Beijing Bastard Read online

  I laughed to myself, imagining Wu Wenguang lopping off heads like a bloodthirsty revolutionary in his zeal to record on his tape nothing less than the spirits of his subjects.

  “Do the performers in the troupe have interesting stories?”

  “Interesting stories? People’s stories aren’t interesting,” he growled. “What is interesting is people’s knowledge, their relationships, their attitudes. Stories are shallow. Those things are deep.”

  Deep. That word again. So high school. And yet . . . so true.

  “Actually, that’s why I called you today,” he said. “I’m doing the subtitles and I need your help translating one of the folk songs. It’s an exceptionally dirty song and my translator is a nice Chinese girl who is too much of a prude to translate properly. Plus to make everything harder, the government has censored many of the dirtiest characters from the dictionary and I have to make them by hand on my computer. These country people have such a rich vocabulary of dirty words and the government wants to choke it to death. They want to control how we think and feel. Can you believe how disgusting they are?”

  I mm-hmmed, fiddling with the magazine layout on the computer. “I can help you translate it. Just fax the song to me.”

  “Actually, that won’t work. It’s in a local dialect and I’ll have to explain it to you, plus it has to go out to a festival tomorrow. Do you have time to translate it right now?”

  “Why not?” This was not a country of people who planned ahead.

  “And you’re not a prude, are you? It is crucial that I get a really dirty translation. If you’re not comfortable doing this, just say so.” I looked over at my coworkers tapping away on their computers.

  “No, I’m not a prude.”

  Translating was a painstaking process. He read the song to me line by line, first in their local dialect with the obscure slang, then translated it into Mandarin obscured by his thick accent. He explained the dirty parts and repeated it slowly to make sure I had understood him. I then repeated the lines aloud in Chinese. Saying dirty words in Chinese was like saying any other words to me, but the sound of them made my coworkers look up in alarm. I then read Wu back my English translations.

  “Roll over and stick it in,” I whispered, suddenly shy.

  “What was that last part?”

  I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece and scrunched down behind my computer screen, glancing nervously at my coworkers, who were now as oblivious to the dirty English as I had been to the Chinese. I enunciated loudly and carefully, “Stick it in!”

  “What?”

  “Stick. It. In,” I said, blushing. “S-t-i-c-k! It! In!”

  “Are you sure it’s dirty enough?” he asked.

  “How about ‘Roll over and stick your dick in. Your. Dick. D-i-c-k.”

  “That’s better.”

  “Okay, read me back what you have.”

  “Roll over and stick your dick in.”

  “Deep. Add ‘deep’ at the end. D-e-e-p.”

  • • •

  During my first year in China I taught myself how to read Chinese with a textbook published by a state-run publishing house. I saw in the table of contents that there was one chapter on film and I turned to it eagerly. Aside from teaching me some useful vocabulary words, it taught me all I needed to know about the state of Chinese film under the Communists.

  movie

  film

  documentary film

  scene

  parade

  peasant

  People’s Liberation Army (PLA)

  mouth

  to shout

  slogan

  to hold up

  placard

  leader

  to wave

  to found

  activity

  gala party

  youth

  firecrackers

  happy

  “Ha ha, how useless!” I chortled to myself. “When will I ever use the words documentary film and People’s Liberation Army in the same sentence?” But China always had a way of surprising me.

  • • •

  Wu Wenguang called again a few weeks later.

  “Wu Wenguang! How are you?” I said.

  “Good, good. I just saw a fantastic new documentary film, called Old Men, about a group of old men who live in the neighborhood of the young woman who shot it. It is the best documentary I’ve seen in a long time.”

  “Is it ‘deep’?”

  “Very deep,” said Wu, not noticing my sarcasm. “It’s amazing that this young woman made it. You would never guess by her appearance that she had this documentary in her—she’s actually a dancer in the People’s Liberation Army dance troupe.”

  “What? Are you kidding?” The People’s Liberation Army is the largest standing army in the world, ready at a moment’s notice to crush all enemies of the workers’ paradise. I had no idea they had a dance troupe.

  “No, no. Talent really blooms in the most unexpected places,” he said. “Yang Lina asked me to help her find someone to polish the English subtitles. I thought of you first. Are you interested?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight is fine.”

  “Have you quit your job yet?”

  “Soon, soon.”

  I went downstairs after work and looked around. The only person standing outside was a woman I thought far too attractive to be a documentary maker. I was expecting someone serious and maybe a little sour, like a female version of Wu Wenguang. This woman was cartoonishly beautiful: Her eyes were big and bright, her lips rosy, and her cheeks as full as apples. I gave her a quizzical look.

  “Wang Zhenluo?” she asked. She smiled to reveal crooked front teeth.

  “Yang Lina?” With those ruddy cheeks and her curvy physique, she did look like a robust revolutionary heroine. I could easily imagine her performing a ballet with a gun in her hand, playing a peasant girl who had thrown off the shackles of oppression and joined the Red Army. Underneath the soft appearance of those heroines always lurked a steely core.

