Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  He sounded just like my parents. You’re spoiled. Your days just pass so pleasantly. When I was in boarding school we had to shower with cold water, which we had to carry by ourselves in buckets. I realized that part of my reason for coming to China must have been to experience some fraction of what they had experienced, partly so I could understand them and partly so they couldn’t hold it over me anymore. I wanted to prove that I could eat bitterness with the best of them.

  “How is your documentary coming along?” he asked.

  “I still don’t have a topic. But I meet so many people through work—I should be able to find something.”

  “You will.”

  Xiao Ding began speaking in English, in his clipped British accent. “Some days I feel like I am too ancient. I only live for other people. I am too scared to offend anyone,” he said. “You can’t be like this in the modern world. But I am too scared to be modern.”

  “I feel old-fashioned too, some days. Like having integrity and being honest don’t get me anywhere.”

  “But my problem is that I’m dishonest. I help people because I worry about what they think about me, not because I really want to help them.”

  “Well, what do you really want?” I asked, while thinking back guiltily to all his help I’d accepted without giving anything in return.

  “I don’t know. Some days, I want to produce my own films instead of just feeling like I am only helping other people with theirs,” he said. “But other days, I just want to kill myself.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “No, that’s not the right thing to do. And your daughter . . .”

  “Yes, she’s the only one I don’t mind living for. She’s the best thing that came out of my marriage,” he said, and added bitterly, “I got married too young and it is impossible to undo what I’ve done.”

  “Have you thought about divorce?” I was twenty-three and anything seemed possible. Every mistake seemed fixable. He didn’t answer and we sat in silence as the masseurs bore down firmly on our most vulnerable spots one by one, causing excruciating pain. At the end of the massage, I felt alert and relaxed, as if I had just swum a mile and then cried my eyes out. The masseurs dried and moisturized our feet and handed us thin ankle stockings to put on, nude for me, black for him. I took mine but Xiao Ding refused his.

  “Why?” I asked. I had never seen a Chinese person refuse something free before.

  “Lao po?” asked the masseur, who had obviously been watching our interactions. Your old lady?

  Xiao Ding nodded sheepishly. I guess no wife would want to find evidence that her husband had gone to a massage parlor with a twenty-three-year-old American girl, however innocent it was. Oh my god—it was innocent, wasn’t it? He noticed my surprised look.

  “Did you know that Zhang Yuan calls you my girlfriend? My squeeze? My mistress?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he does.”

  Outwardly I shrugged, but inwardly, I was furious—at myself for not seeing it coming and at all men for having only one thing on their minds. Though I depended on Xiao Ding’s friendship, after that day we rarely saw each other.

  Chapter Fourteen

  To Fill In the Blanks

  That spring, huge news stories broke in Beijing. In April, some ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners sat silently outside of Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound, to seek official recognition, which eventually triggered a government crackdown. A few weeks later an American jet bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, accidentally they said, killing three. Riots ensued outside the American embassy in Beijing. But because we were officially registered as a Chinese newspaper, City Edition couldn’t do any real reporting that deviated from the party line. Max wanted to run a huge blank photograph to signal our gagged state but even that he thought was too risky. So, frustratingly, our work went on as usual, as if nothing was wrong.

  Then Beijing Scene did a cover story on Zhang Yuan as he was finishing up his latest film, and as he stared puckishly at me from the cover, I decided, That’s it. I’m going to do stories about artists, Max or no Max. Sue would have liked me to do more hard-hitting stories to set us apart from Beijing Scene but when she saw how determined I was, she didn’t stand in my way.

  A young writer with the pen name of Gezi wrote a novel about a friendship that veers into lesbianism, which was touted as the first lesbian novel in China. I wanted to track her down. Though China had no phone book, I’d discovered that you could call 114 and ask for the phone number of any company, and so I phoned her publisher and they helped connect us.

  Gezi had a stern little bob framing a round face with close-set eyes, and her life story was similar to her protagonist’s: At nineteen, she’d left home against her parents’ wishes, moving from Beijing to southern China to attend college. But unlike her protagonist, there was no getting involved with an older woman after graduating. She obediently returned to Beijing, moved back in with her parents, and got a job. But about a year before, she’d quit her job and rented a small studio where she went during the day to write. The catch was that her parents had no idea that she’d quit her job and no idea that she wrote. They thought she still went off to work every day.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it?” she said. “We get along but they’d rather I have a stable job and profession. They say that I had the right upbringing to get a well-paying job. I oppose them but not directly. This is my way of separating from them in a harmonious way.” She laughed, her childlike eyes crinkling up.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Keeping things from my parents seemed so natural to me but coming from someone else’s mouth, it sounded shocking.

  “They don’t suspect anything?”

  “People have called my house asking for Gezi and I just tell them it’s a transliteration of my English name.”

  “Is it ‘Gezi’ for ‘Pigeon’?”

  “No. Do you know the term ‘pa gezi’? It means ‘to fill in the blanks,’ and it’s what writers call writing, as a joke. It’s the ‘blanks’ meaning of ‘gezi.’”

