Beijing Bastard Page 24

  In the end, Yang Lina did show it to her dad. He contradicted everything her brother had said. He said he had never mistreated or abandoned him. He had never promised to take him to Changchun and had even given him a choice of whom to live with after the divorce. He had never called him a “cruel wolf,” not until years later at least. And the kicker: Her brother had only imagined their mom calling out his name when getting beaten. He had not even been in the room that day.

  I was surprised to hear Yang Lina tell her dad she believed him.

  My biggest fear was showing it to you.

  If what Yang Xiaofan said was true, you would have a different reaction.

  I’ll tell you truthfully, what he said was all bullshit.

  At times my conscience makes me think of him but that’s it.

  I only think of him from time to time.

  Whether or not I think of him—what does that matter?

  Not very much.

  And that was the end. It was late when we finished. I felt bruised and tired, as if I had just been forced to break up a fight on a lurid Chinese version of Jerry Springer. I had seen where Yang Lina had come from. And I could see where she was now: sitting on my couch in only her underpants, the blank at the center of her own story. She was naked, but she had never seemed so mysterious to me as she did at that moment and must have been just as mysterious to herself. She didn’t seem to know what to make of her own documentary. She said that when she had screened it publicly, some people in the audience had bawled. Still others said that she was telling the untold story of so many people, especially now that divorce was becoming more common in China. But others had said the documentary was fundamentally flawed because it showed every relationship but the one between her and her family. She’d exposed everyone in her family but herself. Just as she’d been absent when the divorce happened, she was also absent from the documentary, except for that one flash in the mirror and what I assumed was several moments of off-camera sobbing in tune with her brother. Through him, she had tried to feel it, but in the end she had kept herself at a safe distance.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The Outlaws Are the Ones Who Become Moral

  I jiggled the key impatiently. It wouldn’t turn. I rattled the old wooden door. I had kept my key from the time I had lived with Bobo and Bomu because I liked to feel that this was my home too. Now why wasn’t the darned thing working? I rang the doorbell but no one appeared. They knew I was coming over to see Xiao Peng and Xiao Lu’s new baby. I peered through a crack into the courtyard. Nobody. Finally, I called them on my cellphone.

  “Hi, are you home? I’m outside the door.”

  “Oh, that’s you outside!” said Bomu.

  “You can hear me?”

  “Yes. We heard the rattling and thought someone was trying to break into the house. We were scared.”

  “No thief, just me!” I said, and we started laughing. We got along famously now that we didn’t live together anymore, though I knew they thought I didn’t call or visit enough. “My key isn’t working.”

  “Oh, we changed the locks months ago. You might as well throw out that old key.” They had just gotten back from a six-month jaunt to the States, visiting their daughters in L.A., Great-Aunt Mabel in Seattle, Nainai and my parents in suburban Maryland, and an old student of Bobo’s in Philadelphia who took them to New York City for the day.

  Bomu came to the front door and I followed her through the courtyard into Xiao Peng’s side of the house. He was out but Xiao Lu was there in their small living room, washing their son, Sanbao, in a big plastic tub. A tape of Buddhist chanting played in the background. Per the fashion among young people in Beijing, Xiao Peng and Xiao Lu had taken up Buddhist practices, adopting Buddhist names and playing tapes and burning incense at their small Buddhist altar draped with saffron-colored cloth.

  I went back to Bobo and Bomu’s side of the house. The TV was on and Bobo was in his big easy chair, leaning back with his pant cuffs hiked up high and his hands on his knees. I took my old position on the couch. The heaviness that used to accompany a visit to their house was gone. After the Zhang family, they seemed normal, loving. Bobo’s sternness had defrosted, as had my testiness. I felt almost jovial. And why had this room seemed so claustrophobic when I lived here? It was a grand room with tall and wide windows.

