by Val Wang
“The Zhang family is perfect for you,” Mr. Yang said. “Their entire existence revolves around Peking Opera.”
So on an unusually warm September day a few days before my parents were set to arrive, I met Mr. Yang at the Feng Ze Yuan Restaurant near Tiananmen Square so he could take me to Teacher Zhang’s house. He said I’d never find the house on my own. The restaurant was a big, gaudy affair at the foot of a modest street, onto which we turned. Meishi Jie looked like dozens of others in the old city, lined with cube after cube of tiny shops and restaurants and swarming with sights and sounds that screamed Old Beijing: weather-beaten shoe repairmen hunching in the shadows of buildings, white-smocked women steaming dumplings in huge baskets on the street, the ring-ting-ting of bells as bicyclists glided past in slow motion. You are about to find what you are looking for, the sweltering buzz of the street seemed to be saying. The real China.
“During Peking Opera’s golden years in the 1930s, Teacher Zhang trained under So-and-So, the legendary performer,” Mr. Yang explained in hushed tones as we walked. “He then trained his sons and grandson in the ancient art. China has gone through its ups and downs—you know about those, don’t you?—but this family has persisted in practicing and performing traditional Peking Opera. To make ends meet, they now run a home-cooking restaurant in the bottom floor of the house that they’ve lived in since the 1940s.”
He veered into a restaurant only two tables wide. I followed. The restaurant was empty save for two men dipping their chopsticks into steaming plates of food and lazily waving away flies. The air was garlicky and humid. Mr. Yang made a beeline for the back and barged into the dim and cramped heat of the kitchen, past the stares of the cooks, and up a set of uneven wooden stairs soggy with years of rising heat and cooking oil. He knocked on the door at the top of the stairs and, without waiting for an answer, pushed it open and threaded his way through a maze of small, lightless rooms. Each room seemed to have less fresh air than the last. He pushed open one final door and we emerged into a large room that was cluttered and dusty and full of people.
There on a platform bed at the far end of the room lay the unmoving body of an old man. His torso and head were bloated and bare, and a sheet covered him from the waist down. Gnarled hands rested near his face like a child’s. His eyes, peering out from their puffy casings, looked in my direction. I felt a shiver of terror.
“This is the great Teacher Zhang Mingyu, who was once a talented and famous opera star,” said Mr. Yang with a deferent sweep of his hand. “Go ahead and talk to him.”
I accepted a stool by the bed and introduced myself. He made no response. “I’m here to interview you. About Peking Opera.” Was he conscious? I nervously mumbled my questions all in a row: How had Peking Opera changed over the years, had how their family adapted, what about the restaurant downstairs? He gave a slow smile with a mouth full of jack-o’-lantern teeth. His wife, a diminutive woman with a short graying haircut, had been buzzing around the room, first putting the kettle on to boil, then squatting down to scrub clothes. She came over and plugged in his hearing aid.
“You’re going to have to speak louder,” she said to me in a grainy voice. To him, she yelled, “She’s a reporter writing a story about Peking Opera!”
I took a deep breath and repeated the questions in my loudest voice, grimacing at the sound of my flat American accent. His wife yelled into his hearing aid, simply, “She wants to know about Peking Opera in the glorious days before the Communists took power!”
His voice came out in a wheezy, growly puff, its forcefulness taking me by surprise: “So, you’re interested in Peking Opera!” One of his middle-aged sons poured me some tea.
After many repeated yellings of questions and answers, I teased out the bare bones of his story. He had started as an apprentice when he was seven and had grown up to perform in Tibet and Russia. As he spoke, his wife took out yellowed programs to show me and tapped the glass on the nightstand by the bed, under which were trapped photos of a young and virile Grandfather Zhang posing in his opera outfits, here with a spear in his hands, there with his leg high in the air. His pale face, painted white with full mascara and lipstick, looked furious.
“And when did . . . ?”
“Teacher Zhang was a performer of martial operas,” explained Mr. Yang. I imagined his supple body, enrobed in a heavily brocaded costume, doing backflips across a stage. “He fell during a performance in 1963 and was paralyzed.” He had lain in this bed since then. The bed was pushed against the wall, leaving a large practice space on the floor. From this position, he had trained his sons and grandson in Peking Opera, barking out commands as they practiced in the room.
His two sons, Zhang Laisheng and Zhang Laichun, ricocheted around the room like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, cleaning up, doing stretches, refilling my tea. Both were performers in the state-run Beijing Opera Troupe and were in their forties. Both were short, blockily sculpted like gymnasts, and inexplicably tanned. They listened closely to my interview.
The high-ceilinged room was insulated from the hutong outside by a balcony crammed with birdcages and old boxes, and only the sliest light could find its way through the dusty windowpanes. The room was warm and stuffy with the musk of stagnant flesh and urine and I began to feel dizzy. Teacher Zhang’s wife spoon-fed him rice porridge and tea, wiping his mouth with a cloth when most of it dribbled out.
