Beijing Bastard Read online

  “Oh.”

  “It’s very feminine,” he said.

  “Not where I come from.”

  “And where is that?”

  “America,” I said, “and looking feminine is not what I want anyhow.”

  “Why don’t I dye it for you?” he asked. I could see them kidnapping me, their perfect clone, and transporting me back to their home planet. No thank you. I had him hack off the fringe in the back, paid my twenty kuai, and left. At two dollars fifty, at least it wasn’t an expensive disaster.

  The salon was around the corner from my house, so I passed by often. Some days the boss would be outside tinkering on his big red-and-white motorcycle and he would rev the engine when I walked by and throw me saucy looks. I rolled my eyes. But after that first disastrous haircut, I went back a second time and a third and fourth. There was something I enjoyed about my monthly cameos. Everyone greeted me like an old friend and the boss always pushed his peons out of the way to cut my hair. They peppered me with questions. What was I doing in Beijing? Did I like it? And had I ever ridden on a motorcycle? I countered with questions of my own and found out that they were all from down south and had moved to Beijing together and all lived together in the same apartment. And all day long in the salon, they pickled in the saccharine brine of endless Cantopop together. What a life. Like a sitcom, the kind where everyone kind of looks alike, gets along, and talks about nothing all day long.

  Each time, I came out with another bad haircut and I swore it was the last time, but I just wasn’t ready for a messy breakup. In my neighborhood full of families, my young and single hairdressers who had come to the city from afar were the closest I had to kin.

  My silent new apartment started growing on me. Even the mysterious sounds echoing through the air shaft off my kitchen had a routine of their own: Old men hocked phlegm in the mornings, chopsticks clickety-clacked together as they were washed after mealtimes, and almost constantly, a boy was caught in a screaming match with his grandmother. I dubbed them Screaming Granny and Horrible Boy. I even began recognizing them in the yard outside: Screaming Granny was a small and shrewish old woman and Horrible Boy was a child with a big head and a wispy tail of hair hanging down his back. Other neighbors started to take on distinct character too, such as the Perambulator, a bald, hulking old man with heavy-lidded eyes, who every day shuffled slowly, slowly around the neighborhood with a cane.

  Our yard was always filled with middle-aged xianren—the loafers, idlers—who gathered at all hours of the day, playing badminton or mah-jongg, walking their tiny white Pekinese dogs, watching everyone going in and out, as if they lived in a village where nothing much happened. They sat on old sofas that always stayed in the yard. My neighbor and the woman with the bowl cut, whom I nicknamed Bowl Cut, were often out there together. They had missed out on a proper education because of the Cultural Revolution and now they were being laid off from their state-run jobs. I thought of them as a lost generation. Bowl Cut, perpetually clad in her elephant-emblazoned pajama set, was one of the few who greeted me, even occasionally asking if I’d eaten or warning me not to go out too late at night. There was someone whacking women over the head with sticks, she said, robbing them and leaving them for dead. For some reason I chuckled. China’s not so safe anymore, she said sternly.

  After her turn to check the meters had passed, other neighbors took theirs, thus beginning a notorious monthly routine: first a light rapping like a snare drum on my locked security door, then an angry banging and rattling, and then finally the yell, “Open up! I know you’re in there!” Was it the police? Or just a meter checker? I never opened up. Some learned to announce themselves, some left notes in my door, while others resorted to cornering me as I slunk in and out of the building. They would have a curious look around my apartment and ask me questions about what I was doing in China. I asked the same of them but none of us ever gave a straight answer.

  My nightmares about the police persisted, but they took on an increasingly surreal cast. I dreamed one night that the police were going around to every apartment, banging on the doors and checking to see how much soybean milk each resident had drunk.

  One day as I walked down the stairs of my apartment building, I saw the door of the apartment below mine close hastily, and so the next time I bumped into my neighbor across the landing I asked her if she knew of someone moving into 401.

  “Someone said a girl who works in a karaoke bar down the street moved in last week,” she answered.

  “Karaoke bar?”

