Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  • • •

  That weekend, I climbed into the passenger seat of a dinged-up yellow breadbox van, slammed the flimsy door shut, and told the cabbie, “To Maizidian!” I looked out the side window: My four relatives stood on the sidewalk like a family portrait, waving. I waved back as the van tut-tutted into action and we pulled away. I was free.

  “Maizidian’r? The one outside of the Third Ring Road?” growled the cabbie in a voice straight out of a smoky gambling den. He had a flattop and the van smelled like a stale ashtray. He took a swig out of a brown-stained glass jar filled with tea that looked as if it had been steeping since the Qing Dynasty.

  “Yes.”

  “Which way do you want to go?” he asked. We were heading east on Xinwenhua Lu, a busy two-lane artery slicing through the messy, capillary squiggle of the hutongs. People squatted on the sidewalk, watching life pass by.

  “Can we go by the Square?” To soar down the wide Avenue of Eternal Peace with the red walls of the Forbidden City on the left and the expanse of Tiananmen Square on the right would be like shooting an arrow straight through the beating heart of the Middle Kingdom, a glorious way to exit the old city. Plus I didn’t know any other way, and I didn’t want to reveal my unfamiliarity with the city’s geography.

  “Sorry, miss. Can’t take that road in the daytime.”

  “Well, you choose then.”

  The miandi, or breadbox van, can no longer be found on Beijing’s roads but at the time it was ten kuai for ten kilometers, the cheapest cab on the road. Banned on certain roads at certain times, it resembled a motorcycle chassis with a yellow loaf of Wonder Bread stapled on top, with a motorcycle’s legendary “feel” for the road. Every bump and jounce threatened to catapult me through the wide windshield about two inches in front of my face.

  We veered into the hutongs and the familiar walls rose around us like a maze. The miandi barely fit down the narrow passageway and the cabbie honked noisily at the snarls of bikes and people in our way and swore steadily. Despite all the life that rattled between and behind its walls, the hutongs were deeply peaceful, like a place airlifted out of the past. I was going to miss living here.

  “Miss, you’re not a Beijinger, are you?”

  “No, I’m not.” I wondered if he were about to take me for a ride.

  “I could tell from your terrible accent. Where are you from? Korea?”

  “America.”

  “America?! You don’t look American! You look Chinese.”

  “Well, I’m American.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Just is. I grew up there.”

  “So who were those people back there?”

  “My relatives.”

  “I knew someone in your family had to be Chinese. So you’re meiji huaren.” American-born Chinese.

  “Sort of.” This was the number one conversation people loved having with me in China. I wasn’t in the mood to explain the subtle but crucial differences between American-born Chinese and Chinese-American.

  “No ‘sort of’ about it. You are a meiji huaren. So you’ve come back to China to xun gen.” To search for your roots.

  “No, I’m not coming back to China. I’m not from here. I’m American. And I’m not coming here to xun gen.” Couldn’t he see that I was fleeing my roots with only the clothes on my back and my two suitcases? “I’m coming here to xun . . .” I racked my brains for the word I was looking for. “Maoxian.” Adventure. I punched my fist triumphantly in the air for emphasis.

  The cabbie laughed. “Miss, you’re not half bad. You smoke?”

  “Sure,” I said, and he handed me a cigarette, lit it, then lit his own. We smoked in silence.

  I read somewhere that Westerners typically cast themselves as the protagonists of their own memoirs, while Asians are usually bit players in theirs, one mere star in a great constellation. I had gone abroad intending to have swashbuckling foreign adventures and to get as far away as possible from turgid family psychodramas with Confucian overtones. As I told Yeye repeatedly years ago, I was American! But I had made one fatal mistake: I had set the story in China, where my family’s past worked as an undertow, pulling me in directions I was powerless to fight.

  We crossed over the Second Ring Road, which flowed under us like a river of cars, and turned onto a wide avenue clotted with vehicles of all sizes driving like maniacs and honking peevishly. But no one was actually going all that quickly, and the whole scene was at once manic and leisurely. Cranes floated high above us, wheeling slowly over the green-clad skeletons of half-built buildings. Pollution and exhaust hung heavily in the air and the avenue looked unpleasant to walk along. But people did. There were people everywhere, ambling along the sidewalks, stuffed into buses, biking shoulder to shoulder in the bike lane. Their faces looked gray and sad. Hatched from the protective cocoon of family, I could feel myself shrinking as a sea of strangers spread itself around me.

  I thought of my two suitcases in the back and how little ballast they provided for my life. Back in the States, I had crammed them full, but hardly anything had fit. Just a few novels and mix tapes, a small album of photos, a year’s worth of tampons and Wellbutrin, and a tiny but rugged wardrobe of clothing that could withstand the corrosive pollution and tiny washing machines of China. When I thought about the ugly clothing that I’d brought in lieu of my thrift-store treasures, the baggy Lee corduroys and misshapen sweaters I was stuck with now, my mind suddenly flashed back to the Sunday afternoons of my childhood, when I had worn my ugliest clothing reserved especially in a bottom drawer for that hated day’s main event, Chinese School. Now every day was going to be like Sunday.