I imagined him lying in this bed for more than thirty-five years while the world outside the window changed and changed again. Cultural Revolution. Reform and Opening Up. Tiananmen Square Massacre. Capitalism. He’d missed it all. Even his language seemed to be frozen in time. Arcane words wheezed out of his mouth and fell to earth before reaching my ears. He seemed pleased to have a captive audience who had never heard his stories before and he talked endlessly. Nodding occasionally, I began to slip into an interview coma. I took a deep breath that succeeded only at filling me with sadness. I let out a noisy sigh.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he roared at me.
I glanced in fear at the pale face of fury trapped under the glass. “Most of it,” I said. “If I don’t, I’ll ask.”
The family started asking me questions that began with the usual You’re not a Chinese person, are you? that so many people always asked, as if I had somehow stitched together an intricate disguise from the skins of real Chinese people. Usually I responded in my snippiest tone that I was American, but I wanted the family to like me, so I said I was a meiji huaren, an American-born Chinese. The grandmother led the interrogation.
“Do you miss home?” By home they meant my family.
“Not really,” I said. Seeing the horrified looks on their faces, I hastened to add, “But some days I do.”
“Don’t your parents worry about you?”
“Not really,” I lied. “They’ve come to expect the unexpected from me.” I thought they would smile, but they only looked troubled.
“How old are you?” one of the brothers asked. “You look very young.”
“I’m twenty-four,” I said indignantly. “I can take care of myself. We do that in America after we’re eighteen.”
“That’s true,” chimed in the other brother. “She is independent of her family.”
“Are they supporting you?” asked the grandmother.
“I have a job,” I said. “I’m a reporter.”
It was time to regain control of the interview and get out of the house. I turned back to the grandfather and shot off another awkward volley of questions. Why aren’t people going to see opera anymore? How much are your sons paid in the troupe? When did you open the restaurant?
The grandfather didn’t answer any of them. He launched into a monologue that was, as far as I could tell, about the crucial importance of the genealogy of Peking Opera stories and the influences of regional opera styles on Peking Opera, among other topics. I made chicken scratchings on my pad,
pretending to take notes. Did I already have enough for an article? I had no idea. The sons had been watching my efforts with pity and one volunteered that they had opened the restaurant in 1984.
1984. I wrote that down.
“Life is easier now but singing opera is still hard,” he said. A quotable line! Finally someone understood what I needed for my article. I wrote it down and the son took the cue. He started complaining that of the thousands of operas that existed—most dramatizing historical folktales, ghost stories, and classical novels—only thirty or forty were still being performed now. The brothers’ state-run troupe made its money by performing for foreign tourists the most blood-racing fight scenes culled from these operas, calibrated to inject a quick and painless dose of Chinese culture into the tourists’ packed schedules.
“They perform only a fraction of the original operas nowadays. What good is that?” said the grandmother with sudden acrimony. “Who can perform the original operas anymore? Who’s cultured enough to appreciate them?” She saw me scribbling in my notebook and hastily added, “Don’t quote me. I don’t know anything about opera.”
“Did you understand what I said?” roared the grandfather again.
“I did,” I said.
“Explain what I said to you!”
A constellation of family members constantly came in and out of the room, all revolving around the body on the huge bed, all interjecting their opinions about Peking Opera, correcting and censoring one another. I wrote down what I could understand. I wondered which of them actually lived there, as several single beds were scattered around the room. Like most Chinese families I knew, they seemed loath to throw anything out and the room was crusted over with the detritus of decades. The walls were covered with brush paintings from calendars of years past and faded New Year’s decorations that had once been shiny red and gold. Molded Buddha statues in many colors held court in glass-fronted hutches. Plastic soda bottles containing mystery liquids were scattered around on different surfaces. This was the real thing, all right, and I couldn’t wait to leave.
I spent two hours there that first day. Eventually, the family members gathered around the grandfather and flipped him over, which I took to signal the end of the interview. My head was spinning. The grandmother welcomed me back anytime.
Picking up my notes the next day, I found them completely illegible—a smattering of Chinese characters, English words, and crude Romanizations of sounds I thought I’d heard. I had no story. With dread I made the long trip back to their house a few days later for a re-interview. Forget conversing this time. I was a journalist. I needed cold, hard information. Names and numbers.
The house was a beehive of family activity again. The grandmother was there, the middle-aged brothers were there, as were a few teenagers. The grandmother eyed me warily as she escorted me to the stool by the grandfather’s bed. I sat down like a heavy weight. His eyes lit up and he said he had never seen a young person so dedicated to Peking Opera. Surgical strike, I thought. Surgical strike.
“I have just a few more questions,” I said in my loudest and firmest voice. “I want to know about one opera that has survived through the years. Why did it survive? What parts are performed nowadays? What is the basic story behind it?”
