Beijing Bastard Read online

  “Not Chinese? Where are you from?”

  “I’m American.”

  “You can’t be American. Americans all have blond hair and blue eyes.” Now was not the time for a history lesson about immigration. My hands shook as I pulled a photocopy of my passport out of my wallet and thrust it at him. Someone had advised me to keep it with me for occasions like this.

  “Look at my American passport.”

  “This isn’t a real American passport.”

  “No, it’s a pho-to-co-py of a passport,” I said with more arrogance than I felt. I was bold with liquor and the tide turned swiftly. “And how would you know? You’ve never seen an American passport before. I bet you can’t even read it. Can you read English?” Like a cornered animal, I had become mean. He stood there, turning the paper over in his hands, unsure of what to do next. He tried to order me out of the cab again. I saw an opening, one that could even leave him some face.

  “Besides, my Chinese is this terrible and you still think I’m Chinese!” I said in my heaviest American accent and snatched the photocopy back, while slamming the door and telling the cabbie to step on it. The cabbie chuckled and muttered something about a narrow escape. I got to my gate and ran inside.

  That night, I awoke to hear a police helicopter pulsing noisily outside my window. I got out of bed and rushed to the peephole of my front door. Red pointer lights crisscrossed outside; a thin beam of red shone straight in and blinded me as a swarm of officers began to push the door down. The latch on the inner door kept coming loose and I kept slamming it shut. I was terrified for the small girl I was babysitting who was asleep in the bed. The police pushed at the door again, and this time I couldn’t shut it. They flooded in. I yelled and woke myself up. I lay in the dark, shaking. Slowly, I raised up to look out the window, sure that the helicopter would be out there hacking the air to pieces, a policeman’s murderous face mere feet from mine in the cockpit window. There was no helicopter there, only the dark cylinder of the Hotel Kunlun in the distance topped by a steadily blinking light. And no girl I was babysitting, aside from myself. Harbinger, harbinger, harbinger, I thought as I lay back in bed, trembling.

  A few hours later, a rough banging at my door jarred me awake. This time I knew it had to be the police. Who else would be banging at my door at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning? My head was splitting and I pinched myself to make sure I was really awake. I lay still with my head and my heart pounding in unison, silently thanking Constantine for the security door, a heavy metal frame reinforced with thick grating. The inner door, of warped and ill-fitting wood, would have given way with one swift kick like in my dream.

  My landlord’s words—you never know who it’s going to be—came back to me. The week before, Landlord Ma had come to collect my first month’s rent—a thick stack of hundred-yuan notes. She was short and solid and full of suspicions about the country people invading the city. Her husband looked the same; they could have ribboned at a husband-and-wife look-alike contest.

  “Do you have any friends like you who are also looking for an apartment?” she had asked. “We have another apartment just downstairs from yours. We own both, and both are legal to rent out.”

  “Legal to rent to foreigners?” I had responded. I wanted to clarify my own situation. Beijing supposedly had strict laws forbidding foreigners from living in Chinese housing but no one knew the exact rules. And no one knew what would happen if you were caught—a hefty fine, eviction, prison time, deportation? Fortunately, looking Chinese made it easier for me to avoid the police dragnet so by “like you” I took it she meant Chinese face, Western purse strings. She evaded my question and I feared that maybe I’d made her lose face, though she’d never tell me how or even let me know that I had.

  “By the way, never open the door for anyone. You never know who it’s going to be,” she had said. Later that week, I came home one night to find a policeman in crisp olive from head to toe sitting outside the gate of my building. Just the sight of his lapel decorated with sadistically colorful pins started my heart thumping. I had read in the Western press about prison torture in China and had seen with my own eyes the rough and unsmiling way the police handled illegal touts. Not pretty. He stared at me as I walked in.

  I lay in bed, hyperventilating quietly, while a hand tried the door, rattling the metal handle impatiently, then banging again, a low, hard thumping surrounded by a halo of loose metal sounds. After a pause, I heard the door across the stairwell unstick itself and open with a whoosh. I rose silently and tiptoed to the peephole. A plump woman with a jagged bowl cut whom I’d never seen before stood with her back to me. She wore a silky blue pajama set emblazoned with golden elephants and was exchanging something with my neighbor, a stocky woman. I couldn’t hear my neighbor too clearly, but she seemed to know that I was a young woman living alone, that I looked Chinese but was foreign, and something about higher rent. I heard the woman with the bowl cut say, “Hong Kong.”

  “She comes home late,” said my neighbor. “I wouldn’t feel safe if my daughter were living alone.”

  She frowned, shook her head, gave a little smile, and shut the door. I crawled quietly back into bed.

  I grouped all my neighbors in together with the nosy grannies wearing the red armbands stationed in the little office by the front gate; they observed everyone who came in and out and would report any suspicious activity back to the local police. I tried to spy on my neighbors too, peeking into their apartments when I passed by open doors. Often, three generations of a family were stuffed into the same space that I lived in alone. Televisions blared loudly and the stairwell often smelled of fresh cigarette smoke.

