Beijing Bastard Page 21

  “A meng, when you sleep at night and you see your parents, your brother, see your home. This is called a meng,” he said.

  “Oh, a dream. I know what that is.”

  “They’re not allowed to disclose their meng.”

  “Oh, I see.” I had no idea of what he was talking about. But I trusted that the camera was taking it all down. I entertained myself by staring at his bald head while trying to connect the viscous words that oozed out of his mouth with the vivid opera performances trapped forever inside his mind. I realized that all the camera was capable of picking up were words, useless words. And the metronymic chirruping of the family’s pet cricket. His eyes rolled past me and I thought he was falling asleep. The door opened.

  “Look who’s here!” the grandfather said. Enter Laisheng. The Chatty Warrior. The grandmother sprang into action. She began assembling the fold-out table for lunch. I got up to help her, but she shooed me away. Laisheng put his leg up on a dresser to stretch and as soon as I pointed the camera at him, he turned on like a faucet. He began complaining about an upcoming performance he had to do as part of the reform of his state-run troupe. The performance would be graded on a scale from “excellent” to “subpar” and in the future the troupe would use the rankings to staff their performances. No longer would anyone be guaranteed work, even those with “excellent” grades.

  To him, potential unemployment was just the next tragic chapter of a life that had never properly launched. He said had been born in the mid-1950s, right as what he called a “natural disaster” forced “food rations” on the country, stunting his growth. (Actually, it was “Mao’s disastrous agricultural policies” that plunged the country into “famine.”) Just as soon as he was old enough to go to school, the Cultural Revolution started and he was sent down to the countryside to work. Separated from his family and denied schooling, he’d never been properly educated.

  “If ‘descendants of the Yellow Emperor’ don’t understand the matters of the ‘descendants of the Yellow Emperor,’ how can you say you’re ‘descendants of the Yellow Emperor’? How can you say that you’re Chinese?” he demanded.

  I nodded. I shook my head. Who was the Yellow Emperor again?

  He then spent three years serving in the army. Once he was finally back at home ready to perform, the only operas being staged were the revolutionary model operas, performed by troupes he had no way to join. “Now there are opportunities, but I’m too old. I can’t take advantage of them,” he said.

  “No need to talk about it,” said the grandmother, but the warrior was on the warpath already. She peeled a small mandarin and put it in front of me. I didn’t want it, but I ate it, peeling apart the segments with my one free hand.

  “Does your daughter like Peking Opera?” I asked Laisheng. She was the lazy fake-Pringles eater.

  “I don’t want her to learn. This is a terrible profession. You’d earn more selling bottled water on the street.” He launched into a confusing explanation of a Peking Opera story that ended with the pronouncement, “Those are stories.”

  I nodded.

  From the bed issued a roar, “Did you understand?”

  “Um . . .” I couldn’t tell if the grandfather was being helpful or mocking.

  “He said it was a story about a benevolent emperor who came down south of the Yangtze to solve the problems of the people.” He said “tanguan wuli,” which I later found out was an idiom meaning “corrupt officials.”

  “This is a story,” said Laisheng.

  “I got that part.”

  “Is it real?” asked the grandfather.

  “No?” I answered. I had no idea where this was going.

  “Someone once told me the recipe for success was seventy percent connections, thirty percent ability,” Laisheng said. “I’m over forty years old now and I’m still a pusupusu caomin.”

  “What’s a pusupusu caomin?” quizzed the grandfather.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. There was no use lying anymore.

  “Literally a ‘common person in the grass,’ it means just a plain old regular person, without any power.”

  “Do you know what a mayi is?” asked Laisheng.

  “Yes, I know what an ant is.”

  He became livid. “I’m just that ant. I’m just that grass on the plain.” After a moment, he said softly, “Don’t say too much. I don’t want to lose my job. When I’m supposed to practice, I practice. When I’m supposed to perform, I perform.”

