Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

“No,” said Bobo. “We had to come.”

  “I told you twice not to come. I told her to tell you.”

  “She did. Xiao Peng has a car; it’s no problem.”

  They each performed their half of the polite ritual flawlessly and I could see it put them at ease. They walked ahead of my mom and me and talked in a familiar way despite all the years they hadn’t seen each other.

  “We’ll just come over to see you tomorrow. It’s late now,” said my dad.

  “Yes, tonight just go to your hotel to rest.”

  “I meant, you didn’t have to come tonight to pick us up.”

  “No, no.”

  My mom took another close look at me. “Do you floss your teeth?”

  “Don’t look at them, please.”

  “Do you floss it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are they black?”

  “It’s the water. There’s no fluoride. My teeth are embarrassingly disgusting.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Need to bleach it.”

  I was excited for their visit, but nervous too. I had spent the last year in Beijing setting up a whole life away from their prying eyes and now it would be exposed to their scrutiny. Deliberately disconnected parts of my life were about to be set side by side. The police had recently caught Anthony just as he was returning home one night and kicked him out of his apartment. He had moved in with me, but I didn’t say anything about him or our living situation to my parents. Every time we spoke on the phone, they still asked me when I was moving home.

  I had booked them a room in a charming little hotel in an old courtyard house, with windows onto a communal courtyard. The lobby was very Chinese-y, decorated with lanterns and large paintings of peonies and furnished with wooden chairs and benches lavishly carved with flowers and mythical beasts. But all of a sudden their room looked run-down and decrepit, and I knew it would reinforce all their negative ideas about China being backward and dirty, a step down. I could see my dad silently shaking his head, regretting that he had ever left home. My mom, the more adventurous of the two, was trying to be upbeat and carefree. I couldn’t imagine what it felt like to flee your homeland forever as a child, and then come back as an adult tourist, and I felt the complicated swirl of the moment. My teenaged anger at them dissipated; I felt protective instead. I wanted them to enjoy China, to feel connected to it, and to see what a hopeful place it was and how exciting it was for me to live here. We had somehow switched places—I was the one pushing the old country on some picky Americans. It was night and I hoped the courtyard would reveal its beauty in the morning.

  They filled me in on some of the changes they had made to the house in Maryland: They’d replaced the old refrigerator, bought their first microwave oven, and bought a new front door that, even on the hottest days, would be cool to the touch. They’d replaced the kitchen table and the couch. They were planning to get the hardwood floors buffed and to replace the beige aluminum siding. I nodded absentmindedly, not wanting to think about the faraway house.

  Anthony’s parents were also visiting and he had booked them into the same hotel. They had arrived from Australia at roughly the same time as my parents, and in fact, I could see them in their lit room across the dark courtyard, getting settled as we were. I said nothing.

  • • •

  The next day I met my parents for lunch before taking them to Bobo and Bomu’s courtyard house. My dad complained about the water pressure of the shower and on the way over assured me, “I have the antidiarrhea drug, plus the napkin.”

  Bomu poured tea and put out fresh dates as my parents distributed the presents they’d brought: vitamins, echinacea, earrings, Mauna Loa macadamia nuts, a Washington Redskins sweatshirt, a red envelope. They’d also brought a stack of family photos, mostly of groups of people standing in stiff rows.

  “This is last year, the one-year anniversary of my dad’s passing,” said my dad. “My little brother came from Singapore to be there.”

  “He rushed over,” said my mom, who was eagerly crunching her way through the dates.

  “In the background is the Lincoln Memorial. This one was last year in June when Chris just got his law school diploma—”

  “And he said, ‘I’ll take it to show Yeye. It’ll give him comfort,’” said my mom. I leaned in for a peek. My brother stood flanked by Nainai and my dad behind our family gravestone with WANG emblazoned across it in English and Chinese, holding up his diploma. I seriously doubted that he had come up with the idea himself. Sounded more like something my dad would have cooked up, the filial son that he is. Or my mom, who has a performative streak.

