by Val Wang
Trading stories of our apartments, we found we all heard the same mysterious noises, like the pipes being playfully clanged on and the pearl necklace breaking and spilling its beads, which began to seem more amusing than menacing. We all also had girly neighbors who left their apartments in the evening and came back very late at night. The ones across the landing from Becky’s apartment had even chosen English names and she was frequently woken in the middle of the night by the sound of banging and a young woman yelling, “Carol! Kai men’r!” Open up!
Inspired by my new friends’ apartments, I asked my landlords to clear their belongings off the balcony, save for the giant naked baby doll. I painted the walls of the balcony orange, bought a few plants, and moved a chair out there. It wasn’t such a bad place to hang out.
After the big fiftieth anniversary passed, I’d realized there wasn’t much to be afraid of in my building. The neighborhood grannies outside my building grew to tolerate me, even occasionally greeting me as I went in and out. I got used to living with a constant, low-grade fear of the police. The policeman still sat regularly outside my gate, but after several times of seeing a woman come up to him, I realized that he was just waiting for his girlfriend like any old schmo.
Flattering ourselves that we were as feisty and devil-may-care as the Chinese grannies living in our compounds, my friends and I began calling ourselves “the grannies,” a name that stuck.
Cookie and Emma’s apartment became the epicenter of our social life. We ate almost every night at a neighborhood restaurant called Lao Beijing, or Old Beijing, and after dinner, we went to their apartment to watch pirated VCDs that always cut off the last two minutes of the movie, or went out dancing or to the local gay bar, a bare-bones affair called the Drag-On located on a dirt road heading out of town.
Unfortunately, the police were often posted at the gate of Cookie and Emma’s compound, demanding identification from whoever came in and out. With vigilance, avoiding them was easy. We just went around back and scrambled over a wall to get in or out. We told ourselves we would rather live in Chinese housing with its faulty plumbing, nosy neighbors, and fear of the police than in sterile expat housing or in the sentimental hutongs of the old city. Gretchen even took a novel approach to her local policeman; instead of hiding from him when he periodically knocked, she would invite him in for a chat over instant coffee, the kind that came in a packet with sugar and milk included. He never turned her in.
This corner of the world was grimy; it was where urban construction grit met dirt that blew in from the countryside. Things combined in a way we had never seen before and the neighborhood felt as if it belonged to us.
A reporter came from Hong Kong to expose the underbelly of Asia’s up-and-coming capital of sin and had written for a British newspaper about Maizidian’r with its casual brothels and police crackdowns and growing population of Gen X expats, the newest lost generation. Forget Prague. Beijing was the Paris of the twenties of the late nineties. Emma’s mother in the UK read the article and called her in a panic for her safety. Maizidian’r had made it.
One day, I likened our lives to those in Beijing Bastards and Cookie made a noise of disgust. “That was the worst movie, Val,” she said. “Full of wankers.”
Cookie knew artists from her time at the Central Academy and Becky and Gretchen worked for rival art galleries, and so we all got invitations to underground art events. The invitations were strictly word-of-mouth and the events were always packed, everyone hurrying to see it before the police shut it down, which happened once in a while. We often found ourselves crammed into a cab looking for an obscure venue, each more unfindable than the last.
One time we arrived to find a blindfolded man standing on a pedestal, naked save for his cloth-wrapped penis onto which a bird was attached via a string. Another time we found a woman sitting on the floor cradling a blotchy fetus and guiding a transfusion tube flowing with oil into its mouth. She was one of the young artists from that first underground exhibition I’d been to the year before, who all used human corpses procured from morgues in their work. It was hard to tell what they were trying to say with their work. Were they expressing the absurdity and degradation of the human spirit in a totalitarian regime? Trying to win a gross-out competition started in the West? Having a laugh at our expense? Even when I interviewed them and asked about the materials they used in their art, they issued only the most gnomic pronunciations. “What did Lu Xun say?” they said, referring to the famous Chinese writer. “‘The earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.’” Chinese art was the new avant-garde, pushing the shock value of art just beyond what artists in the West could or would do.
At one exhibition, I bumped into the Texan art collector, who was happily chomping away on a cigar. He said he’d quit his job at Motorola and was going full bore on his website about Chinese contemporary art. His Chinese wife’s solid job at an American multinational financed his quixotic schemes. He boasted that he had the blood of both the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Texan horse thieves running through his veins, and I could see both the noble and ignoble at work in him: His website gave China’s best artists international exposure, and if it enhanced the value of his own art collection, so be it. His hustle was typical of the art scene, in which critics doubled as dealers and artists invested in lavish catalogs in the hopes that they would find their way into the right hands half a world away.