  “Thank you so much for helping me. I just realized today that I need this done in three days to submit to a film festival, and someone told me the English translation I got is just terrible but I don’t read a single word of English. It won’t take long to fix, just a few hours. Wu Wenguang said you are the best translator in Beijing,” she said, her words rushing at me like a waterfall. “I don’t know what I would do without you. You are saving my life. You really are my rescuer. Really.”

  She dished up a long-lashed look of gratitude. I expected nothing more than a gruff—if deeply felt—thank-you from most people in Beijing, and the limpid pools of her eyes rendered me utterly defenseless.

  “Oh no, don’t thank me. I’m just happy to be able to help you,” I said, and began walking.

  “Really, I am completely helpless without you,” she said, shifting into a breathy tone that caught me in midstride.

  “Stop, stop. Let’s go,” I said, angling toward the road to catch a cab. She stopped me and pointed at a white Volkswagen Santana sitting in my office building’s small parking lot.

  “I have a car.”

  These were magic words I rarely heard in Beijing. I clambered eagerly into the passenger seat and we started the long drive out to her apartment on the western edge of the city. She was a terrible driver, absentmindedly swerving all over the road, speeding, tailgating, turning to scrutinize me in busy traffic. She said she knew my boss Max from years ago, that she used to date one of his friends who lived in his dormitory.

  “What was he like then?”

  “He used to keep a monkey in his room and when he came home drunk, which was often, he would beat it.”

  “He hasn’t changed much,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I felt ins
tinctively that if I told her about what I’d been through with Max, she’d understand.

  “Wu Wenguang said you want to make documentaries,” she said sweetly.

  “I do!” I said, not mentioning that I’d originally wanted to make a documentary about filmmakers like her. “But I don’t have a topic yet and I don’t have any equipment. It’s just a dream right now.”

  She turned to me again with an unexpectedly stern look on her face, her brows knit, and said firmly, “You can’t stop dreaming. I have a camera and an editing machine.” My ears perked up. “You can use them whenever you’d like.”

  I had another one of those moments when the sky seemed to crack open and blind me with the unbearably brilliant light of my future. You’d think I’d have learned to mistrust the grandiose promises of the universe by now.

  “Really?”

  “Really. I know you can make a documentary and I’ll do anything I can to help you.” She wove erratically through the erratically weaving traffic. I trusted her words more than any man’s. She turned to look at me as she accelerated toward a line of cars stopped at a red light, and as I braced myself for a bone-shattering crash, she declared emphatically, “I like you.”

  “I like you too,” I said. I liked her recklessness, her generosity, the messy thrill of being with her. In my heart, I felt an instant bond between us—a rare feeling in Beijing or anywhere really. I’d never had an older sister, and I’d always imagined it would be something like this: She would do the things I wanted to do a few years before I did and then steer me in the right direction. Though as I clutched the door handle and jammed on the invisible brake with my foot, I felt like the stodgiest of older sisters.

  Her neighborhood, Qingta, felt more anonymous than mine, the buildings higher and blockier, and more stained with age, with no shops nearby. We climbed the concrete stairwell and paused before her door as she rummaged in her bag for her house keys. A magenta sign with four gold characters brightened up the dark wall and I sounded it out slowly: a mi to fo. Her two-bedroom apartment was similar to mine, its clinical rooms softened by girlish disorder. Papers and bags were scattered everywhere. Photos were taped directly onto the wall. A big off-yellow teddy bear lay on his side on a pink leatherette couch.

  Off of the living room were two rooms, on the left her bedroom and on the right a narrow room filled almost entirely by the metallic bulk of an editing machine. With two monitors like heads perched on two tape decks like gaping mouths, it looked as majestic and dumb as an idol in the wilderness. To find such a thing in an apartment on the edge of Beijing in 1999 was nothing short of a miracle.

  Yang Lina brought the machine to life and sat at the controls as I read along with the translation. It documented a year in the life of a group of old men who gathered in the same spot every day in her neighborhood, squatting on low stools, gossiping, not doing much. The documentary followed them through four seasons, starting in the summer when they searched for shade to sit in and swatted flies from one another’s heads. They were salty old fellows in Mao suits who complained about everything: being nagged by their wives, neglected by their families, forgotten by the Communist Party and about how worthless they felt, fit only for the trash heap. (When one of their wives complained that he doesn’t love her, the old man responded, “If I didn’t love you, I would have strangled you long ago.”) The only thing they enjoyed was one another’s company.

  The documentary moved as slowly as the old men, as did our subtitling, which had to be completely redone. She had already distilled each long line of dialogue into its basic meaning in Chinese and I had to translate it into something that sounded like spoken English and would be short enough to fit on the screen. Xiao Ding’s training was coming in handy.

  By two in the morning, we hadn’t even gotten through autumn. Everything in China took longer than I thought it would. She drove me home all the way across the dark and sleeping city.

