Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping came to power, the workers were moved out and the houses returned to our family. Bobo’s father was finally allowed to move back to his house in 1981.

  We then saw scenes shot from a car driving along the Avenue of Eternal Peace past Tiananmen Gate. It looked like an old National Geographic vision of Beijing: The wide avenue was clogged with bikes, and a few yellow breadbox vans were starting to ply the roads.

  The video ended with exterior shots of the old family house, which Bobo said was no longer in the family. The government had taken it over and then turned it into a dormitory, and since the shooting of the video, it had been demolished. You couldn’t see much of it—just a two-story gray exterior wall. I had never even heard of this house. Nainai had grown up there, Bobo said, and so had he. They had lived there with their extended family and their servants. He said it had been a grand house with a courtyard big enough to drive a car around in. There had been a rockery in the center, as well as his grandfather’s huge fishbowl full of goldfish.

  “In the past, when your Yeye lived here, when my Yeye lived here, when my aunts lived here, we used to always sit outside in the summer. You could watch stars in the yard, you could eat watermelon, you could drink tea and talk,” said Bobo.

  “Old Beijing habits,” said Bomu.

  “Before the Cultural Revolution, we always ate out in the yard at Qianbaihu also. Then, there wasn’t any TV to watch. We would all sit out in the yard and talk or play cards.”

  “Why don’t you sit in the yard now?” I asked.

  “Now the yard here is too small. If we sat outside and ate, no one could ever bother trying to come into the yard. That’s one thing.”

  “Also, the pollution is bad,” says Bomu.

  “Scientific advances have enabled me to install an air conditioner, turn it on, close the door, and be cooler than I am outside,” says Bobo, speaking theoretically because the voltage in the hutong was prohibitively low to install an air conditioner. “I don’t need to go out anymore.”

  “Were you sad to leave the house at Qianbaihu?”

  Xiao Peng had been listening the whole time, and while I could tell he thought my questions were stupid, he couldn’t resist putting his two cents in. “I didn’t feel anything because I knew it wasn’t our own house. It’s not like losing something that’s your own. Anyhow, the atmosphere of the hutongs when I was growing up is already gone, destroyed by tall apartment buildings. Sanbao will probably become accustomed to living in a huge city. I just regret that he won’t experience traditional Chinese community life. Before, every room had people living there.”

  “It was too crowded,” said Bomu, laughing.

  But Xiao Peng was serious. “It was too crowded, but life had a mood that was important.”

  “People had feelings for each other,” she said. “People took care of each other.”

  “Our living conditions are much better now, but if you ask how that time was, it was also really good,” he said. “There’s nothing specific that’s worth recalling. There’s nothing that’s negative either. Life is just like that.”

  Xiao Peng was still a character straight out of Beijing Bastards, a tough guy who never made a big deal out of anything. Owning a house, owning a story, or not owning either—what was the difference?

  He was right, in a way. Some of my questions were stupid. I was asking an outsider’s questions and making a story out of something that was just life. I thought of the things that they didn’t need to explain to me: the feeling of biking through the hutongs at dusk or of stumbling into a freezing outhouse at three in the morning, the smell of burning coal, the taste of warm baozi and the fear that they are stuffed with human flesh. Living in these courtyard houses had made me feel a part of my family as nothing else had.

  I wondered where my relatives would live when this house was demolished, which would happen eventually. Bobo and Bomu were getting used to the idea that they would be exiled from the old city where they had grown up. They had gone to look at newly built villas in the suburbs, modeled on the kind of suburban house I’d grown up in.

  “Not bad,” Bobo said. “But the prices are ‘not bad’ too.”

  Bobo and Bomu had lived through so much; the demolition of their homes and their way of life was just the next thing that they had to adapt to. I tried to adopt their equanimity about it, tried to see what was happening less as destruction and more as change, a mere swapping of set scenery that we would improvise new lives in, but I couldn’t. I felt more ready than ever to leave. And actually, they were leaving too. We were all ready to start over in America.

  • • •

  Without telling Bobo and Bomu, I visited Nainai’s courtyard house before moving back to the States. I wanted to talk to average Beijingers who lived in a zayuan’r, who didn’t have relatives in the States, and who didn’t own their own houses. I didn’t tell my relatives because I didn’t want them coming along and censoring what people had to say. I went also because I wanted to know some history of Nainai’s house from the people who had actually lived there.

  I found the house, just north of the Avenue of Eternal Peace. The front door was open and I walked in cautiously. I knew what to expect this time and the place looked merely rundown, not heartbreakingly ruined. It was the end of summer and the house seemed to be peeling apart from the heat, layer by layer. At the end of one corridor, an old couple sat on stools in the shade, fanning themselves. The woman asked me what business I had there. I explained that it was my Nainai’s house—yes, she was in America—and I’d come to take a look. She asked me if I was related to the man who took care of the house. Yes, he’s my Bobo, I said.

