Beijing Bastard

by Val Wang

  “Oh no, she’s gotten started,” said her son, laughing.

  “I may be poor, but I used to be a pretty cultured person. But if they don’t let me be cultured, I’ll curse them. I can’t take it anymore,” she said. She turned to her husband and said, “You worked for the Communist Party for thirty years and what did you ever get? Since we were young, the Communist propaganda has always said that we are living under the red flag, growing up in the heat of the sun. Up until now, I have yet to taste the sweetness.”

  She said they had just put a deposit down on a three-bedroom apartment in a newly built compound south of the city. The 990-square-foot apartment cost around one hundred thousand yuan, just over twelve thousand U.S. dollars. Wang showed me the advertising flyer, which someone had handed them on the street. It showed a bird’s-eye view of a cluster of around twenty buildings, edged by green fields. Above the buildings was a blue sky filled with clouds, and the following text was superimposed on it:

  People who live in the city all dream of, at the end of a busy day at work, returning to a space that they can completely call their own: home. But faced with unattainably high prices, your dream may just turn into an illusion. Qin Yuan will help you to transform your dreams into reality. The low price of 1,130 yuan per meter will move you greatly.

  They were planning to visit the apartment the next day and buy it before the price went up. The way it worked, they told me, was that developers would sell apartments while they were still building them and use that money to finance the construction of later buildings. Unbuilt apartments were the cheapest, then bare concrete apartments, then renovated ones, and so on. But it was a delicate balance; the newspapers were rife with stories of people who bought early and were cheated by unscrupulous developers who ran out of investment money and were never heard from again.

  I asked if I could go with them and they agreed. The compound, almost an hour’s drive south from the western edge of the city, seemed achingly far away, but it was the best they could afford with the little bit of money Wang had saved from years of work. She wasn’t happy about it.

  “Beijingers don’t want to leave Beijing. To grow up in Beijing your whole life and, in the end, to be chased into the mountains—” she said, not knowing how to describe the horror of their exile. After the Cultural Revolution, the countryside symbolized a place of hardship where city people were “sent down” as punishment. “They are making us into peasants. And now the peasants, or people with power or influence, can come into the city.”

  “Peasants at least have land that they can work on. If we go out there, we’ll have no work to do. How about this: We go and ‘Develop the West,’” her husband said, referring to the government’s plan to offer subsidies to those willing to move from China’s richer coastal areas to the underdeveloped inner regions. “Give me some land then—”

  “We’re not afraid of hardship,” she cut in. “We’ll work the fields!” I had a vision of Wang in her Eric’s of Paris T-shirt and perfectly made-up face hoeing in a bean field.

  She turned to me and, in another fit of wild dreaming, pitched an idea of opening a salon in the States.

  “You can be the boss and I’ll work for you,” she said. “I can cut hair all day long. We can make lots of money and come back to China to spend it! I have about ten more good years in me. What do you think? What kind of invitation letter do I need?”

  “I think it’s very difficult to get such a visa. I don’t . . . I’ve never done it before,” I said.

  Her husband looked embarrassed. “It’s not that easy. You have to prove how much money you have in the bank, in U.S. dollars. You have to have a business plan. And now America is restricting Asian and Middle Eastern visas.”

  “Well, just look into it,” said Wang. “Think of all the money we could make.”

  Wang’s entrepreneurial spirit had taken her a long way. She started cutting hair when she was twenty-one and after ten years of working in one of Beijing’s large state-run salons, she quit and opened her own salon. The year was 1987 and Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening-up” policy encouraged private businesses. Wang’s salon was the first shop on a new commercial strip on the north side of Beijing. She decked out the tree in front with strings of tiny lights and opened for business. Working long hours, she earned about thirty times her old salary. Wang kept on top of new trends, learning how to stencil in eyebrows and to do tattoos. After ten years of owning her own salon, she was hired at Eric’s of Paris.

  After four years at Eric’s of Paris and then hopscotching through various salons, she had somehow become one of the Beijingers who just idled at home. It didn’t fit her character.

