Beijing Bastard Read online

  Then the wind shifted and I caught a whiff of the slight, sweet miasma from the outhouse at the center of the courtyard. I held my breath and plunged into the small brick hut that contained only a porcelain squatter, a spigot, and a dirty little red bucket. When I had first gotten to Beijing, Bomu had been worried that the soft American cousin wouldn’t be able to handle the outhouse and had apologized profusely for the inconvenience. Ha! I was tough. I could handle anything. But my soft American backside was another matter, hence the secret roll of TP.

  As I walked back inside, I thought back to my first jet-lagged night in Beijing, when I had fumbled my way out to the courtyard in the middle of the night to escape the stuffy, sleepless house. The cool air on my cheeks had come as a relief. I had sat on the edge of a brick planter filled with bamboo, put on my headphones, and pressed play on my Walkman; single guitar notes dropped like cooling lozenges into my ears as Elliott Smith’s mournful voice spun my insides into taffy.

  There’s nothing here that you’ll miss

  I can guarantee you this is a cloud of smoke

  I had looked up, above the tiled roofline, above the skeletons of trees, up to the single tall apartment building looming in the darkness, its lights all extinguished. I had felt like the only one awake on this side of the world. I had looked up to the expanse of dark, starless sky opening above my head and breathed in the entirety of the heavens.

  Trying to occupy space

  What a fucking joke

  What a fucking joke

  After my early-morning blowout with Bobo, I took the subway to work. I worked as an editor for City Edition, a new English-language magazine. At the end of college, I had written a grant to make the documentary about the filmmakers, and when it didn’t come through, I’d decided to move to China anyhow. I’d found a job teaching English for a year in Tianjin, a city not far from Beijing, and this year had made the leap to the big city.

  The City Edition office was located down a maze of unnamed streets that seemed to have been tossed down to earth as haphazardly as pick-up sticks. I walked past a hotpot restaurant, past an enormous billowing smokestack, and through a black metal gate bedizened with five or six bronze plaques proclaiming the very long names of the various state agencies housed within, the largest of which was the enigmatic “Office of Defense Conversion.” Inside the gate was our six-story building, covered entirely in white tile like the inside of a bathroom. There was no elevator, and so of course we were on the top floor. In the hallway on the way to the office was the public squatter toilet.

  The routine of putting out a magazine was relentless. Every two weeks we produced a magazine of twenty-eight pages. Twenty thousand copies of it were distributed for free at bars and hotels around town. I was the only editorial staff aside from my American boss Sue, who was often preoccupied with writing reports on obscure topics like soybean futures to finance the magazine. My job was to compile and design the twelve-page Entertainment Guide, write restaurant and art reviews, compile shopping guides, handle freelancers, copyedit stories, and if all that got done, write my own articles. Every issue, I went down a list and called every art gallery, aquarium, bar, cinema, club, shooting range, teahouse, and theater in town to see if they had events. The graphic designers laid out the magazine on computers that kept crashing because of the pirated software. After we checked the proofs of the magazine, it was sent to the printers, and the deliverymen distributed the magazine around town via tricycle. Once the paper was out, we did it all over again.

  Like many start-ups, the magazine lacked basic organization. While I was in the States waiting for my visa, Sue had hired Leo to fill in for me. Leo was a recent engineering grad from Africa, and even though I’d arrived to take over, he still hung around the office every day, his awkwardness quickly turning to desperation. Sue told me that there’d been a coup in his home country, and because his father had been high up in the government, he couldn’t go home. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that his job was over and that she couldn’t sponsor his visa.