  “Say what should be said and don’t say what shouldn’t,” the grandmother said to me. “All of the things about connections. We all know it, but there’s no need to say it.” She began talking about a story she’d seen on the news about a provincial leader who had been executed for taking bribes.

  I had trouble following their instinct for allegory, for using the past to talk indirectly about the present, or for using animals to talk about people. They had to practically spell it out for me: The leaders were not benevolent; they did not care about solving the problems of the people, and anyone who said differently was parroting fictions. Their state-run opera troupe, from the highest level down, was corrupt. Those with connections rose to the top, and the ants, even those who were the true heirs to the art, stayed in the grass.

  We sat quietly. The grandmother cleaned the grandfather’s ears with a cotton swab, then cleaned her own.

  “I want to ask you, Miss Wang, what else do you want to learn?” said the grandfather. “I want you to ask questions.”

  “Actually, I’m fine with just chatting,” I said in my most cheerful tone of voice, trying to defuse the tension that my presence seemed to generate. Why couldn’t they just relax and stop putting on an act for me? “I’m not here as a reporter anymore.”

  “Your foundation is very thin,” reproached Laisheng.

  I remembered what he or his brother had said to me a while ago and I repeated it defensively now. “My life is about going many places and seeing many things, not like you. You only know one thing: Peking Opera.”

  “So you know Peking Opera through and through from your one visit today, right?” asked the grandfather.

  “That’s not really my hope.” I groped for a way to deflect his scrutiny. I didn’t want to be the center of attention. If I could have directed the scene, I would have been a fly on the wall and the curmudgeonly grandfather would have uttered wise, salty pronouncements about life as the grandmother muttered rueful asides, and they would have bickered among themselves in a way that illuminated the richness and complexity of a cultured Peking Opera family. But instead they just plopped me on a stool in the center of room, lectured me with obscure stories, and slung insults at me when I didn’t understand them. Why were they being so obstinate? I’m sure they asked themselves the same question about me. Maybe that drunken relative rubbing his belly after dinner had been right—a foreigner had no way of understanding a family this deep.

  Any sensible person would have walked out of the room. But despite—or probably because of—our discomfort, I felt I was onto something. But I would never have had the courage to stay in the room had I not had my camera there as protection.

  I tried to explain my vision of the documentary in simple terms. “I’m not only interested in Peking Opera. I’m actually more interested in your family, in your lives. Your everyday lives.”

  Silence.

  I squeaked out, “Our lives are not alike.”

  “Not alike?” the grandfather boomed.

  The room reeked of urine and coal smoke. Spending too much time with Chinese families made me dizzy and, occasionally, gave me migraines. I stared wistfully at the TV, wishing we could just sit and watch it together. I had come to think of the act of communal TV watching as the highest expression of intimacy in a Chinese family.

  “Do you know that foreigner on TV who does cross talk?” asked the grandfather.


  “Dashan,” I said with an angry sigh. I hated Dashan. Cross talk is a traditional comedic art in which two men stand on a stage and engage in rapid-fire, pun-laden exchanges, and “that foreigner” was Mark Rowswell, a.k.a. Dashan. Supposedly his Beijing accent was so perfect that if you closed your eyes you would mistake him for a real Chinese person. But open them and you’d see a tall, sandy-blond Canadian with glasses whose blubbery lips were perpetually parted in the smile of ingratiating naïveté native to North American nerds. Dashan was now cashing in on his fame by starring in commercials for miracle pills that claimed to clear up spotty skin and regulate sleep patterns. “Yes, I’ve seen him.”

  “This is like chaocai,” said the grandfather. “Do you know what chaocai is?”

  “Yes, I know.” Stir-frying a dish.

  “You take a pan, pour the oil in, cut the cai: the onions, garlic, meat. You put them into the pan and chao it, add some soy sauce, then put it onto a plate and on the table. This is a complete thing, isn’t that right?”

