Beijing Bastard Page 18

  I hoped they weren’t going to make us talk to our dead ancestors, as they had made me talk to Yeye two years before as he lay in a coma in a brightly lit intensive care ward. I thought back to what the fortune-teller had said about Yeye. Had he really died disappointed? I knew he was disappointed in his three ungrateful grandchildren, none of whom had earned a Ph.D. as he had or spoke much Chinese. I never felt as though I lived up to his expectations.

  But something odd had happened at his last Christmas dinner, during my senior year in college. He was uncharacteristically quiet and as I looked across the holly-festooned tablecloth at his stooped form, I saw something I could barely believe: There was actually a soft look in his eye, and I swore I saw something ineffable pass over the table from him to me. It felt a lot like the gesture of approval I had been waiting my whole life for from him. I wasn’t sure of what I’d seen, but when he became sick the next month, it made sense that he had known the end was near and had finally shown his hand. Not wanting to interrupt my studies, my parents forbade me from coming home to visit him in the hospital until Spring Break, after everyone else in the family had already visited. When I got home, we drove straight to the hospital. “Just talk to him,” said my mom as we stood over his bed. “He can’t hear us,” I’d said. I’d been tongue-tied and embarrassed and had mumbled a few things. My mother had stepped in and told him in a clear, chipper voice that Val was standing here and that she was about to graduate from college and was going to China in the fall. I’d nodded mutely. Shortly after we got home that night, the hospital called to say that he had passed away. The last words he heard on this earth were that I was going to China. Unless he didn’t hear it at all.

  According to the traditional Chinese custom of ancestor worship, when your elder dies, the cycle of obligations that constitutes your relationship to him or her doesn’t end—it just kicks into a higher gear. You care for their graves, and in return, they bring you prosperity and good fortune, and your success glorifies them. But if you neglect them, they become vengeful “hungry ghosts” bent on your destruction, and your failure then reflects back on them, bringing shame and disappointment. It is a vicious, never-ending cycle.

  I wasn’t sure how much my family still believed in these ideas after all that they had gone through, all that China had gone through. All I knew was that we went to bow before my ancestors’ graves and that I felt Yeye’s presence in my life every day. I felt watched and judged but I also felt part of something strong, something that had survived.

  Yeye’s death had an unexpected effect on my family—all my closest relatives suddenly seemed like complete strangers who had no connection to me whatsoever. I realized we had all related to one another through him, and when that nucleus disappeared, we flew apart like errant electrons. Whenever an old person exits or a new person enters a family, everything changes.

  Now that I was in Beijing, I suddenly had so many questions for him about what the city had been like in his day, what his life had been like. I had lost my chance. And I had no way of telling him what it was like now or that my Chinese had improved a lot, thanks to all of the “eaah training” I’d undergone at home. My only consolation is that he knows my news already or had even played a part in me going to China.

  As we were cleaning up to go, Xiao Peng asked if I was hungry and offered me one of the apples. I was disgusted. Wasn’t that like eating the bodies of our relatives? Like the wafer and the wine? He laughed and said it wasn’t like that at all, as he took a big bite of the apple.

  • • •

  The next morning, instead of going to see The Document, we went to visit Great-Aunt Mabel’s new courtyard house. The hutong was thick with the call of food vendors and Bobo had to shove out of the way two tricycles and two bicycles blocking the doorway so we could enter. The courtyard was like a jungle inside, with vines hanging from the eaves and from a lopsided trellis, semidead trees languishing in pots, weeds straggling up from between the bricks on the ground. One big tree loomed over it all. The house itself was in good shape, and when we went inside the rooms, we saw they were big and high-ceilinged. We walked through all sixteen empty rooms, our voices bouncing loudly off the concrete floors and dusty plaster walls. Bobo said Nainai’s house had twenty-two rooms, and if she exchanged it for a different one, it would be even bigger than this one.