  We looked through the photos from their trip. There wasn’t a single candid shot among them, or a smile. Bobo and Bomu posed grim-faced under the statue of Lincoln at his memorial, next to the charging bull on Wall Street, on my parents’ suburban lawn pushing the lawnmower. The people in the photos were so unlike the ones sitting next to me laughing and offering pronouncements about each place: L.A. (“The air’s so clean and there are so few cars!”), suburbia (“Beautiful, but you need a car to go anywhere.”), and New York City (“So chaotic!”). They spoke happily about being reunited with Nainai after more than fifty years. My dad had reported that the meeting had actually been slightly anticlimactic after their years of constant phone contact.

  I envied them, spending half the year in the States and half in Beijing. It seemed ideal. They also had a whole book of happy photos of their youngest daughter: her posing in front of a car, her posing in a flouncy wedding dress. She was finally married.

  After we finished looking through the photos, Bomu left to practice with her neighborhood dance troupe, which was learning a new North Korean dance, and Bobo returned to his TV show. Singers, one after another, came in their street clothes onto a vast stage bedizened with large gold stars and as garishly lit as an intergalactic landing strip. They sang opera songs, rather badly. My time with the Zhangs had not cultivated my palate for Peking Opera, but this was worse than usual.

  “What is this?”

  “China’s First Annual Amateur Peking Opera competition. This is Day Two.”

  “Day Two? It goes on for two days?”

  “No, five days,” he said, looking excited at the prospect.

  “Why didn’t you compete? I bet you sing better than these people.”

  Bobo threw back his head and laughed. He and his friends regularly got together to play and sing opera songs and, like the Zhangs, had even rented out a theater for an amateur performance. When he showed me the videotape, he’d had to point himself out. He was swaddled in a thick brocade outfit, his face thickly painted. We watched him teeter violently around the stage in his platform shoes until he lost his bout with gravity and toppled over. I had never told him about Grandfather Zhang, whom I think he would have had a lot of respect for. For a while I had been seeing the Peking Opera family more often than I saw my own, but it had been more than half a year since the end of my documentary. Once in a while the Zhang family still called my cellphone and though it made me feel like a cold-blooded strangler, I simply muffled the phone until the song silenced itself.

  A tiny girl came onto the stage clutching a microphone, which looked as large as a can of tennis balls in her hands. Pert and innocent as a pebble, she squinched up her face as if in dire pain and began singing with all her might.

  “She’s the youngest competitor. Only four years old,” Bobo said. “Her story has been in all of the newspapers.”

  I could imagine the state-run newspaper touting her—as well as this competition—as proof that Peking Opera had a future. I thought of Grandfather Zhang lying in his bed, frothing. The benevolent emperor came down south of the Yangtze to look into the condition of Peking Opera. This is just a story. Do you believe it, Miss Wang?

  “What song is she singing?”

  “A part by Lin Chong in a story called the Wild Boar Forest. Do you know The Water Margin?”

  “Yes, sort of.” One of the masterpieces of Chinese literature about a band of outlaws . . . in some dynasty . . . long ago.

  “Lin Chong is an honorable man, a military officer who is framed because a corrupt officer wants his wife. In this s
cene, he is being escorted through the Wild Boar Forest by soldiers who’ve been hired to kill him. He later escapes but his wife commits suicide and he eventually becomes a bandit to avenge her.”

  “You would never guess that by looking at this little girl.”

  “Usually the rulers are the good characters but when they’re corrupt, the everyday people or the outlaws are the ones who become moral. The world gets turned upside down.”

  “What kind of role is Lin Chong?”

  “A lao sheng.” Of the four main character types in Peking Opera, the lao sheng is the eldest and most dignified. That constipated face had been her attempt at dignified gravitas. The world really was turned upside down. Little girls singing lao sheng roles. Old men lying in bed as helpless as babies. She finished her song and the crowd erupted in loud applause. I asked Bobo if her performance had been good. He said yes, but his yes was cautious—she was just a gimmick, after all. Good singing takes years of practice and a deep understanding of Chinese history, that much I did know.