  But tomorrow! Tomorrow I was having brunch with Zhang Yuan, the director of Beijing Bastards. Just yesterday he had called me at the office. “Zhenluo, I’d like to invite you out to brunch at the Kunlun Hotel; it’s a five-star hotel.” I’d protested, saying Max made us pick up the tabs when we did interviews and he’d kill me if I went somewhere so expensive. “Don’t think of it as an interview then. It’s my treat.” It was true; I’d gotten all the information I needed from him at our first meeting. My life was now beginning for real.

  The farther we drove, the wider the streets got. Soon we were barreling down an eight-lane highway that ran on a flyover above the city. The Third Ring Road. The meter clicked above ten and began ticking steadily upward. The city sprawled out on either side of the road. The Hot Spot Disco, marked with a giant bull’s-eye. A single silvery skyscraper. A mausoleum laced with a filigree of unlit neon spelling out KTV: karaoke. In between were old Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks with rows of blackened balconies that seemed to trumpet a message of socialist realism: Comrades, life is suffering. The day was sunless and stern. Moving to Beijing suddenly seemed like the wrong idea. While the hutongs of the old city had been built to human scale, the wide roads we drove on now were meant to dwarf us lowly mortals. The scene was magnificent, squalid, and beautiful all at once.

  “What’s America like? Better than this, I bet.”

  “Better than this? No way. It’s not like the streets there are paved with gold. People care only about money. It’s meaningless. I prefer being here.”

  “People here are starting to just care about money too.”

  “Not everybody.”

  “No, but this place is changing.”

  We eased off the highway and made a right onto a narrow road lined with small shops and restaurants. Large trees arched above. The shops here were flimsier than in the old city, the air dustier, and the sidewalk appeared to be made of packed dirt like a frontier town. And people on the street looked even sadder. After living protected inside the old city, here I felt dangling and exposed.

  “Miss, this is Maizidian’r. Let me know where to stop.” I looked around and tried to remember. Large restaurant on right. Bathhouse on left. We were close. Smaller shops: hairdr
essers, skinny restaurants, a sex shop.

  “Stop! It’s here!” I said, gesturing to a five-story brick building behind a row of shops. The cabbie pulled up to a tall black metal gate. I opened it and he took a right into a narrow drive behind the building, which had twelve entryways. Just inside the gate was a small office from whose gloomy interior peered a granny wearing a red armband, mentally noting my arrival.

  “Be careful coming home here at night, miss.”

  “Why?”

  “There are men clubbing women over the head with gunzi this big,” he said, holding his hands apart the length of a baby crocodile. “Then they’re stealing their purses.”

  “Thanks for the advice.” He sounded like my parents, in whose vision of the world everything was fraught with danger: Walking in a city at night could lead to mugging and rape, dating boys to pregnancy, driving a car to a deadly crash. But Beijing was quiet and peaceful at night, with none of the undercurrent of violence I expected from a big city.

  We unloaded my two suitcases, I paid him, and the miandi backed out with a series of growls and rattles, leaving me all alone. I entered the dim concrete stairwell and lugged my suitcases one by one up to the fifth floor. I leaned against the wall in exhaustion as I unlocked the sturdy metal security door and then the inner wooden door. Ahhh . . .

  But I wasn’t alone! Someone was in the foyer, coming toward me. I jumped. She jumped. Then I realized that it was only me, reflected in a gigantic mirror that ran the length and height of the tiny, gloomy foyer. I pulled a string and a doughnut of light on the ceiling crackled on; the foyer was suddenly huge and lit like a school cafeteria. The light was not kind on my double’s face: She looked so unsure and so serious dragging her luggage across the threshold into her new life. All the layers of her clothing were mismatched and the right arm of her pilly green sweater was dusted with fine white powder. Her posture was terrible. Your mom is right, I thought. You do look like a bag lady. I bared my teeth at her and she smiled back prettily. I turned off the light.

  I walked the length of the apartment, from the snug bedroom on the left, down the hallway on the right, past the kitchen and bathroom, and into the large living room at the end, filled with an assortment of ugly furniture. Light filtered in through the dirty windows of the balcony. Out on the concrete floor of the balcony sat piles of my landlord’s junk: boxes, paint rollers, a giant naked plastic baby doll. I sat down on the slippery blue couch. Fluorescent lights, cold tile floors, painted concrete walls. Objectively, the apartment was kind of depressing, but as I sat there, I recalled the hooligans in Beijing Bastards living in an apartment just like this. You could choose instead to see it as raw and true. Stripped to the essentials. Free of the smugness of courtyard houses and brownstones. I saw that there could be relief in living on the margins, outside of history. There could be a home for the outcast in me, right here.

  And the magazine containing the apartment listing? It would hit the streets tomorrow.

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  The Original Beijing Bastard

  I woke with confusion to find myself in a strange bed with sun coming in through the window. I was in my new apartment. And I was having brunch with Zhang Yuan in a half hour. I hurried to take a shower, my first in a long time. My whole body itched, my face had broken out, my skin was dry and cracked, my hair was matted—I couldn’t wait to get clean. If this meeting with Zhang Yuan wasn’t an interview, I wondered, could it be considered more of a date?