  As I stood between my mom and Xiao Peng, she said to him, “Two or three years of living here is enough for Val,” hoping for his corroboration.

  Xiao Peng smirked and said, “But China’s so big, there are so many places you haven’t gone to visit yet.”

  On the drive home, Bobo said that he’d gotten a call from Party Secretary Li that morning. She had corroborated the existence of The Document but said it was in a repository that only someone from a danwei, or work unit, someone like her, had access to. But seeing it would be no easy feat even for her—she would need explicit written permission from the head of the Xicheng District Housing Management Bureau. Bobo counseled holding off on seeing it until there was an impending demolition.

  My dad asked in a hesitant voice, “What does The Document say again?”

  “That if the titleholder ever returns to China and establishes residency, the whole house will be returned to you, empty. Why are there tenants there now? Because you haven’t established residency.”

  “If I want to do that, does it mean I have to live here, long-term . . . ?”

  “No, you don’t have to move here. But when it gets demolished, and you’re negotiating with them, you put The Document right in front of them and say, ‘Here! You must give me an empty courtyard house. And you take care of the tenants. I’m not taking care of the tenants!’” Bobo gave a big smile, and slapped “The Document” into his open palm with triumph. I never understood how, if it was so hard to see The Document, Bobo knew its contents so well. “Do you understand?”

  Dad nodded grimly, then smiled with his mouth only. “I understand. I understand perfectly.” He paused. “So I don’t have to establish residency here.”

  “No, no.”

  “But if I don’t, there’s no way to chase out the tenants unless it gets demolished.”

  “Right.” Bobo thought it would happen in the next five to ten years. “The most important thing is that when it comes time to demolish this house, they know that the owner is an overseas Chinese and that they won’t be able to dismiss you so easily.”

  I wondered what Nainai would want to do. I suspected that she didn’t want the connection with Beijing anymore. She was never coming back, and even if she did, she would no longer recognize the city she grew up in. I suspected she would probably take the cash.

  Bobo, of course, didn’t mention his own wishes for the house. Did my parents suspect Bobo’s hope to live in the new house? Did he even have that hope, after what had happened with Great-Aunt Mabel’s house?

  • • •

  I took my parents to the City Edition office, introduced them to my coworkers, and showed them the magazine, pointing out the masthead with my name on it. My mom looked proud but a little puzzled to see the desk and computer where I spent most of my days, far away from her. My dad didn’t look unduly impressed but he did seem reassured to meet Sue and to see that another sane, intelligent American had made the same decision I had to move halfway around the world from her family to work on a two-bit magazine. Sue asked about the Peking Opera story, which was scheduled to be the cover story of the upcoming issue, and I told her that due to the re-interview I needed more time to finish it and we should probably push it to the next issue. She disguised her annoyance as best she could.

  I organized a lunch for my parents to meet my friends. We went to Jin Ding, a raucous dim sum palace, and sat around a lazy Susan covered with tiny plates. Anthony was there, as were Jade, Cookie, Rachel, Yang Lina, and a few others. We went around in a circle and each of us solemnly stated how many years we’d been in C
hina. When we were done, my dad chuckled and said, “You all sound like you’re talking about your prison sentences!”

  My mom chimed in, “Val’s always complaining about the pollution here—it’s really not so bad!”

  I had instructed everyone to keep mum about Anthony but halfway through lunch, Rachel forgot and dropped an allusion to my boyfriend. Everyone froze, silent.

  “What was that?” my mom asked.

  I shook my head slowly at Rachel.

  She warbled something unintelligible in a British accent and I quickly changed the subject. There were still limits to what I would show my parents of my life and what they were willing to see.

  I gently refused to let them visit my apartment, saying that it was too far away and not worth the time. Not only would the local sex shops, prostitute neighbors, and bomb-shelter décor of the apartment have upset them, but also I would have had to systematically efface all signs of Anthony’s presence there, just like that character in Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, who in a fast-cutting montage takes down all his photos and packs away all his boyfriend’s clothing when his parents come to New York from Taiwan for his green card wedding. It’s a funny conceit for a movie but such a hassle in real life, and depressing also to confront the lies I had to tell in order to live the life I wanted.