  “If I had the chance to go to the U.S., I would definitely go,” she hinted. “It’s not that I want to forsake my country, but I’m kanpo hongchen.” Disillusioned with human society. The idiom alluded to the tradition of people retiring to the isolation of the countryside to live a monastic life. “But I’m not willing to go be a monk or a nun. I want to live life.”

  We finished eating, I paid her her Eric’s of Paris rate for the haircut, and we made preparations to meet the next morning.

  “Granny, what do you think about that? We’re going to be living in an apartment!” her husband said.

  The granny didn’t answer.

  “Maybe when we move we’ll have a new mood,” Wang said. “The only sure thing is that there’s going to be a change.”

  • • •

  The next day, I arrived at nine o’clock sharp at the office of the housing developers, on the fourth floor of a two-star hotel, where we were all going to catch a shuttle bus to the compound together. There was no new mood yet. The air was already thick with cigarette smoke. Wang and her husband were sitting around a small table listening to the entreaties of a tanned and gaunt young man in a slightly baggy suit who addressed them as “Big Brother Wang” and “Big Sister Wang.” They were visibly angry. He was smiling overconfidently, wolfishly almost, and apologizing in a loud voice. He, or someone at his company, had sold the apartment that they had put a five-hundred-yuan deposit on. It was a south-facing three-bedroom apartment situated on the ground floor so the aging grandmother could easily walk in and out. There were no more ground-floor apartments in the size and orientation that they wanted. Wang Le suggested an apartment on the third floor. Her husband looked astonished that she would even consider it. She gave a shrug.

  Agent Wang made a great show of returning the money to them and offering cigarettes all around, including to me. He tried to draw me into conversation by noting the coincidence of our common surname, but in this country at least, I didn’t find it much of a coincidence. At least he didn’t try to tell me that five thousand years ago we were family. Agent Wang said he had also sold the apartment that Wang Le’s brother had put a deposit on. As her brother took his deposit back, Agent Wang pumped his hand unctuously while saying, “It was good cooperating with you.”

  Eight of us had come along to view the apartments: me, Wang Le, her husband, her brother, and her two sisters, plus her younger sister’s husband and five-year old daughter, Niu Niu. Her younger sister, skinny with a puff of hair in the front like a rooster’s crown, already owned three homes: one villa and two apartments. Her husband, a Communist cadre who was chain-smoking and talking about raising pigeons, casually mentioned—as if he were talking about matching sweaters—that if other family members bought apartments there, they would too. I wondered if her sister was the “friend” married to the Communist cadre who Wang Le had alluded to yesterday.

  Wang Le asked to see the official certificate of their company to verify that it was legitimate, but Agent Wang laughed away her concerns. “The investor is from Beijing. If he were from Guangdong or Hong Kong, you’d never be able to find him if something went wrong,” he said, and then added what was to become a refrain of our trip today, “You rest easy.”

  We had been
waiting a half hour by this time and we asked him when the shuttle bus was coming. He went behind a partition and, when he emerged, told us that the road to the compound was closed.

  “But aren’t there public buses that go there?” asked Wang’s older sister. “How are they getting through?” He went back behind the partition again.

  The family began milling around the room. Agent Wang came out and, seeing them examining a poster depicting the same bird’s-eye view of the compound that was on the flyer, said that only three of the twenty buildings had been built, but in three more years the whole compound would be completed. The cadre scoffed and said he bet that even if you gave them thirty years, they still wouldn’t finish building it. Wang Le used this opening to jockey for a discount.

  “You rest easy,” said Agent Wang. “We’ll get you the best discount.” He assured us that the delay was due to a little engine trouble and that they were fixing the bus, but minutes later, he admitted that he had no idea what was going on. He concluded that we probably couldn’t go today. Wang and her husband shrugged, resigned to the inefficiency. I wanted to yell at him but knew it wasn’t my place to.

