Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  “This was me at my most beautiful age, twenty-five,” she said. She stood with her back to the camera posing outside near some spring blossoms, wearing a long, sleeveless magenta dress that luridly hugged her curves. A thick braid hung down her back and she looked over her shoulder at the camera, smoldering with virginal chastity. She looked like she came straight out of the countryside, though I would never have said that. I was a good leftist with none of my dad’s ugly bourgeois derision about recent Chinese immigrants he found too rustic.

  “I don’t really like this photo,” I said. “You look too—”

  “Rustic?”

  “Yes. I was embarrassed to say that,” I said. Now, at twenty-seven, her hair was chopped to her shoulder and the look in her eye had become much more knowing.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “You’re twenty-five now. You’re at your most beautiful. I forgot to ask you earlier: Are you looking for a boyfriend?”

  “No.” I was actually twenty-three, and I wasn’t the type to go looking for love like a sad beachcomber sweeping the sands with a metal detector. If love wanted to find me, I was right here.

  “Because I have an ex-boyfriend I think might suit you. He’s a good man and he has a good job at Motorola. He lives out in Tongxian but don’t worry—he has a car. Do you want to meet him?”

  “No thanks,” I said. I was American, a liberated woman who was going to make it on my own, even if I had neither of the two things I had learned from Yang Lina that one needed in order to make a documentary: time and money. I just had to find those, choose a topic, hone my abilities to be kuanrong and to use lixing, and I was most of the way there. “But can I really borrow your camera one day?”

  “Yes,” she said, picking it up. It was an expensive three-chip camera. “My axe.”

  “And your editing machine?”

  “Of course.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Evening Swan

  The city was full of manic energy in the months leading up to the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, which had happened on October 1, 1949. Periodically the newspapers and TVs would announce a jieyan and the police would seal off the Second Ring Road, barring anyone from going in or out of the area for a few hours as they did a dry run for the great military parade. Gigantic empty floats would roll down the Avenue of Eternal Peace bound for Tiananmen Square. Fighter jets flew in perfect formation past my office window.

  The year 1999 was also the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and well before June 4 the square was completely shrouded in construction scaffolding and closed to the public.

  The city began cleaning up my neighborhood of Maizidian’r. They leveled the dirt sidewalks and set down intricately patterned concrete tile. They demolished some of the hairdressing salons that lined the street, along with some small restaurants and convenience stores, pirated CD shops, and boutiques catering to girls with cheap tastes. I came out of my building one morning to find the police swarming around the baozi seller. Her barrel was lying on its side, the coals spilling out onto the sidewalk. The police were yelling at her and she looked scared, a few tears streaked down her face. I never saw her again.

  An inexpensive Italian restaurant called Peter Pan took over the shop fronts where she had been. Unlike most of the restaurants on my street that were dim and grimy and whose doors were hung with dirty plastic flaps, Peter Pan was bright and clean with big windows. I wrote a scathing review of the restaurant for the magazine (“Instead of being a symphony of starch and cheese and grease and tomato sauce, the pizza tastes like a pizza muffin made cautiously on a saltine”) but every day when I came home, people I knew would be inside the lit fishbowl eating like starved guppies.

  Moral pollution had to be cleaned up too. The police began crawling around the neighborhood like olive-skinned cockroaches, checking identity cards at gates and systematically going door to door to saohuang, to sweep out decadent elements like prostitutes and foreigners. Everything took on a suspicious look. A white van with police license plates slowly cruised the street with its door provocatively slid open. A small swarm of young policemen on bikes pedaled up and down the street. A traffic light went up at the intersection by the New Ark Hotel and at night a red-armbanded officer wielding a red light saber would be posted there trying unsuccessfully to stop people and check their identity cards.

  The construction of the Fourth Ring Road neared completion, pushing the edge of the city outward.

  I started dating Anthony, the dark-haired man from the art gallery, whose accent turned out to be, in his words, “overeducated Australian.” He had earned a law degree but had forsaken a proper career at home to come to Beijing and work at an art gallery run by a fellow Australian. He lived nearby, also in a questionably legal apartment, and he said his parents were also planning to visit during the fiftieth-anniversary celebration.

