by Val Wang
We stopped first at the office of a friend of her dad’s to pick up money; then she dragged me to markets all over town, from the open-air Silk Market in the east to the three-story Pearl Market in the south to the warehouse-like Tianyi Market in the west to the traditional Qianmen market in the old city, each with rows and rows of tiny stalls crammed to the ceiling with goods and each manned by its own vendor who would grab our sleeves and say, “Konnichiwa!” Along with silk and pearls, we saw knock-off North Face jackets and Beanie Babies, chinoiserie, singing Mao lighters, fur coats with the claws still attached. Shopping was antithetical to my lifestyle, but Jade bought something at every stop: cream to keep her face pale and blemish-free, bright red dye for her hair, a long down coat, three-inch platform shoes, furry handbags. By the end of the day she was laden down with huge shopping bags. She had grown up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and I guessed that her upbringing had given her elaborate grooming habits as well as confidence about what she wanted in life.
We spent a long time in traffic jams, the crawling, honking, smoggy, never-ending traffic jams for which Beijing was getting famous. Cabbies were only too willing to talk. They complained about the police who they said just stood in the middle of the road socializing instead of directing traffic, about pedestrians who didn’t follow rules but whom you unfortunately couldn’t just run over, and about the government that had reduced cab fares by 20 percent without reducing their fees.
At one point we drove down a rubble-strewn street that was more Beirut than Beijing. Courtyard houses on both sides of the narrow street lay in ruin and most of the roadbed had been dug up. As dust swirled up into the windshield, we navigated the crooked line of pavement that remained between tall construction barriers. This road was Numero Uno of the “Big Three” projects: Ping’an Dajie, parallel to the Avenue of Eternal Peace. The deadline for the project was the fiftieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, less than a year away. The wheel of development that had crushed my relatives’ courtyard house was rolling over other houses all around the city. This place that I was growing to love was disappearing right in front of my eyes.
• • •
Despite Max’s attempts to dissuade me, I was still intrigued by the world of underground art. So when the City Edition fax machine spit out an invitation for an art exhibition that was being held in an apartment complex over the weekend, I decided to go. A crudely drawn pictograph resembling a cartoon treasure map indicated the location. Perhaps here I would find the underground artists at last.
I took a cab alone up to the North Fourth Ring Road. Out the window was a dusty wasteland dotted with apartment megablocks, low warehouses, and the occasional building crane. The desolation was overwhelming. I had the cab drop me off where I thought the map indicated and I circled around and around the huge and deserted apartment blocks with the map in hand, secretly hoping I wouldn’t find it so I could turn around and go back home. Finally I saw a cluster of young people standing outside a doorway smoking. They nodded at me as I took the steps leading down into the basement.
I walked down a corridor over a series of gigantic lightboxes in which a man’s face struggled underwater, his palms pressed against the glass, bubbles trailing out of his mouth. I walked from room to room in the dank and labyrinthine concrete bomb shelter. It was exactly what I’d hoped an underground art exhibition would be like. In one room, two eight-foot-tall beings constructed entirely of vegetables appeared to be locked in a distinctly carnivorous embrace. Body parts figured in many of the artworks. In one room a waxy torso floated upside down next to a pair of legs, which were next to aluminum pipes twisted like intestines, next to what looked like an actual intestine inflated with helium. Out of thin air phantom cellphones rang and people left messages, and the whole scene was harshly lit by a single lightbulb. In another room, a real fetus rested on a single bed made of a slab of ice. In another, an arm dangling from the ceiling gripped the end of a rope that reached down and snaked over the entire floor. A Chinese couple was standing on the pile of rope staring up at the arm.
“Is it real?”
“Looks real.” It did too, all blackened and shriveled.
“E xing,” said the woman. Nauseating.
“Ku,” said the man. Cool.
