Beijing Bastard (13 page)

A
giant coffin held aloft by several men in long gowns bobbles merrily down a narrow hutong and arrives at the door of a courtyard house, where the men try to collect the payment for the thirty new layers of lacquer recently added to it. The lady of the house instructs her servant to turn them away. The coffin is her father-in-law's pride and joy, which the Old Master has spent the family fortune lacquering up year after year.

Xiao Ding stopped the tape and rewound to the beginning, apologizing for the low production value of the made-for-TV movie. Several days before, he had called me, reminded me of who he was (Zhang Yuan's “translator” friend from the Pretty Bird Club), and asked if I'd be interesting in a job helping him polish some English subtitles. China Central Television had hired him to subtitle a movie adapted from an old stage play that was airing on their English-language channel. The movie wasn't so great, he said, but he remembered me saying that I wanted to make a documentary and this job would be good practice if I wanted to go on to subtitle independent films later, which was a good way to meet other filmmakers and start making my own documentary.

And so I found myself in Xiao Ding's apartment on a Sunday afternoon. The apartment was alarmingly stripped down; the walls and floors were bare concrete and the fixtures protruded abruptly out of the walls, as if the builders had abandoned the place halfway through construction. He said the movie was based on a play from 1940 called
Peking Man.
The playwright, Cao Yu, was one of China's first Western-style playwrights and had studied Eugene O'Neill and Aeschylus in college. The play was about the Zengs, an ancient fossil of a Beijing family in the 1930s who are educated, mannered, snobbish, and completely out of step with modern times. They are deeply in debt to their neighbors, a nouveau riche textile manufacturing family, and the Old Master is thinking of handing over either their decrepit courtyard house or his coffin to settle the debt. Xiao Ding was prim and fussy with the subtitling, dictating exactly how many characters could fit on a line and pressing me to make each line sound like real conversational English. We sat close together, debating every line of the movie.

The story focused on the worst few days of the Zengs' lives. At the end, right before the family is forced to hand the coffin over to their neighbors, the Old Master delivers a speech in which he calls all his children “stupid, lazy, and unfilial.” The playwright could have taken the words right out of my Yeye's mouth. It was eerie to see him fictionalized this way, years before he became who he was. The playwright had been about the same age as him and in fact the play had been published in the year of my dad's birth. Amazing also was the fact that this play could still have so much meaning sixty years later, that traditional families would still be struggling to adapt to modern times.

When we finally finished subtitling, I was exhausted. I looked around Xiao Ding's apartment and saw photos of his wife and daughter, who was almost a teenager. He told me that during the week they lived with his wife's parents in a courtyard house in the old city, where their daughter went to school, and they came back to the apartment on the weekends. They were out for a few hours to give us privacy.

“How old is she?”

“Twelve. I got married very young,” he said. He was in his thirties. “My daughter is really growing up. Every week I bike her home—she sits on the crossbar of my bike and we talk. It's one of my favorite parts of the week but she's getting a bit too big for it. It's awkward.”

“Why don't you let her ride her own bike?”

“She wants to but I don't think it's safe.”

“You've got to let her grow up.”

“I know, but it's hard.”

After subtitling
Peking Man,
Xiao Ding and I began to talk often on the phone and to have dinner occasionally, always during the week. This time I could get direction for my wayward life with none of the moony stuff or the bombast or the pesky element of sex. Xiao Ding was so practical.

“Well, you have to decide if you want to shoot a documentary about the city or the country.”

“The city, of course.”

“Well, then you've made your first decision. That's good. Now you just need a topic.”

“I'm working on it.”

Then one day Xiao Ding told me he had another job he needed help with and asked if I wanted to split the work and money with him again. The job: subtitling
Crazy English.
Months had gone by since I'd last talked to Zhang Yuan, and after all that happened between us, I couldn't believe I was saying yes. But the reflected glory, the money—those were all things I couldn't refuse. We sat in my apartment watching
Crazy English
as we translated. Zhang Yuan and his crew themselves appeared in the first scene of the film, tramping down a snowy street filming Li Yang, all of them yelling in unison, “Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!” Zhang Yuan's cheeks were rosy and he looked so pleased with himself. Was he finally triumphing over his shyness? As if echoing my earlier thoughts, Xiao Ding said he couldn't believe he was helping Zhang Yuan with the subtitles. I was surprised—I'd thought they were friends.

“We are friends but he takes advantage of me.”

“He does? How?”

“He doesn't speak any English, so he takes me abroad to translate for him at film festivals but then he doesn't pay me anything to be there. Nothing.”

“Why do you go with him, then?”

“I can't resist the chance to go abroad. I won't make it there by myself. And he's my friend and I want to help him. I know what my job in life is: to help other people.”

It was a noble character trait but I couldn't help but find it kind of pitiful.

“Once we were in Berlin together and he had gone off to talk to some people and I didn't even have any money for food. I was starving and I had to wait for him to return to eat,” he said, his voice sour with humiliation. “He treated me like his
puren.
”

Puren
? After he had gone home, I looked it up in the dictionary. Servant.