When he told me he was in the process of staffing up his website, I told him I’d just gone freelance and he offered me what I considered the perfect gig: Every week I would call up an artist and arrange a time to interview him (always a him) and then go to his house and talk for a few hours about his life and work. Then we’d go out for dinner and get drunk, and occasionally he’d try to get me to stay overnight, and I’d refuse. (The Texan hadn’t mentioned this part of the gig.) I’d go home and sometime in the next few days write up a small profile, and after I’d interviewed all the artists in one genre, would write a longer wrap-up piece. My meager paycheck was more than enough to make ends meet.
For a series on video artists, I interviewed Song Dong, an artist who combined video with performance work. He began by shooting a video of himself eating noodles as he watched TV, and then projected the video back onto his bare torso as he sat facing a mirror trying replicate his own behavior. The resulting video of his performance is eerie; most of the time his past and present selves are slightly out of sync with each other but once in a while the two snap together, and you feel a jolt. Song said, “In China, you are always taught to experience other people’s lives, what it’s like to be a peasant or a factory worker, but you are not taught to know your own life.”
For his next piece, he took the same concept but instead projected onto himself a video of his father talking about his past as a Communist cadre. A Communist cadre and a contemporary artist; in the way their faces mismatch and meld into a grotesque third being you can feel the distance between them, the tension. The father talking and the son listening. But again there are those brief moments when the two faces nest perfectly and become one, and when they came, tears sprang into my eyes. I told Song how moving I found his work. “In Chinese families, it’s rare to have flesh touching,” he said. “This was my way of having contact with his flesh. His history, after all, is mine too.”
His history, after all, is mine too. Those were words I never forgot.
• • •
I began nervously writing my first article for Business China, about tampon companies trying to break into the Chinese market. A friend had introduced me to the editor, a Bostonian named John, who liked my pitch. That week, he happened to be coming up from Hong Kong to meet his writers, of which I was now one, and I took him for a drink at the city’s oldest rock club, Keep in Touch. John was on the prowl for the inside story and he listened with hungry eyes as I rattled on about sexual modesty, the sanitary plastic fi
ngers enclosed in the tampon boxes, the fact that while only 1 percent of Chinese women used tampons, 73 percent said they experienced discomfort attributed to the use of crappy sanitary pads, and that panty liner sales had jumped 1,024 percent in the last year. Tampon companies were running ads with ballet dancers reassuring women that tampons were an “appropriate protection.” When I finished talking, John said it was a terrific story. Send it next week. Then he turned the conversation to the lives of young expats in Beijing.
“What can you show me?” he asked.
“My neighborhood’s not bad. It’s a red-light district,” I said.
He nodded eagerly.
“You can meet my friends too.” I called Gretchen and Cookie and told them we’d be going to Peter Pan. We walked up the Third Ring Road, onto Maizidian’r Street. “See Arnie? That’s a brothel. See the hairdresser? That’s a brothel. See that sex shop? Hey, do you need any pirated DVDs?”
Gretchen arrived first. John asked how we had ended up here. I explained that I wanted to write and make documentaries and here was where the craziest stories were. Gretchen explained that she was here on a Fulbright studying contemporary Chinese art and interning at an art gallery on the side, though she seemed to spend most of her time shopping. And how had we had met? Gretchen explained that had we met at a meeting of Chinese lesbians where I had been faking it and she had not. Lesbians! John was intrigued. Was this the Underground he had been hearing about? Ah, the Underground. We nodded mysteriously.
Cookie burst into the restaurant, wearing her phoenix-print knickerbockers. Her flaming red hair was wildly unkempt, beyond the point of fashionable, and her fanny pack was bulging like an overstuffed calzone.
“Are you a representative of the Underground?” John asked.
Cookie unclipped her fanny pack and sat down. “I am the Underground,” she said.
We ate our flavorless pizzas and drank our sour red wine. John looked around, taking in the dingy red-checked tablecloths and the Chinese waitresses struggling with the Italian names.
“Why do you like it here so much?” he asked.
We all thought for a second.
“This place is wicked,” Cookie said. She was still working for the international news agency and was becoming a professional at spinning the most lurid version of events. “There are police lurking everywhere and to get home I have to jump the fence in my compound, which is full of prostitutes and punks. A prostitute was killed there just the other day.”
“In your compound?”
“Yes, just inside. That’s what we heard from Big Sister Bao.”
“Who?”
“The mafia don who runs my compound. Plus, the Chinese food here is smashing.”
John ate it up. I was starting to eat it up.
“We’re all artists,” she went on. “Val here is shooting a documentary.”
“And Cookie is a modern calligrapher.”
“A modern calligrapher?”
“She rips and pastes colored paper to form huge characters and spray-paints characters on wood. She studied calligraphy at the Central Academy of Art before [McNews] claimed her soul.”
“You work for [McNews]?” John asked in surprise.
“I was in print, but I just moved to TV. I want to be a camerawoman,” she said. “And there’s always a rumor of someone writing a screenplay.”
“I see. What else?”
“Cheap rent.”
“Tchotchkes.”
“Massage by blind people.”