  My parents and relatives segregated by gender. Bobo sat in his easy chair and my dad on the couch next to him and they talked about our family’s courtyard houses: who had lived in which house when, what year their children had immigrated to the United States or Australia. Of the house we sat in now, Bobo explained which parts had been sold off and how it had been laid out originally.

  My dad had trouble recalling the house as it had been then. “I remember coming to this house just once.”

  “Oh, no. You came many times.”

  Bobo’s real aim was to talk with my dad about Nainai’s house. When the government began returning confiscated houses to their owners after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Bobo wrote Yeye and Nainai and they mailed him a photocopy of the old Nationalist-era deed and a letter authorizing him to be their legal proxy. Bobo navigated the bureaucracy office by office to get the house back. He said he was becoming anxious because the demolitions were creeping closer and closer to the house and they had to decide what to do if it was next. He was happy to finally rope someone with an American passport into the process and he talked through all the technicalities as my dad took notes in a little notebook. He laid out the options: My dad could try to go to court and get another courtyard house like Uncle Johnny had for Great-Aunt Mabel or he could take cash. Bobo told him about Great-Aunt Mabel’s new house: It had sixteen rooms and the courtyard was so big you could drive a car around in it. It was empty right now, awaiting renovations.

  “Xiao Peng and Xiao Lu can live there,” said my dad.

  Bobo laughed heartily as if my dad had told a good joke, then turned to me to ask half in jest if I knew anyone who might want to rent it. I laughed too, but then asked how much rent would be. Around two thousand U.S. dollars, he said. At almost ten times my current rent, it seemed like a fortune.

  Bobo said the big problem with Nainai’s house was the tenants. The house was a zayuan’r, literally a “mixed house,” which more than ten families occupied. Some of the families actually lived there and others just squatted in the hopes that they would be compensated when it was demolished. Bobo collected—and kept, I think—the nominal rent from them and fielded their irate phone calls asking for repairs that no one had the money to pay for. How would we get them out? Who was responsible for remunerating them if the house got demolished—the government or Nainai?

  Bobo said that to help grease the wheels, he had set up a banquet with the Xicheng District party secretary of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, who had helped Uncle Johnny secure his new house.

  “I’ll introduce you as a Nationalist—”

  “The descendant of one,” my dad clarified.

  “I’ll tell Party Secretary Li your dad was secretary-general in Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party.” I assumed this would be a strike against my dad, not for, but I figured Bobo knew what he was doing. “At dinner, you just bring up one request,” said Bobo, before feeding Dad the script for the evening. “‘We very much thank the government for returning the house to us after the Cultural Revolution. I hear from my cousin that there’s a document in the Beijing archives and I’d like to ask your help in arranging to see this document.’”

  Bobo explained that the document, which I began think of as Th
e Document, stipulated that if Nainai returned and established residency, the government was required to return the house to her empty. “If they let you see The Document, you say to them, ‘May I photocopy it for my mother to see?’” Here Bobo let out a nervous laugh. “If they don’t let you, it’s okay. Take down the filing number. It will come in handy when it comes time to demolish the house.”

  My dad looked miserable. I remembered the warning he’d given me about people doing favors for you and expecting favors in return. In dealing with the house, he wanted to follow carefully in Uncle Johnny’s footsteps but Uncle Johnny was an immigration lawyer. What did my dad, a midlevel manager at IBM, have to offer?

  Bobo took out the old title encased in a shiny red folder and we handed it around.

  The women—Mom, Bomu, and Xiao Lu—sat to the side talking about an assortment of safe topics, like the impossibility of losing weight. Mom is a talented ink-wash painter whose work adorns the rooms of the house I grew up in, and she explained how the artist had done the calligraphy hanging up on Bomu’s walls—with a slow preparation and a fast execution. She also trotted out some of her favorite stories, like the time when my journalism teacher in high school had asked if the editor in chief two years before me who shared my surname was my brother (he was) and I’d said, “No, I don’t have a brother. How could you think someone so ugly was my brother?” She still found my effort to step out from my brother’s shadow hilarious. Mom was also still nonstop eating dates. “I haven’t eaten fresh dates since I was a child,” she said. “I was four when I left but I still remember the taste.”