  Most of the staff was women, from the Americans heading the departments down to the squadron of petite and bilingual Chinese staff, mostly saleswomen in pencil skirts and tiny pumps. The women had all chosen English names—Amy, Jean, June, Shannon, Shirley, Susan. There was also our intern Jade, a Chinese-American woman around my age who had come to Beijing to study Chinese at Capital Normal University. Now her course was ending and she needed to find a job, preferably in photography. Though I was the one on staff, Jade was the more confident and put-together one. Her hair was long and straight, her perfectly ovoid face as milky smooth as a porcelain doll’s, and her figure voluptuous. She made me see myself clearly: how sensible my shoes and clothes were, how short and nest-like my hair, how un-made-up my face. We gravitated toward each other, despite (or perhaps because of) our differences.

  Sue had started the magazine with a buff Chinese man in his midthirties who had chosen for himself the English name Max. I wasn’t sure what he did at the magazine save for storm in and out of the office looking terribly busy, issuing the odd edict, and cutting a swath of testosterone through our nest of estrogen. He was also the one who dealt with the censors. Since City Edition was registered as a Chinese newspaper, we were subject to strict but amorphous regulations; one misstep could shut down the paper. The only other men in the office were a rotating squadron of petite and monosyllabic deliverymen and the American web designer Scott, chunky with the goatee, ponytail, and labyrinthine imagination of a role-player. He spent most of his time out on the balcony smoking and once casually asked me if I wanted to write about human smuggling, as he knew someone at the Canadian embassy who was smuggling people through Canada. At night a local gym teacher, Lao Li, Frankensteinian in build, slept on a little couch in our advertising room. It wasn’t clear why we needed a night watchman, who exactly was going to be breaking into our offices or why.

  Sue was bilingual, frighteningly smart, and alarmingly tactless. She had moved to Beijing in her twenties like me, gotten married to a Chinese man almost twenty years her senior, moved back to D.C., and then back to Beijing in her thirties to run the US-China Business Council, which she had recently quit to start the magazine. She was turning forty soon. Today she wore a gray skirt suit and her stern Presbyterian face was adorned by a rare slash of lipstick, which served to make her more intimidating, not less. But when I told her about the living conditions at my relatives’ house, she softened.

  “I have no idea where, or even if, they shower,” I said. “The other day my uncle put a pan full of water on the dining room table and washed his hair right there. I need to move out soon.”

  “Max might be able to help you. He’s one of those Chinese people who doesn’t have a cent to his name but has access to apartments all over the city.”

  I had no idea that such people existed. But I had noticed strange things about money here. In a supposedly Communist country where many were paid about ten dollars a month, the roads were filled with Mercedes-Benzes and the restaurants were bursting with fat men. Was this what my dad was talking about when he referred to corruption?

  After work, I was supposed to go straight home because Bobo and Bomu didn’t think it was safe for a young woman to be out alone in the city at night. I got on the subway at the northeast corner of the city and took a seat on an empty stretch of bench. The subway was eerily out of character for Beijing—the high ceilings and heavy stone of the stations made it as hushed as a mausoleum, and the cars were clean, efficient, and unpeopled, like a monorail at a theme park. The subway had only two lines, one that followed the old city wall and another just a straight line, so most people biked, cabbed, or took buses around the city.

  At the next stop, an old woman got on, and instead of choosing the seat that was mathematically calculated to be the exact farthest away from me and everyone else as possible, as someone in New York would do, she sat right next to me, her leg touchi
ng mine. I recoiled as if her fist had punched through a glass wall separating us. Between the subway snugglers, chatty cabdrivers, and nosy relatives, the lack of privacy in China was both a lot to adjust to and all too familiar. I scooted over. After riding the loop line halfway around, I exited the subway and headed up a street lined with beeper shops for the short walk home.

  The street was alive at this hour. Rush hour traffic in cheerful primary colors jammed the four-lane street: yellow breadbox vans, tiny red cabs, and navy-blue Volkswagens were all weaving madly, straddling two lanes, tailgating, lollygagging, rattling, and honking noisily. Hulking red-and-cream city buses wheezed slowly down the street and in their shadows darted lithe little turquoise-and-white minibuses that illegally plied the same routes, a ticket taker always hanging halfway out the door yelling the bus number and hustling people on and off the bus. In the bike lane filled with leisurely cyclists, a horde of androgynous teenagers in matching school tracksuits swooped through. As saccharine love songs blared from shop speakers, I jostled with grannies hocking loogies onto the sidewalk and paunchy men in thin pants clutching pleather man-purses and talking on big cellphones. I was instantly part of the mad flow without having to exchange a word or even a glance with anyone.