I walked through almost twenty rooms. Cutting through the dank and sweetly rotten smell came a scent like french fries. I found my way to a room where many people were gathered. Two girls in tight dresses were standing behind a deep fryer from which they fished out things that they then gave to a fey creature with curly hair to line up on the floor. They were tanks. Was it a reference to the Tiananmen Square Massacre? What did it all mean?
The combined effect of all the pieces in the space did make me feel slightly sick to my stomach. Unlike the Political Pop and other high-minded, clean-looking art of the Inside Out exhibition, these pieces felt more visceral and more intimate, like alienation experienced truly from the inside out.
Most of those milling around were Chinese guys with hair of varying lengths and with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. A few young Westerners wandered through. I didn’t know anyone and couldn’t tell who the artists were but everyone there seemed to know one another. I passed the man whose drowning face I’d walked over before, but was too tongue-tied to say hi.
I finally saw someone I knew, a Chinese guy with a shaggy bowl cut and kindly eyes; I couldn’t quite remember where I knew him from. I lunged at him eagerly but as he recoiled with a look of shock I realized who he was: Cui Jian. China’s first rock star. Hero of Beijing Bastards. I almost blurted out that I was friends with Zhang Yuan and that the film they’d made together had lured me to Beijing, but at the last moment, I grabbed hold of myself and moved on.
Chapter Nine
The Redemptive Power of Family
My phone rang early Christmas morning with an especially festive jingle. I knew who it would be. But it wasn’t just my parents, but also my brother; Nainai; my aunt, uncle, and cousin; plus various other relatives, twelve total, all together on speakerphone yelling over one another. “Merry Christmas!” “We wish you were here!” “Do you have plans tonight?” “What is the weather like?” I tried to answer their questions but in the pause after I spoke others rushed in with more questions. Finally I gave up trying to speak and just let their words wash over me. I was happy to be so far away so I could avoid answering questions about what exactly I was doing with my life. I hung up and lay back down in bed.
Several months had passed since my brunch with Zhang Yuan and he became oddly elusive about setting exact dates for the trips to Ürümqi or Rome and began ignoring my phone calls, which only made me call more. I had a dream in which he spoke perfect English and I wondered if he had been pulling my leg the entire time. I decided it was time to visit the film set in Tianjin and called him to let him know I would be doing just that.
One Sunday right after the New Year, I took the three-hour train to Tianjin with Jade. Zhang Yuan met us at a hotel, looking harried and distracted. As his driver took us to the set, he turned around in the front seat and told us about the film. Called Going Home for New Year’s (or Seventeen Years in English), it was the story of a woman returning home for New Year’s after spending seventeen years in jail for killing her sister. He talked absentmindedly, as if reciting rote interview responses for a reporter.
“Going home for New Year’s is an incredibly important ritual for families in China. So there is already so much tension there. Then add on the years they haven’t seen each other and her killing her sister. You really don’t know if her family will forgive her,” he said. “It’s a story that all of us who leave home live through. What do we find when we go back home for New Year’s?”
“Mmmmm,” I said. On another day I would have found him profound. Today he seemed infuriatingly mundane. I wasn’t just an average reporter. What about Rome?
“Max says you got permi
ssion to shoot in a prison,” said Jade, in her sauciest voice.
“Yes, the Ministry of Justice gave us permission to shoot in a women’s prison.”
“Can we go into the prison?”
“Sorry, we shot those scenes last week.”
“Oh, too bad.” Jade pouted. “I really wanted to go to prison.”
We arrived at a brick apartment building and went into a ground-floor apartment with a hard concrete floor. The cast and crew were waiting for Zhang Yuan and he was quickly absorbed into the fray. The living room and kitchen were being used as the set, while the rest of the apartment was filled with cords and boxes. As the producers and technicians buzzed around the apartment, Jade and I sat on some big black boxes in the darkness of the balcony, waiting for the action to start. I felt moronic all of a sudden.
“I think he’s hot for you,” said Jade.
“Today he’s actually being cold. Besides, he’s married.”
“So what? This is China. Everyone cheats on their wife here.”
