Beijing Bastard Page 19

  Finally there was something I needed from her.

  “Can I borrow your camera?”

  “Of course. You finally have an idea for a documentary?”

  “Yes. It’s about this old family that does Peking Opera. The grandfather was crippled years ago during a performance and he has been lying in the same bed for thirty years. He yells at everybody from the bed and they all perform Peking Opera too,” I said. I imagined my experience with the Zhangs would be like hers with the old men. I would shift gears, stop pressing them for information, and let their lives unfold naturally. The resulting film would be a document about the dissolution of Old Beijing as seen through the eyes of one family.

  “Do you like Peking Opera?” she asked.

  “Well, not really,” I said. I thought back to a performance Bobo had taken me to at the Workers’ Club, a huge unheated theater whose hard wooden folding seats were filled with the thickly bundled forms of old people. Martial operas are full of exuberant acrobatics, manic backflipping, and spirited swordplay, but of course Bobo had taken me to see a literary opera: a long philosophical argument sung in a slow screech and acted out with tiny but meaningful movements—here a mincing step, there a flicking sleeve—and accompanied by the arrhythmic clanging together of what sounded like pots and pans. The costumes I could appreciate—long brocaded gowns, three-inch wooden platform shoes, headdresses from which sprouted wide fins, colorful flags or pompons on springs—but even they formed part of the crust of Peking Opera that I found impossible to break through. Robots could have been operating the figures from underneath for all I knew. If the theater hadn’t been freezing cold, I would have fallen asleep. “But the family—there is something about them that draws me in. Something deep.”

  “Trust that feeling,” she said, and lent me her camera.

  • • •

  My entrance into the Zhang house, I was happy to find, did not make a huge splash. An assortment of relatives was already twittering around the large room and the TV was on, blaring with a Peking Opera performance. I had brought a copy of my article (titled “Peking opera hits low notes”) and they gathered around as I translated it for them. The story portrayed them as tragic heroes battling the tides of history and the scrofulous policies of the state-run troupe to keep the ancient art alive. They began arguing among themselves. You said too much. No, he was just telling the truth. I never said that! This is going to get us in trouble with the troupe. What is there to be afraid of anymore?

  They certainly were in party mode. The room was claustrophobic, and unlike on other days, when the house had seemed a continuation of the street below, tonight I felt cut off, in a hermetic bubble locked away from society. Round folding stools were scattered around the room. I sat on one on the periphery and took out the video camera. I looked at the crowd of relatives chattering loudly to one another and remembered from my childhood how much Chinese sounds like yelling when people are happy. Grandfather Zhang would be the main character of my documentary, of course. He was the nucleus of the family, in the same way my Yeye had been. Supporting characters would include his wife and high-kicking sons Zhang Laisheng and Zhang Laichun. I still had a hard time telling the two apart. I clung to oversimplifications: Laisheng was known in the family as the one who said too much, Laichun for being incomprehensible.

  I concentrated on the images in my viewfinder and watched greedily as it took everything in. The other relatives visiting for the day and milling around the room would make colorful extras. Grandpa Zhang’s other two sons hadn’t fallen far from the tree. One was a producer of kung fu films and the other, the eldest, his face ghoulishly frozen on one side by a stroke, told me about the twenty-part miniseries he had written about his father’s life. It made a good story, he said, because their family was still “slightly feudal,” which I took to mean that they all, like me, lived in fear of the autocratic patriarch barking out mean things from the bed. The grandmother, overhearing our conversation, insisted that it was my responsibility to find funding for the filming of the miniseries. I nodded weakly.