  Of course I didn’t mention my dream of making a documentary. I knew they would have thought it a waste of time, just more evidence that I was ruining my life. I didn’t need to reinforce those naysaying voices in my head that I’d tried so hard to drown out. Sometimes living a double life is easier for everyone.

  • • •

  As the week went on, my parents and our relatives became more relaxed with one another. Once at lunch, when Bomu wheeled a dish around on the lazy Susan for Dad to try and Bobo scooped up a big spoonful of it, Dad moved in to receive it, but Bobo just deposited the food onto his own plate, leaving Dad hanging. Bomu, sitting between them, nudged Bobo and they all laughed at his rudeness. Dad wasn’t a guest anymore, just one of the family.

  Spending a week with my parents would normally leave me curled into a defensive crouch, but for once they were out of their comfort zone, and I was in mine. My mom talked about me in the third person as usual, but what she said surprised me. (“Val does all of the talking in the cabs. We don’t even open our mouths. They would know instantly that we weren’t from here.”) My parents did seem somehow out of place in Beijing, like rubber figures among people hewn of wood. She also asked me if I had learned any “authentic Chinese cooking” I could teach her. Bobo talked about me in the third person too. (“Her Chinese has improved so much since she first came. We’re so impressed at how capable she is, coming here with nothing and making a successful life for herself.”) While their praise may just have been a way to be polite to one another, I lapped it up.

  • • •

  On the last day, Bobo finally took us to see Nainai’s courtyard house. Unlike my dad’s childhood recollection, it was not on a wedge of land at all but rather at the corner of a quiet hutong and a busy street, across from which was a huge modern office building, which Bobo said was a “Grade A” building and would greatly increase the property value of the house. The shiny modern building and the low, gray houses didn’t seem to fit together in the same frame. We walked in through the open red door and confronted not a huge open space but a narrow corridor that ran around the perimeter of the courtyard. After all the families had been moved into the house years ago, the space hadn’t been big enough, so they started building sheds in the middle of the courtyard to put coal burners, kitchens, and extra bedrooms.

  “My, it’s old,” said my mom.

  Bobo stood in the middle of the corridor with his arms outstretched.

  “The Second Door was here.”

  “I remember,” said my dad, and pointing to one of the rooms, said, “I lived there.” Walking a little farther, he said, “And Shushu was born here. That was Mom’s bedroom.”

  We walked all the way around the narrow corridor, which was jagged with things constructed only of the simplest materials. A metal shed lashed crookedly together with wire and topped with a makeshift roof patched with plastic held down with bricks. A tarp-shrouded pile of something used as a shelf for small pots of plants and bright plastic soda bottles. Loose, thin underclothes drying on wires. There were no sign of the locust tree, flowering crab apple tree, and grape arbor that Bobo said originally stood in the huge courtyard.

  “It’s so broken,” said my mom as she peeked into a curtained room, reporting that things were piled up haphazardly inside. Mom could have been talking about the house’s Confucian unity, which indeed was broken. The layers of other people’s used and unused things, piled up like a collage, made distinguishing the original layout of the house nearly impossible, and heartbreaking. There was no way to delete all that mess and rewind fifty years to when the courtyard was empty and peaceful, and my dad a little boy. My dad said he vividly remembered going from this house to Great-Aunt Mabel’s house.

  Bomu said that the house actually looked better than usual. The government had painted the outer walls for the anniversary and hung up some red lanterns.

  A woman wheeled in her bike and went inside, but we exchanged no words. For a moment, I saw us as cartoon characters in a Communist textbook: the evil, well-fed landlords (Americans, no less) coming to survey their property and the noble workers full of dignity.

