Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  “You can pretend to be if you cut this poem out,” she said.

  “Yeah, take it out,” I said.

  He laughed. Feng Lei was scrupulous and exacting and didn’t give much away. Even if I had swept him off his feet, his expression probably would not have changed very much.

  “Zhenluo is cold, but you are even colder!” she scolded him. (She thought me cold?) “If you two had a kid, it would just sit there staring off into space!”

  At this, we both stared awkwardly off into space.

  Feng Lei owned a small cornflower-blue scooter that looked like a Jet Ski on wheels, which he rode all over town. He took me from Yang Lina’s house to the subway on it, and I straddled the seat behind him, crooking my legs awkwardly so my feet wouldn’t drag on the ground, and gingerly put my hands on his waist. On the subway on the way home, I tallied up the points. He wasn’t a sure winner but he merited at least another date.

  The second time I rode on his scooter he ventured that I should sit sidesaddle. He was taking me out to a used-camera market on the western edge of town where he was going to help me to pick out a manual camera. How romantic! I was going to be the star of my very own movie, finally. But Beijing was no Rome. There were no piazzas, no flocks of scattering pigeons, just wide, dusty streets with buses blowing fumes in our faces. It was summer and over a hundred degrees and I felt as if I were being dipped in sweat, battered in pollution and fumes, and then deep-fried by the sun. The scooter was too big for the bike lane and too small for the car lane, so we wove wishy-washily in and out of both lanes. I clung to the back handle of the scooter like a barnacle and tried my best to flirt.

  “How do you load film?” I asked coquettishly at the market. He gave me thorough step-by-step instructions.

  “I printed photos and they all have a light stripe on them. What should I do about it?” I asked later on the phone, in my most helpless voice. He told me to go back to the market and call him back if I wanted him to talk to the shop owner.

  “What are you doing after work?” I asked. He said he didn’t know when he was getting off work. That snow just kept drifting down. I feared that I was having another telephone romance, like with Zhang Yuan, but this time completely devoid of intrigue and excitement. I wasn’t yet at the age when I would find a sober and responsible man attractive, and I kept myself interested only by imagining the wickedness and passion roiling beneath his placid exterior, if only I could find the trapdoor. I tried to convince myself that Feng Lei and I were having an In the Mood for Love kind of romance—much emotion, few words.

  After a while, I suspected stagnation. I complained to Yang Lina.

  “You’re not just playing around with him, are you?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t just go out with him a few times, make him fall in love with you, and then leave him.”

  “Love?” I said. Forget love. I was just trying to have some fun.

  “He’s smart not to get involved with you,” she said. “You might just get up and leave.” Not one to let love—or the lack thereof—sabotage his documentary, Feng Lei left for two months to shoot a documentary about a simple fisherman in the Northeast. And so our beautiful, mysterious, transient, possibly nonexistent romance was over.

  • • •

  Yang Lina soon found another blind date for me. She said Zhao Jun ran a website about Chinese independent film.

  “I told him, ‘She’s not beautiful at first sight, but if you get to know her, you’ll find she has character.’ And then Xu Xing said, ‘She has flavor. You have to slowly taste her.’”

  “That’s so disgusting. I can’t believe you said all of that,” I said, while thinking, You think I’m ugly?

  “You’re so old-fashioned to be shy about this.”

  “Arranged marriages are old-fashioned,” I said with indignation.

  Zhao Jun called and proposed we meet for drinks at a bar near my apartment. I had a drink beforehand with Cookie. As she sat across from me, I thought tipsily, My friends are the real love affair of my time in Beijing.

  “I don’t want to go through with this. It’s so moronic.”

  “But, Val—you love meeting new people!”

  I looked at her in amazement. “Cookie, have you been paying any attention these past few years? You’re the one who loves meeting new people. I’m shy.” Sometimes I wondered if she saw me at all or merely a tweaked reflection of herself.

  “Oh, right.”