  I began to go along with him to help him translate as he interviewed Chinese artists for magazine articles. His Chinese was terrible. He tried to take lessons, even got a tutor who he heard was a semifamous but washed-up writer from the 1980s whose books had been translated into French and who had fathered a child who now lived in Paris with his maman. Anthony enjoyed being tutored by a fading literary luminary, but for reasons I can’t remember—did Xu Xing come to lessons drunk? did he talk about sex too much? did Anthony lack entirely the gift of learning languages?—he wasn’t learning much and fired him. Anthony’s lack of language skills embarrassed me and I wondered why I was merely doing the translating instead of publishing articles myself, but he was charming and kind and would sing to me as we walked around the city together at night. And after being alone for so long, it was a relief to have someone to eat dinner with, to accompany me to buy a bike, to wake up next to.

  One night I grudgingly went to dinner at Peter Pan with Anthony and two of his British friends. One of them was Cookie Cousins, the calligrapher whose show I had gone to months ago. I couldn’t believe I was meeting her at last. We ate on the roof, from which we could see down into the yard of my building. I was surprised to hear Cookie say that she worked at an international news agency, translating stories from Chinese newspapers into English. Mostly about coal mine accidents, she said. Her dad was a journalist too and had helped her get the job. She said she had grown up all over the world—she had been born in Tanzania, then lived in Pakistan, then Thailand. Her parents were in India now. She had been named after an American whom her parents had met on a train.

  “But Cookie is really an artist,” said Rachel, who had moved to Beijing recently from Hong Kong to start a new contemporary art gallery in a courtyard house. “A calligrapher.” Cookie said she was experimenting with spray paint now. I looked at her hands. She was tall, but she had tiny hands.

  I was also surprised to find out they lived in my neighborhood, in a big compound next to a deserted lot, accessible only through a narrow dirt lane that wound past a row of hair salons and a hospital specializing in treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

  “Today my washing machine broke with all the clothing in it, and I had to go see Big Sister Bao to get it fixed,” said Rachel.

  “That’s the good thing about having no washing machine,” said Cookie. “Xiao Pan, our male ayi, does it all by hand. He has to scrub the cream off my knickers by hand.” Ayi was the all-purpose word for everything from housecleaner to nanny to auntie.

  “Cookie!” said Rachel. “Anyhow, she told me, ‘Big Sister Bao will take care of you.’ She actually said that!”

  “Who is this Big Sister Bao?” I asked.

  “She’s this woman resembling a small ferret who brokers all of the deals in our compound,” said Cookie. “She finds apartments for people like us, collects rent, pays off the police, repossesses furniture when people leave, all of it. She’s a nosy bugger—she knows who lives where and how much we pay and what we
do for a living.”

  “Every month, to pay rent I take a fat wad of cash over to her apartment and she asks lots of questions.”

  “I can’t tell her who I work for, so I say I’m teaching English,” said Cookie.

  “No doubt she skims a bit off the top,” said Rachel. “Her nest must be pretty well-feathered.”

  “Why don’t you just pay your landlord directly?”

  “I’ve never met them,” said Rachel. “She says they’ve moved down south of the city into cheaper apartments—they just basically live off of the rent we pay, like twenty-five hundred kuai a month.” Most people in Beijing made around one thousand a month.

  “What a great scam for all of us,” said Cookie.

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t know my landlords,” I said. “I came home last week and found them there running a load through my washing machine. They said they thought I’d be out. Then a few days later I dreamed I found a Discovery Channel camera crew in my living room that my landlord had let in, thinking I was out at work. I told them to get the hell out and then a helicopter flew right by the window.”

  The night air was sweet and cool. People in my building had finished dinner and were coming out with their yappy Pekinese dogs to take in the night. The Perambulator was out perambulating and I pointed him out to my new friends. I told them about Bowl Cut and Screaming Granny and Horrible Boy. They told me about the characters in their yard, and my ears filled with the narcotic sound of British accents that would ring in my head until I fell asleep.