  “Are you ever going to tell them?”

  “Women here, before they’re married at least, have so little independence. We’re watched over by our families. In a few years, when I’m married and perhaps more successful with my writing, have kids, then I won’t mind if they know.”

  I had much more independence than her, on the surface, but inside I felt just the same. And married? Kids? I surmised that Gezi wasn’t a lesbian. However, she did know a few lesbians who were having a get-together on the weekend. Did I want to go? My journalistic curiosity prompted me to say yes, as did plain human curiosity. Maybe what I’d said to ward off Max had more than a grain of truth to it.

  The meeting was in someone’s cramped, fluorescent-lit apartment. About fifteen women were there and I scanned the crowd. Gezi was there, as was one glum-looking American woman in a plaid shirt. She’s just arrived from San Francisco, the leader of the group said proudly. Gretchen said she was in Beijing on a Fulbright to study contemporary Chinese art. She was unfriendly to me, as if rebuffing an unwanted advance, and I was unfriendly in response. Two Americans are never supposed to be nice to each other when meeting in a foreign country. The whole get-together felt more like a meeting than a party and at the end of the night I lay on a bed having a polite, boring conversation with a Chinese woman. I have no recollection of what we talked about, probably where we were from and how we had found our way there. I concluded I probably wasn’t a lesbian after all.

  Beijing Scene also jumped on the Gezi story and our stories came out at about the same time—theirs was given prime real estate in their magazine, while mine was relegated to the back pages of the Entertainment Guide.

  My next story was about the new contemporary art galleries springing up in Beijing that were nurturing undiscovered artists as well as giving artists who exhibited abroad a place to show
their work at home. I first interviewed expats who ran contemporary art galleries like the Courtyard Gallery and the Red Gate Gallery, and they put me in touch with Chinese gallerists like Ai Weiwei, who had recently returned to Beijing after twelve years in New York and teamed up with a Dutch collector to open a gallery in a warehouse south of Beijing inspired by the cavernous dimensions of galleries in SoHo. Almost impossible to locate, the gallery was intended only for art insiders. But it wasn’t very hard to get inside the small and welcoming community, especially as a Western journalist. Ai Weiwei said he was impressed by how much newer artists were “looking inward to get something out, not just looking around to find a good way to sell their work.” I also met the independent Chinese curators who had organized the exhibit in the bomb shelter I’d been to, which had become a legend in itself. They said they’d closed it after two days because everyone who was expected to come had come and the fresh produce had started to rot, not even to speak of the corpses. A Texan art collector who had started a website about Chinese contemporary art told me with delight that after a writer had described the exhibition, many people wrote in with outraged responses. “They said something like, ‘Such barbarism is a thing of the past.’”

  Shock value was in the DNA of Chinese contemporary art. The era had started with an ill-fated group exhibition in February 1989 called China/Avant-Garde that showed at the official National Art Museum of China. It was the culmination of the 1980s, a decade of unprecedented political and cultural openness, and the government had laid down just three rules: nothing political, no pornography, and no performance art. So of course one artist set up an installation consisting of two phone booths with a mirror in between them and came one day, stepped into one of the phone booths, and fired a gun into the mirror. The government shut down the exhibition, and avant-garde art, like avant-garde film, went underground and overseas. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened four months later. News of underground exhibitions in Beijing now spread only by word of mouth.

  When a record nineteen Chinese artists made it into the Venice Biennale this year, 1999, the appetite of the international art market was truly whet for Chinese art. As more galleries and curators came from the West to pluck artists out of obscurity, more and more artists poured into Beijing from the provinces. The artists and the curators were trying to get the market to move past art that was recognizably “Chinese.” The godfather of the avant-garde, curator Li Xianting, once asked in an essay whether Chinese art was merely “an eggroll at an international art banquet” and an outraged collector wrote back saying, “Are we looking for an eggroll? We’re more sophisticated than that.”

  But were they?

  I interviewed the assistant at the Red Gate Gallery, a young guy named Anthony, who said in a dashing accent I took to be British, “There was a big kick-up last year about a New York Times write-up of the Inside Out show in New York. It was very much still talking about Mao and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Chinese artists got really angry. They’re insisting on giving their own interpretations of the work rather than simply conceding to what Western audiences have to say about them.”

  I nodded, thinking how nice his voice sounded and how dark his eyes and hair were. Then he used the words soiree, hoi polloi, and anarchy in the same sentence, and so I took his number.

  The article made it onto our cover and I began getting invitations to new exhibitions and gallery openings. I liked being around artists and seeing China and the world through their eyes.

  It was around this time that my parents confirmed that they had booked spots on the group tour. They were coming.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Young Woman, Old Men

  Do-DOO-do, do-DOO-do, do-DOO-do!

  I fished my small black beeper out of my bag and called the unknown number, asking the man who answered if he’d beeped 16386. I was impatient, as the magazine had to be put to bed that night. I was sitting in the design department finishing the layout of the Entertainment Guide.