  Today the city had opened itself to me, but with each step closer to home, I felt my family closing back in. After our altercation this morning, I knew the food on the dinner table would be laced with corrosive, gut-twisting guilt.

  Just before turning the corner to the house, I saw a noodle shop and suddenly veered in. I took a table at the back, away from the big picture windows, and ordered a bowl of beef noodles. The beef was thinly sliced, the noodles jagged and yellow, and the broth salty and hot and swimming with scallions. I ate happily, savoring my privacy and the fact that no one in the world knew where I was right then. My only company were the two glassy-eyed waitresses next to me, listlessly watching a TV that hung in a corner; on it the two unsmiling anchors of the national news sat stiffly in their bouffant hairdos against a blue background. I watched people pass by the window in the distance. It was the first time I’d felt relaxed in days.

  I thought back to the first time I’d met Bobo and Bomu, a year earlier, and how much had happened since then. Shortly after I’d moved to Tianjin, six of my relatives rented a van to come visit me and we went out for a big banquet lunch. I then proceeded to, as family legend has it, eat them all under the table while they looked on in shock that such a tiny woman could fit so much food in her stomach. A Chinese banquet host is required to load food onto a guest’s plate, and while most know to leave a little bit on the plate, I thought the polite thing to do was finish everything, especially when it was so delicious, so they kept piling on more food, and I kept eating it all. My gluttony at this meal has passed into lore. I had already started falling in love with China before the lunch, but meeting them made me feel as though I truly had an anchor here. I began plotting my move to Beijing the next year.

  The month after their visit, I took the three-hour train to Beijing and stayed with Bobo and Bomu in a large courtyard house, not the one they lived in now but a much bigger one down the street on Qianbaihu Hutong that they said was about to be demolished. Both houses were in Xidan, a quiet neighborhood of small hutongs, or alleyways, in the southwest corner of the old city a short walk from the Forbidden City.

  Relatives came from all over the city to meet me. Some of them had evidently met me when they visited the States years ago. Bobo’s sister I remembered, mostly because she had brought me a pair of dangly earrings. She told me she had lived in Great-Aunt Mabel’s old apartment in New York for a year, the same apartment I lived in years later. Though she was a doctor in China, she had made a living in New York by wrapping dumplings for restaurants in Chinatown. She spoke no English, and when the phone in the apartment rang, she would pick it up and say her one English phrase, “You speak-a Chinese?” If the answer was no, she would hang up. My balding great-uncle with chipmunk cheeks I didn’t remember. He pulled out a photo of us sitting together on a park bench somewhere in America. I examined it. That was him (same chipmunk cheeks, more hair, fewer liver spots) and that was me (cute, oddly self-possessed, legs too short to reach the ground), but the photo brought back no memories. I felt shocked, as if I had been leading a secret life with these strangers all these years and only now was my past coming to light.

  In the center of the courtyard of the house stood an apple tree, taller than the house itself and loaded with fruit. From a bough of the tree hung a cage with two small yellow birds. Bobo brought out a rough-hewn wooden ladder and we all took turns climbing up and throwing the apples down to a bedsheet held below like a trapeze net. Standing in the spacious courtyard, I felt connected to the basic elements of life: Above was an open canopy of sky, below were solid gray stones, and on all four sides was the wooden house, dark and warped with age. Just being there gave me a thrill, like I was stepping right into one of Nainai’s epic family dramas, the ones on videotape that she kept on constant rerun at home with the families fighting and scheming in their huge, pristine courtyard houses. This house was less than pristine, but to me it was beautiful, and when I told Bobo so, he looked pleased.