  My new shower was a hose that dangled from a pipe in the bathroom. I shucked off my clothes and ran shivering into the kitchen and turned on the water heater—click, click, click—until a blue flame came on with a tiny roar. I rushed back into the bathroom, turned the metal valve open, heard the water rush, and watched as the thin yellow hose bucked upward—straight onto the bare lightbulb. Smash! Tiny shards of glass rained all over me as the hose continued to whip madly around the small, dark bathroom. I shut off the water and after checking for both of my eyes (yes) and for blood (no), I stood silently for a minute getting colder and colder. There was no time left to clean up the mess. I brushed the shattered glass out of my hair, stepped around the shards on the floor, and got dressed, donning last my orange Bionic Woman jacket, which looked much better on the fringes of the city than in the center. I might not be clean but at least I looked good.

  The hotel restaurant was quiet and spotless and bright, both deeply soothing and oddly jarring after the life I had been living at my relatives’ house. Tall windows opened out onto a manicured garden. I felt cleansed by the mere proximity to cleanliness and light.

  Zhang Yuan guided me to a table. The brunch was a buffet and I loaded my plate with bagels, eggs, and bacon and filled a thin white teacup full of coffee. The food was delicious. The caffeine, the light-filled room, and the sound of silverware clanking on plates made my head swim. I am sitting here having brunch with Zhang Yuan. He looked like a giant Muppet, tall and huggable with a frizzy shock of hair and shiny button eyes. I hung on his every word.

  “China is a great place to be a writer because here is where the craziest stories in the world are. You won’t find a guy like Crazy English in America. You could write a whole book about him. You have very valuable ‘international muscle,’” he said. “Do you know the secret to being a documentarian?”

  “No,” I said, leaning in to catch the holy words as they fell.

  “To be kuanrong and to use lixing.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “Actually, I don’t know what those things are.” Since he didn’t speak any English, he wrote the characters for me on a scrap of paper. Later, when I looked them up I learned they meant tolerant and rationality.

  He said that Crazy English had started out as just another documentary project but had become fraught as it forced him to confront his own inability to speak English and to ask uncomfortable questions about his own personal failings. Was it his shyness that was holding him back? Was the only way to overcome his weakness to yell, “I am strong!”? He said that when he was filming a huge rally in Hunan Province, Li Yang had called him to the stage and introduced him as a world-famous film director.

  “I was completely tongue-tied with embarrassment. I couldn’t say a word, even in Chinese. I was overcome with a feeling of zibei,” he said, of inferiority. “Then I started to wonder: Is a fundamental part of being Chinese to feel inferior—to the people around you, to the rest of the world?”

  All month at my relatives’ house, I had felt swaddled in layers and layers of cotton, furiously trying to triangulate between what people said and what they meant. His words pierced through my confusion, showing me the possibility of speaking directly about China and about what was in one’s heart. All the things that I hadn’t said all month bubbled to the surface. I couldn’t stand living with my relatives but now that I’ve moved out, I feel all alone. I tried to shower this morning but the lightbulb shattered all over me. Everything seems so difficult. I miss home. I’m scared. Zhang was a good listener, tolerant and rational. He told me to stop worrying.

  “You have a home here now,” he said. “Are you afraid of people in America forgetting you? You’ll have your own life one day, have children.”

  “I don’t want to get married!” I said wildly. The American women in the office, all in their thirties and married or engaged, had spent a half hour one day exchanging stories of their marriage proposals. I found it hard to believe that this was a viable topic of conversation for liberated modern women to be having and even harder to believe that one of them had gotten engaged on the steps of a church in Tuscany at dusk.

  “You will one day,” he said.

  “It’s hard here,” I said. “I have no old friends here.” Starting over was not liberating or glamorous. Sure, I had escaped the stale circle of New York, that ambitious gaggle of college graduates moving into lofts in Williamsburg or brownstones in Park Slope as i
f it were their fifth year of college and getting their starts in publishing or video production. I had struck out into a whole new world, but my own personal world was still as expectant as an empty shoebox.

  “Sometimes new friends feel like old ones,” he said.

  “Almost,” I said with exaggerated mournfulness.

  We figured out that we had both lived in New York the same summer a few years before. We had both been lonely, both zigzagged aimlessly around the city, both watched a lot of films. Our slug trails had no doubt crossed. We agreed that New York was the best city in the world.

  “If only we had known each other then,” he said, the tease of his words lost on me. Taken seriously, the words were perfectly calibrated to touch the tender heart of a young woman. Something ephemeral and precious was passing between us like a current of electricity. A vision of the future was coming into focus.

  I remembered my mom’s warning about men on the hunt for a green card, and as I sat there, my relationship with Zhang Yuan progressed quickly and unexpectedly in my head. Ours would be a classic tale: American girl meets Chinese director, he divorces wife, marries her for a green card, they live turbulently ever after. It would be a deliciously ambiguous affair. Was he using her? In love with America? Or with youth? Was she using him for his stardom to realize her own artistic dreams? Would they fall in love or would it end in tears? Or both? Marriage proper was for squares, but marriage for a green card made me swoon.