  At home, I went searching for an article about her. One Chinese website gushed that “from the first note of her song, the love and hate in her voice were unmistakable.”

  • • •

  Suddenly, the Zhang family called me several times in one week. I didn’t pick up, but knowing what I would hear on the other end, I resolved to the next time.

  Of course it was Laichun, the clown, even though he refused to identify himself. He spoke in the slow, slightly demented (drunk? damaged?) way that I had come to expect of him. My stomach twisted at the sound of his voice.

  “How is the family?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said, and slurred something incoherent. Finally, he told me that the grandfather had passed away the month before. I offered my condolences. He apologized for being too grief-stricken to call sooner. We left it that I would go to their house if I had time. I thought back to Yeye’s death and the way we had all spun out of orbit like planets released from the sun’s grip. I wondered if the Zhangs would be happy to find their own lives now or if they would be completely lost without their North Star.

  He called back a few hours later. “Didn’t we [something-something] earlier?” he asked in a tortured tone, his voice catching right at the crucial word.

  Even though I had no idea what I was agreeing to, I said, “Yes, yes, we did.”

  “You’ll come visit if you have time?”

  “Yes, I’ll come if I have time.” I wished I could go to their house and pay my respects but I couldn’t. What had happened between us had hit too close to home, and I couldn’t bring myself to revisit it, or them. Not yet.

  I read that construction had started on a hundred-million-dollar Peking Opera theater inside the Second Ring Road funded solely by local businesses. I could envision the twelve hundred seats of the clean and well-heated theater filled with crowds of young people, the same ones who could be seen around town wearing Chinese silk jackets embroidered with gold phoenixes and dragons, who were interested in injecting a quick, painless dose of their own history into their packed schedules. I imagined child stars singing lao sheng roles with all the love and hate that four-year-olds can muster. There would even be a museum in the theater, displaying photographs and sculptures from Peking Opera’s history, and I could imagine an enterprising person going up a narrow alley near Tiananmen Square, finding the Zhang family, and re-creating their room in the theater, just to make sure that the past is really past. More likely, when their street is demolished along with the rest of the old city, the Zhang family will just disappear like ghosts into an anonymous concrete apartment like mine on a desolate road on the edge of town.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Not Really “In the Mood for Love”

  The unexpected happened: Yang Lina fell in love. He was a penniless writer of forty-five and they were having passionate sex all the time, she said, everywhere, including up on the Great Wall. They were even videotaping themselves. Her boyfriend had found the videotape, but she wasn’t ready to break up with him yet because there was the chance that her new relationship was not going to work out. “People who know us say it’s only going to last three more months, that we are two crazies and it can’t last,” she said.

  Xu Xing was a sleepy-eyed writer who wanted to transform Yang Lina into an artist. She had been given so much natural talent, he said, she just needed some culture.

  “He tells me that Western girls return money that they borrow from their boyfriends and that they think being independent from their boyfriends is important,” she told me, as if it would be news to me. Who was more naïve, I wondered, her for not knowing that or me for assuming that everyone knew? “I never think of returning my boyfriend’s money. I always think I deserve to be treated this way. It’s his responsibility to give me what will make me comfortable.”

  She said Xu Xing tutored expats in Chinese to make ends meet and I realized that he had been Anthony’s tutor a long time ago, the semifamous but washed-up writer from the 1980s.

  When she finally broke up with her dakuan, she had to face reality. She said she had always been sheltered by men and by the People’s Liberation Army and now she had to live on a fourth of the money that she was used to. She had been acting and dancing her whole life, but now she was getting too old to dance, and good acting roles were hard to come by. For the first time in her life she had to try to find a job, but of the “three musts,” all she could do was drive a car. She couldn’t speak English or use a computer. Her car and video camera were getting old, but without her dakuan, she couldn’t trade them in for newer models.