  • • •

  One winter morning, a key turned in the lock of my heavy security door as I stood inside lacing up my shoes, about to go to work. I froze in fear. The logical response was to run out to the balcony and hide quietly until whoever it was had looted from my apartment whatever they wanted and left. But fuck it. I was tired of freezing in fear, scampering, and hiding. This was my house! I took a deep breath, readied myself to bust some karate moves if necessary, and flung open the inner door just as the outer door swung open. I stood face-to-face with my neighbor sheepishly holding my keys in her hand.

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “And why do you have my keys?”

  She explained that she lived across the landing and that my landlord, her good friend, had given her the keys so she could come and close the jie men’r to get her heat fixed.

  “Jie men’r? What’s a jie men’r?” I asked.

  “It’s in your kitchen. It’ll only take a second.” She ushered in a scrawny worker who wore camouflage pants rolled up to the knee. He climbed up on a chair and slowly turned a small red wheel connected to some pipes that ran along the ceiling. Suddenly, the wheel broke off in his hands and boiling water began thundering down. He jumped off the chair. We froze, panicked. I began scurrying around clearing the floor and my neighbor ran to her apartment to get blankets and pails to soak up the water, the whole time whimpering, “Daomeile! Daomeile! Daomeile!” (“What a disaster! What a disaster! What a disaster!”)

  “Why don’t you find a way to turn off the water instead!” I said.

  “Daomeile! Daomeile! Daomeile!”

  “Bu ben, bu bu biao!” I yelled over the roar of the water, stabbing my finger at the pipe spewing boiling water and hoping that this tongue-twisting chestnut of Chinese medicine wisdom (“Fix the source, not the symptom!”) would get through to her, but she kept repeating her mournful refrain and running for more blankets. The worker stood unmoving in the growing fog. Water, an inch deep, was cascading over my tile floor, out my door, and down the concrete stairwell. Neighbors began coming up to investigate.

  After a half hour, somehow the water was turned off. Word about the jie men’r spread quickly. My apartment filled up with curious neighbors, twenty or thirty of them. They were everywhere.
Some were in the kitchen, offering advice about fixing the jie men’r, others lined the hallway and spilled into the living room. A few were in my bedroom fingering things on my desk. My papers were curled with the damp and the air was stiflingly close. I called Sue to tell her I would be late to work. No one owned a car, so the worker began a long bike ride out to a warehouse to get a new jie men’r.

  My neighbor introduced me to the woman with the bowl cut, who lived in apartment 101. The woman said the ten apartments in our stairwell took turns checking the water and gas meters and collecting the money, and she had already come by a number of times, but I never answered the door. I lied and said I’d never heard anyone knocking. She then read the meter and issued me a tiny piece of foolscap with a number penned on it, the amount of which I promptly forked over to her.

  Then a bulky policeman in olive showed up. I tried to shrink into the background and we played a deadly cat-and-mouse game around my apartment until he eventually cornered me and asked me where I was from. I cracked under his interrogation and admitted that I came from America. He fixed me with a look. Would I, possibly, be interested in teaching his kid English? I agreed but gave him my telephone number with two of the digits transposed.

  Hours passed and the worker finally returned. He climbed up on the chair and held the new jie men’r up to the pipe. Too big. No one seemed surprised but me. This time, he measured the pipe first before leaving again for several hours. I called Sue and told her I wouldn’t be making it in at all. Most of the neighbors dispersed, leaving their dirty footprints all over the wet tile floor. By five in the evening, the worker had returned, installed a new jie men’r, and my neighbor had finished mopping my entire floor. Everyone left; I took my shoes off and had a seat.

  Chapter Eight

  The Most Important Man in My Story

  On Monday morning, the entire City Edition staff piled into the advertising department for our weekly meeting. Sue said the new cover story was about an underground drag show hosted by the French chef of the Parisian bistro Maxim’s, provided it passed the censors, who’d been dragging their feet. If we had a story that Sue and Max judged sensitive, Max would take it to show our censors, whom I never met, and anywhere from a day to a week later, he would return with their yea-or-nay verdict.

  Max strutted into the meeting. All eyes turned to him. Bad news, he said. He’d just met with the censors and they’d finally made a decision: It was a no-go. We’d have to come up with a new idea for a cover story soon.

  A thought sprang to mind. Over the summer, I had seen Inside Out: New Chinese Art, a big show on Chinese contemporary art at PS1 in New York. Like the characters in Beijing Bastards, the artists had put their bad attitudes on flagrant display. Huge heads in pop colors laughed at jokes we couldn’t hear. Chairman Mao’s face was painted just as Warhol had done it years ago. In one gigantic photograph, a man sat naked in a public toilet coated in shiny honey and crawling with flies.

  I dreaded opening Beijing Scene each week to find profiles of the latest artists, articles I’d wish I’d written.

  “What if we did a cover story on underground artists?” I proposed. I didn’t know any artists but I figured Max did. He shot me a scornful, pitying look.

  “Chinese art is bullshit. I used to like art but then I decided it was a load of dog farts. Now I just have lunch every month with my friend Li Xianting, who runs the avant-garde art scene here, and he tells me who’s hot and what’s worthwhile. Everything else is shit. Do you want to know what is important?”

