Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  We went upstairs. When Wang suggested that Cookie dye her hair, she eagerly agreed and soon it was a reddish color that pleased them both.

  When it was my turn, Wang scrutinized my face, pulling my short hair in all directions and letting it fall. She said that if I wanted my hair to stick up straight, I should get a perm. A perm! Bad adolescent memories surfaced.

  “Not with curlers, just with foil on the ends.”

  “No, no perm.”

  “If you don’t perm your hair, it won’t stick up.”

  Then all of a sudden, I said yes, and the next thing I knew my head was covered with a bumper crop of foil-wrapped sprigs of hair, and toxic chemicals were burning through my scalp. Afternoon sun flooded into the salon and I couldn’t tell if that funny feeling in my chest was extreme peace and happiness or a panic attack gathering steam before erupting.

  Wang took out the foil, rinsed my hair, and sat me in front of the mirror. I put my glasses on. My hair stuck straight up, but in a crinkly, crispy sort of way that seemed to be the hallmark of this salon. I looked as if I’d been electrocuted, then deep-fried. All I could think was, Damaged, damaged, damaged.

  “It’s called Exploding Fireworks,” she said proudly. “Really huopo.”

  I nodded, trying to hide my crushing disappointment. I could always shave it in the morning.

  “Do you know how you should do your hair in the mornings? You should take a pillow like this,” Wang said, holding the imaginary pillow flat on outstretched arms as if presenting us with a crown, “and rub it all over your head.” She bent down and thrashed her head around wildly. “It makes great effects.”

  “She’s completely mad,” said Cookie.

  But the next day I looked in the mirror and somehow, my hair didn’t look half bad. Angular and jarring and unbalanced. Every day I grew into the haircut more and more, and by the end of the week, I felt as though I belonged to myself finally and not to some tribe of Cantonese karaoke stars. At the eleventh hour, Wang Le had divined my inner character and even when people stared at me on the street, I didn’t care.

  • • •

  I called my parents with the news that they’d been waiting for since I moved to China.

  “I got into grad school!” I said. “I’m moving back in the fall.”

  “Oh, Val, that’s wonderful,” said my mom. “What are you studying?”

  A tiny part of me wished I could say law or medicine but mostly I was delighted to tell the truth. “Writing.”

  “Journalism?” asked my dad.

  “No, creative writing. I’ve been doing journalism for the last five years, remember?”

  “Oh.”

  “Where?” asked my mom.

  “At Johns Hopkins.”

  “Close to home!”

  “Yes,” I said, not sure what home meant anymore. I had deliberately chosen a place close to both my parents and New York but I wondered if it would be too close for comfort.

  “We can help you with the tuition,” she said.

  “No need. I got a full scholarship. Plus a stipend.”

  And with this, I was at least partially redeemed in their eyes. And I felt relief. My double life had become more tiring than it was worth, and like with many things one hides from others, my desire to write had been hidden from myself as well. I had mixed feelings about returning. China was where the best stories were, not to mention my entire life and all my friends and contacts, but to write about it, I needed some distance. I was willing to barter my Beijing life for what I wanted more: a writing life.

  The chair of the writing program said he didn’t support the writing of memoirs, only traditional nonfiction, so what was I planning on writing about? I panicked. I hadn’t infiltrated the inner circle of Falun Gong leaders or taken up the cause of any political dissident or exposed any humiliating government scandals. Nothing important had happened to me in five years. I’d been a hunzi, befriended a few artists, failed to make a documentary. How could you write about that?

  What’s more, I found out that I had mistranslated a long time ago and the foundation on which I’d built my life was shaky. Zixun fannao does not necessarily mean “seeks trouble for oneself”—it can also mean “worries oneself over nothing.” Instead of finding adventure, history, and truth in China, had I merely been plumbing my own anxieties, neuroses, and self-deluding fictions?