  I was pleased by all the changes in her life, and not only for noble reasons. Witnessing someone falling in love is a wonderful thing, but so is witnessing them getting their long-overdue comeuppance. Finally she couldn’t float above me in her bubble of wealth, oblivious to the compromises and anxieties that come with having to work for a living and believing she could solve my problems by playing matchmaker with her discarded exes.

  My solitary state still troubled Yang Lina. Her eyes would get soft with pity and she would tell me that one day I would find someone who would love me for who I was, she was sure of it. One day we went together to Yonghegong, the city’s big, official Buddhist temple, and jostled through crowds of tourists and Saturday-afternoon Buddhists. Yang Lina was a born-again Buddhist, like Xiao Peng and Xiao Lu, and suddenly, without a word, she bought a fagot of incense, lit it on the altar fire, and stood before a Buddha painted in bright, strong colors with the smoldering spaghetti sticks clamped in her prayer hands. I stood by patiently as she assumed a holy look on her face and bowed three times to the statue. She then shot me a naughty look and said she had asked the gods to help my marriage prospects.

  “I’m very happy alone,” I said indignantly. “I have a lot of good friends and that’s more important than having a boyfriend.”

  “This is sure to work,” she said, and then stuck the incense in the trough of sand and let the smoke take her prayers up to the heavens where hopefully the gods—evidently the only ones who could help my love life now—would send a man down to me.

  One day later that summer, I met Yang Lina at the Starbucks at Pacific Century Plaza. We commandeered an olive-colored velveteen couch by the window and sipped our drinks, coffee for me, fresh-squeezed orange juice for her. On the patio outside, people sat smoking in the thick Beijing air. Yang Lina said she was about to meet with a documentary maker who would be a perfect match for me and that I should go along with her. She felt as if she still owed me for the subtitles, which I had ended up refusing money for.

  After taking a gulp of orange juice, Yang Lina pulled out her cellphone and called him.

  “Hi, Feng Lei. This is Yang Lina. I have a question. Actually, I have three. Number one: Do you have a girlfriend? Number two: Are you married?” She paused and shot me a coquettish look. “Number Three: Do you ha
ve kids?” At this she started giggling uncontrollably. “Good, because I have a friend I want you to meet.”

  We went to Yang Lina’s house. Feng Lei was slim and had a pointy head, shaved close. He wore rimless glasses that matched his thin lips. We barely made eye contact the entire night but this didn’t prevent me from tallying his good and bad points. I kept staring at his cellphone, encased in a plastic shell and clipped to his belt (bad) so I could avoid looking at the socks he wore under his sandals (worse). He said he still lived with his parents (bad). Yang Lina told him I had tried to make a documentary about a Peking Opera family but that I’d had to stop when one of the sons fell in love with me. Feng Lei suggested that the story of love sabotaging my documentary would make a good documentary (good). He’d brought a tape of his documentary, Falling Snow in Yili, a simple story about a Kazakh girl and her nomadic family in western China. It opened with a scene of snow falling through a block of purplish sky (good).

  “This has the depth of film,” Yang Lina cooed. “You’ll have to pass on some of your technical prowess to us!”

  His documentary was simple and deadpan, but not in the comical sense of the word. The girl hauled water from the well. The girl ate dinner with her family. There were few lines of dialogue, whose slight translation mistakes I helped correct.

  “Is this a portrait of your soul?” asked Yang Lina.

  Feng Lei laughed nervously and said he guessed it was (not bad). The documentary ended with a maudlin poem declaiming that people were like snow—beautiful, mysterious, and transient (terrible). I waited to see how Yang Lina would respond. She told him to cut the poem out.

  “Your movie is so profound until then,” she said. “You come off as so mysterious.”

  “But I’m not mysterious,” he said with a laugh that both Yang Lina and I agreed later was mysterious. He laughed slightly at every little thing.