“You know, I went there the other day and my guy wasn’t blind.”
“Massage by mostly blind people.”
“Ladies Night. This bar nearby had free gin and tonics for women every Thursday.”
“They thought it would attract Chinese girls who could only drink one or two.”
“Not a bunch of sloppy Western girls.”
“We put them out of business.”
“We’re hunzi,” said Cookie.
“What’s that?”
“Like slackers.”
“I know what I like most about being here. Freelancing,” I said. “Freedom in general. I feel really free here.”
John started laughing. “You’re from the United States of America and you come to the last huge Communist country in the world to find freedom,” he said, with a combination of pity and admiration that somehow pleased me.
“Funny old world,” said Cookie.
“You can find stories from the fringe,” he said to me. “You can become Business China’s gonzo reporter.”
I walked upstairs to my apartment, buzzed on the idea of our lives—or was it on the Great Wall wine that John had put on Business China’s tab? I parted the lush red curtains to the balcony and stepped outside for a smoke. All the lights were out in the building across the street. I could see only the blue flicker of televisions in dark rooms and the aged yellow moon hanging in the sky. I stood smoking and listening to the velvety quiet of the night. A knot tied and tightened within me began to loosen. The quiet was interrupted every so often by the gentle rattle of an old taxi or the throaty purr of a luxury car. I saw a mule cart piled high with bricks gliding slowly down the street, a tired farmer at the reins and the hooves clacking a lonely tune on the pavement. The mules came out only at night when they were allowed on the Third Ring Road. A few years in the past, there had been no Mercedes on this street and a few years down the road there would be no more mules. But right now we were double Dutch jump-roping, all the strands of different speeds weaving together in a moment of synchronicity as perfect and fleeting as a heartbeat. A queen could not have felt more content surveying her kingdom. The farmer and mule slowly disappeared out of sight. I exhaled the last of my smoke into the night and went inside.
Chapter Twenty-one
The Decomposing Heart of Old Beijing
I celebrated Christmas with Cookie and Emma, who baked a desiccated nut bread and invited over Chinese friends with whom we played a disastrous round of charades thanks to our dearth of shared cultural references. The millennium came and went. Winter became spring. My freelance career took off. After my tampon article for Business China, I did one on the bra industry, then another on the fur industry.
After a particularly infuriating phone call with my parents when they asked yet again when I was moving home for graduate school, I’d had enough. My mom had just gotten an e-mail address and I fired off an angry e-mail.
You and Dad are always doubting what I do and telling me I am doing the wrong thing instead of trusting that I am responsible and will find jobs to do that will support me and make me happy. You seem to think that if I went to law school or graduate school my life would instantly become better, but that’s not true. I understand that you’re worried about me, but I wish you would support my decisions and be curious about my present life more than my future.
I readied myself for the impact of their response. Anything was better than their endless needling criticisms.
I LOVE YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE!!!!!! I will support you on all the decisions you made for your future. After all, who will know you better than yourself? Please keep writing to me, and tell me more about your life and work in China. I LOVE YOU TOO MUCH.
She forwarded it to my dad, and even he grudgingly offered his support.
The important thing is to find something that rewards you with satisfaction, peer respect, and financial security (whatever the order you would like). Launch yourself while you are young and energetic.
I began to share a little bit more of my life in China with them, sending them clips and links to articles I’d written. I knew they weren’t happy with my decisions, but they started keeping their complaints to themselves. But I still didn’t tell them about my documentary plans, which proceeded in secret. I scraped together money to buy a video camera, a simple one-chip one, not like Yang Lina’s t
hree-chip monster. I was ready to really start making the documentary. But I didn’t call the Zhang family. I wasn’t as staunch a comrade as Yang Lina. When difficulties presented themselves, I just wanted to quit. The hunzi in me was fighting with the ambitious go-getter, and winning.
Then Laichun called one day to tell me his father was in the hospital with heart trouble. My first thoughts were largely selfish. If the decomposing heart of the decomposing heart of Beijing gave out, my documentary was over. He was my ticket out of the workaday world of journalism and into the jet-setting stratosphere of art. I kicked myself for procrastinating. I thought about Yeye and the trite but true lesson I had learned from him: Once death came, you didn’t get any second chances. I kept calling to check on Grandfather Zhang, and when Laichun finally told me he was out of the hospital, I made a date to drop by for lunch on the weekend. Laichun said I should come later because he had a midday performance, but I was adamant on coming for lunch. I wanted my visit to be a finite activity. A few hours would be enough to get some good footage without getting drowned in the morass of their family life.
Only the grandfather and the grandmother were home. I had never seen the house so quiet. The grandmother smiled politely and said that her sons would be home soon. They seemed excited for my visit. I took the familiar stool by the bed and saw that my article had been framed and hung on the wall next to the bed. I asked the grandfather about his health. He looked the same as he ever did. I turned on the camera and he immediately launched into a story that I didn’t understand.