  She shot me a look as if I didn’t know what happened at a karaoke bar, aside from off-tune singing.

  “Is she from Beijing?” I asked.

  “Would a girl from Beijing be living here? I think she’s from Sichuan,” she said. I could almost hear her explaining what kinds of girls came from Sichuan to Beijing, the capital of China, to work in karaoke bars, but she just gave me a humored look. “You don’t understand, do you?” She looked as if she’d said too much and shut the door. My neighborhood was a haven for the undocumented—not only Westerners but also Chinese people, particularly girls who came from places like Sichuan to work in places like karaoke bars.

  Just outside of my gate was a young woman who tended stacks of small bamboo steamers, which sat on a large metal barrel filled with hot coals. Every morning on my way to work, I bought a steamerful of baozi from her. The woman’s face was fresh and unlined but as she emptied ten tiny baozi into a wafer-thin plastic bag, I noticed her hands were as chapped and wrinkled as an old crone’s. Winter in Beijing was gray and cold and the bag warmed my hands as I walked. I ate slowly, trying to make the baozi last the entire twenty-minute walk.

  One morning I was suddenly struck by an image of my mom warming her hands with a hot bagel on a cold New York morning, a story she had told me many times. I knew my parents had emigrated to the States and worked hard so that I wouldn’t end up back in China, warming my hands with pork buns. Our lives had a sick, sweet symmetry that they did not seem to appreciate.

  As I walked into the office and popped into my mouth the last baozi, my coworker saw me and shot me a look of disgust.

  “You eat those?” she asked. “Street food is filthy.” She then took great pleasure in telling me that a few years ago they had caught a baozi seller from the countryside whose baozi had been stuffed with human flesh—right in the Xidan District where she and my relatives lived.

  City Edition continued to be a shaky mast to lash my life to. While our art director worked alone in the office late one night with the goateed web designer Scott, he subjected her to a confession that he had participated in blood-drinking rituals in Florida years ago. He claimed blood didn’t actually taste so bad. He was dismissed and a laptop disappeared with him. Soon thereafter I returned to the office one day to find Sue yelling at Distributor Lu and telling him to leave and never come back. He was the thief in the office and that wasn’t the worst of it, she said. She may have been paranoid but Beijing seemed to confirm one’s hallucinations.

  Max decided to bring his fortune-teller into the office. “She’s the real thing,” he said. “From the countryside.”

  Everyone wanted a turn. Sue went in first, then other coworkers. Each came out seeming as though she’d looked a ghost in the eye. She was eerily accurate, they said. She knew the exact date someone’s parents had gotten into a car accident. She knew someone else had had kidney surgery and she said it had happened without a knife because she’d probably never heard of laser surgery.

  She spared no one.

  “If you give birth to a boy, you’ll die in childbirth.”

  “You will be a young widow.”

  “You had an affair,” she said to the husband of a couple sitting before her and in the shocked silence that ensued she said, “But it’s okay because so did she.”

  Everyone was reevaluating their lives in the light of what she had told them.
She told Sue and Max that their company would never make money because the building had been built on the site of an old temple. They had to move out of this building as soon as possible, but for a temporary fix, she skewed all the desks at weird angles.

  When I went in for my session the next day and sat next to her on a couch, I saw she had the stocky build and ruddy complexion of a farmer, and the same impassive stare, as did a buddy she’d brought. The enormous glass table that had filled the small conference room was gone. Max shrugged when I asked about it. Bad feng shui, he said. She asked my birthday in the lunar calendar, slowly examined my palms, then looked me dead in the eye, as if seeing straight through to my soul or thinking deeply about what she was going to have for lunch. Her eyes lost focus and she began to speak cryptic rhymes as her hand tapped out a rhythm on the towel on her lap. When she came out of her trance, she and her handler interpreted what she’d seen on the other side.