  I asked the granny if she liked living here. Her middle-aged daughter, wearing a housedress and round metal glasses, came out carrying a metal pail. The granny said she liked it, yes. Her daughter disagreed, saying, “There’s no shower or bathroom. It’s cold in the winter, hot in the summer. It leaks. I don’t like living here.” The roof, originally a sea of gentle upside-down-U-shaped tiles, was patched haphazardly. Her mother conceded that it leaked.

  “We have to pay for all repairs by ourselves,” the daughter continued, and her mother was forced to agree again. Her daughter added, “This house is beyond repair.”

  “Beyond repair,” echoed the mother, but her affection was unwavering. “It’s convenient to go in and out.”

  They told me they’d lived in the house since the Cultural Revolution.

  “There must be some stories from then,” I said.

  “We’ve forgotten all the stories a long time ago,” said the daughter.

  “All of the stories?”

  “What stories are there?” she said. “They let us live here, so we live here.” It reminded me of what Xiao Peng had said about not feeling anything when the old house was destroyed because it hadn’t belonged to them. None of us had anything else to say. The daughter filled the bucket from the outside spigot, the water drumming loudly onto the metal. I asked their surname and they said Fang.

  On the way out, I met a girl with pigtails wearing a strawberry-print dress. Around eight years old, she’d been living in the house for two years and liked it because it stayed cool in the summer. She kept two white rabbits in a plastic crate outside her door. I helped her feed them some lettuce, took her picture, and then left.

  Bobo and I talked about what was going to happen with Nainai’s house. He didn’t want to be her proxy when demolition time came. He would rather my dad or uncle come in person to deal with it.

  I wondered aloud if Nainai would choose a new house or cash. I said I preferred for her to choose a new house. It would be wonderful to have a courtyard house in Beijing that I could always return to. Choosing cash would mean that our hold on the land was gone and would disperse, dollar by dollar, out into the world.

  “Are you g
oing to come take care of the house? Who’s going to come?” Bobo asked. “It’s better to just get a lot of a little bit of money and give it to Nainai.” He paused, unsure what constituted a lot or a little bit of money anymore, to an American or a Chinese person. Or what constituted enough money to compensate for the loss of your family home, the loss of your last toehold in your homeland, the loss of a life you never got to lead. “She’ll be able to spend the money for two years,” he said, and laughed bitterly. “You could even negotiate,” he said, and the thought made him laugh again, this time not as bitterly. “Your Chinese is good enough.”

  “I’m too young,” I said, chiming in with my own laughter. No one in the government would take me seriously.

  He didn’t protest and we left it at that.

  Chapter Thirty

  Your Face Is So Magnificent, but the Back of Your Head Has Rotted Away

  Right before moving back to the States, I called Wang Le’s cellphone to check that she was still at her latest salon so I could get my last haircut. She told me she had just quit the day before, without further explanation. I was dismayed. How could I go back to the Cantonese hairdressers of the world right before I moved home? She offered to do a house call.

  “No, that’s too much trouble,” I said. “I’ll come to your house.”

  “But my house is so run-down; it’s a zayuan’r,” she said, and added, “I’m embarrassed to have you come over.”

  “I’m not embarrassed if you’re not embarrassed,” I said.

  “Well, then, I’m not if you’re not,” she said.

  “You don’t like living there?”

  “It’s terrible, we hate it.”

  A bell went off in my head. Of course. Here was the family I had been looking for. I told her about my project and asked if I could interview her and her family. She readily agreed.

  “You don’t mind talking on the record?”

  “I’ll tell you everything. What do I have to hide?” she said. “Come in the afternoon so you can eat my husband’s dumplings.”

  She picked me up at the intersection of Dongdan, one of Beijing’s oldest and busiest shopping streets, and a road so new that I wasn’t sure it even had a name yet. Cars hurtled down the fresh, unmarked pavement. We turned off into the hutongs and headed toward her house. Old people sat outside on tiny stools, gently fanning themselves in the heat. Children and cars were the noisiest things around, yelling and honking and vexing one another’s passage through the narrow hutong. Inside the house, the passageway was only a wingspan wide and we walked along over loose tiles set crookedly into the earthen ground and wooden planks laid over pools of standing water. She kept repeating the same apologetic refrain, “It’s so ugly, so dirty.”

  Seven families lived in the house and for privacy had covered over windows with old newspapers or calendar pages and hung doors with bead curtains made of popsicle wrappers folded like origami and hooked together with paper clips. We saw no one until Wang’s next-door neighbor came out in his wifebeater tank top. He didn’t say hello. Wang’s family had just a small corner of the courtyard to themselves. On top of a tarp-covered mound was a pile of drying pumpkin seeds, crawling with flies. Wang’s husband, tall and genial, greeted me from the doorway.

