Beijing Bastard Read online

  At around this time, Yeye and Nainai left Virginia and moved into an apartment in a retirement community not far from us and they added to the chorus of disapproval; in fact, Yeye must have been its original source, as my parents’ successes and failures ultimately reflected back on him. When I was present in the room, they criticized me in the third person. It was their job to talk and mine to listen. Nainai stayed in Yeye’s shadow for the most part and bore the brunt of his increasing irascibility. I remember being confused when he called her a fantong, or a rice bucket, until my mom told me it also meant “imbecile.” But Nainai never became meek. She had been born into a wealthy, educated family in Beijing and to show for it carried herself with a haughtiness I later associated with native New Yorkers. The gentle and humorous Nainai of my childhood faded away and in her place was an imperious matriarch full of dissatisfactions she could communicate with a single look.

  When I dated a boy who resembled in my mom’s eyes a Hispanic drug dealer and whose radical leftist parents were getting a divorce because their open marriage was falling apart, my mom routinely hung up on him when he called our house, riffled through my journals seeking dirt, and once delivered a succinct four-word safe-sex talk to me: Don’t ruin your life. My parents sensed me going my own way and instead of loosening their grasp, they tightened it. The “drug dealer” had actually been a straight-A student who eventually went to Harvard, though my mom had accurately sniffed out his beliefs in wanton drug use, free love, and Marxism. After my parents caught me alone at his house, something snapped in our relationship. Being Chinese was obviously the root of my problems, and so I began to hate all things Chinese, or what I imagined to be Chinese.

  I went off to a liberal arts college, where I became a leftist, a feminist, and a vegetarian; shaved my head; and veered off the doctor/lawyer trajectory into English and Women’s Studies. My parents insisted I go to the number-one-ranked liberal arts college, instead of to my first choice, Oberlin (ranked twenty, down from fourteen), which my dad likened to “marrying an alcoholic and going on a honeymoon on a sinking ship.” While I was away at college, he frequently sent me photocopies of Ann Landers columns that he found relevant to my life. One letter I particularly remember came from a dad who wrote in wondering how to deal with his daughter whom he characterized as “very smart but with no common sense.” “No common sense” my dad had highlighted in yellow and underlined twice in red. I too was an avid Ann Landers reader and my personal favorite column came from a young Asian-American woman who wrote in wondering how to deal with her parents who kept her under virtual house arrest. The letter had been signed, “Oppressed, Repressed and Depressed.” I clipped it out and taped it into my journal. I don’t remember what advice Ann Landers gave either of them, probably to seek counseling. But that wasn’t our way, to say our problems out loud to a total stranger.

  In short, the peace my parents had found in the suburbs was not mine to inherit. I didn’t feel as though I belonged there, or anywhere yet, and I itched to travel to exotic places far away to look for what was missing in my life.

  So I went to Sweden. I went in my junior year of college, taking a break from the manicured New Englandness of Williams College, but to my dismay found it was even cleaner, colder, darker, and more orderly than the places I’d come from. The alienation I felt from my family seemed to extend to the rest of humanity and I spent most of my time watching films alone. One night I went to see a film purely because I had deciphered in its description the words kinesisk rockstjärna—Chinese rock star. There wasn’t much to Beijing Bastards. You could take a character from column A, put him or her in a setting from column B, and make him or her do something from column C, and you’d pretty much have it.

  A

  B

  C

  hooligans

  concrete apartments

  drinking

  rock star Cui Jian

  rock concerts

  fucking

  knocked-up girls

  train tracks

  cursing

  But the film opened an escape hatch into a world mirror opposite of the version of China I had grown up with, where we were all nerdy, overachieving droids with no errant desires of our own who lived out the script as it had been handed to us, marching through the Ivy Leagues into respectable professional careers.

  I had rarely put any thought into what contemporary China was like, and when I did, it took a huge mental leap to imagine the farmers and petty bureaucrats of my supposed motherland—even my own relatives seemed impossibly foreign. But to my surprise, I recognized myself in those characters on-screen and, through them, the filmmaker who had created them. I was young and alienated too, also drifting without narrative, and like the filmmaker, I just wanted to find a way to get the moment down on paper—by writing, by filming, by any means necessary.

  Back in the States, I stumbled across an article about the “Sixth Generation” of filmmakers in China who shot gritty underground films in Beijing, including the director of Beijing Bastards, Zhang Yuan. The filmmakers had even written a manifesto that declared their aim: “To present a more truthful and more expansive document on the life of the Chinese people.” After making Beijing Bastards, Zhang Yuan was labeled a disseminator of “spiritual pollution” and the government banned him from making feature films. To avoid censorship, the Sixth Generation directors all made films without official permission, funded mostly by Europeans and screened only outside of China, mostly in Europe.

  These filmmakers became my heroes. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to make films like them. I liked the way that having a camera in my hand gave me an excuse to poke into people’s lives and go where I wasn’t sure I was welcome. Everyone I knew in New York was starting to shoot their own documentaries with these affordable new digital video cameras.