  I had to find an important, relevant topic to write about and do some interviews in the few months I had left. There was one story that had been in the Western press that I did know about: the demolition of the old city. After seeing my own family’s house demolished, the sense of urgency to document the city before it disappeared had stayed with me. And now that I was leaving and would be losing the city in a different way, writing about it felt even more crucial. The city as I knew it could live on, on the page at least.

  Whole neighborhoods were disappearing overnight. The demolitions happened so suddenly. First, would appear on the wall, large and circled. Next would appear handwritten lists of possible apartments—their addresses, size, cost. Families picked new apartments and moved out. Giant earthmovers moved in, gnashing through roofs, smashing down walls, and reducing the intimate capsules of houses into big uneven yards, which stayed suspended, for a period of time, in states of half death. I went to see the demolition sites. Only the outlines of houses were left: fragments of walls, looking like Kit Kat bars snapped open, worn wooden doorframes standing alone, no longer separating inside from outside. I walked over sturdy wood beams and old stones, flimsy plaster and jags of glass, straight into the homes of strangers. I looked at the peels and cracks of their walls, at the years of cooking grease and dust, at the faded posters that they had decided were not worth taking away, the occasional shoe. Just as in Maizidian’r, I was surprised at how little space each house took up. How could it have been enough to contain all the life that had existed here, all of the time that had passed? The demolition sites drew in people who hauled away reusable parts of the city, brick by brick, beam by beam.

  I took cluttered and incoherent photos and tried to talk to residents who were moving out. They weren’t eager to recollect their pasts in these old, decrepit houses and seemed to be thinking more about their roomy new modern apartments.

  Only a few devoted to the old houses protested for their preservation. And soon their focus shifted from the idealism of preserving the old city, which most saw as impossible, to the pragmatism of getting adequate compensation for the demolished houses, enough to buy new apartments elsewhere and move on with life. I met people who had filed lawsuits against the city government and development companies for violating their land-use rights, sometimes in groups as large as twenty thousand. I met a lawyer who had filed mass civil suits and won. I met an activist who wanted to stage a huge march to Tiananmen Square to protest and was looking for the protection of the international media. But I didn’t want to find a hero. I wanted to find an ordinary family who felt comfortable talking about their old house, their memories, about this way of life that was disappearing.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  I Hope to Bring This Tape to You in Person

  I trooped off to Bobo and Bomu’s house one day, minidisc recorder in hand, and sat down with them in the high-ceilinged room that had been my bedroom when I first moved to Beijing. Bobo sat in his big easy chair, which was covered with a protective sheet and doilies. On the wall next to him, a big reed butterfly covered a blotch of crumbling paint. Bomu stood doing bouncy dance moves and gently pounding her thighs with her fists. I hoped she would chime in with her comments too. Four years ago when I’d lived with them, they’d been cagey when I probed them about the houses, but when I approached them now as an interviewer, they readily agreed to answer my questions. Somewhere along the line we had grown close.

  There was an element of panic to my questioning. We were both leaving soon for the
States—me to go to school in Baltimore and them to visit their daughters in L.A., and this might be the last time we’d meet in this house.

  Bobo said that years ago he borrowed a video camera and a car and shot a video to show his aunts the condition of their houses in Beijing; he pulled it out for us to watch. He said it showed all four of the family houses: Great-Aunt Mabel’s big house that had been demolished, Nainai’s house filled with squatters, the house we sat in now, and their original family house that I’d never seen. He lifted the doily on the VCR, popped the video in, and pressed play. We saw a shaky shot of mottled gray walls; someone biked by. It took me a second to recognize Qianbaihu Hutong, where Bobo and his family lived for almost fifty years. The video was stamped August 1993—almost ten years earlier.

  “The hutong looks horrible,” said Bomu, ever concerned about appearances. You could see the blackened side of a house and, if you knew to look, the edge of a public toilet. But once the camera panned to the front door, those annoyances were forgotten, and she sat down to watch. Bobo, tilted back in a laugh, stood in front of a wooden door flanked by carved stone figures.