  Outside, Bobo and my dad huddled to one side, whispering about what would need to be done next. My dad looked appalled, as if he wanted nothing to do with this house, its history, and all its complications. The web he’d wandered into was stickier than he’d imagined and I saw he wanted to return to a place where the rules were clear and people actually followed them. I gave up the secret hope I’d been harboring of living there. We snapped some photos to show Nainai, and left.

  • • •

  Just before the fiftieth anniversary, my parents prepared to join their tour. I stood in their hotel room as they packed their suitcases. Before we parted, I wanted to tell them about some of the things I was now beginning to understand about them, little things like why my mom always carried clean toilet paper around in her purse, and bigger things too, about our family’s past and the ways it affected us today. Their peripatetic childhoods, recounted as stories, sounded so glamorous to me, but only now could I begin to imagine their reality. So much loss. So much beginning again. And then to have children who were so different than you, who had different values. Plus, could we talk for a second about the absurdity of our situation? My mom had asked me to teach her authentic Chinese cooking. But these weren’t things I knew how to talk about with them. I just told them I was glad they’d come, and they told me they were glad to see their relatives after so many years and glad to see that I had friends and what seemed to be a stable life.

  Then my dad started talking, surprising me.

  “Did you notice how I was able to connect with my cousin? Almost instantly?”

  “Childhood companions,” said my mom cheerfully.

  “No, because—” said my dad, drawing a breath that shook with emotion as he tried to formulate his thought. He exhaled heavily. “My cousin is just that type of person.”

  “Yes, he’s really great,” I agreed.

  “He’s very friendly,” said my mom.

  “And his father was like that,” he said, and then, shaking off his sentimentality, added brusquely, “His father never worked for one day in his life. Rich family. Didn’t have to.”

  On the day of the anniversary, Anthony’s parents switched from the hotel in the courtyard house to one overlooking the Avenue of Eternal Peace so they could watch the military parade. Anthony and I joined them. Tanks and missiles rolled majestically down the wide avenue, followed by phalanxes of goose-stepping soldiers, then more tanks, more missiles, more soldiers. Jets cruised in formation t
hrough the sky. It was breathtaking and impressive and grotesque. I was relieved to see it through their eyes, as some buffoonish show of might that bore no relation to me at all.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Warrior and the Clown

  Reporter Wang?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Reporter Wang?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Guess.” It was a middle-aged man with a Beijing accent. I’d interviewed so many people who fit that description.

  “I really don’t know.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!” I said impatiently. “Just tell me, all right?”

  “It’s Zhang Laichun.”

  “Oh, hi!”

  “We haven’t heard from you in a long time.” It had been a month or so since my Peking Opera story had come out.

  “I’ve been so busy with other stories.”

  “You should call us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, kicking myself for my knee-jerk apology.

  “What are you doing on Saturday?”

  “Nothing special.”

  “We’d like to invite you to my father’s birthday party at noon on Saturday.”

  Though I had met many other people since Grandfather Zhang, his words still grated harshly on my ear: Even if I talked to you every day for ten years, you still wouldn’t know anything about Peking Opera. He had lodged himself in my mind as nothing less than the decomposing heart of Old Beijing itself. An idea had been percolating in my mind.

  “Would you mind if I videotaped you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Great. I’ll be there at noon.”

  I immediately called Yang Lina. We had become friends, whatever that meant in Beijing. Life here was still governed by guanxi, connections, and friendship felt like wampum, something to be bartered for the stuff you needed. Old Men had gone on the international film festival circuit and she needed letters and résumés to be translated to and from English, always at the last minute. In exchange for my help, she offered me many things. Her equipment. Her ex-boyfriends. Her advice. Never date a poor artist. Always use protection. I refused everything, especially the condescending advice. In America, we learn about sex in elementary school, I said. At this, she erupted into an oddly violent giggle and told me I was even more adorable than ever. If I’d wanted an older sister, I’d gotten one, with all the bossiness and superiority built right in.