“I’m not into married men.”
“Do you have the hots for him?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think I want to be him.”
“Don’t lie. I think you want to be with him. Are you really attracted to him? You have weird taste. He looks like Eraserhead or something.”
Zhang Yuan’s fuzzy head loomed over everyone on the bright set and he looked so authoritative, pointing here and there. The actors wandered around, talking and laughing, one woman wearing a police uniform. We asked one of the crewmembers what they were filming today. He said they were about to shoot the last scene of the film: the reunion between the daughter and her parents.
Finally, Zhang Yuan called for silence and the actors took their places. Their faces suddenly became stoic and unemotional, just like a Chinese family’s would be when something traumatic was about to happen. The daughter and the policewoman escorting her home entered and the reunion seethed with the tension of emotions felt but not expressed. Then suddenly the dam burst and the daughter collapsed into her father’s lap, weeping and saying hysterically, “When I was in prison, I often missed my own father! But I couldn’t remember what he looked like! In the end, I couldn’t help thinking of you!” He forgave her in the most syrupy fashion possible like in those schlocky soap operas my relatives watched. They hugged.
I cringed. This wasn’t the Zhang Yuan I knew. His films were understated, cynical, ironic. His films didn’t have happy endings and they didn’t celebrate the redemptive power of family. Family, for all its promises of unity, was supposed to be full of betrayal, like the mother who abandons her son in Mama or the father whose alcoholism breaks up his family in Sons. What was redemptive was Art. I blamed the censors.
At a break in the shooting, I told Zhang that I needed to go and asked if his driver would drive me back to Beijing as he had promised. It was late and I had to work the next morning. He was busy and barely gave me a glance.
“Actually, the driver’s not going back tonight,” he said. “He can drive you back early tomorrow.”
“But I have to be there by nine o’clock. Max is bringing his friend from The Wall Street Journal to come critique our magazine. He said I absolutely have to be there.” Sue was in the States for the holidays and I was the only editor in town.
“You’ll be there. Just go sleep in my hotel room.”
I scowled. “Sleep in your hotel room?”
“We’re going to keep filming all night,” he said. “It’s fine.”
So Jade and I went and slept in his room, each in a single bed. Very late that night, he came in and I woke up. He politely sat and read for a while as I peeked at him through half-closed eyes, then finally he crawled into bed with me. Ahhh. This was the Zhang Yuan that I knew secretly existed, less the esteemed film director and more of a bastard. I looked across the pillow but could barely make out his features in the dark. His face looked fleshy and tired. He flung a rubbery arm around me and slurred, “Zhenluo,” and began whispering unintelligible nothings into my ear and stroking my head. What I wanted had finally zoomed up into my face, but up close, it didn’t look so good. I wasn’t a cheap film groupie who played mistress to someone else’s fickle, doughy-faced husband who made corny films—not with my friend sleeping in the next bed over, anyhow. If Jade hadn’t been there, I wonder how I would have felt and what might have happened. I rolled over and went back to sleep.
When I woke in the morning and looked out the window, all I saw was soft whiteness. A damp fog had descended on the city. Had last night all been a dream? Next to me was the bear-like, slumbering form of Zhang Yuan. Nope. I got out of bed, roused the sleepy Jade, and made Zhang Yuan call his driver. As soon as he had, he fell back asleep. I shut the door softly behind us.
As we drove, the fog became thicker and thicker and as we were about to enter the highway, we saw that the taillights of the car in front of us glowed a faint rosy pink.
“We can’t go any farther until the fog clears,” the driver said, as he pulled off onto the shoulder. I looked at my watch: six thirty. I was barely going to make it as it was.
“But I have to get back!”
“Miss, look at this fog. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Okay, okay.”