  She said I’d never be very rich but I’d never be very poor either. I’d stay in China for three to five years. After leaving, I’d have a constant desire to return, but I’d come back only once. When I was twenty-seven, I would meet my mate, who would be three years my senior and more successful than me. She told me I was doing the right thing, walking the road of culture, and that I should work at a TV or radio station. Most of what she said was vague because, she said, I was so young and my future so full of possibility. The Chinese idea of fate is less like a sneak preview of a movie already shot and more like a treatment for an as-yet-unmade one, especially near the beginning of life. It was up to me to make what I would of it. I confess to being disappointed.

  However, she did say some clear and damning things about my personality—that I am very smart but afraid of everything, that I have a surly, inflexible personality, and that I zixun fannao, which I translated as “seeks trouble for oneself.”

  “Is there anything I can do about this?”

  She shook her head no. I figured if I couldn’t change it, I might as well make it the bedrock of my new idea of myself. Seeks trouble for oneself.

  Then she started telling me about my past. She knew I wasn’t born in China, that I had come one year before, that I had one older brother. Check, check, check.

  “Someone in your family was in the government. Your father?”

  “No.”

  “Your grandfather?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see him very clearly. Well, he died disappointed.”

  I wasn’t unduly impressed. Fish around in most families that had fled China and you’d find someone who had been in the government. And didn’t everyone die disappointed?

  • • •

  The phone still rang each Sunday evening and my stomach would drop out as I prepared for the onslaught of self-doubt that my parents’ calls would instigate. I was amazed that these feelings could be effortlessly transmitted halfway around the world on a thin metal filament. Now, not only was everyone’s offspring going to medical school, but they were also getting married.

  “We went to a wedding this weekend,” my mom reported breathlessly. “My friend Janet, my oldest friend from Burma who lives in Philadelphia, remember her? Her oldest daughter, Lisa, the one named after me, got married. She’s five two and her husband is six one. Can you imagine? Guess where they met? Emergency room. Emergency room doctors. All their friends at the wedding were doctors too. Boy, those doctors sure know how to party! All out on the dance floor until the wedding was over. I said, ‘How do you do it?’ And Lisa said, ‘We work hard but we play hard too!’”

  It wasn’t enough that we had to excel at work, but we had to excel at getting married and partying too. Did it ever end? My best friend from childhood had gone to medical school but she had shocked everyone by marrying an East Village tattoo artist.

  “Do you like him?” I asked my mom after the wedding.

  “It’s her life to ruin,” she answered.

  I wondered what my parents told their friends about me, or if they even spoke about me at all.

  Then the conversation took an unexpected turn. “My friend Betty is organizing a tour group that is coming to China during the anniversary celebration in October,” my mom said. “One week, eight cities. It comes to Beijing first.”

  “Are you joining it?”

  “We’re thinking about it,” my mom said.

  “No, no,” my dad said. “No decision yet.”

  “Is it a tour for white people?” I asked. “That might be kind of weird for you guys.”

  “No, everyone on it is Chinese. All the tour guides will speak Chinese.”

  “I think you should do it. Bobo and Bomu and I can take you around Beijing.”

  “No decision yet,” my dad repeated.

  “Your sister can come for a week to take care of Nainai,” my mom said to him. “You take care of her the rest of the year; Judy can do it for one week.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “We have to go.”

  My parents in China: It was hard to imagine. As much as I associated them with this place, it was me who actually lived here.

  For hours after I talked to them, I sat paralyzed on my couch, unable to reenter the fragile life I’d built for myself here.

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  It Stinks

  City Edition moved to the Asia-Pacific Building, a ten-story yellow-brick building with red trim and a huge Bank of China billboard clapped to the roof. It was a step up from the Office of Defense Conversion, and to Max’s delight, the building had been designed using feng shui principles dictating that none of the doors or windows could face a cardinal direction and so the whole building sat at an awkward angle to the road. (I laughed, but about a year after we moved into the building, Sue and Max sold the magazine for a sizeable amount of money.) The building was actually an apartment building and the new office was a three-bedroom. One bedroom held the editorial department, one the design department, and the third was Max’s office complete with a “computer” that was merely a monitor and keyboard sitting in jaunty relationship to each other. The large living room was for advertising. In the kitchen, our driver regularly whipped up multicourse lunches for us. Max took an apartment upstairs and would drift lazily down to the office in a shorty robe emblazoned with the artist Xu Bing’s fake Chinese characters. It was a homey arrangement.