  She picked me up again the next evening after work and as we drove past the exact place where her documentary had been shot, a chill shot through me. The documentary had consecrated a completely nondescript spot on the sidewalk, though the old men were no longer there. Through her film I was seeing a side of the rapidly changing city that was hidden in plain sight. It offered me one of the deepest understandings I had of the city yet.

  She picked me up for two more days until the subtitling was finished. At the end of the documentary, one of the old men doesn’t show up for the daily meeting and the others go around to his house, only to find out that he has died.

  The credits rolled and I saw that she worked under another name, Yang Tian-yi, which she said was her Buddhist name. She had put only one reference to herself in the movie, an old man saying that she was the staunchest comrade of them all, arriving each morning before they did.

  “You went every day?” I asked.

  “Almost every day.”

  “For how long?”

  “Two years total.”

  “How did you start doing it?”

  “At the beginning, I saw the old men in the neighborhood and something about them really moved me. I had an instinct about it, so I borrowed cameras from people and started shooting them. You always have to follow your instincts.”

  “Didn’t you have to go to work?”

  “Our work unit doesn’t meet very often, only when we have to perform.”

  The rest of the old men, she said, were now too frail to make their daily meeting and so stayed home alone. Though I was glad to be done with the subtitles, I was sad to leave their slow world. Wu Wenguang had been right—it was strange that this steady documentary about old men had come out of such an erratic flibbertigibbet who had never had big dreams about filmmaking and had never even watched many films. She had simply seen something that moved her and picked up a camera.

  “How much does a machine like this cost?” I asked, running my finger around the plastic shuttling knob of her editing machine. I was turning Chinese, asking the price of everything.

  “Twenty wan,” she said. Two hundred thousand yuan. I did some quick math in my head. With my salary, about eight thousand yuan a month, it would take more than two years to earn enough to buy that machine, if I lived in a cardboard box on the side of the road and ate only grubs and leaves. Yang Lina was a dancer in the People’s Liberation Army troupe. It didn’t add up.

  “How did you afford it?”

  “Oh, I didn’t buy it! My boyfriend bought it for me.”

  “You said, ‘I want an editing machine,’ and he just went out and bought it?”

  “Well, I started editing in those places you rent by the hour, but he didn’t like to see me doing that. When he saw I was really doing this movie, he just bought it for me, and my camera as well.”

  “And the car too?” China was supposed to be a Communist country, but some people seemed to be rolling in it.

  “Yes.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s in finance.”

  “How did you meet him?” I felt embarrassed to be prying, but she spoke completely matter-of-factly about him. She bustled around the apartment doing a version of cleaning that I was familiar with, just moving things from one place to another.

  “He came to the troupe one day and he picked me out of a lineup of dancers,” she said, giving a naughty squeal and looking away, as if replaying the scene in her head. I imagined a back hallway of their theater, all bare and Communist-looking with heavy industrial fittings running along the ceiling, and the soft, beautiful heroines standing in a line as a man with a black pleather man-purse clutched under his armpit walked up and down, pinching their arms before making his selection. “We’re all from the provinces and we all moved to Beijing alone, so we look out for one another. Whenever one of us meets a dakuan, we’ll introduce him to whoever needs one.”

  I acted cool, as if pimping for your
friends was a completely common occurrence in my world too. The dakuan were the Mr. Big Bucks who zipped around town at night in their expensive black cars, talking loudly on their clunky cellphones, eating big dinners, always accessorized with a young, slim creature on their arm. I imagined the dancers sitting on silk pillows and eating bon-bons during the day, beautiful Communist heroines basking in the spoils of capitalism.

  “Many of the dancers have married their dakuan.”

  “Are you going to marry your boyfriend?” I noticed that she didn’t call him her dakuan, so I didn’t either.

  “I really don’t know,” she said with sudden solemnity. “He’s very good to me. I’m always losing my house and car keys, so he made me ten copies of my keys so I’d always have extra. I’m always leaving my cellphone in cabs or restaurants and he always buys me new ones of those too,” she said, shaking her head at her own hopelessness. She was such a xiaojie, the all-purpose Chinese word that meant young woman, waitress, and prostitute. I followed her into her kitchen and found it dusty and empty save for one small pot. She said the only thing she knew how to make was instant noodles. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper as if letting me in on a big secret. “The men in my life have been very important and influential to me.”

  I looked around at her apartment, which he no doubt paid for as well. No one in China seemed to marry for love.

  I went over to her wall of photos. Taped up were close-ups of the tanned, leathery faces of the old men and a group photo of them at Tiananmen Square, where she had taken them on a field trip when she had owned a small breadbox van. Attached to their lapels were tiny butterfly pins with flapping wings that she had bought for them. There were also many photos of her family but no complete family photos, only duos and trios, with her younger brother. Many were of herself and I recognized the set of feminine poses I’d seen her strike already that day, like a deck of queens. The pin-up with flirty eyes. The displeased mother with mock knit brow. The theatrical nun with wide solemn eyes. She sighed and pointed to one photo.