The grandmother yelled into his hearing aid, “She wants to know about one opera that has survived through the years.” She looked at me and asked, “Is this your meaning?” I nodded and she repeated the question several times into his ear.
He launched into a story about when the family had staged a one-night performance of an opera that hadn’t been performed since 1949. 1949. I wrote that down. The year the Communists took over China. His story might not be so off the mark. As he spoke, I took furious notes. He described training his fourteen-year-old grandson for three years in the technically complex opera, which involved twirling poles and rings on his arms and legs. He had trained seven other performers, rented a theater for a night, which cost more than a month’s wages for his sons, printed programs, and performed the opera.
“The title?” I asked. They wrote down the characters: . Later, I found it meant The Ring of Heaven and Earth. The grandmother pointed to a teenager sitting in the corner, the grandson who’d performed the piece. I smiled at him, but his expression—imperious with eyes that bore into me like drills—did not register any change. She then showed me a video of the performance. The old opera hall was only half filled with an audience of friends and family. This family was perfectly tragic. Or was that tragically perfect? I couldn’t have scripted their lives better.
“Today’s Peking Opera performers would never have the skill to perform the opera,” snorted Grandfather Zhang. “They treat Peking Opera as a job, not an art. A fourteen-year-old can perform better than they can. Look at my grandson. Look at how poised he is.” The grandson certainly was unnerving. In fact, all the family members who performed opera seemed wound like coiled springs. I would not have been surprised if they had started doing backflips across the large room. The house set me on edge.
The family had another grandchild, a girl, who was not in the least interested in Peking Opera. She sat lazily on the couch eating Dasbro brand potato chips, which came piled high in a bright tube just like Pringles. Zhang Laisheng’s and Zhang Laichun’s wives, if they had any, were not present.
I pressed on with my interrogation. I found out the sons each made a base salary of two hundred ninety-nine yuan per month in the state-run troupe, plus twenty to thirty yuan per performance. The combination of a bloated troupe and dwindling audiences meant that each month they performed at most ten times. In a good month, they would barely make eighty U.S. dollars. Satisfied with the details, I shut my notebook.
“You are getting only the skin and bones of opera, not the meat,” the grandfather roared at me.
“But I’m only writing a newspaper article,” I said.
“She’s only writing a newspaper article, not a book,” yelled the grandmother. “She doesn’t need to understand all of Peking Opera. She’s just writing one story.”
“Even if I talked to you every day for ten years, you still wouldn’t know anything about Peking Opera,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Are you willing?”
It seemed rude to reject such hospitality. I imagined years of rigorous physical training in Peking Opera singing and acrobatics, or hours of listening to arcane Peking Opera stories over cups of tepid tea. I agreed limply, but I suspected that we would never see each other again.
As I put my notebook in my bag, the invitations came from all sides. One son said fervently, “We’re good friends now. A Swedish journalist also came to interview us, but we like you much more. You didn’t come to interview us. You came as a friend.” The grandmother casually murmured to me that I was welcome to come again to visit.
“We’re always home,” she said.
“Thank you very much. I will if I have time,” I said insincerely. Chinese people are incredibly hospitable; I had met people on trains who had invited me to their homes for Chinese New Year after only a fifteen-minute conversation. But such warm hospitality also set off alarm bells in my head.
Part Four
Chapter Eighteen
Fifty Years Later
My parents looked wordlessly around their hotel room, taking in the sagging beds and peeling paint. They had arrived a week before their group tour started, on the day of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration on October 1, 1999. The Chinese government called the Communist takeover “Liberation,” and preparations for the celebrations had reached a fevered pitch. Right before my parents’ arrival, the government had shut down the city’s most polluting factories and the sky changed from its usual mealy gray to a brilliant blue. But beneath that beautiful facade lurked our side of the story: The date also marked the anniversary of my parents’ exile from the country and the moment their lives had veered off course. If they
hadn’t left China, my dad would have stayed in the north, my mom in the south, and they would never have met in New York—and I wouldn’t exist. The accident of my own existence seemed worth celebrating.
Bobo and our extended family had just left the hotel. We had all gone to the airport together to pick up my parents, per Chinese tradition, and thanks to Xiao Peng’s friend had even bypassed security to wait at the arrivals gate to catch my parents right as they got off the plane. Droves of strangers walked out first. When they finally emerged, we hugged and I felt relief, as if they were unaccompanied minors who might have missed their connections in Chicago or Tokyo.
“Hey, you put on a little bit of weight” were the first words out of my mom’s mouth, then seeing the video camera in my hand quickly added, “Good,” as if she had meant it as a compliment all along. I had borrowed Anthony’s video camera to record this momentous occasion and kept it running for most of their visit. I hoped it would force everyone to be on their best behavior, myself included. My parents hugged Bobo and Bomu and the moment brimmed with many years of unspoken emotion. My dad hadn’t seen his cousin since he was eight.
“You didn’t have to come to get us,” he said. “She could have come alone.”