  But sitting with my desk facing Sue’s all day was nerve-racking. She looked on impatiently as I labored over my articles, self-consciously doing interviews over the phone and polishing each sentence to a lapidary perfection. When I finally submitted them to her, she would crack them into pieces and rewrite them in her own voice, pooh-poohing my objections. “Why are you mad about my edit?” she said once. “That story was no good in the first place.”

  Most weekend nights found me drinking with Jade, Steve, and Max in a bar filled with other expats. I drank to forget the difficulties of my life: being lonely, struggling at my job, chasing a dream that seemed so out of reach. As winter deepened, so did the drinking. But no matter how much I drank, I never really felt better.

  While I enjoyed spending time with Jade, there were so many ways in which we were mismatched. One Saturday afternoon we watched Beijing Bastards together in Steve’s apartment; Jade had found a pirated VCD of it. “Val, this is the movie that brought you to China?” she said. “It stinks.” And seeing it through her eyes, I realized it did stink. Plotless, inane, badly shot. Drained of all the secret meaning it had had for me. I saw the foundation of my dreams from a different angle, one that made it look flimsy and vaguely risible. I wished I hadn’t rewatched it, especially with Jade.

  So when a woman with a British accent called me at City Edition to tell me about an art exhibition of hers that she hoped I would promote in the arts listings, I jotted a note to myself to go. It seemed a promising place to meet some new friends. The woman introduced herself
as Cookie Cousins and said she’d studied calligraphy at the Central Academy of Fine Arts the previous year and her work was all modern calligraphy, and that I should come along to the opening in a few weeks. There was something inviting in her voice, aside from the fact that she was inviting me to invite the whole city to her opening.

  When the night came, Jade had no interest in going. I donned a new pair of boots, which were tall and black with three-inch high heels and two big silver buckles. In the store they had looked sexy and dangerous, but when I strapped them on, they looked gaudy and ridiculous. The more I looked, the less I could tell. I teetered down Sanlitun, buoyed by the rowdy laughter and yelling jangling out of the bars into the dark street.

  The Dreamy Gallery was small, full of people and blindingly bright inside. I walked in mincing steps around the perimeter, looking at the art and trying not to topple over. The calligraphy barely looked like characters, more like abstract ink-drip paintings, wild and idiosyncratic. Tall paper lanterns painted in the same way glowed warmly on the floor. I looked around for Cookie. She was easy to spot, in an unabashedly loud thrift-store dress, messy spiky hair, and big clear-framed glasses, talking nonstop in a high-pitched, dotty British accent, surrounded by friends, some Western, some Chinese. You should be my friend, I thought as I stood blankly on the other side of room with the light glaring on my awful boots, but I left my thrift-store clothes at home. I went home without even saying hi.

  The next Saturday night when my phone rang, it was Jade as usual. I dutifully headed out to meet her, Steve, and Max. While other parts of the city went quiet at night, my street was filled with a strange mix of people: dour and tired farmers who had come to the neighborhood to work on all-night construction projects, hairdressers who also worked all night, karaoke girls in tight floor-length outfits, men in suits driving black cars, young Westerners headed out to bars. I didn’t blend in, but I didn’t stick out either. My neighborhood was itself a nightlife destination, lined with pleasure palaces with English monikers: the Backingham Palace, a cylindrical bathhouse with gigantic copper columns; the Moon and Stars karaoke bar; and Maggie’s 2, a brothel advertising itself with a huge photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger smoking a cigar. At the only intersection in the neighborhood sat the New Ark Hotel, a three-star affair that rented out what they called “o’clock rooms” that went for a much cheaper rate than a whole night. Being out on the street was like teetering on the edge of the world, but it felt safer than being in my apartment. At least I wasn’t breaking any laws out there.