  “Yes.”

  “News is important.” He fixed me with a look to make sure his words had sunk in.

  Max’s cellphone rang. He looked at the number in annoyance before rejecting the call and I saw the saleswomen exchange sly glances. For the past few days, droves of women had been calling our office looking for Max. Whenever the phone rang my heart gave a little hop—was it Zhang Yuan? Once when I picked it up, it was an American woman on the other end, looking for “the Chinese man.”

  “Which Chinese man? Max?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, sounding embarrassed. I told her she had the wrong number but she quoted Max’s cellphone number. Sometimes he forwarded his cellphone calls to the office.

  Max told us about a fortune-teller he’d been seeing recently. She knew things about his past that she had no business knowing as well as everything that would happen to him in the future, though she said there was one thing she wouldn’t tell him: when and how he would die. Every single day he called her and she told him what was going to happen to him and what to watch out for. We all listened, rapt. This was typical: Max issued ridiculous pronouncements and my Chinese coworkers pampered his ego and doted on him, teasing and giggling. My natural tendency was to be sarcastic and emasculating but I was new here, he was my boss, and I needed his help. I tried to join in.

  “What did she say today?” I asked.

  “That my finances are not good, so I can’t buy lunch for everyone today.”

  “But, Max, you are always so successful!” cooed another coworker.

  “But my love life is supposed to go well. I am supposed to get together with a woman from another continent,” he said, with a glance at our blond American art director. This made the women giggle and exchange more glances.

  When his phone rang again, he stormed out of the meeting.

  “Who are these women who are calling?” I asked Shannon, the graphic designer who shared a room with me. She had grown up in Beijing and still lived with her family in an apartment complex for army families manned by a military guard toting a machine gun. When I was still living with my relatives, Shannon and I had talked briefly about finding an apartment together but I was much more impatient than she to be on my own and I feared that she was like my relatives, a stranger to the concept of privacy.

  “You didn’t hear?” she asked, grabbing a copy of the latest magazine and turning to the personals, which were meant to connect Western companies and Chinese employees, Chinese nannies and Western babies, language tutors and eager students, and lovers of all stripes and sizes. “Ad sales were slow, so the ad department decided to put some fake ads in. Look in Lonely Hearts and see if you can figure out which one it is.”

  Most of the ads were Chinese women looking for Western men.

  Here lovely Chinese lady, early 30 years old, 160cm tall, can speak three foreign languages, now live and work in Beijing, looking for serious partner leading to marriage: European 175–180cm tall, 30–40 years old, white man, well educated, live and work in Beijing too.

  Waiting for you. Chinese lady, well-educated, slim, curvy, long hair, starry eyes, sweet, good-looking, looking for her life partner here. You don’t have to be rich to be my prince, as long as you are caring, responsible, athletic, well-educated, kind, understanding, extrovert, of course single, willing to spend the rest of your life with me, I would love to be in your arms for ever. By the way, you better be 30ys above, 170–180cm in height. Thanks! :)

  Where are you ? I am 36-year-old Chinese female. I like swimming, music, film, and I like to write story. Looking for somebody has something same as me and become the most important man in my story?

  Only one was a Chinese man looking for a Western woman.

  I like the nightlife, I like to boogie!! I am a big strong Chinese man who speaks a little English and is looking to have fun, night and day. Ring me and I will rock your world! Call me at 13-9555-1977.

  “You put in his real phone number!” I said.

  “He has no idea because he doesn’t read English and none of the women who call speak Chinese!” she said, and let out a wicked bark. I don’t think they thought the ad would yield so many phone calls, that there were so many lonely Western women out there looking to have fun. Max didn’t go out with any of the callers, but everyone in the office enjoyed seeing his feathers so ruffled for once. But secretly, I coveted Max’s confidence. I
found it hard to say anything with absolute certainty, a skill I suspected I had learned in college. What feeling or thought was to be trusted if everything and its opposite were also true? I wanted Max’s macho swagger, wanted to dress up in corny outfits and have everyone hang on my most outlandish words.

  Were those survival skills he had learned growing up in a prison? That was one of the rumors that swirled around Max. Beijing was a city that ran on rumors—no one in their right mind would trust any official news—and Max attracted more rumors than anyone else I knew. His parents had been jailed during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the myth of his shadowy origins went, and the prison was where he was raised. He also had clandestine connections to the People’s Liberation Army—how else would he have gotten those pictures of the PLA training grounds?

  In each issue of the magazine we included how-to guides to help expats re-create the lives they’d left behind at home, and because it was almost Christmas, Sue told me to put together a shopping guide. And while I was taking cabs around the city, I was to gather quotes from cabbies about the traffic to help her with an article she was writing about the “Big Three” construction projects meant to ease the city’s notorious gridlock.

  I had no money and hence had never gone shopping in Beijing, but Jade knew the city better than I did, so she eagerly volunteered to come along and take photos. We’d been spending a lot of time together recently. She’d come to my neighborhood to have dinner, we’d gone together to Steve’s apartment in the diplomatic compound to watch Clinton getting impeached on CNN and Bride of Chucky (her choice).