  “Wang Zhenluo.” The voice was deep and loud and jagged, as if the man’s windpipe had been removed and replaced with an industrial-grade rock polisher.

  “Wu Wenguang! How are you?”

  “Still alive,” he said. Wu Wenguang was another one of the Sixth Generation documentary filmmakers I’d read about long ago and hoped to meet. Xiao Ding had introduced us, and Wu called me occasionally to get help with translations or just to check up on me. He seemed to like me because I was young and idealistic and wanted to write and make documentaries that told the unvarnished truth about China, once I figured out what that was. If he had more in mind than that, I never found out. “What are you doing right now?”

  “I’m at work,” I said, cringing slightly, knowing what was coming next.

  “You’re still at that job? Why are you wasting your time with a full-time job? How do you expect to make a documentary if you spend all day nailed to an office working on someone else’s project?” he growled. I could picture him on the other end of the line: small glasses, bony angular face, wispy facial hair, looking exactly the part of an old wise man who has retreated to a mountain to regard society from afar. He was only in his forties, but I was young and to me he seemed ancient and full of wisdom. I swore I could smell cigarette smoke drifting through the phone line.

  “I need the money,” I said, not wanting to say more in front of my coworkers, who despite their appearance of quiet diligence surely had their ears flapping madly. I wished I’d never told him I wanted to shoot a documentary.

  “You need to go freelance.” Wu Wenguang said this last word in English with the stress on the second syllable. His English was a ragtag affair that he claimed to have picked up “on the street.”

  “I’m not ready to quit my job.” I had no savings, no way to get a visa, no safety net. I was already living in a gray zone—now he wanted me to work in one too? I imagined telling my parents when they came that I had quit my job and was shooting a documentary.

  “You’re staying in that job for the sake of security. That’s bullshit. You’re young. You need your freedom.”

  I laughed. Freedom. He said the word ziyou with a desperate reverence that made me laugh. Wu was an ideological hard-liner, not for Marxist-Leninism but for other pure ideals: Freedom, Truth, Art.

  I laughed when he said I needed my freedom but something about it stuck in my craw. It was an inner state that we all sought, no matter what system we lived in. This was the voice I’d been waiting for, someone who would tell me to let go of other people’s ideas for me and to follow my own, not just about making a documentary but about everything. I needed someone to say that I could be anything I wanted to be in life, and mean it.

  “Have you gotten yours yet?” he asked.

  “My what?” He had been blathering on about something, his words tumbling out in his Yunnanese accent that wobbled higgledy-piggledy with the stress on all the wrong characters like a chair with a bum leg. My mom’s family was from Yunnan too and I found the difficulty of his accent familiar and comforting.

  “DV camera,” he said, saying the letters in English.

  “No.”

  “You should get a DV camera. DV is a revolution.”

  “I’m broke, I told you,” I said. How on earth did Wu make ends meet? He had long since quit his job in state-run TV and seemed to spend most of this time making rambling, overgrown documentaries that screened exclusively at international film festivals.

  “Plus the longer I’m here, the less things seem to make sense,” I said. “I’m not really a Flying Pigeon anymore but I’m not a Forever either.” Those were the two popular brands of bicycles in China and were how a Chinese woman categorized foreigners in a book I had read: The foreigners either fly away or they stay forever. I didn’t want to be shallow and fleeting, but I also didn’t want to be trapped here for the rest of my life.

  “Don’t mak
e it out to be so complicated. You’ve been in China long enough and met enough people to be able to say something meaningful about China. I have this Italian friend who was just like you, here for years and always wanting to make a documentary. Finally he took a car trip with a Chinese friend and made a documentary about it. It was simple but deep. You could do the same thing.”

  “Do you really think so?” Like Dumbo, I was desperate for my magic feather.

  “DV cameras are not that expensive. Save some money and get one. Don’t you want to join the revolution?”

  Wu Wenguang was right. My job was becoming tedious and repetitive, and I had become slipshod and unreliable. I wanted to write more articles but I spent all my time calling up aquariums and shooting ranges, many of which wouldn’t send me their information because they said they’d already sent it to Beijing Scene, and I was running out of steam to write entertainment blurbs. (“Remember the Rainbow Bar? We didn’t think so.”) All that redeemed the job was the soap opera that constantly unfolded in front of my eyes. Someone had recently spotted our kleptomaniac ex-distributor Lu downstairs at our building sans front teeth and Sue had found out that our blood-slurping former web designer Scott had “assumed someone else’s identity” in Texas years ago.

  “What are you working on?” I asked Wu, hoping to draw fire away from me.

  “I just finished traveling around the countryside shooting a documentary called Jiang Hu: Life on the Road,” he said. “I shot a group of traveling opera performers who live a jianghu lifestyle. Jianghu includes anyone outside of society who travels around, including thieves, prostitutes, and, long ago, martial artists. The tradition is almost dead and I wanted to document it, so I traveled with the troupe for months, shooting hundreds of hours of footage. I wanted them to forget I was shooting, so I held my camera at chest level. I never once looked through the viewfinder. The picture is not pretty but my technique captured the essential spirit of the people.”