  “My own small piece of heaven and earth,” he said.

  A traditional courtyard house, it had four wings: They lived in the tallest northern wing, cooked in the eastern, and let me stay in the entire western wing, Xiao Peng’s old room. The southern wing was vacant and it was there that I took sponge baths with boiled water, just letting the bathwater soak into the concrete floor. I had to tie the door shut with a rag.

  Xiao Peng and his wife, Xiao Lu, lived in a quarter of a small courtyard house ten minutes down the road, which they had to share with three other families.

  After that first trip, I went back many times during the year I lived in Tianjin. Sometimes I would tell them I was coming to visit and cancel at the last minute, and they would call me a xiao pianzi, a little cheat.

  Each successive time I visited them that year, more and more of their neighborhood had been demolished. They said the government was reclaiming the land to build an office building. People moved out of their houses and earthmovers came, their claws ripping through the quiet, old houses as if their walls were made of tissue paper. When I visited, Bobo and Bomu wouldn’t let me stay out past ten o’clock at night because, they said, you never knew who could be lurking in the rubble of razed houses that surrounded their own.

  But as the year went on, they still didn’t move out and for some reason they wouldn’t tell me why. Neither would they tell me where they would go when they did, only that they were debating between a courtyard house in the old city and an apartment in the suburbs. “No, we don’t want to move,” they said. “Because we’re old people and old people like living in old houses.” They had gone to see an apartment in a tower block on the outskirts of the city and Bomu had pronounced it “asymmetrical, lopsided, terrible, like a pigeon’s cage.” Bobo had said, “Too many stairs. Too few friends.” They didn’t seem to mind that the courtyard house didn’t have a toilet or even an outhouse and that they had to use the public toilet out in the hutong.

  I minded. The public toilet was a brick building surrounded by a moat of fecal odor so pungent it stopped me in my tracks at the door. I held my breath and forced myself into the dark chamber, where the smell kicked in the doors of my senses with a strong boot. The space was open and slats had been cut into a concrete floor. I squatted and added my contribution to the lot in the trench below. Once in the toilet I saw an old woman with sagging breasts wearing a T-shirt that read, I’M JUST HERE FOR THE BEER. The toilet was something of a party scene in the mornings, full of neighborhood grannies squatting and reading their newspapers at a leisurely pace, seemingly oblivious to being marinated in a foul miasma. As for me, I did my business as quickly as possible and fled before gagging or passing out. I always left with the sense that my delicate brain ch
emistry had been irrevocably altered.

  Bomu apologized profusely for the inconvenience and dropped her voice to confide, “This house used to have a bathroom years ago.”

  “Why doesn’t it now?”

  “Long story.”

  I waited for her to tell it, but she didn’t.

  I visited one last time in the summer to look for a job, contacting Western newspapers as well as the two English-language magazines in town, Beijing Scene and City Edition. I gave the editors a story I’d written about a man in Tianjin who’d started a league for American-style football.

  On that visit, Bobo and Bomu’s house had been an island in a sea of deserted, half-demolished shells and piles of rubble. Bobo told me that they woke up one morning and found that someone had crawled over their wall at night and slept in the courtyard. It was during that last visit that I pried the truth out of them: The house didn’t belong to them but to Great-Aunt Mabel, who now lived in Seattle. They had been living in and taking care of her house for almost fifty years and were stalling to give her lawyer son Johnny time to negotiate with the government for a new courtyard house. He could do so because Great-Aunt Mabel held an American passport.

  When I moved to Beijing in the fall, I had expected to find Bobo and his family ensconced in Great-Aunt Mabel’s new courtyard house with an entire wing set aside for me. Instead, they had moved to Xiao Peng’s small courtyard house, somehow acquiring another quarter of it from one of the three families. No one had uttered a single word about what had happened to the old house.