“He uses people. If you're a member of the press, he'll befriend you, especially if you're a beautiful young woman.”

“Oh.”

The footage of me interviewing Li Yang hadn't made the final cut of
Crazy English.
Instead Zhang Yuan had used footage of an interview by a reporter from
Time,
a pretty, bright-eyed Caucasian woman.

Xiao Ding was a good listener and I took advantage of it, barraging him with my complaints. That day I complained about how hard it was to make friends, especially Chinese friends. I told him, “I look Chinese. I speak Chinese. But I just don't feel close to most Chinese people.”

“Chinese people feel the same way,” he said. “People have trouble trusting one another here. And you have to understand Chinese society. The key to Chinese society is relationships and Chinese relationships exist as a series of concentric circles. At the middle is your family, then come
friends, then acquaintances, then strangers. Sometimes, friends become so close that you treat them like family. But that takes a long time.”

After we finished, we went to get foot massages at a place I'd been frequenting recently, a neon-lit parlor off of the Second Ring Road that was open around the clock. Inside was a hive of cubicles filled with throne-like recliners. We lay back and soaked our feet in a medicinal brown brew; I could feel my troubles streaming out the soles of my feet. Eventually the masseurs came, a man for me and a woman for him and began their methodical journey of pain across the terrain of our nerve endings.

“Ow!” The pain was intense and direct.

“That's your number 10,” he said as he handed me a tote bag printed with a map of the foot. Number 10 was my head.

“You don't sleep very well.” He pressed down extra hard.

“Owwww!” Sometimes it scared me that the masseurs knew what was going on inside of me better than I did. I started in on my usual litany of peeves to Xiao Ding. I complained about how frustrating my job was, how bad my Chinese was, how I was never going to be able afford a video camera.

“Why do you complain so much?” asked Xiao Ding. “Your life is pretty good, pretty easy. Where I grew up, we lived in a simple house and in the winter one night as I was sleeping, a rat ran over my face. I'll never forget the feeling of that. At least there are no rats running over your face while you sleep. Buck up. Study Chinese.”

He sounded just like my parents.
You're spoiled. Your days just pass so pleasantly. When I was in boarding school we had to shower with cold water, which we had to carry by ourselves in buckets.
I realized that part of my reason for coming to China must have been to experience some fraction of what they had experienced, partly so I could understand them and partly so they couldn't hold it over me anymore. I wanted to prove that I could eat bitterness with the best of them.

“How is your documentary coming along?” he asked.

“I still don't have a topic. But I meet so many people through work—I should be able to find something.”

“You will.”

Xiao Ding began speaking in English, in his clipped British accent. “Some days I feel like I am too ancient. I only live for other people. I am too scared to offend anyone,” he said. “You can't be like this in the modern world. But I am too scared to be modern.”

“I feel old-fashioned too, some days. Like having integrity and being honest don't get me anywhere.”

“But my problem is that I'm dishonest. I help people because I worry about what they think about me, not because I really want to help them.”

“Well, what do you really want?” I asked, while thinking back guiltily to all his help I'd accepted without giving anything in return.

“I don't know. Some days, I want to produce my own films instead of just feeling like I am only helping other people with theirs,” he said. “But other days, I just want to kill myself.”

I didn't know what to say. “No, that's not the right thing to do. And your daughter . . .”

“Yes, she's the only one I don't mind living for. She's the best thing that came out of my marriage,” he said, and added bitterly, “I got married too young and it is impossible to undo what I've done.”

“Have you thought about divorce?” I was twenty-three and anything seemed possible. Every mistake seemed fixable. He didn't answer and we sat in silence as the masseurs bore down firmly on our most vulnerable spots one by one, causing excruciating pain. At the end of the massage, I felt alert and relaxed, as if I had just swum a mile and then cried my eyes out. The masseurs dried and moisturized our feet and handed us thin ankle stockings to put on, nude for me, black for him. I took mine but Xiao Ding refused his.

“Why?” I asked. I had never seen a Chinese person refuse something free before.

“Lao po?”
asked the masseur, who had obviously been watching our interactions. Your old lady?

Xiao Ding nodded sheepishly. I guess no wife would want to find evidence that her husband had gone to a massage parlor with a twenty-three-year-old American girl, however innocent it was. Oh my god—it was innocent, wasn't it? He noticed my surprised look.

“Did you know that Zhang Yuan calls you my girlfriend? My squeeze? My mistress?”

“No.”

“Well, he does.”

Outwardly I shrugged, but inwardly, I was furious—at myself for not seeing it coming and at all men for having only one thing on their minds. Though I depended on Xiao Ding's friendship, after that day we rarely saw each
other.

