Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  That night was like any other, save for the fact that one minute we were at the bar and the next Max was in my bed complaining about how uncomfortable it was. Max was not my type. Macho. Commanding. A bulldog. But this was Beijing, where the rules seemed to be the opposite of what they were at home.

  His warm body was comforting. But his smoky breath was repulsive, as was the thought of the dark, rotting infinity where once his teeth had been. He wore bright red briefs, which I did not allow him to take off. He pulled me closer and I mimicked his desire. Our chests touching, the warmth of his back against my forearms, our legs beginning to entwine. I wanted it, then I didn’t. It was warm, but it turned my stomach. Jade’s voice popped into my head. What can he do for me? You had to know what you wanted. I did. I didn’t. I didn’t. My disgust coalesced finally into a hard kernel. I pushed him away and got up.

  “I’m not really into this,” I said, and then drove what I thought would be the final nail in the coffin. “I think I’m a lesbian. Sorry.”

  “If you’re a lesbian, then we can snuggle and it will be no problem,” he said, as if we were playing a game of logic.

  “Go to sleep.”

  “I cuddle with my good friends all the time without any problem.”

  “We’re not good friends. Go to sleep.”

  After that night, my relationship with Max slowly deteriorated until we barely talked to each other anymore. He no longer helped me with my articles and I stopped my clumsy attempts at pampering or doting. I was stunned and embarrassed. By getting involved with Zhang Yuan and Max, I had alienated the two men who were going to help me reach my filmmaking dreams and help me make it as a journalist. Everything I’d come here for seemed to be slipping out of my hands.

  I told no one at the office but Jade and I told her the story mostly for comic effect, about his clumsy kisses and the red briefs and about my lesbian confession.

  “I guess I’ll be buying my own drinks from now on.”

  “Lesbian?” she said in a naughty tone of voice. “Really?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Probably not. All I know is I don’t like Max. And I don’t need him.”

  And I realized it was true. If I wanted to be these men, why didn’t I just be them, instead of idolizing them, depending on them, ending up in bed with them, and waking up in the morning even more empty-handed than when I went to sleep?

  Chapter Twelve

  Yijia’s Grand Opening

  One Saturday morning, Bobo called me to tell me that Xiao Peng was driving the family to IKEA—Beijing’s first—up on the North Fourth Ring Road and to ask if I wanted to meet them there. I said yes, welcoming the chance to spend time with them out of the house. I was so thankful not to be living together anymore and so glad they knew nothing about the messiness of my life. IKEA was the newest tourist destination for locals in Beijing—I even brought along my camera.

  The store was packed. A sign in the bedroom department invited shoppers to try out the beds for at least a few moments, but there was no need for such an invitation. Entire families bounced up and down together on the beds. People sat on all the sofas and picked up and examined every utensil in the model kitchens, as if encountering the relics of a futuristic civilization. We joined in.

  After a walk through the store, Bobo and Bomu sank down into two recliners. They looked slightly ill at ease and seeing them there reminded me of my very last visit to their big courtyard house, the one that had been demolished the summer before. I had returned to that house one day to find a pert single bed sitting in a corner of the living room, which had been completely cleared of the sagging couches and worn side tables. The bed had been covered with a fresh pink bedspread, and the two cracked walls of the corner it sat in had been plastered with flowery wallpaper. This is unexpected, I thought, but no one acted as if anything were different.

  I finally asked, “This bed—why is it here?”

  “We’ve thrown out the old furniture and bought new furniture,” Bomu said. “We got this bed just for you. You should sleep here from now on.” They all turned to me and smiled, and when I smiled confusedly in return, they all roared with laughter. I stood helplessly, cursing them. Xiao Lu finally took pity on me and told me that a TV series was renting out the courtyard house to use as a set and paying my relatives four thousand yuan—almost five hundred dollars—for a few days’ inconvenience. Our house was going to be in one of those cheesy soap operas that they were always watching! Bobo and Bomu were giddy like children the night before a circus comes to town. “My” bedroom was to be the boudoir of a pop singer, a girl with sophisticated Western tastes. I imagined the camera framing the immaculate corner and cropping out the threadbare reality of my relatives’ lives.

  The crew descended on the house the next morning. I heard them arrive as I was taking my sponge bath in the room with a rag for a knob; moments later a crew member burst in on me. We both yelled in surprise and the door quickly shut. They unleashed chaos in the house. Actors got made up in the living room, directors called for silence during takes, and camera operators clambered over the roof like monkeys. Bomu’s mother, a squat, bowlegged granny with no teeth, flirted mercilessly with the handsomest of the young actors. The crew set up a washing machine (clearly a fiction) in the middle of the rundown courtyard and took and retook a scene of an utterly ordinary middle-aged woman—a very famous actress, my relatives whispered to me—uttering a plaintive monologue that I didn’t fully understand, her voice going high and wheedling over something (the licentious pop singer girl? the world gone awry?). We were riveted. The house was full of laughter and I saw, for the first time, my relatives smiling and looking happy. The crew admired the old courtyard house; my relatives beamed and demurred.