  We entered their space, just one tiny room crammed with beds: On the left side of room was a bunk bed and on the right were two single beds that had been pushed together to make a larger bed; in between them was only a narrow gap. The room fit together like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle: The top bunk was stacked high with large cardboard boxes, and on other high shelves more boxes reached up toward the lofty ceilings. Concrete floors made the room feel chilly and dank even though the summer air was stifling. By the door was another small bed on which Wang Le’s ninety-two-year-old mother-in-law, skinny and toothless, perched cross-legged. I almost didn’t see Wang’s son, who was wedged into the corner behind the bunk bed, playing a computer game showing brown brick dungeon walls.

  “This is my son. He’s twenty-two,” said Wang. “Do you think he’s too fat?”

  After we drank some orange soda, Wang pulled down a box full of her haircutting supplies and we went out into the courtyard to prepare for my haircut. She ordered her husband to boil water to wash my hair, and when the shampooing was done, I rinsed it over a painted metal washbasin on a stand, which he emptied into a tall metal pail. The pail, in turn, would have to be emptied in the drain outside. Her husband noticed the flies crawling on the pumpkin seeds and yelled to the granny that he was throwing them out. She had been peering out of the window at our activities.

  “What?” she yelled back.

  “I’m throwing out your seeds!”

  “Why?”

  “There are flies all over them.”

  “Oh, flies,” she said. “All right.”

  He went inside to prepare dinner and Wang Le covered me with a red haircutting apron and began to cut. As she jerked my hair to and fro, I could see the crooked flagstones below and the sky and the large tree above. The summer day loosened its humid grip and the air was perfect. I mentioned this and Wang seemed surprised.

  “You think it’s nice out here?” she asked. She complained that it was too small. “If I took a stool and sat out here and you took a stool and sat out here and we stuck out our hands, we’d be able to shake.” Mosquitoes started biting our legs, but the haircut, as usual, didn’t take very long. We rinsed my hair out again in the washbasin and went inside to eat, leaving my fallen hair on the ground.

  They had set up a folding table between the door and the beds and offered me the seat of honor on the bed. Her husband brought out a steaming plate of pork and celery dumplings. Though I knew it was hopelessly sentimental, I couldn’t help but glow from my al fresco haircut, the deliciousness of the dumplings, and the overall romance of hutong living.

  Wang and her husband started talking excitedly about the new apartment they wanted to buy. This was my cue to take out my recorder and ask them what was wrong with living in a courtyard house. So many things, it turned out. The beams of the house were rotting. You could see the sky through the crumbling roof, and rain poured down into the house, as did dirt. Rats ran huala huala on the roof at night. The room was stifling in the summers because there was no air circulation, but if you opened the door, the mosquitoes came in. The drains didn’t drain and there was nowhere to shower. Every night around nine o’clock, the room reeked of excrement.

  They were living in this room only temporarily while the government demolished and reconstructed the courtyard house that contained their original room. There, the beams had rotted to the point that they feared the house collapsing and killing someone. That house had been built during the Japanese occupation in the 1940s and had never been restored. Wang’s husband’s family had been assigned to live there in 1957, and the rent, thirty yuan per month, had barely grown since then.

  “They should have knocked these houses down a long time ago,” said Wang. “They’re not fit for humans to live in. Nowadays, the doghouses that rich people buy are more beautiful than these houses.”

  Her son complained that the government cared only about its facade, about fixing up big avenues and restoring relics and temples while the common people went hungry. I wondered what he and Wang’s husband did for a living, if they did anything at all.

  Their old neighborhood sat right behind the International Hotel, a five-star hotel on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. “From the International Hotel, which is so magnificent, you can look down into our one-story houses, which are just like slums. If the government wants to improve its facade, it should fix the slums,” said Wang. “Your face is so magnificent, but the back of your head has rotted away.”

  To demonstrate this discrepancy to the people in the hotel, she wanted to hang a Chinese flag on the roof of the house. I had no way of telling her that the guests in the hotel, looking down at the flapping flag, wo
uld miss her furious irony and see only a charming scene. Half of the time, I myself idealized the courtyard houses as a peaceful and humane escape from modern life.

  She said if you wanted to shoot a movie about the past, you could just bring over the crew. “You don’t even have to fix it up. You can immediately come and shoot this scenery that we’ve inherited.”

  The Beijing government had stipulated that each person should have a minimum of 160 square feet of housing, but the four of them together lived in a room that was not even 200 square feet, and they complained that no one in the government had come by to investigate. Why should they bother? Wang said she had a friend who was married to a Communist cadre and they had plenty of houses.

  Wang’s son had burned his hand while working as a cook and, lacking health insurance, was out of job. China’s cradle-to-grave housing and health system was unraveling as a result of state-run companies downsizing in preparation for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and her son was among the many laid-off workers who idled their days away, living off meager savings and hoping things didn’t get worse. He complained about a news broadcast he had recently seen; one segment said China’s basic economic level had reached the “moderately well-off” level, while the next was a story on people starving and suffering from some natural disaster.

  Wang started lamenting, “The Communist Party spreads such beautiful propaganda. What do you mean Beijing’s population has reached the ‘“moderately well-off” level’? This is fucking bullshit.” Gone was my charming hairdresser and in her place was a Beijinger with years of pent-up grievances.