Beijing Bastard Read online

  I went to find the people I’d been writing about. When I called Yang Lina, I was not surprised to hear an automated voice tell me it was an “empty number.” I got her new number from a mutual friend and visited her in a new apartment she’d bought. The intervening years had been difficult for her: She had gotten married, had a daughter, and gotten divorced, and hadn’t made any more documentaries. Running through her usually bright, strong voice was a new note of sorrow. Money had made everyone in her generation crazy, she said. It had ruined their lives. Her mother was raising her daughter up in the Northeast, and she was starting on a few new documentaries, mostly about groups of women.

  As for the subjects of my own documentary, I no longer kept in touch with the Zhang family but I did wonder what had happened to them. One afternoon, I took a walk down their street; the narrow alley had been widened several years before, and now the small shops and restaurants on both sides were in the process of being demolished and the whole area remade into a pedestrian-friendly shopping and hotel district designed to mimic the intimate dimensions of the original neighborhood. I stood outside their restaurant and looked up into their apartment above. It looked emptied out, the windows flung open to the street.

  Wang Le’s number was also disconnected and Cookie told me the last she heard she was working at a salon “on that really long road which was chai’d and made into a modern road” that ran parallel to Wangfujing. I spent an afternoon biking down the road, poking my head into all the hair salons asking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. All this thinking about her made me want to cut my hair short. A branch of the British salon Toni&Guy had recently opened and I went there instead and emerged looking like any woman with a pageboy whom you might see on the streets of London or New York.

  Graham arrived and I took him to see my relatives. They were refreshingly unchanged. They still lived three generations all together in the same courtyard house and we still sat and watched TV together and they still made jokes about how much I’d eaten the first time we met years ago. The newborn baby had transformed into a rambunctious little boy who, as we sat quietly talking, rode his scooter in circles around the room at top speed, barely missing the TV, people’s toes, and the stools with glasses of tea perched on top. And Xiao Peng, who played a Game Boy all through dinner, seemed to be shrinking in years. Though my relatives and Graham had no common language, they liked one another, as I knew they would. They accepted him more easily than did my parents, who didn’t mind that he wasn’t Chinese but couldn’t help disapproving of us living together. Bobo took us to see another courtyard house that Uncle Johnny had bought, which he had renovated impeccably and then rented out to the Inner Mongolian provincial government.

  While I kept pointing out to Graham all the new things he should ignore, I began to see that many of the city’s particularities had remained the same. The city still moved with the same drowsy, frenetic pace of life as before, and Beijingers were still gruff and loquacious with the same take-it-as-it-comes attitude. Under the new upholstery of the city, an indestructible something had endured. Graham noted gently that perhaps it was as much the passing of my own youth that I mourned as the city itself.

  In 2008, I returned to Beijing for the summer to work for NBC News during the Olympics. The fortune-teller’s curse: broken.

  Cookie was also going to be there for the summer and we decided to live together. Bobo told me the tenants in Nainai’s courtyard house had finally been evicted (more details than that were not forthcoming) and I told him I might want to live there with my friend that summer, so I went with him and Bomu to see the house. We walked in and I saw that the courtyard was wide-open, all the makeshift rooms in the center having been demolished. But the house was a wreck. The yard was filthy, trash strewn everywhere, red firecracker papers dotting the ground. Half the roof tiles had fallen off, and where they hadn’t, tall yellow grasses sprouted straight up. Laundry was strung across the courtyard, and Bobo casually mentioned that a friend of his was living in the house to look after it. Not to worry, he said, they’d left the best room for me. The grayish walls of “my” room were blotched with water stains in some spots and patched with newspaper and checkered cloth in others, and dust lay thickly on every surface. Even after a good mopping the place would still look pretty grim. The toilet was predictably small, dark, and pungent, the squatter merely a slat cut in the concrete floor, and needless to say, there was no shower. I didn’t disguise my unhappiness with the situation and Bobo smiled and laughed in a way that made me feel he was disguising other emotions. This wasn’t the gentle, fictional Bobo I’d been spending so much time with in my writing, but the real one. Prickly and still a mystery in many ways. I met his friend, a man whom my dad would have characterized as rustic, with crooked teeth and an unctuous smile, and I understood that I would be living with him the entire summer, as well as with his friend, a sesame cake maker. On the way out Bomu mentioned a policeman lived there too. It’s safer with him here, she assured me. I suddenly had a pang of compassion for Uncle Johnny.

  Cookie and I instead rented an apartment in our old neighborhood, in a gongyu that hadn’t existed when we’d lived there. An enormous neo-Roman triumphal arch stood as the entrance gate, inset on each side with a soldier easily twice our height clad in full battle regalia. The building had an elevator and we even registered officially with the police. The city, on its best behavior with fresh flowers everywhere, was unrecognizable. It was a simple and happy time and we got to be young again for a summer before saying good-bye to it—the city as we’d known it, our youth. I realized China was a place I could return to, a place my parents could return to, as long as I accepted that none of it could ever be counted on to stay the same.