  I rode my bike to the Big Easy, a New Orleans–themed restaurant painted a salmon pink and encrusted with intricate wrought iron railings, as though it had been airlifted from Disney’s Bourbon Street. It was plunked right outside the gates of the Rock ’n’ Roll Disco, a gigantic silver orb that did a fair imitation of Epcot Center. Zhao Jun was waiting outside. He was pudgier and sloppier than Feng Lei. Usually, I liked a man on the mushy side, but he was too much. And his front teeth were black with rot, blacker than mine had ever been. I thought I’d specified “no bad teeth” to Yang Lina.

  We went up the spiral staircase, sat at a small wooden table, and ordered beers. It turned out that Zhao Jun ran the film website only in his spare time. For a living, he pedaled birth control pills. Literally. He rode his bike around town from pharmacy to hospital to drugstore selling over-the-counter birth control pills for a Western pharmaceutical company. It was difficult, he said, because the doctors all expected kick-backs.

  “Over-the-counter birth control pills? Is that safe?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, it’s perfectly safe,” he said.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “The company is Western and very reputable.”

  “Just because they’re Western doesn’t mean they’re reputable,” I said, wondering why I was being so difficult.

  “Do you like films?” he asked with a smile.

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Yes. What directors do you like?”

  “Wong Kar-wai is my favorite.”

  “I love his films too. And I love Martin Scorsese.”

  “Yes, Scorsese is good.”

  We drank several beers. I could not free myself from the droning and familiar rhythms of our conversation, where one person says something and the other agrees. If Feng Lei had given nothing away, this guy was trying to give it all away.

  “I feel really comfortable talking to you,” he said toward the end of the date.

  “Oh, I’m glad.”

  With a swoony look in his eyes, he told me how lucky Xu Xing was to be with Yang Lina. Okay, Yang Lina was beautiful and huopo, but he wasn’t—then I realized, he was. He was in love with Yang Lina. I saw that intelligence and personality were not considered beautiful to a Chinese man. Well, rotting front teeth and boring conversation were not attractive to an American woman, so we were even.

  Zhao Jun called repeatedly over the next few weeks. When I picked up, I was noncommittal about setting up another date. I resigned myself to never dating in China. The last time he called I was shooting pool with Cookie. I let it ring and kept on playing.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  In the Path of the Wrecking Ball

  At the end of the summer the dreaded character began appearing on a stretch of the shops on Maizidian’r, including the ones right outside my door. Demolish.

  I was dismayed—but what a scoop for The Marzipan Inquirer! Spurred by the energy of our neighborhood, planning of our publication kicked into high gear. We had to do it before the neighborhood disappeared. We planned the issues:

  Issue 1: Welcome to Marzipan Street!

  Issue 2: Destruction of Marzipan Street!

  Issue 3: Long Live Big Sister Bao!

  I grabbed my camera and went outside. The hairdressers had evacuated their salons and the shops were selling off all their goods, their stands spilling out onto the sidewalks. W
ord got out about the sale and soon the entire street was lined with vendors who had never even had shops on the streets, selling Mao badges, vinyl shoes, gigantic underwear. The atmosphere was festive. After everything was sold, the shopkeepers scattered. Then the demolitions started. Workers with hammers and sticks began tearing down the shops, which were surprisingly flimsy. Brick shacks with corrugated tin roofs patched with plastic sheeting that was held down with bricks, they came apart quickly with a loud popping of glass and cracking of walls. People came to cart away the reusable parts—doorframes, mirrors, glass. Soon all that was left were blank squares on the ground that looked too impossibly tiny to have held all the life that they had.

  Weeks later the city painted on all the remaining shops on my street. Even Peter Pan, the model denizen of the block, was slated for demolition. The same scene played itself out again: clearance sales spilling onto the sidewalk, random vendors from elsewhere, swarms of frugal shoppers, men with hammers and crowbars, smashing glass and falling walls, scavengers in three-wheeled carts, and, in the end, just a strip of multicolored squares on the ground. It happened so quickly I barely had time to react. The first round of demolitions had been exciting and energizing, but the total decimation of the neighborhood was heartbreaking. Without my nemesis Peter Pan, without my whole street, what was I?