  • • •

  Yang Lina had looked close to home to find a subject for her documentary and I realized that my neighborhood was a veritable treasure trove of topics. I could make a documentary about hairdressing salons and call it Salon. Or one about the small shops and call it Boutique.

  I went by one day to see my hairdressers but they were gone. I peered into the darkened salon; everything was still intact inside. They probably just migrated back south for a spell, I thought. I walked by every day, expecting to see them inside busy doing nothing, but a sad, creeping feeling grew. I was never, ever going to tear down the avenues of Beijing on the back of the boss’s crotch rocket with the wind whipping through my mullet. Within weeks another set of hairdressers appeared who looked pretty much exactly like my old ones, as if someone had ordered up another six-pack of Cantonese Glam-Rock Hairdressers. Though nearly identical, they were complete strangers. Tres bizarro, I thought. It was time to find a new documentary topic, and new hairdressers.

  A friend who was in her thirties and who somehow maintained glowing skin and sleek hair in Beijing’s dry and polluted sandstorm climate recommended a salon across from the Indian embassy.

  “Ask for Li Bin,” she said. “He’s a genius.”

  I slid open the door and walked into an oasis of quiet. No Cantopop here. Sitting in the waiting area was a young Chinese woman with perfect nails and hair as long and smooth as water who did not look in need of a haircut. I, on the other hand, looked like a yeti at the tail end of winter. To complete the look, my teeth had recently gone mysteriously black.

  “Is it possible to get my hair cut by Li Bin?” I asked the receptionist with my frostiest smile. She looked at me in amusement.

  “Today?”

  “Yes, today.”

  “No. You need an appointment for him.”

  I sat down and assumed my most aloof look, pursing my lips and floating my eyebrows upward as if to say to no one in particular, “Oh, really?” Li Bin came over to the reception area. It was obviously him—the leonine hairdo, the Rico Suave manner—and my waiting area companion glided out of her seat for an air kiss. He led her away.

  I took a look at the salon. The circular room was frosty white and minimalist. Haircutting chairs orbited a hair-washing throne, which was partitioned off by a translucent curtain and was exuding the delicate scent of aromatherapeutic shampoos. Beijing had a lot of smells, many odors and miasmas, but scents were rare, and the salon felt as if it were floating high above the city in a bubble of luxury and calm. Places like this are dangerous, I thought. The world outside became even harder to live in afterward.

  In a few minutes the receptionist introduced me to Xiao Cai, a slight man with glasses, more a mortician than a stylist. After a hair washing, he led me to a chair. I asked for a short and messy haircut. I moved my hands wildly as to evoke a thunderstorm, a gazelle in flight, anarchy. He nodded. I took off my glasses and closed my eyes prayerfully. When I opened them and put my glasses back on, I saw a big wave of hair sweeping imperially across my forehead. I had aged ten years in the chair. I looked like the Empress Dowager.

  “It’s called the Evening Swan,” he said. Maybe I could grow into it, I thought. Grow up a little. Make fancier friends. Go to dinner parties. Who was I kidding? The whole reason I was in Beijing was to prolong my adolescence, or to finally have the one I never actually had. To live heedlessly. Avoid respectable, full-time work. Drink too much in dirty bars. That was not a job for the Evening Swan.

  • • •

  Beijing had many bars but the fashionable crowd was big enough to keep only one bar at a time packed full. For a while it was Half Dream, a bar run by Jin Xing, China’s most famous transsexual, a globetrotting modern dancer and choreographer whose M-to-F surgery had been videotaped from start to finish by Zhang Yuan. Decorated in burnt sienna hues and filled with oblique statuary, Half Dream had the seedy, highfalutin atmosphere of a Roman bath. Then came Vogue, a dark cavern of white frosted glass that personified the L.A. of my nightmares, and the Loft, a carbon copy. That summer it was the Havana Cafe, a Cuban bar built on an empty patch of cement north of the Workers’ Stadium and run by a French-Algerian DJ who had told me before it opened that one successful Latin dance party he had thrown full of “crooowds and crooowds of people” had inspired him to open the bar.