  I took Bobo and Bomu to see a show at the new multimillion-dollar Peking Opera theater that had opened inside the Second Ring Road and was surprised to see the theater full. I also finally met their two daughters, who were back for a visit. The younger daughter had two sons and the older daughter was divorced, or so Nainai had told me. Bobo and Bomu now wintered annually in L.A. and hoped to bring Sanbao to the States in a few years.

  After the Olympics were over, Graham came again, and at Cookie’s suggestion, we went to visit a miraculously preserved Ming Dynasty town down south in Anhui Province and stayed at an inn run by a Shanghainese poet.

  The Pig’s Heaven Inn was just as beautiful as Cookie had said it would be. It was an old wooden house with soaring proportions built around an inner courtyard set with plants and a huge ceramic fishbowl. While architectural details like the intricate wooden latticework of the doors and windows were perfectly preserved, the inn also had a pleasant sense of growth and decay, of time passing. We were the only ones staying there and we spent days wandering around the alleys of the walled village of Xidi, which felt as picturesque as Beijing had years ago, more so even. The whitewashed buildings all had baroquely carved lintels and dark roofs with flying eaves. Most ancient villages like this had been demolished during the Cultural Revolution; Xidi had been preserved by one official’s patronage, a fluke of history. The village felt unreal as a dream but Graham is an anthropologist and I wanted to sell him on China as a future field site. Once he was hooked, I would do the bait and switch and show him the real China.

  Our birthdays fall near each other and we’d brought presents to exchange. After dinner we sat upstairs on a balcony that overlooked the sea of tiled roofs of the village. We could have been hundreds of years in the past, save for the occasional solar panel on the roof. Mist painted itself poetically onto the hills in the distance. Graham handed me a small box, saying he was giving me a selfish present that was more of a present to himself. Even after I opened it, it took me several moments to understand what it was. My twenty-three-year-old self would kill me if she knew I was going to end a book about her with a marriage proposal in a storybook foreign locale. But there were so many things about life she could never have known.

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sp; The night before our wedding, my parents sat me down for a talk in their living room. Dread curdled in my stomach as I had flashbacks to other talks they’d held with me in that room. I hoped the words “marrying an alcoholic and going on a honeymoon on a sinking ship” weren’t going to come out of my dad’s mouth. They didn’t. He said kindly, “We wish you all the happiness in the world,” as my mom nodded her agreement. He continued, “But if anything goes wrong, you should know that you can always come back to us.” Go back to them? I was shocked. I had been on my own since graduating from college. But to them, I’d been their ward all these years, until I got married and they could pass on the responsibility. We’d been operating under such radically different ideas of family and independence, and each been oblivious to the other’s point of view. It was no wonder we’d had such a hard time. To my surprise, after the wedding the familial pressure I’d felt my entire life lifted.

  My parents had long since stopped asking about my book, and I never told them about my struggles to finish and sell it. One night I stayed over at Nainai’s apartment, and in the morning as we sat outside before I left, she said to me without prelude, “I hope you can make your mark in the world.” I nodded, and she said she knew it wasn’t easy. This encouragement was her last gift to me before she passed away the next year. She was ninety-five.

  Her courtyard house in Beijing she bequeathed to her three children. They held on to it for a few years as the houses around it were sold to a state-run developer who planned to knock them down and build a complex of high-rises. My dad’s younger brother, who lives in Singapore, took on the task of dealing with it, relieving my dad of the burden. My uncle wanted to trade the courtyard house for another one so we could retain a family home in Beijing, just as I wanted, but my dad and his sister had no interest in that. Just recently, under pressure from the developer, they sold it. Bobo said Nainai told him over that phone before her death that if the house was ever sold, he would get a cut of the profits, and so he has.

  With Nainai gone, and now our house too, a crucial part of our connection to China is lost. My parents talk on the phone with Bobo regularly and I get back to China as often as I can, but I wonder, as time goes on, will Xiao Peng and I have as strong a relationship as our parents and grandparents did? What will take me back there? What will take my children back there?

  Marriage gave me the accepting family I’d craved for so long and it primed me to do the most square thing of all; our twins were born in 2012. After I birthed out almost fourteen pounds of baby the natural way, words I’d been waiting years to hear finally came out of my mom’s mouth: “I am so proud of you.” (If I’d known all these years that that’s all it took.)

  Just as Yeye’s passing irrevocably altered our family structure, adding August and Maurice to our family tweaked ancient patterns we had no way to intervene in ourselves. I see more of my parents than I have in years, and we even vacationed together in the summer, renting a beach house together for a week.