  “That was back when you still had hair and didn’t have a stomach,” Bomu said. “That was back when the door wasn’t painted red yet.” She didn’t need to mention that that was back before the house had been demolished to make way for a parking lot.

  Bobo stood awkwardly for a moment before turning and walking in. The camera followed him and we went ten years, or one hundred, into the past. This trick of time is the magic of courtyard houses. They are able to conjure the lives, so different from ours, that have been contained in their walls. Watching the video, I felt as if I were seeing their courtyard house for the first time, feeling exposed to the sky but also enclosed on four sides by the house. We saw the apple tree that we picked apples from my first fall in China and, hung from a bough, a cage containing two small yellow birds. The courtyard was green and blooming.

  “How big the lilies were,” said Bomu wistfully, “and the grapes, how sweet.”

  The video trailed Bobo as he walked through his daughters’ rooms, filled with tiny knickknacks, and into the airy northern room bathed in light. The family was gathered stiffly on the couches as if waiting to greet relatives in person. Their older daughter, in her twenties, was sitting in a long white dress, while the younger daughter hid behind the refrigerator. Xiao Peng must have been filming.

  I imagined Nainai and Great-Aunt Mabel sitting in their comfortable apartments—in Leisure World in suburban Maryland and the Upper West Side of New York City, respectively—and watching the tape. Did they feel sadness to have left or relief that they were not still there?

  Xiao Peng drifted in to watch with us. His side of the house was a mess: The roof had caved in, showering his bedroom with dirt. Through the hole in the roof, you could see the sky. Xiao Lu and their son, Sanbao, were at her mother’s house until the hole could be repaired. I already knew how Xiao Lu felt about the courtyard houses: She had grown up in a courtyard house shared by many families and would rather live in an apartment. She didn’t think preservation should stand in the way of the city’s progress.

  With a sweet, cloying smile into the camera, the older sister said, “I hope to bring this tape to you in person.” She left for L.A. not long afterward.

  “She’s so beautiful,” said Bomu. The sister then ordered her little brother, Xiao Peng, to stop shooting and show himself, so Bobo took the camera from him and Xiao Peng sat down on the couch. He was skinny with a big grin.

  “Look at how spirited you looked back then,” said Bomu. “Not like now.” The present-day Xiao Peng shrugged apathetically and said nothing. But back then, he spoke freely into the camera, telling his relatives in America that Beijing had gone through big changes, that cars filled the road, and that he was going to study hard for his classes at Beijing Film Academy and send them his projects so they could see his progress. “This house can’t compare to the U.S., but it’s considered all right here,” he said. The older Xiao Peng laughed a little bit at himself, but not too much.

  “I look horrible,” Bomu said with false modesty. “Those front teeth are so big.” She was still slim and graceful, the type who compels people to say she must have been a great beauty in her youth. Everyone was laughing in the video, not speaking anymore, and Bomu laughed in person too. “Things were so much fun back then. Not like now.”

  It was true; I rarely heard them laugh like that anymore. I assumed they missed their daughters, just as my parents missed me. Bobo, Bomu, and Xiao Peng didn’t agree about much these days, but they all said that things seemed better then. Then they all lived together in a whole courtyard house with an apple tree in the yard and a room for each person. Bomu said she spent all day cooking dumplings, sesame seed cakes, meat buns, hongcai soup, whatever that was. But these days she was too tired to cook. Xiao Peng was often out at night; he had stopped coming home when Bobo called, sometimes even refusing to answer his phone. Just like his grandfather who had been left behind when Nainai and Great-Aunt Mabel went to the States, he was the one left behind while his two sisters made new lives abroad. He had never managed to get a visa.

  I asked Bobo if he liked living in the hutongs.