  I met Jade there. We picked our way around huge sacks of dirt outside, on which slept exhausted construction workers, through the bar whose walls were covered with lurid murals of Havana at sunset, and onto the patio. There were indeed crowds and crowds of people here, expat and Chinese, standing shoulder to shoulder and all trying to get the attention of the harried waiters so they could yell the one magic word: mojito! Suddenly, my beeper went off. I pushed my way to a phone and called the unknown number. It was Cookie.

  “Where are you right now?” she asked.

  “At the Havana Cafe.”

  “Smashing. I’m coming over to hang out.”

  She showed up soon afterward in a pair of calf-length knickerbockers in a loud fuchsia-and-green phoenix print with her peroxided hair spiking every which way; it looked less like bedhead than the result of a fork stuck violently into an outlet. She was an exotic cockatoo in the company of gray pigeons, and people stared at her as she walked in. The room seemed to grow brighter when she was in it. She downed a mojito and we talked about how we’d both made our way to Beijing. She said she had studied Chinese in college and loved all things Chinese, especially Chinese men.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “I think they’re sexy!” she said.

  Jade and I wrinkled our noses.

  “Why?”

  “They’re hairless and sleek. Like dolphins. I dated this one artist. He was married. Actually he was about to get a divorce. The first night he took off his pants and underneath he had on bright orange long underwear.” She laughed uproariously. I thought back to Max’s red briefs, and knew we would be friends. We count this night as the beginning of our friendship.

  I came back very late that night, and tipsy. My building was hushed. All the lights were out in the windows and the yard looked peaceful without its screaming children and little white dogs. A cat ran out into the light and then back again. The defensive mental armor I donned every time I’d gone out at night in New York was completely unnecessary here. Without it, the nights felt light a
nd carefree. The few people who did come out were completely different than those who went out in the day, and as long as they weren’t the police, I wasn’t scared of them. I often saw two blade-slim women with identical haircuts and handbags walking slowly past, like two vampires. That night I walked in at the same time as two young Asian men with guitars strapped to their backs. One came right up to me.

  “What’s your name?” he whispered in English.

  “Val. And you?”

  “Marco.” He must have been in one of the ubiquitous Filipino bands that played Eagles and Beatles covers in the lounges of the city’s hotels.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  We nodded covertly and went our separate ways.

  I climbed up the stairs as quietly as I could. Stacks of cabbage, enough to last the winter, were piled up in the stairway and someone had started raising a baby chick in a Styrofoam box.

  I began spending more time with Cookie and Rachel. It felt strange coming all the way to China to hang out with white Westerners but I had more in common with them than with most Chinese people I knew. I also envied them. Even though they stuck out like sore thumbs, there was a lightness to their existence in Beijing. While I tried to live as they did, a heavy weight inside always seemed to be pulling me down.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Peking Opera & Sons

  Feeling bloodied and bruised from jostling with Beijing Scene to stay atop the cutting edge, I decided to write an article for City Edition about the most uncool topic I could think of: Peking Opera. In opera’s heyday, from the 1920s through the 1940s, opera stars were the pop stars of the day. Today the only people who watched were the older generation, people like Bobo.

  I was interested only in traditional Peking Opera, not in the model operas with revolutionary themes sung during the Cultural Revolution when traditional opera had been banned. The born-again leftist in me could not overpower the idea that I had inherited from my family: that Chairman Mao and Communism had destroyed China. I saw traditional Peking Opera performers as the keepers of an old order, from a time when my family had thrived in China; my parents’ imminent arrival no doubt exerted a subconscious influence on this choice of stories. After interviewing an opera performer named Mr. Yang who had quit the state-run troupe to pursue the slightly humiliating but ultimately lucrative work of singing for money at a restaurant, I asked if he knew a traditional Peking Opera family I could interview.