  We ate hotpot together, our chopsticks dipping into the roiling pot in the middle of the table, fishing out meat and vegetables that others had put in. One portly middle-aged relative became drunk and sat rubbing his bare belly after the meal. When I pointed the camera at him, he launched into an extended monologue about how rich and complex the language and lives of a cultured Peking Opera family like theirs was. The liquor made his thick Beijing accent even more incomprehensible. My mind drifted. And the winner is . . . Val Wang for Peking Opera & Sons. A bright light shone on me. Thank you so much for this honor. I never imagined I’d be standing right here. I just had a video camera and a dream—to tell a simple story about the richness and complexity of a family steeped in Peking Opera. There are so many people to thank. Yang Lina and Wu Wenguang for all of your help and encouragement, Cookie for your support, the Zhang family for opening your home to me, my own family in Beijing, and last of all, Mom and Dad for your patience, I told you this whole artist thing would pay off. When I returned to the room, he was still talking, saying that their language was so full of literary allusions that mere commoners wouldn’t be able to understand them, much less a foreigner.

  I turned my camera to Laisheng and Laichun. Natural performers, they came alive in front of the camera. They had a spirited debate about what I should do with my life.

  “She shouldn’t stay in Beijing too long,” said one of the sons.

  “She should,” said the other.

  “No, she shouldn’t.”

  “Maybe you’re right. Beijing is too complicated, too chaotic for her.”

  “No, that’s not why. She shouldn’t stay in any place for too long.” I noted the envy in his voice. He turned to me and said, “Your life is about going many places and seeing many things, not like us. We can only do one thing: Peking Opera.”

  They envied my mobility and I envied their permanence. The Flying Pigeon and the Forever. I thought it might be nice to have a place to call home and one thing I was really good at.

  One of the two said, “People say I drink too much.” Both of them drank too much, downing glass after glass of erguotou, the toxic local firewater whose heavy, sickening bouquet filled the air. I would drink a lot too if I belonged to this family. How could they stand to be in that room together day after day? Didn’t they drive one another crazy with the scrutiny, the guilt, the recriminations? Just being there for a few hours made me feel like a fish gasping for air. Maybe, come to think of it, having a place to call home was overrated.

  I remembered what Xiao Ding had said about Chinese relationships existing as a series of concentric circles. I was still in their outer orbit; I would have to get closer to make a better movie like Yang Lina had done with the old men.

  The family gathered around the grandfather’s bed. I turned my camera toward them. Were they about to sing a birthday song and eat the sticky rice cake with the character , meaning “long life,” written on it in hawthorn candy, which sat on a side table? The cake was lightly dusted with tiny black specks of soot and all night I had been mentally rehearsing my excuses for not wanting any. They wrestled with something and I saw they were emptying his colostomy bag together. Even this was a family affair. It was my cue to leave. I turned off the camera and said my good-byes. The cake sat untouched on the side table.

  Laisheng gripped my arm and walked me outside. I breathed much easier in the cool night air. He told me, “In Peking Opera, I play the warrior. Laichun plays the clown, so he likes to joke. I don’t like to joke.” The family was right. Laisheng was chatty. He then said that he felt very close to me and was sure that we were good friends. I could barely tell him apart from anyone else in the family and I wasn’t sure I felt very close to him, but the polite thing to do was agree, so I did.

  • • •

  Old Men started winning international awards. The Award o
f Excellence at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. The Golden Dove prize at the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. The SCAM Award at the Cinéma du Réel festival. A French TV station bought the documentary. International curators, Beijing Film Academy professors, and underground filmmakers showered Yang Lina with invitations to international festivals and private screenings of films. And so of course I was in constant contact with her, helping her to communicate with the outside world. Every time we met she would greet me with an inchoate gurgling of my personal name—Zhenluo!—and a pronouncement of how she perceived me at that moment. Some days it was You are so adorable and so naïve! or You are so well-behaved and serious! Her idea of me as a prim little violet grated on me; it was so different from my idea of myself as a swashbuckling bohemian. After all, hadn’t the fortune-teller said I zixun fannao, sought trouble for myself?

  She began to throw references to obscure directors into our conversations.

  “Bu-lie-song is so simple and so strong.”