  “It’s so run-down,” they said.

  “But it’s so rare for one family to have their own courtyard house these days,” said the crew, and my relatives had to agree. Most houses were now divided among many families. No one mentioned the fact that the house would be demolished soon.

  Bobo pulled out Quadrangles of Beijing, a glossy bilingual book about courtyard houses, to show me. The houses in it were not like the rustic shanty we were sitting in now—the courtyards were all palatial in size, emptied of bicycles, laundry lines, and stacks of coal, and perfectly restored. They looked exactly how I had imagined courtyard houses to look before I actually came to China, like miniature Forbidden Cities. In fact, each courtyard house was designed using the same cosmological rules as the Forbidden City, and Confucian hierarchy was embedded right into its architecture; the tallest northern room always housed the eldest family members while the lower rooms housed younger generations. The book said the house was originally designed to be a symbol of stability in an eternally fluctuating world, and the empty space of the courtyard—with its piece of sky, its fruit tree, its caged bird—was meant to cultivate family harmony. The photos staged picturesque scenes: an old couple playing chess and drinking tea, or three generations of a family sitting together making dumplings.

  But Bobo and his family never sat in the courtyard of their house. They never set out a table to eat or drink, never played chess or stargazed. The skies in the day were milk white with pollution and the night sky too obscured to see stars.

  The TV series injected the courtyard house with one last burst of life right before its destruction and I learned the fun way what my family had been learning the hard way all these years (the second time is a farce, after all): that life could be shuffled around as easily as sets in a play and we, its unwilling actors, would be forced to play along. If Bobo and Bomu suffered any sadness about the impending destruction, they did it inside, silently.

  For those few days, fact and fiction were melded together, but after the house was demolished, the fiction peeled away like wallpaper. It was all that remained.

  Back in IKEA, Bobo and Bomu had settled into their chairs. Had there been a TV on, we cou
ld have stayed all afternoon. It was a strange, cozy scene, so I took out my camera and told them to smile; they assumed stern, beatific expressions and I snapped a photo, setting off a bright flash. A salesman in a blue oxford rushed over.

  “Please stop taking photos.”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “Store policy is no photos. Please put your camera away.”

  Xiao Peng stood on the side, smirking. “People are taking pictures of the furniture and getting it copied cheaper elsewhere, you know.”

  “I know,” I lied.

  On the way out, I noticed that most shoppers left empty-handed. By the checkout counter was a row of waist-high cardboard bins filled with loose and inexpensive items: shrink-wrapped stacks of six colored plastic cups or five concentric containers for leftovers, bags of one hundred tea lights. Shoppers clustered around the bins and seemed to buy the items as souvenirs of their visit, or consolation prizes. We left without touching a thing.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Peking Man

  A giant coffin held aloft by several men in long gowns bobbles merrily down a narrow hutong and arrives at the door of a courtyard house, where the men try to collect the payment for the thirty new layers of lacquer recently added to it. The lady of the house instructs her servant to turn them away. The coffin is her father-in-law’s pride and joy, which the Old Master has spent the family fortune lacquering up year after year.

  Xiao Ding stopped the tape and rewound to the beginning, apologizing for the low production value of the made-for-TV movie. Several days before, he had called me, reminded me of who he was (Zhang Yuan’s “translator” friend from the Pretty Bird Club), and asked if I’d be interesting in a job helping him polish some English subtitles. China Central Television had hired him to subtitle a movie adapted from an old stage play that was airing on their English-language channel. The movie wasn’t so great, he said, but he remembered me saying that I wanted to make a documentary and this job would be good practice if I wanted to go on to subtitle independent films later, which was a good way to meet other filmmakers and start making my own documentary.

  And so I found myself in Xiao Ding’s apartment on a Sunday afternoon. The apartment was alarmingly stripped down; the walls and floors were bare concrete and the fixtures protruded abruptly out of the walls, as if the builders had abandoned the place halfway through construction. He said the movie was based on a play from 1940 called Peking Man. The playwright, Cao Yu, was one of China’s first Western-style playwrights and had studied Eugene O’Neill and Aeschylus in college. The play was about the Zengs, an ancient fossil of a Beijing family in the 1930s who are educated, mannered, snobbish, and completely out of step with modern times. They are deeply in debt to their neighbors, a nouveau riche textile manufacturing family, and the Old Master is thinking of handing over either their decrepit courtyard house or his coffin to settle the debt. Xiao Ding was prim and fussy with the subtitling, dictating exactly how many characters could fit on a line and pressing me to make each line sound like real conversational English. We sat close together, debating every line of the movie.

  The story focused on the worst few days of the Zengs’ lives. At the end, right before the family is forced to hand the coffin over to their neighbors, the Old Master delivers a speech in which he calls all his children “stupid, lazy, and unfilial.” The playwright could have taken the words right out of my Yeye’s mouth. It was eerie to see him fictionalized this way, years before he became who he was. The playwright had been about the same age as him and in fact the play had been published in the year of my dad’s birth. Amazing also was the fact that this play could still have so much meaning sixty years later, that traditional families would still be struggling to adapt to modern times.