  “Then you find a way!” said Wang’s older sister. She was pudgy and shrill and I was relieved to see her taking control of the situation. “I think I’ve spent too long working in a foreign company. I can’t stand this way of doing things. People have come from so far away to buy your apartments and you can’t even find a bus to take them there.”

  He went back behind the partition and, within minutes, announced that the bus was here. We got in and headed toward the highway. Wang sat in the back to play with Niu Niu. After fifteen minutes of driving on the newly paved highway, we turned off onto bumpy country roads.

  “This road has been bought by the developers. By 2008, when Beijing hosts the Olympics, this area is going to be villas with golf courses,” said Agent Wang, pointing out the window. All that was there now were fields of green and low brown warehouses storing bricks or window frames or boxes of beer. We shared the narrow road with huge blue cargo trucks and bouncy motorized tricycles called bengbeng cars. The whole scene was glazed with hazy summer pollution and I couldn’t decide what would be worse: this desolate countryside or villas filled with Chinese yuppies. After a half hour, we reached the compound.

  There are two words in Chinese that translate into “apartment building”: loufang and gongyu. Loufang, where I lived, borrowed their featureless design from the Soviet aesthetic and you could tell from the outside what the inside would be like: cramped and dark with concrete floors and a dusty balcony crammed with broken sinks and naked baby dolls. Too many people would live there fighting with one another in the too-small space, watching China Central Television while sitting on a thin, hard couch still covered in its original plastic. Gongyu were just the opposite, striving instead toward the Chinese ideal of Westernness. The Grecian detailing and garish paint jobs of the gongyu indicated the openness, sophistication, and hardwood floors inside. I imagined lives of ease filled with DVD watching and joyous family gatherings.

  With this idea in mind, I expected to be greeted at the compound by a statue of some galloping horses or maybe some freestanding Corinthian columns, but the small cluster of dirty concrete buildings we drove up to just screamed loufang. The buildings were painted yellowish with thick blue stripes. They already looked run-down without ever having been lived in.

  “What do you think of the exterior?” said Wang’s older sister.

  “It looks like a steamboat,” said Wang Le. Other than scrawny marigolds growing in the dirt around the buildings, there was little sign of life. The languid whirring of cicadas and hollow metallic clanging from the construction site in the compound were the only sounds. Summer heat had started to rise off the pavement.

  “Well, it’s no villa,” said her younger sister in a shrill voice. “Far from it.”

  The compound had rows of padlocked garages that were, oddly enough, the exact same size as their current house, 200 square feet. Wang anxiously asked Agent Wang if all the parking garages had already been reserved.

  “You rest easy,” he said. “We’ll get you the parking space.”

  The eight of us followed him and his great ring of keys from apartment to apartment, all just dusty concrete shells empty save for the occasional lacquered wood nightstand to imply a bedroom or an asymmetric tchotchke-holding shelf to imply a living room. Agent Wang took us to apartments on the ground and third floors. Wang’s husband kept hinting that the ground floor would be more convenient.

  “She can’t be the only consideration,” said Wang of her mother-in-law, “because in a few years—”

  Agent Wang took us to see a finished apartment. The heavy security door unlocked with a clang and a lone man in a wifebeater tank top opened it. He was unshaven and heavyset and I felt as if I had seen him somewhere before. Afraid to track dirt into his new house, we stood at the threshold, breathing in the cool rush of air-conditioning and craning for a look. I could see fancy kitchen fixtures and a big plush sofa. The bright, immaculate apartment looked as it had been dropped from outer space into the concrete shell and the man shuffled gingerly around in it. The only other person we saw at the compound was a cloth-slippered worker covered head to toe in dust, working in another apartment. In the midst of construction rubble, he had laid down planks of wood and bamboo matting to make a bed, which was then shrouded with a ghostly mosquito net. I imagined how quiet it must be here at night.

  Agent Wang used great pomp to state the obvious. He threw open doors and announced, “The difference is that this apartment is larger than the other one we just saw.” His already loud voice was amplified to an unbearable volume by the bare concrete walls and seemed to get louder at every stop. Wang told me he used to be in the army.