  On the last night, as we sat in the kitchen after the boys went to sleep, my dad began telling the story of his journey to the States when he was sixteen, which I’d never heard in full before. His family of five set sail from Jakarta in December of 1956. They first hopscotched around Asia, stopping off in Taiwan to get passports, taking another boat to Yokohama, Japan, then a train to western Japan, and finally boarding a Chinese freight ship bound for America. The only other nonsailor aboard was given the luxurious guest suite at the front and they were given a windowless room in the back, which was freezing in the winter and, by the time they got to the Philippines to pick up a load of iron ore, boiling hot. We were roasting like peanuts back there, he said. The ship then took a month to get to Hawaii. It was mind-numbingly boring, Dad said, so he and his siblings roamed all over the ship and got to know the entire crew of twenty. The sailors stitched together a volleyball out of scraps of cloth and, when it flew overboard, just made a new one. Yeye befriended the captain and got them moved to a room closer to the front of the boat. They sailed through the Panama Canal and finally arrived in Baltimore in April of 1957. They took a train up to New York City and wandered around 125th Street with all their worldly possessions in a few suitcases, not knowing what they were going to do.

  “Didn’t you have a plan?”

  “A plan? There was no plan.”

  “I thought Yeye had a job here.”

  “No, no.”

  “You just came.”

  “Yes.”

  They bumped into a Chinese man and struck up a conversation. He took pity on them and let them stay in his apartment for a few nights. He even lied to his wife, telling her Yeye was his cousin.

  “Was his wife Chinese?” asked Graham.

  “No, she was black. She was very welcoming. Without that man, I don’t know what we would have done. Just to have a place to stay for a few days was a tremendous help.

  “The man was from Tianjin,” my dad said as an aside to me.

  It seemed I’d been doomed to retrace my parents’ steps in ways I’d never even known. What had gone through my dad’s mind when he’d heard years ago that I would be moving to Tianjin? It must have seemed a meaningful coincidence and, knowing him, not a positive one. Closer to a bad omen. But now I understood parts of his story that no one else in our family did. As usual, though, he shifted quickly out of sentimentality. “That man had been in the U.S. forty years. But his English still wasn’t very good.”

  “That’s a crazy story.”

  “Anyhow, that’s why I don’t ever want to go on a cruise ship. Mom always wants to take a cruise. I say no way. It’s like being in prison.”

  “Why did Nainai and Yeye decide to come, if they didn’t have a job or much money?”

  “It was Nainai’s idea. Like many Chinese people, she was a little bit fascinated by America. So Yeye agreed.”

  Could Nainai ever have foreseen the changes that not only China but also America and our family too would undergo? No more than I can look into the future another half century and see where everyone ends up. Nainai and Yeye made a lucky gamble coming to the States, but as China rises, perhaps the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. All I can do is what my parents and theirs before did and so on up the chain: Give the boys the best start I can and hope they forgive my missteps. They are enrolled now in a Mandarin-immersion day care where they are getting excellent “eaah training,” and I sense that somewhere out there, Yeye is finally laughing.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Bobo, Bomu, Xiao Peng, Xiao Lu, and the whole clan in Beijing for welcoming me despite my barbaric ways. Thank you to all the grannies, hunzi, and other friends in Beijing who lived this story with me, and to the Zhang family for opening your home to me.

  Immense gratitude to everyone who helped me along on this long journey of writing, especially the following: Rebecca Barnes, Nick Poppy, Jeff Alexander, Jonathan Ansfield, Ann Finkbeiner, Chip Brantley, Heather Dewar, Sally McGrane, Shanti Avirgan, John Sanchez, Blue Chevigny, Justine Kalb, Margot Meyers, Ben Ryder Howe, Carey Goldberg, Krista Van Fleit Hang, Eric Han, and Jo Lusby and the Penguin China office.

  Thanks also to the Brooklyn Writers Space and the Writers’ Room of Boston, and all the kindred spirits found there.

  Thank you to Gillian MacKenzie, the very best agent a writer could have, for your smarts and savvy and good cheer when I waver. Thanks also to her assistants, Adriann Ranta and Allison Devereux.

  A huge thank-you to my editor, Lucia Watson, for sharing in the vision of this book with me and for keeping me on the path when I strayed.

  Thank you to Gigi Campo and to the huge crew at Gotham who turned the file on my computer into a beautiful book out in the world: Brian Tart, Lisa Johnson, Lauren Marino, Megan Newman, Susan Schwartz, LeeAnn Pemberton, Dora Mak, Mikayla Butchart, Spring Hoteling, Beth Parker, Gina Chung, Farin Schlussel, and Allison Prince. Big thanks especi
ally to cover designers Monica Benalcazar and Stephen Brayda.

  Finally, thank you to my family. To my parents, Allan and Lisa Wang, for long ago giving me the choice to either “read a book or look at the wall” and for so openly sharing your stories with me. This book has been a long way of delivering a short message: I love you. To my brother, Chris Wang, for being so perfect growing up so I didn’t have to be. To Carol and Richard Jones for your unwavering support.

  My deepest love and gratitude is reserved for Graham Jones, a prince among men, for always listening with love, care, and humor, and for the way you believed in this book and in me. Without you, well, I just shudder to think. And finally thank you to my princelings Augie and Momo for simply being.