didn’t happen, they had acquired an apartment in the suburbs and traded it for another quarter of Xiao Peng’s small house. He had had only a quarter of it because years ago Bobo’s father had gambled away the other three-fourths of it. Not only had he been a gambler, but he’d also been a bigamist and there had been a lot of drama about which one of his two wives would inherit the remaining quarter of his house. The stories went on and on, full of betrayals and dashed hopes, our family ties bound and unbound through the houses.

  I’d also found out more about Nainai’s courtyard house. When Yeye and Nainai had fled in 1949, they’d entrusted the house to Nainai’s only brother, Bobo’s dad. The Communist government eventually took control of the house during the Cultural Revolution and started assigning families to live in the different rooms, ten in all. Even though the house had been legally returned to Yeye and Nainai, the families were still living there. Bobo had been taking care of the house since his father’s death, and if Nainai got a new house, I was sure Bobo and Bomu wanted to move in. I imagined living there myself. I was a pawn in a game of musical chairs much larger and older than myself.

  Several men in baggy suit jackets and mismatched pants stopped their bikes nearby, mesmerized too by the irregular bobbing of the fountains. Their faces were tanned and lined and their hair gray with dust; they had clearly come from the countryside to work on construction projects in the city. The clumsy slapstick of the plumes made me sad for what had been destroyed but I suddenly wondered if they saw the opposite: the extravagant promises of the future, majesty just practicing her steps. It was getting late and I looked at my wrist to find the time, forgetting that the day before I’d dropped my mom’s old watch on the hard tile floor of the courtyard house and the hands had stopped. Nothing I did would make them start again. It was probably time to go home but I watched the fountains long after the workers left, partly to mourn the loss of Old Beijing and partly, truth be told, to avoid going back to the suffocating old courtyard house.