Beijing Bastard (10 page)

“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.

O
n 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).

We stopped first at the office of a friend of her dad's to pick up money; then she dragged me to markets all over town, from the open-air Silk Market in the east to the three-story Pearl Market in the south to the warehouse-like Tianyi Market in the west to the traditional Qianmen market in the old city, each with rows and rows of tiny stalls crammed to the ceiling with goods and each manned by its own vendor who would grab our sleeves and say,
“Konnichiwa!”
Along with silk and pearls, we
saw knock-off North Face jackets and Beanie Babies, chinoiserie, singing Mao lighters, fur coats with the claws still attached. Shopping was antithetical to my lifestyle, but Jade bought something at every stop: cream to keep her face pale and blemish-free, bright red dye for her hair, a long down coat, three-inch platform shoes, furry handbags. By the end of the day she was laden down with huge shopping bags. She had grown up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and I guessed that her upbringing had given her elaborate grooming habits as well as confidence about what she wanted in life.

We spent a long time in traffic jams, the crawling, honking, smoggy, never-ending traffic jams for which Beijing was getting famous. Cabbies were only too willing to talk. They complained about the police who they said just stood in the middle of the road socializing instead of directing traffic, about pedestrians who didn't follow rules but whom you unfortunately couldn't just run over, and about the government that had reduced cab fares by 20 percent without reducing their fees.

At one point we drove down a rubble-strewn street that was more Beirut than Beijing. Courtyard houses on both sides of the narrow street lay in ruin and most of the roadbed had been dug up. As dust swirled up into the windshield, we navigated the crooked line of pavement that remained between tall construction barriers. This road was Numero Uno of the “Big Three” projects: Ping'an Dajie, parallel to the Avenue of Eternal Peace. The deadline for the project was the fiftieth anniversary of the People's Republic of China, less than a year away. The wheel of development that had crushed my relatives' courtyard house was rolling over other houses all around the city. This place that I was growing to love was disappearing right in front of my eyes.

•   •   •

Despite
Max's attempts to dissuade me, I was still intrigued by the world of underground art. So when the
City Edition
fax machine spit out an invitation for an art exhibition that was being held in an apartment complex over the weekend, I decided to go. A crudely drawn pictograph
resembling a cartoon treasure map indicated the location. Perhaps here I would find the underground artists at last.

I took a cab alone up to the North Fourth Ring Road. Out the window was a dusty wasteland dotted with apartment megablocks, low warehouses, and the occasional building crane. The desolation was overwhelming. I had the cab drop me off where I thought the map indicated and I circled around and around the huge and deserted apartment blocks with the map in hand, secretly hoping I wouldn't find it so I could turn around and go back home. Finally I saw a cluster of young people standing outside a doorway smoking. They nodded at me as I took the steps leading down into the basement.

I walked down a corridor over a series of gigantic lightboxes in which a man's face struggled underwater, his palms pressed against the glass, bubbles trailing out of his mouth. I walked from room to room in the dank and labyrinthine concrete bomb shelter. It was exactly what I'd hoped an underground art exhibition would be like. In one room, two eight-foot-tall beings constructed entirely of vegetables appeared to be locked in a distinctly carnivorous embrace. Body parts figured in many of the artworks. In one room a waxy torso floated upside down next to a pair of legs, which were next to aluminum pipes twisted like intestines, next to what looked like an actual intestine inflated with helium. Out of thin air phantom cellphones rang and people left messages, and the whole scene was harshly lit by a single lightbulb. In another room, a real fetus rested on a single bed made of a slab of ice. In another, an arm dangling from the ceiling gripped the end of a rope that reached down and snaked over the entire floor. A Chinese couple was standing on the pile of rope staring up at the arm.

“Is it real?”

“Looks real.” It did too, all blackened and shriveled.

“E xing,”
said the woman. Nauseating.

“Ku,”
said the man. Cool.

I walked through almost twenty rooms. Cutting through the dank and sweetly rotten smell came a scent like french fries. I found my way
to a room where many people were gathered. Two girls in tight dresses were standing behind a deep fryer from which they fished out things that they then gave to a fey creature with curly hair to line up on the floor. They were tanks. Was it a reference to the Tiananmen Square Massacre? What did it all mean?

The combined effect of all the pieces in the space did make me feel slightly sick to my stomach. Unlike the Political Pop and other high-minded, clean-looking art of the
Inside Out
exhibition, these pieces felt more visceral and more intimate, like alienation experienced truly from the inside out.

Most of those milling around were Chinese guys with hair of varying lengths and with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. A few young Westerners wandered through. I didn't know anyone and couldn't tell who the artists were but everyone there seemed to know one another. I passed the man whose drowning face I'd walked over before, but was too tongue-tied to say hi.

I finally saw someone I knew, a Chinese guy with a shaggy bowl cut and kindly eyes; I couldn't quite remember where I knew him from. I lunged at him eagerly but as he recoiled with a look of shock I realized who he was: Cui Jian. China's first rock star. Hero of
Beijing Bastards.
I almost blurted out that I was friends with Zhang Yuan and that the film they'd made together had lured me to Beijing, but at the last moment, I grabbed hold of myself and moved on.