  “You should lower your voice,” she said to him after we had seen five or six apartments. “You must be tired.”

  “It’s no problem!” he yelled.

  We went outside to get away from him. The inside was stifling and clogged with dust, the outside sticky and sweltering. We were exhausted not only from the heat but also from the effort it took to imagine the future when their lives would be relocated into these vast and empty steamboats. I was thirsty, but we hadn’t brought anything to drink, an oversight that might have actually been for the best since none of the toilets were working yet. Wang’s younger sister had brought a big bag of drinks and snacks for Niu Niu, who slurped and chomped her way through them.

  Wang was confused by all of the different apartments that seemed so similar and asked me my opinion, but they had all blurred together in my mind. In such heat, there was a great possibility of making the wrong decision.

  “I asked Niu Niu for her opinion and do you know what she said?” Wang asked as we stood in the atrium of one apartment. I was about to laugh until I realized that she was dead serious. “She said, ‘All three of our houses have living rooms right as you walk in.’” I waited for more insight, but no more was forthcoming. Wang looked as worried as a child.

  “What are you looking for in a house?” I asked her.

  “I’ve lived in such a small place for so long. I’d like to experience the opposite. I’d like a big house,” she said, and added hesitantly, “One that’s not too high up.”

  Agent Wang kept fielding cellphone calls and coming back to crow triumphantly, “We’ve sold another one!” while holding aloft a piece of paper on which was penned the magic digits of the sold apartment. I caught Wang consulting again with Niu Niu. Outside one of the apartments, Niu Niu crouched down, lifted up her skirt, and urinated on the ground.

  Suddenly, Wang and her husband decided to buy a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of one of the buildings, even though the apartment was smaller than the one they had originally put the deposit on and wasn’t south-facing. The master bedroom looked out on a six-foot-high wall, beyond which was a big r
usty industrial building that, according to Agent Wang, was a natural gas plant. He was about to X off the apartment in his book and call in another sale into the head office when Wang paused, uneasy. She was worried that she would have to keep the shades drawn all day to block out the sight of the plant, darkening an already dim apartment. Agent Wang assured them that the plant would be demolished in a few years and transformed into green space. Her sisters joined her in criticizing the apartment. We went outside and stood in a tense circle in the dead heat.

  “I want a third-floor apartment,” Wang said to her husband. “I don’t want to live on the ground floor.” He was shocked by the directness of her declaration. The sisters asked me and I reluctantly agreed with them. The view from the ground floor was oppressive.

  “Even our American friend thinks it’s too low,” said her older sister.

  Wang’s husband shook his head angrily. For him, his mother was the unalterable factor in this equation and he assumed Wang thought so too. Her sisters encouraged her to look at more third-floor apartments. He conceded defeat to the trio of sisters.

  “You do what you want,” he said, sitting down. “I’m not even going to look anymore.”

  “I’m taking my money and buying what I want,” she shot back before going upstairs. “You don’t have to live there.”

  Out of her husband’s earshot, Wang began fuming about his intractability.

  “He’s lived in courtyard houses for fifty years. He can’t change his habits now. He’s like a peasant, walking in and out of our ground-floor house in his slippers. Of course he thinks it’s convenient. I do all of the cleaning,” she said, as she gazed out the window at the bean fields below. “I don’t want to say ugly things, but she doesn’t really have many years left. And she doesn’t ever go out, even now.”

  We prepared to leave. Agent Wang, sweaty but undefeated, smiled wolfishly and said he knew they could resolve their problem. But how could they? They would have to choose between moving upward toward Wang Le’s dream apartment or staying on the ground floor with its familiarity and her husband’s filial obligations. I realized with a flash that they were just like my parents: my dad who would sacrifice everything for Nainai and my mom who wanted to live a more unfettered life. I thought back to the wording on the flyer that led them here in the first place, about one’s dreams ruined because of unattainably high prices. Did Wang Le or my mom ever imagine the true price of their dreams? Did they really think they could convince their husbands to pay?