  “Ji-ya-luo-si-ta-mi’s films about Iran have helped me to see my own culture more clearly.”

  “I’ve been watching too many French films and they’ve made me want to be passionate and sexual.” She erupted into her violent giggle again. Unlike most Chinese people I knew whose inner lives seemed to be locked away in top secret underground vaults, Yang Lina’s spilled out all over the place like jelly from a powdered donut. It would have taken at least four shots of espresso or a high fever to whip me into the state of giddy, bright-eyed frenzy she seemed to be in all the time.

  Bu-lie-song? Ji-ya-luo-si-ta-mi? If I could decode the names, I was sure I would know whom she was talking about. I was American, more modern, more culturally sophisticated, with more knowledge of obscure films than someone who had grown up in a country completely cut off from the world. But even when I found out who they were, I realized with a pit in my stomach that I hadn’t seen any Bresson or Kiarostami films, and I had no idea what they were like. Zhang Yuan’s words came back to me: Was a fundamental condition of being Chinese to feel inferior—to the people around you, to the rest of the world? Was a fundamental condition of being American to feel superior?

  • • •

  The Zhang family liked to call me on the phone. Sudden and demanding, their phone calls were usually invitations for events that were happening the next day. Often, I already had plans.

  “Hello?”

  “Reporter Wang? It’s . . . Laichun.” The Incomprehensible Clown. Increasingly, the phone calls were coming from him. I tried to dissuade him from calling me Reporter Wang, as I wanted the family to relax around me. He informed me that they were taking the grandfather out in his wheelchair the next day.

  “So I’ll go out with you?” I asked.

  “It’s not about whether you’ll come or not. His health has been bad and we’re taking him to the park.”

  “Okay, I’ll come,” I agreed.

  “What time will you come?” he asked.

  “Midday.”

  “What time?”

  “Ten o’clock?” I did what I could to be tolerant and rational, but I never seemed to know the right answers. He laughed. The acidity of his laughter set him apart from Laisheng. Laisheng was more of a giggler.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded.

  “Our lives are not alike. Our days have mornings and afternoons.”

  I understood him to mean that I should come earlier, so I arranged a hurried borrowing of Yang Lina’s camera and ended up going at eight o’clock sharp, just as they were carrying the grandfather downstairs.

  The family members took turns wheeling the grandfather slowly down the hutong as the rest of the group bobbed around him like tethered balloons. I faced them, walking backward, and shot their procession. We turned onto wider, busier streets leading to the Temple of Heaven Park. When we arrived at a circle of dirt in an isolated grove in the park, Grandfather Zhang gestured with palms up to the empty space and said, “We have arrived at—”

  “—our performance arena,” his relatives filled in with a murmur.

  “—Metropolitan Washington.”

  We all paused in puzzlement. I assumed he was trying to create a sense of pomp for me, but as usual, his true meaning was nearly impossible to decipher. Laichun took a nearby tree branch and swept dead leaves from the circle and then the grandson began practicing opera forms from The Ring of Heaven and Earth. The grandfather sat bundled up under a tree and barked commands at him, ordering him to perform certain moves for my camera and critiquing his technique. I suddenly realized that, unlike my vision of the documentary, they wanted me to shoot a lavish extravaganza showcasing the glories of Peking Opera.

  The trees were in fall bloom. In the quiet green, old folks practiced tai chi and other exercises in slow motion. I leaned back and tried to enjoy the show.

  In the winter, the Zhang family called several times, but I always found an excuse to decline their invitations. I was busy writing articles, I said. Or my friend with the video camera was out of town. Or I was going home for a visit. In truth, visits to their house were disturbing. I didn’t feel like myself there. I never said what I thought, only what I thought they wanted to hear, to avoid disrupting the harmony of their household. Just as my dad did to Nainai, or so my mom claimed. “If she told him that a black table was white,” said my mom, “he would just agree.” She, like me, preferred expressing her opinion. But for the first time, I knew how my dad felt. It was just easier to go with the flow.