  In an aside to me, she said, “I’m so glad we made it to China. I didn’t think Dad was going to be able to leave Nainai.” Since Yeye’s death two years before, things had changed at home. I was gone, for one, and my brother had moved back to D.C. after law school to work. My parents had begun spending Saturdays with Nainai and my dad’s conscience made it difficult to leave her even if his sister came to fill in. “Every single Saturday, we cook for her and we clean. I drag my whole vacuum cleaner over there. It’s okay to leave her for two weeks.”

  “How is she?” I asked. “Is she okay without Yeye?”

  My mom dropped her voice. “They say some women have a second life when their husbands die. She plays mah-jongg every week with her friends in the building. Actually, she couldn’t be happier.”

  My dad had immigrated to the States with his entire family and lived with them until he got married and is filial in a way that would make Confucius proud. But I suddenly realized that my mom enjoyed sacrificing her own freedom for her elders as little as I did. And actually my parents were not the unified two-headed beast they had merged into when I was in high school, but in fact were quite opposite: my dad pessimistic and reticent, my mom optimistic and ebullient. Though one trait they do share as the eldest siblings in their respective families is the conviction that they are always right.

  Xiao Peng asked my parents, “So what do you think of Beijing?”

  “I’ve found that drivers on the road don’t really follow the laws here,” my dad said sternly, causing Bobo, Xiao Peng, and me to burst into laughter.

  That night when I dropped them off at the hotel, my dad told me he had avoided the outhouse the entire time we had been at their house. I tried to convince him it wasn’t so bad, but he said it was no problem so long as you drank nothing.

  We returned to Bobo’s house every day. Just like during my first visit to Beijing, relatives swarmed in from all over the city to see my parents. They gossiped about all the relatives not present. There was so much talking, so many banquets. Everyone made the usual jokes about how much I had eaten at that first meal years ago, and like they had to me years ago, they piled food onto my dad’s plate, even against his protestations.

  • • •

  The night of the banquet with Party Secretary Li came. We arrived first and were led to a private dining room garlanded with rainbow tinsel. As I took a seat at the one circular table filling the room, my dad said, “Valerie, you can’t sit there. The head seat is the one facing the door.”

  Bobo assured him it didn’t matter but after a look from my dad, I muttered, “Gotta follow the rules,” and ceded the seat to Bobo, who had invited everyone and was picking up the tab.

  “American tables are always rectangular,” my dad said, before launching into a lesson about American seating hierarchies.

  When Party Secretary Li arrived, we all leapt to our feet and they fought over who would sit where, until finally she took a seat between my dad and Bobo. She was a smiling, round-faced woman with a cylindrical coxcomb of bangs perched atop her head. She wore a seafoam green suit jacket and had a bright, precise voice.

  During the dinner, punctuated by numerous toasts, Dad became charming and full of jokes and Chairman Mao quotations but I could see that underneath he was profoundly uncomfortable. Chumming up with the Chinese bureaucracy was not his idea of fun and he did it only to fulfill his obligation to Nainai. He asked his scripted questions as ordered and Party Secretary Li promised to do what she could.

  She told him that China had changed since he’d left and as the son of a Nationalist he had nothing to worry about. She said the government no longer “puts hats on people and whacks them with sticks”—old code words for labeling people politically and punishing them. “Policies are looser now.”

  “If I were afraid, I wouldn’t have come back,” he said.

  • • •

  The next order of business was to visit the cemetery where our ancestors are buried. Nine of us went together. Wan’an Cemetery was far outside of the city, near Fragrant Mountain in the northwest. We bought flowers from a man selling them out of a van and signed in at the front gate; you had to know someone inside to get in.