  The city then eradicated the traces of the shops and turned the empty lots into construction sites. They dug up the road three or four times that year, often working late into the night. Occasionally it had a purpose, such as leveling the sidewalk or laying down new natural gas pipes, and other times they dug ditches and then promptly covered them up again, like an absurdist play performing modernization ad nauseam. The honking below my window was endless.

  That summer the city launched their bid for the 2008 Olympics. They began painting the drab facades of the old apartment buildings in pastel shades of blues and pinks to give them new life. They started with the buildings that flanked the roads the visiting dignitaries of the International Olympic Committee would travel, but after the committee had come and gone, the city kept painting buildings like a corpse that couldn’t stop twitching. They painted the nice old brick of the building across the road an overgrilled salmon color, and one morning I woke up to see a worker dangling outside my bedroom window on a wooden plank, painting my building the dreaded color. I could hear more workers clattering through the stairwell, taking ladders to the roof and clumping around noisily. When I came home that evening, I found salmon paint splattered on my front door like a curse.

  The city built large restaurants and tacky ornamentation in place of the tiny demolished shops. They enclosed anemic rose gardens with tiny wrought iron fences and erected lit billboard advertisements. On the construction lot walls they painted line-drawn scenes depicting satellites orbiting Earth and people using computers, primitive pictograms showing how advanced China was. Tents were erected on the sidewalk, and at the end of the day, exhausted construction workers would collapse onto raised wooden pallets in plain view of the street, their hair gray with dust.

  But the new street was a flop. The overpriced Chinese restaurant that replaced Peter Pan was always empty. The four-star hotel that went up in one of the empty lots never opened. The space in front of my building eventually became a long rectangle of grass surrounded by a knee-high concrete wall. You couldn’t walk on the grass, but people did throw their empty plastic bottles and yesterday’s newspapers on it. One morning I saw a single three-inch platform shoe, black and lonesome, lying in the grass. The city also planted tiny saplings in front of the grass, but like anything not properly rooted into the ground, they fell over in a storm. The whole street felt ghostly and artificial and we lost motivation for The Marzipan Inquirer.

  The city was changing and it was the first inkling that we were going to change too. Our magic moment was tipping into dusk and I began to understand it would soon be time to move on. To a new neighborhood, or possibly farther.

  • • •

  On my next visit to the States, I saw that my parents were making more renovations to their house. After they finished with the inside, they started on the outside. Calling the forsythias “junk plants,” my dad dug them up and threw them out. The red dogwood in the front yard, my mom’s favorite, suddenly died. She was busy planting and tending beautiful new plants: a crepe myrtle where the dogwood used to be, peonies, chrysanthemums and geraniums where the forsythias had been, plus new red canna lilies and purple butterfly bushes that attracted monarch butterflies. But all I saw when I went home were the scars on the ground left by the forsythia bushes. The unchanging house had given me a sense of permanence about the world, just as my parents had wanted it to, but when such permanence was revealed as an illusion, I was ill equipped to deal with it. I preferred the house as it had been. Luckily, the pine trees still stood. My parents worried aloud about their dangerously burrowing roots and floated the possibility of chopping them down.

  My mom still told me all about her friends’ children getting married but I slowly realized that the weddings were a highlight of her social life, a place where she could let loose.

  “Growing up, when I was dancing was the only time I could stop worrying,” she told me, the only time the responsibility of being the eldest of seven children was lifted. “We went to a wedding last weekend, of our friends the Chengs. Do you remember them? You went to Chinese School with their sons Tony and Billy?”

  “No.”

  “Tony got married. Do you remember him?”