  “I like living in the hutongs. Why? Because every nation has its own national culture,” he began, his pointer finger going up and his eyelids fluttering in a teacherly way. I reached over to pause the videotape. “Now, if you look north from the Forbidden City, the whole view is courtyard houses, like a single roof, and you can go there and say, ‘Ah ya, this is the emperor’s majesty.’ You don’t just knock down old houses and build tall buildings and say you’ve built a modern city. When you’re done with it, how will it be different than Shanghai or Tianjin or New York or Paris? What difference is there? There’s no difference.”

  Bomu interjected, “Courtyard houses are dirty.”

  “Of course, courtyard houses require more work than an apartment building. You have to clean the yard.”

  Bomu refrained from mentioning that she was the one who did all the cleaning. “And going to the bathroom is not convenient.”

  “Yes, going to the bathroom isn’t convenient. But if you can renovate, then all these problems go away.”

  “The country should do renovations. We don’t have the money to. The roof just fell down, and dirt is all over. It costs ten thousand kuai to fix,” she said.

  We started the video again and it moved to Xiao Peng’s old room hung with posters of scantily clad girls, the same room I stayed in when I came to Beijing to look for a job long ago.

  I asked something I’d wanted to know since that time. “What happened to the house during the Cultural Revolution?”

  Bobo stiffened and began speaking in a somewhat robotic voice. “The Cultural Revolution was a mistake in the course of Chinese history. The government chased out of their houses the ‘five black elements’—landlords, rich farmers, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists—and moved in people without homes, poor people. People like us who had houses were considered moneyed and were chased out. You didn’t have the right to live in your own house anymore and you had to live in a small room somewhere else. Your house was given to the ‘five red elements’—the workers, farmers, soldiers, revolutionary cadres, and revolutionary martyrs.”

  “Did you have to move out?”

  “The house was handed over to the government, but because I wasn’t the landlord—your Great-Aunt Mabel was—we were allowed to live there. They said, ‘You are of the capitalist class and if you close the door, you might be engaging in espionage,’ so they moved in a family of workers and we had to leave the door wide-open.”

  He said a family of six lived in the eastern wing of the house for twelve years. The parents worked for a construction company.

  “Did you have any contact with them?”

  “No.”

 
“None at all?”

  “No.”

  “They lived there for twelve years and you didn’t have any kind of relationship with them?”

  “Our educational levels were not the same. Our living conditions and our habits were not the same.”

  “What was their attitude toward you?”

  “They were the power of the revolution, we were the opponents of the revolution. How could they have treated us well? It wasn’t possible.”

  “Did you ever see them after they moved out?”

  “Their oldest son was a student at our school. After coming back from the army, he became a worker too. They all became workers. Not a single one of them studied hard and got out of that life.”

  I remembered another question that had been nagging me for years. Bomu had enigmatically mentioned a bathroom that had existed in the house at Qianbaihu. What had happened to it? I imagined something ominous and meaningful.

  Bobo shook his head angrily. “Before, the eastern wing had a bathroom, with a toilet, a sink, and bath. When the workers moved into that wing, they demolished the toilet, crammed tiles in the drain, and clogged it up. After they left, even if I had wanted to fix it, I couldn’t have. It was clogged beyond repair.”

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed by the senselessness of the answer. It was even more mysterious than the question.

  Bobo turned back to the TV and restarted the video. Nainai’s house came next. It looked pretty much how it looked the day we visited with my parents. A shirtless man came out of one of the rooms.

  “This is how poor people live,” Bomu explained. This was how most people who live in courtyard houses now lived, in a zayuan’r with other families. The video then moved onto Bobo’s father’s old house, the one we sat in now. It was like watching a store security camera of ourselves, with a ten-year time delay.

  Bobo said that at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 his father had been forced to move out and live in a single room nearby, measuring 130 square feet. Bomu said it was lucky he’d already sold off three-fourths of the house before then or there would have been even more trouble. Neither mentioned his gambling or his multiple wives. Nor did they mention that during the Cultural Revolution Bobo’s younger sister had been accused of hiding jewelry for Great-Aunt Mabel and had committed suicide by throwing herself down a well, leaving her young daughter motherless; my dad told me that story later.