  When Nainai’s older sister offered up her apartment in New York to her relatives the summer before my senior year, I eagerly took her offer. It was a rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side where Great-Aunt Mabel had raised her family after they immigrated to the States more than forty years before. The lease was in the name of a Chinese man long dead; the rent was two hundred and seventy-three dollars a month plus the cost of an anonymous cashier’s check. She was moving to Seattle to be near her son Johnny. I planned to live there that summer while interning at a publishing house and then move back after graduating, but without notice she “sold” the apartment to a perfect stranger for a thousand dollars. Having robbed me of my ancestral rent-controlled birthright, Great-Aunt Mabel then had me live with this person, her false heir—a horsy Chinese-American woman with an ugly boyfriend and a bad temper—for the entire summer and instructed us to tell anyone who asked that we were her granddaughters.

  After graduating, moving back to New York was the logical next step, but I balked. Without my rent-controlled apartment, the future seemed like a terrifying void of boring office jobs and unfulfilled dreams. Even finding overpriced housing was deathly cutthroat. I’d heard a story of a friend of a friend who’d had to resort to desperate measures: She had an inside person working at The Village Voice who would call her before the paper went to press and whisper to her the details of apartments for rent, and I didn’t know anyone at The Village Voice. Plus, I’d lived in New York long enough to know that the city was just like a guy I was dating there: shiny and mesmeric as mercury and just as elusive. Slipping away right as I reached for it. I longed to be somewhere I could touch and be touched by.

  Around this time I read Things, a novel by Georges Perec about a young couple that decamps from their blissful life in Paris and moves to Sfax, an obscure seaside city in Tunisia because—as I care
fully copied into my journal—because Paris had become “a shrunken universe, a world running out of steam, opening onto nothing.” It was exactly how I saw life in New York unfolding if I moved there. Perec went on: “Puns, boozing, walks in the woods, dinner parties, endless discussions about films, plans, gossip had long stood in for adventure, history and truth.”

  Adventure, history, and truth. I liked the sound of that.

  Suddenly, I knew beyond a doubt what I was meant to do: Go to Beijing, find the filmmakers, and make a documentary about them. I wanted to kick my nerdy upbringing to the curb and chase that vision of myself that had flitted across the screen in Beijing Bastards. Imagine the street cred I’d have if it worked out! This wasn’t a plan that anyone with any common sense would have hatched. Luckily, I had none.

  When my parents heard the news that I was moving to the country they’d fled almost fifty years before, they were less than happy. Things may be different today, but in the late 1990s no one in their right mind was moving to China.

  “How about graduate school in English, Val?” asked my mom. “A job in publishing in New York? You had that summer internship.”

  “It was great because it helped me figure out that I didn’t want to work in publishing in New York.”

  “What is your Five-Year Plan?” my dad demanded, as if I ran my life like a socialist dictatorship.

  “Five years?” I said. “I can barely think about the next five minutes!”

  “Why go to China? Do you know how dirty the bathrooms are there?”

  “I thought you would be happy. You made me learn Chinese growing up and whatnot.”

  “You were pampered growing up,” said my mom. “You’ll see when you get there.”

  “You’ll hate it there,” my dad assured me.

  Before I left, each took me aside for a private talk.

  “Val, I want you to watch out for men who will want to marry you for a green card.”

  “Oh, Mom,” I said after I’d stopped laughing. “I don’t even like Chinese guys.”

  Her expression shifted. “Val, don’t be so close-minded. If you find a nice one who you think can make it in America, don’t say no just because he’s Chinese. Keep an open mind.”

  My dad warned me about corruption. “China is a place governed by relationships, not by the law. People will do favors for you and expect you to do favors in return,” he said. “Your Yeye had hated that about China and you have no experience dealing with it.”

  I nodded.

  “Plus, the customer service there is terrible,” he said. “Terrible.”

  To them, me moving to China was a step backward that would unravel all the work they’d put into my life. They had achieved the Chinese-American dream: steady job, house in the suburbs, children through good colleges. I was supposed to repeat the pattern. I didn’t tell my parents that my dream was to make a documentary, to be an artist.

  My dad also told me that Nainai still owned a courtyard house in Beijing. He had lived in it for two years of his childhood and all he remembered was that it was located on a wedge of land between two roads. He didn’t know much more than that.

  As for Yeye, he found out on his deathbed that I was going to China; I never knew what he thought about it. I know only that he believed he could never go back to China because as soon as he stepped off the plane he would be captured and executed, even though we told him that anyone who might kill him was probably already dead.

  The only member of my family who wholeheartedly approved of my decision was Nainai. “Life is slower in China. People don’t rush around like they do in America,” she said in a tender voice I wasn’t accustomed to hearing. “You’ll love it there.”

  Chapter Two

  Fresh Tensions in U.S.–China Relations

  I awoke with a start.

  “Zao,” said Bobo. Good morning. I was lying in bed, earplugs in my ears, airline eyeshade over my eyes, but they were no match for the big color TV two feet behind my head, which Bobo had just turned on, loud. Bobo is Nainai’s eldest brother’s eldest son and was the relative in Beijing with whom she kept in closest contact. When I had moved to Beijing the week before, Bobo had graciously allowed me to stay with his family until I found my own apartment. He, his wife, their son Xiao Peng, and their daughter-in-law Xiao Lu lived in half of a small courtyard house in the old city. I slept on a folding cot in the living room.