  “What are you trying to say?” I asked. I had had enough of their riddles and circuitous stories.

  “The dish is cooked and I’m sending it to the table for you to eat.” Here he paused for effect. “My meaning is to tell you a complete thing. But you just want to put in some onions, some meat, some potatoes—you don’t even use a pan, you just boil them in water. It’s not like a thing at all. I want you to go home and say, I came to China and met a Zhang Mingyu who told me how Peking Opera developed and how to tell folktales.” He squinted. “Are you interested?”

  “I’m interested in whatever you have to say,” I said wanly. Someone had ripped out my backbone and replaced it with grape jelly.

  We paused in frustration.

  “Do you like Dashan?” I asked. Every Chinese person likes Dashan.

  “I don’t like him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I like his thinking, his erudition. Do you understand?”

  I understood his jab perfectly: I was too Westernized and should become more Chinese with Dashan as my role model. Some Chinese people, even ones I liked, called me a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Dashan they called an egg.

  “I hope that you grow up to be a skillful, wise woman. You can’t disappoint your parents,” the grandfather said. His frustration was palpable. “You make me anxious. You’ve come all this way to China. Just to chat is not enough.”

  “I can learn things from chatting,” I mumbled.

  “Oh,” said the grandmother in a loud voice. She shot me a pitying look. “She says, ‘From chatting I can learn things.’”

  I cringed to hear my soft words shouted into the hearing aid.

  “What have you learned?” roared the grandfather.

  Lunch was ready. Steaming hot dishes were brought upstairs from the restaurant and I gladly moved my stool over to the table. I placed the camera on the table, left it running, and shook out my aching arm. Laisheng poured me some beer and I drank it down greedily. For himself, he took out an enormous plastic container of the local firewater erguotou, as big as a jug of cooking oil, and poured a generous glassful. Two liters of erguotou could certainly drown out a lot of family madness. Laisheng told me about a Japanese woman he had once met more than fifteen years before.

  “She could only speak a little Chinese so I learned some Japanese. If you want to say she is beautiful or that you love her, you say, Aishiteru. Sugoi kirei is ‘I love you.’” He giggled again and poured himself more erguotou. “I’m embarrassed. Quickly, drink some more beer.”

  He said he used to own his own restaurant and then became a seafood wholesaler. He said that the salt water had suffocated his marriage. “There is a saying in Chinese: ‘If a man has money, he’ll learn wickedness. If a woman learns wickedness, she’ll have money,’” he said. We laughed.

  This was the first I had heard of his divorce. Both sons, it turned out, were divorced. They were the kinds of sons who would never detach from their family. No woman would willingly be a part of this family, I thought. It revolved unerringly around the patriarch, an ogre who constantly contradicted everyone around him, or at least always seemed to contradict me.

  Laisheng said he had a new girlfriend and invited me to their new apartment on Cow Street, in the Muslim area of town. He told me about renovations he was making to his apartment and we idly watched a Hong Kong pop star on TV. At long last, I was less entertaining than the TV.

  The door flew open suddenly. Laichun burst in, out of breath and with wild eyes. It took a moment to put my finger on why he looked so strange: His lips were bright with lipstick and the area around his eyes was ablaze with large swooshes of colorful eye shadow. I started in surprise until I remembered that he had just finished a performance. That explained his appearance, sort of.

  “People kept staring at me as I biked home,” he said. I laughed. “But I didn’t care because I knew I was biking here to see you. I biked as fast as I could.”

  “Really!” I said, reeling from him as one would from the forced, melancholic hilarity of a clown.

  After he had cleaned off his makeup, Laichun poured himself half a glass of erguotou. “Your Chinese has improved a lot,” he said.

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  “Your replies used to come really slowly. On the other hand, my English hasn’t improved at all,” he said. “I still just know that one word.”

  “Bye-bye!” chimed in Laisheng.

  “You took it right out of my mouth.” The family roared with laughter.