  “No, but let me guess—he’s a doctor now.”

  “Yes, an anes . . . aneththe . . .”

  “An anesthesiologist?”

  “Yes. Guess who he married?”

  “Another doctor, named Mindy Yang, perhaps a pediatrician?”

  “No, a blondie!”

  “Wow, good for him.”

  “Six feet tall. He’s tall but she’s even taller. And guess what she does for a living?”

  “She’s a lawyer.”

  “No, a helicopter pilot! Can you believe it?”

  I laughed. My mom actually had a sense of fun that I’d forgotten about.

  They were finally starting to accept that I lived in China for the time being. My mom compared my move to Beijing with her own impulsive leap to America and said that we shared a spirit of adventure. I protested that her move had taken more courage than mine, to leave everything behind for good.

  “It’s good to know about East and West,” she said. “If you come back, you can know about the world.”

  But strangely, the States was starting to feel like the dream and China the reality.

  • • •

  One night soon after I’d gotten back, as I left Cookie and Emma’s apartment complex at midnight, a man’s voice called out.

  “Hey, you! Stop!”

  I kept walking. What a yahoo. Beijing was full of guards dressed up in uniforms, trying to push people around. Once a gated city, Beijing still loved its gates, and with each gate came a guard who ruled his tiny empire like Genghis Khan. The best thing to do was to keep walking until you exited his dominion.

  “Young lady, stop! This is the police.”

  Just steps from the gate, I almost bolted, but not wanting any buckshot in my backside, I turned around slowly. The uniformed man approached and asked which apartment I lived in. I looked closely and saw that he did indeed have a police badge and the cruel, stony-faced visage of Beijing’s Finest. Why had I walked out without checking for police first? I was getting soft.

  “I don’t live here.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Not here, I told you.”

  “Where do you live then?”

  “Xidan.” It was my relatives’ neighborhood, all the way across the city.

  “What were you doing here?”

  “Visiting a friend.”

 
“Take us to their apartment.”

  My stomach dropped out. Luckily, he and his partner had collared another illegal, a skinny Chinese guy with spiked hair, and he was on the chopping block first. I wandered off to the side, pulled out my cellphone, and dialed Emma’s number with shaking fingers. I could barely draw enough breath to tell her what had happened.

  “They want me to take them to the apartment I was in.”

  “Please don’t bring them up here!”

  “I know, I know, but I don’t know what to do. Fuck!”

  “Fuck! I’ll figure it out and call you back.”

  “Hurry, I don’t have much time.”

  “My heart is going like a choo-choo train.”

  I waited nervously, watching them interrogating the guy. His shoulders were hunched in defeat and humiliation and my stomach curdled in dread. What was I going to do? Take him to a random apartment and feign surprise when a total stranger opened the door? Revise my story and say I’d just popped into the compound to buy a bottle of water, which I’d finished and thrown out already? Feign insanity? Did I have the right to remain silent? Would the police take an American to the clink? Would I hold up well under torture? I bet I wouldn’t. My phone finally rang.

  “Okay, you can go to Big Sister Bao’s apartment in entryway 11,” said Emma.

  “Oh, thank god. How will I recognize her?”

  “She said to just go into the entryway and she’ll meet you there.”

  “Okay. I have to go. He’s coming back.”

  With two policemen in tow, I walked as slowly as I could to entryway 11 and up the concrete stairwell. On the second floor I bumped into a woman with a frizzy perm wearing a shapeless nightgown. I paused and raised my eyebrows.

  “Miss Wang!” she said.

  “Big Sister Bao!” I cried.

  She greeted the officers with a familiarity that managed to be both saccharine and oily. “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” They grunted in recognition. She was clearly all paid up on her bribes and they couldn’t lay a finger on me. I could have knelt at her feet and kissed her dirty flip-flops. I was ready to part ways then and there, but the four of us all trooped up to her apartment where she poured us tea and we sat around chatting as the TV blared in the background.