  “Zao,” I croaked out. I pulled off my eyeshade and looked at my watch. Six o’clock. Zao means both “good morning” and “early.” Early. Way too early for the TV to be on that loud. I lay still. My cot was wedged between the TV and a long couch that was covered in a sheet as if its owners were away on a long trip. The room had high ceilings, and across from the couch were a wide window and a tall door trimmed in lime green, which opened onto a walkway that opened onto a courtyard. Morning light straggled in and the air was heavy with coal soot. Bobo and Bomu were dressed and ready to go, except that they didn’t ever go anywhere. They were both retired teachers in their sixties and seemed to spend most of their time inside this dim, cluttered room watching TV, as if making up for a whole lifetime lived without it. Bobo is my dad’s cousin, and his turning on the TV briefly reminded me of my dad’s long-ago habit of waking me on Saturday mornings by flashing my bedroom light and clapping crisply, but Bobo seemed even sterner and more unyielding than my dad, with no apparent soft spot in his heart for me. Bomu was equally formidable. Slim and beautiful, she had big, sad, quietly judgmental eyes and she rarely smiled.

  On the surface, we were excruciatingly polite to one another. Though I had always been the rebellious one in the family, with a flick of the switch into Chinese I had been instantly transformed into an obedient daughter who said whatever she sensed the other person wanted to hear. I could tell that my relatives were thinking much more than they were saying too, and the air was close with unspoken feelings.

  “Not going to work today?” Bobo asked. I should have sprung lightly out of bed, but this morning I had had enough of the role-playing. I had come to China to get farther away from my family, not closer, and had somehow ended up living with these humorless old people who were proving to be a concentrated version of all the irksome traits of my parents. Plus, the house’s indoor plumbing was limited to a cold tap, so I hadn’t showered in days and the itch of my uncleanliness made me cranky. Let them see the real me, I thought.

  I paused dramatically and said in my most acidic tone, “Of course I’m going,” before burying my face in the pillow. I willed the darkness to take me away—preferably to a soot-free apartment with a flush toilet, a hot shower, and no relatives. We had exchanged only a few choice words, but they were enough to uncork the bottle of gripes that we had all been filling for the days I’d been living with them. And who knew what tiffs had been simmering between them and my relatives in America for years? In the ringing silence, I could hear Bobo’s thoughts loud and clear: Disrespectful, ungrateful, spoiled American. I shot back with my own: Domineering Confucian overlords.

  I was tired of sleeping on other people’s couches. I’d been doing it for two months already as I waited in New York for the sacred Z Visa that would allow me to work in Beijing. First on the couch (and in the bed) of my ex(ish)-boyfriend in Park Slope, who was two years older than I and whom I was madly in love with and who I was slowly realizing did not love me in return (was congenitally incapable of love, he claimed, wires got crossed somewhere).

  When he kicked me out, I moved to the raw Williamsburg loft of three of my male college friends, one of whom was another ex. He was training to be a French chef, another was a sushi chef, and the third was broke and living off his parents while he procrastinated about making any decisions about his life. I too ran out of money but, refusing to ask my parents for any, went to a temp agency and ended up as a temp at the temp agency. My friends rented a sunny corner of the loft to a male painter who
produced larger-than-life-size canvases of pinkish nudes with huge cocks. I slept on a soggy mattress positioned between the huge, looming cocks and a gigantic fan with exposed blades. It was summer and the loft had been full of clusters of coeds who inexplicably found my friends sophisticated and worth sleeping with. I wondered if they did it just so they could hang around the loft, which had great views of Manhattan. It was hard to tell. Everyone began sleeping with everyone else’s ex-girlfriend (except for me), and as the loft had no walls, only translucent partitions, the situation quickly deteriorated. I couldn’t wait to leave and have a room of my own far, far away.

  Now I was here. After a few minutes of silent standoff with Bobo, I swung my legs over the cot and sat up. I put on my jacket and my shoes and discreetly unrolled a few squares of the plump roll of white toilet paper I had secreted in my bag. I refused to use their toilet paper, which had roughly the look and feel of tree bark and was constantly migrating around the house, first under a pair of glasses on the bookshelf, then on the dining table.

  I passed through the walkway, lined with eight or nine cages each filled with a small, twittering bird, and went outside into the courtyard. Soft morning sunlight lit up the crooked gray paving stones and green plants of the small space, which was surrounded on four sides by the weathered wood of the house, painted a faded maroon. The yard was crowded with handmade brick planters and potted plants, cylindrical coal briquettes stacked underneath the windows, sturdy bikes covered by worn plastic tarps, and laundry lines hung with giant bloomers billowing gently in the morning breeze. Black soot dusted everything. I drew a deep breath of crisp fall air and my bad mood dissipated. I couldn’t wait to move out, but I would miss this charming, ramshackle oasis in the middle of the city.