  “Miss Wang, drink up!” he said, raising his glass. I took a sip, leaving some beer in the glass. Any less and a refill would have been forthcoming. I quietly announced my intention to go. Between the grandfather’s fulminations and Laichun’s vaguely creepy aspect, I had had enough for one day. I turned off the camera. Laichun turned to me in horror, or mock horror, I couldn’t tell.

  “You can’t go just as soon as I get here.” He then gave me a strange and mournful look.

  I went to the bed to yell good-bye to the grandfather.

  “It is not enough to just chitchat!” he yelled. He smiled his jack-o’-lantern smile at me as I tiptoed out.

  I immediately called Cookie and we went out and got drunk. I told her about my afternoon with the Zhangs. I was just trying to shoot a vérité documentary about them but they were always quizzing me about things I had no way of knowing. Plus the air in the apartment was so stale and they had the gall to compare me to Dashan.

  “That sounds like it could really do your head in,” said Cookie. “But you know what, pal? I don’t think you should worry about it. It’s fabulous that you’re shooting this documentary. Just keep doing it!”

  As the gin and tonics took hold, the sting of the day began to dissolve.

  A few days later, I called Yang Lina to talk about my trouble with the documentary.

  “The family seems somewhat uncomfortable with me there and I feel somewhat uncomfortable being there.”

  “Give it time,” she told me.

  “I want to capture their relationships to one another but they keep talking to me instead!” I said.

  “Maybe your relationship with them is the real story then.”

  “But that’s not what I had in mind.”

  “Don’t worry too much. Just keep shooting.”

  I was determined to prove Grandfather Zhang wrong. I could learn things about Peking Opera. Though I had one of the world’s foremost experts on Peking Opera at my fingertips, I began trawling the Internet for information. I learned that the Yellow Emperor was the ancestor of all Chinese people and that there was some debate as to whether he was an actual man who had led a prehistoric Chinese tribe or merely a mythic immortal with the body of a dragon. I learned about an old opera superstition forbidding the utterance of the word meng backstage because
of Yu Meng, a legendary jester who impersonated a famous scholar in the year 403 BC. I learned that every detail of Peking Opera has a fixed and formal meaning. For instance, the flicking of a sleeve expresses disgust and the asymmetrical face paint of the jing character type indicates a criminal character.

  • • •

  One of the artists I interviewed for the Texan’s art website had a cat who was pregnant. When I asked what he did with all the kittens, he said that he gave them away to lonely artist friends all over the city, and named which artists had which tabbies. I suddenly realized that I too wanted a cat so that I could be part of his feline family tree. By this time, I understood the importance of being part of a lineage, that there were families other than the one you were born into that you could belong to. I began fantasizing about my cat. A girl cat, of course. Neurasthenic. Spooky. Prone to unexplained hunger strikes and possessed with the ability to read minds and converse with the spirits.

  The call from the artist finally came. His cat had given birth a few weeks before, as had her equally profligate daughter. I went over immediately. Eight kittens gamboled around the courtyard, each as tiny as a human palm. Most were white, which I didn’t want. One was a calico, a girl, bright-eyed and sensitive but already claimed by another artist. The one remaining kitten was an aggressive orange ball gnawing on a vine with a stubborn look on his face.

  I took him.

  In the mornings, as I interviewed people over the phone, he sprinted around my room, chewing on every cord in sight and pouncing on invisible foes. I named him Qu Qu’r, meaning “cricket.” When I sat down to write, he would climb all over me, up my arms and onto my head, where he would try to perch. If he wanted to play, he nipped my ankles and meowed until I stopped working. At night in bed he did laps around my head. I wasn’t getting much sleep, and secretly, I was disappointed. Brawny, blunt, and down-to-earth, Qu Qu’r was not the cat I had ordered up in my mind, and I resented the musky dose of yang energy he injected into my house and the way that he scrutinized every single thing I did. I withheld my full affection from him, hoping he’d change.