  When we finally finished subtitling, I was exhausted. I looked around Xiao Ding’s apartment and saw photos of his wife and daughter, who was almost a teenager. He told me that during the week they lived with his wife’s parents in a courtyard house in the old city, where their daughter went to school, and they came back to the apartment on the weekends. They were out for a few hours to give us privacy.

  “How old is she?”

  “Twelve. I got married very young,” he said. He was in his thirties. “My daughter is really growing up. Every week I bike her home—she sits on the crossbar of my bike and we talk. It’s one of my favorite parts of the week but she’s getting a bit too big for it. It’s awkward.”

  “Why don’t you let her ride her own bike?”

  “She wants to but I don’t think it’s safe.”

  “You’ve got to let her grow up.”

  “I know, but it’s hard.”

  After subtitling Peking Man, Xiao Ding and I began to talk often on the phone and to have dinner occasionally, always during the week. This time I could get direction for my wayward life with none of the moony stuff or the bombast or the pesky element of sex. Xiao Ding was so practical.

  “Well, you have to decide if you want to shoot a documentary about the city or the country.”

  “The city, of course.”

  “Well, then you’ve made your first decision. That’s good. Now you just need a topic.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Then one day Xiao Ding told me he had another job he needed help with and asked if I wanted to split the work and money with him again. The job: subtitling Crazy English. Months had gone by since I’d last talked to Zhang Yuan, and after all that happened between us, I couldn’t believe I was saying yes. But the reflected glory, the money—those were all things I couldn’t refuse. We sat in my apartment watching Crazy English as we translated. Zhang Yuan and his crew themselves appeared in the first scene of the film, tramping down a snowy street filming Li Yang, all of them yelling in unison, “Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!” Zhang Yuan’s cheeks were rosy and he looked so pleased with himself. Was he finally triumphing over his shyness? As if echoing my earlier thoughts, Xiao Ding said he couldn’t believe he was helping Zhang Yuan with the subtitles. I was surprised—I’d thought they were friends.

  “We are friends but he takes advantage of me.”

  “He does? How?”

  “He doesn’t speak any English, so he takes me abroad to translate for him at film festivals but then he doesn’t pay me anything to be there. Nothing.”

  “Why do you go with him, then?”

  “I can’t resist the chance to go abroad. I won’t make it there by myself. And he’s my friend and I want to help him. I know what my job in life is: to help other people.”

  It was a noble character trait but I couldn’t help but find it kind of pitiful.

  “Once we were in Berlin together and he had gone off to talk to some people and I didn’t even have any money for food. I was starving and I had to wait for him to return to eat,” he said, his voice sour with humiliation. “He treated me like his puren.”

  Puren? After he had gone home, I looked it up in the dictionary. Servant.

  “He uses people. If you’re a member of the press, he’ll befriend you, especially if you’re a beautiful young woman.”

  “Oh.”

  The footage of me interviewing Li Yang hadn’t made the final cut of Crazy English. Instead Zhang Yuan had used footage of an interview by a reporter from Time, a pretty, bright-eyed Caucasian woman.

  Xiao Ding was a good listener and I took advantage of it, barraging him with my complaints. That day I complained about how hard it was to make friends, especially Chinese friends. I told him, “I look Chinese. I speak Chinese. But I just don’t feel close to most Chinese people.”

  “Chinese people feel the same way,” he said. “People have trouble trusting one another here. And you have to understand Chinese society. The key to Chinese society is relationships and Chinese relationships exist as a series of concentric circles. At the middle is your family, then come friends, then acquaintances, then s
trangers. Sometimes, friends become so close that you treat them like family. But that takes a long time.”

  After we finished, we went to get foot massages at a place I’d been frequenting recently, a neon-lit parlor off of the Second Ring Road that was open around the clock. Inside was a hive of cubicles filled with throne-like recliners. We lay back and soaked our feet in a medicinal brown brew; I could feel my troubles streaming out the soles of my feet. Eventually the masseurs came, a man for me and a woman for him and began their methodical journey of pain across the terrain of our nerve endings.

  “Ow!” The pain was intense and direct.

  “That’s your number 10,” he said as he handed me a tote bag printed with a map of the foot. Number 10 was my head.

  “You don’t sleep very well.” He pressed down extra hard.

  “Owwww!” Sometimes it scared me that the masseurs knew what was going on inside of me better than I did. I started in on my usual litany of peeves to Xiao Ding. I complained about how frustrating my job was, how bad my Chinese was, how I was never going to be able afford a video camera.

  “Why do you complain so much?” asked Xiao Ding. “Your life is pretty good, pretty easy. Where I grew up, we lived in a simple house and in the winter one night as I was sleeping, a rat ran over my face. I’ll never forget the feeling of that. At least there are no rats running over your face while you sleep. Buck up. Study Chinese.”