We sat quietly as the car was enveloped in a puffy whiteness. Needling through the fog was Max’s voice telling me to find a way back to Beijing, to do whatever it took to get back. But something wicked in me told me to stay put and just be lost in the dream of last night. The bright lights of the set, the dark room, the arm around me, the words whispered in my ear. It was a relief to not have to try to see into the distance, calculating things and being rational. Because once I got back to Beijing, it would really be over with Zhang Yuan. And with it my idea to do a film about filmmakers.
We finally got back in the afternoon. Max was furious.
“Where the hell were you? There wasn’t a single editor here when my friend from The Wall Street Journal was here. Do you know how embarrassing that was for me?”
“I’m sorry! We were in Tianjin last night and the fog was so thick we couldn’t drive on the highway until after noon.”
“Why didn’t you take a train?”
I stood dumbfounded. “The fog . . .”
“What were you doing in Tianjin?”
“Visiting the set of Zhang Yuan’s film.”
“Zhang Yuan’s film! You are unbelievable.” Brought out into the light of day, the fluffy stuff of my dreams solidified, cracked, and crumbled to dust. He thrust the tape recording of the session at me and ordered me to listen to it, gave me a beeper with the admonition to carry it with me at all times, and stormed back to his office.
Our art director came over. “You didn’t miss much. That guy’s main piece of advice was: more sex,” she said. “He was one of those white guys who comes to China and gets all excited about sex shops and prostitutes. I just thought, ‘Well, go visit them yourself.’”
Chapter Ten
Seeks Trouble for Oneself
I looked in the mirror one morning and realized with a sinking feeling that it was time to get my hair cut. My artfully shapeless hair had become truly shapeless. Finding a hairdresser is hard in any city. You need someone who can prune away from your unruly bonsai anything that is not the essential you of that exact moment. There were many hairdressing salons on my street, all with the same basic look: a bare cube big enough for only one or two haircutting chairs, a tatty curtain hung at the back. One or two heavily made-up young women stared out in boredom. Most were empty during the day. Once I saw a man actually sitting in one of the chairs. A real hole in the wall, I couldn’t help thinking. The ladies had skills, I was sure, but they weren’t the ones I was looking for. Other shops lining the street catered to their needs, some selling skimpy, glittery clothing and fake eyelashes, others selling prophylactics and sex
toys.
There was only one salon in my neighborhood that I was sure wasn’t a brothel. It was a basement shop staffed by a handful of what looked through the fishbowl window to be diminutive glam rockers, men and women all identically clad in tight, shiny black clothing and all sporting puffy mullet cuts dyed different shades of dirty orange. Most of the haircuts I saw on the street looked so utilitarian: long straight falls pulled back into thin ponytails, shapeless bobs, stiff permanent waves. The best haircuts I saw were the crude pageboys on the ruddy farmer women who drove their donkey carts into the city. The mullets were a pretty radical look for Beijing circa 1999 and one that inspired slightly more confidence than the prostitutes. And so I went there.
The salon was big, with ten haircutting chairs, all empty. A TV hung in the corner of the salon, blasting Cantopop karaoke videos. The place smelled sour and burnt, but it was too late to turn back. The staff had already whirred lazily into action. One of the women led me to a chair, washed my hair, gave me a long head massage, then sat me down in one of the hairdressing chairs. I took off my glasses.
One of the men came over to pin on a bib and scrutinize my hair. The boss, who had been watching carefully, came and pushed him out of the way. He was tall, the only one of them taller than me, and had short, well-styled hair (still black) and a not-unhandsome face. He also had a disturbingly long pinky nail, which came in handy when it came time to part my hair. Make it look messy, was all I told him.
He began snipping cautiously, hair by hair. The other hairdressers sprawled out in the empty chairs and warbled along sporadically with the music in Cantonese, which was so cloying that my teeth felt as though they were rotting just listening to it. He cut so slowly that eventually the songs started to repeat themselves. I squirmed in impatience. When he finally finished, I put my glasses back on and looked in the mirror. Puffy on top, with a wispy frill of hair in the back like a lacy bed ruffle. I looked exactly like them.