  Chapter Twenty

  To Know Your Own Life

  Crowds of Chinese men in their stockinged feet, their vinyl shoes shucked onto the floor, sat in the departure lounge playing cards and yelling. They would have been smoking had they been allowed. Other people were clipping their toenails or posing for photos in front of the big picture windows. Our airplane sat docilely outside, getting slowly filled with suitcases and gasoline.

  I was returning to Beijing after visiting the States, back to my parents’ house in the suburbs and then up to New York to see friends. The house I had grown up in seemed smaller every year I went home and my parents unchanging. Despite all the progress I (and we) had made in China, time stood still there. “When are you moving home?” my mom kept asking, while my dad said, “You’re not doing anything interesting over there, are you?”

  Nainai was the only one interested in hearing about Beijing. I told her about how the city was now and how her relatives were doing. When I went to visit her apartment, I saw that in the middle of Yeye’s old study that still held his desk and bookcases there now stood a square table with a mah-jongg set on it. Nainai did seem different somehow, more lighthearted. Home in general felt light without the weight of Yeye. His death had left a power vacuum in the family that no one could or would fill. Nainai didn’t seem keen to. My dad aspired to it but did it in middle manager–style, compiling address lists and forwarding New York Times columns by David Brooks, with none of the fear-inducing gravitas of Yeye.

  I went up to New York, which was so seductive, so frictionless. I kept bumping into the ghosts of myself, versions of me who had moved into that rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side after college. I longed for dinner parties, for endless discussions about films, plans, and gossip. I wanted to have a room in Brooklyn with a desk by a sunny window where I wrote. Adventure, history, and truth? Was that really what I’d found in Beijing? All I knew was that both places couldn’t exist in my mind at the same time; each was forgotten when I traveled to the other side of the world. The plane ride was a bookend holding everything in place, the dream between two realities. Or maybe it was the void separating the reality of America from the dream of China.

  I wasn’t eager to go back and face my life in Beijing. Sick of the Entertainment Guide and longing to have more time to do my own stories and shoot my documentary, I’d wanted to go freel
ance for a while (Wu Wenguang’s voice never stopped needling me from within), but I’d never dared. Right before my trip to the States it had happened abruptly, at Sue’s instigation. I’d avidly agreed but now I realized that freelance was just a polite word for unemployed. I had actually been gently fired. While I was in the States, a friend had e-mailed to say he’d seen Anthony out with another woman. We broke up via a very pricey phone call. I had nothing to go back to: no job, no boyfriend, just the nub of a documentary. I was panicked and dreaded exiting the airport and feeling the tugs on my sleeve of drivers pestering me to take their illegal taxis, and the whole rigmarole beginning for another year.

  I told my friend in New York who had given me the orange jacket long ago about how frustrated I was to be returning again to China because it made me feel as if I were doomed for all eternity to retrace the trajectories of my parents and grandparents. It made me feel so determined by my family’s past. She looked at me kindly and with a dash of pity for my obliviousness and said, “We all are, Val.”

  At some point in the airport, the entire crowd rose, unbidden by any announcement, and rushed the gate.

  • • •

  In the breach that Anthony left, new friends entered. I discovered that my neighborhood was actually full of young expats, mostly women, whose stories were startlingly like mine. Cookie lived there with her friend Emma, Rachel lived nearby, and they knew some other Brits, plus a woman who worked at Beijing Scene. Cookie somehow knew Gretchen, the woman from the lesbian meeting, who defrosted significantly after she found out I wasn’t actually a lesbian, and Becky, who had taken over Anthony’s old job at the gallery after he quit to work as a lawyer. We all spoke Chinese, had come to China alone seeking adventure, and found life on the rough-and-tumble fringe of the city to our liking. Most of us had short hair, none to my recollection wore makeup, and everyone’s teeth had gone black like mine. They were much more like me than Jade, and I found myself drifting away from her.