  As we waited in the rain for the gates to be opened, my dad asked Bobo in a hesitant manner I’d never seen before, “So, do you think yesterday went well?”

  “Very well, very well,” Bobo said in a schoolmasterish tone that made us all laugh, even my dad.

  “Are you the director or the leading actor of this drama? I can’t tell,” said my dad, who must have been feeling like a bit player. I knew the feeling.

  “Party Secretary Li, didn’t she promise she’d get this done for you? I’ll call her tonight. Once it’s all arranged, we’ll go see The Document tomorrow morning.”

  Water dripped out of the many trees in the lush and overgrown cemetery. Birds squeaked loudly all around us, and the world felt damp and heavy. The burial plots stood shoulder to shoulder, a city of the dead, and most were family tombs, some guarded by fierce marble lions, others just simple stones. As we walked through, Bobo pointed out the graves of relatives they knew and they traded gossip about them as if they were still alive. He pointed out the graves of famous people too, like the large ocher slab flanked by flower vases that marked the final resting place of Cao Yu, the playwright who had written Peking Man, the movie version of which I’d subtitled. Seeing his grave felt as meaningful as seeing my own relatives’ graves; here was someone who had made stories out of the lives of the families buried around him, stories that would outlive us all.

  Bobo said that our family grave had been defaced during the Cultural Revolution and Nainai and Great-Aunt Mabel had sent money to restore it. But Bomu muttered that after Nainai’s brother passed away she had stopped sending money to the family. I never knew she’d even been sending money but it didn’t surprise me. This story about the graves was one of the many stories I never heard until I came to China, most having to do with the Cultural Revolution: Our ancestors’ graves had been defaced, our courtyard houses had been confiscated by the government, Bobo’s youngest sister had committed suicide. No one wanted to talk about the past.

  We finally arrived at the grave. The plot itself was as big as half a tennis court. At the back of the plot was a large gray tablet as tall as I was, engrave
d with Nainai’s surname and the names of people running down it. The names at the center of the tablet were Nainai’s father, a Qing Dynasty military general, and her mother. In front of the tablet were two carved plinths under which they lay and in front of that a simple concrete bench. Xiao Peng swept it and set down offerings: a plate holding a small pyramid of apples, another of peaches, another of Oreos. It being Mid-Autumn Festival, he also set out a plate of mooncakes. Dad set down the flowers.

  Bobo’s sister traced her finger down the family tree, through Nainai’s generation, down to her own, stopping on her own name, carved already into stone. It gave me goose bumps. Nainai’s name was also carved next to her brother’s, and I thought of our family headstone in Maryland that also had her name carved onto it, above her birth year with a hyphen dangling off of it. Talk about being divided—half in China and half in America, half in this life and half in the next already. The tree continued down to Xiao Peng’s generation; his name was there, as was that of his older sister in L.A., but the younger sister’s wasn’t; Bobo’s sister didn’t say why. I was thankful not to see my own name staring out at me.

  Bobo said that due to space considerations the government had decreed that no more graves were to be dug in the cemetery. Even the people whose names were on the tombstones would have to be cremated. If they wanted to, they could sell off the unused sides of the plots to another family to bury their dead. The real estate of the dead was as much in demand as that of the living.

  After a bit of you go first, no you go jostling, Bobo got down on his knees in front of the offerings. With his palms on the ground, he inclined his torso all the way down, his forehead touching the ground, then up, three times in a kowtow. Then rising stiffly he bowed three times from the waist. He stepped to the side and my dad came up. Bobo mimed the movements for him. We took turns in order of seniority, with me last. I found it difficult. At the moment my head went down, I sensed the amount of humility it would take to do this fully, and my neck strained upward, not wanting to submit. I saw that while my mom performed with theatrical solemnity, she too had the same problem.