T
hat spring, huge news stories broke in Beijing. In April, some ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners sat silently outside of Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound, to seek official recognition, which eventually triggered a government crackdown. A few weeks later an American jet bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, accidentally they said, killing three. Riots ensued outside the American embassy in Beijing. But because we were officially registered as a Chinese newspaper,
City Edition
couldn't do any real reporting that deviated from the party line. Max wanted to run a huge blank photograph to signal our gagged state but even that he thought was too risky. So, frustratingly, our work went on as usual, as if nothing was wrong.

Then
Beijing Scene
did a cover story on Zhang Yuan as he was finishing up his latest film, and as he stared puckishly at me from the cover, I decided,
That's it. I'm going to do stories about artists, Max or no Max
. Sue would have liked me to do more hard-hitting stories to set us apart from
Beijing Scene
but when she saw how determined I was, she didn't stand in my way.

A young writer with the pen name of Gezi wrote a novel about a friendship that veers into lesbianism, which was touted as the first lesbian novel in China. I wanted to track her down. Though China had no phone book, I'd discovered that you could call 114 and ask for the phone number of any company, and so I phoned her publisher and they helped connect us.

Gezi had a stern little bob framing a round face with close-set eyes, and her life story was similar to her protagonist's: At nineteen, she'd left home against her parents' wishes, moving from Beijing to southern China to attend college. But unlike her protagonist, there was no getting involved with an older woman after graduating. She obediently returned to Beijing, moved back in with her parents, and got a job. But about a year before, she'd quit her job and rented a small studio where she went during the day to write. The catch was that her parents had no idea that she'd quit her job and no idea that she wrote. They thought she still went off to work every day.

“It's strange, isn't it?” she said. “We get along but they'd rather I have a stable job and profession. They say that I had the right upbringing to get a well-paying job. I oppose them but not directly. This is my way of separating from them in a harmonious way.” She laughed, her childlike eyes crinkling up.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Keeping things from my parents seemed so natural to me but coming from someone else's mouth, it sounded shocking.

“They don't suspect anything?”

“People have called my house asking for Gezi and I just tell them it's a transliteration of my English name.”

“Is it ‘
Gezi'
for ‘Pigeon'?”

“No. Do you know the term ‘
pa gezi'
? It means ‘to fill in the blanks,' and it's what writers call writing, as a joke. It's the ‘blanks' meaning of ‘
gezi.
'”

“Are you ever going to tell them?”

“Women here, before they're married at least, have so little independence. We're watched over by our families. In a few years, when I'm married and perhaps more successful with my writing, have kids, then I won't mind if they know.”

I had much more independence than her, on the surface, but inside I felt just the same. And married? Kids? I surmised that Gezi wasn't a lesbian. However, she did know a few lesbians who were having a get-together on the weekend. Did I want to go? My journalistic curiosity prompted me to say yes, as did plain human curiosity. Maybe what I'd said to ward off Max had more than a grain of truth to it.

The meeting was in someone's cramped, fluorescent-lit apartment. About fifteen women were there and I scanned the crowd. Gezi was there, as was one glum-looking American woman in a plaid shirt. She's just arrived from San Francisco, the leader of the group said proudly. Gretchen said she was in Beijing on a Fulbright to study contemporary Chinese art. She was unfriendly to me, as if rebuffing an unwanted advance, and I was unfriendly in response. Two Americans are never supposed to be nice to each other when meeting in a foreign country. The whole get-together felt more like a meeting than a party and at the end of the night I lay on a bed having a polite, boring conversation with a Chinese woman. I have no recollection of what we talked about, probably where we were from and how we had found our way there. I concluded I probably wasn't a lesbian after all.

Beijing Scene
also jumped on the Gezi story and our stories came out at about the same time—theirs was given prime real estate in their magazine, while mine was relegated to the back pages of the Entertainment Guide.

My next story was about the new contemporary art galleries springing up in Beijing that were nurturing undiscovered artists as well as giving artists who exhibited abroad a place to show their work at home. I first interviewed expats who ran contemporary art galleries like the Courtyard Gallery and the Red Gate Gallery, and they put me in touch
with Chinese gallerists like Ai Weiwei, who had recently returned to Beijing after twelve years in New York and teamed up with a Dutch collector to open a gallery in a warehouse south of Beijing inspired by the cavernous dimensions of galleries in SoHo. Almost impossible to locate, the gallery was intended only for art insiders. But it wasn't very hard to get inside the small and welcoming community, especially as a Western journalist. Ai Weiwei said he was impressed by how much newer artists were “looking inward to get something out, not just looking around to find a good way to sell their work.” I also met the independent Chinese curators who had organized the exhibit in the bomb shelter I'd been to, which had become a legend in itself. They said they'd closed it after two days because everyone who was expected to come had come and the fresh produce had started to rot, not even to speak of the corpses. A Texan art collector who had started a website about Chinese contemporary art told me with delight that after a writer had described the exhibition, many people wrote in with outraged responses. “They said something like, ‘Such barbarism is a thing of the past.'”

Shock value was in the DNA of Chinese contemporary art. The era had started with an ill-fated group exhibition in February 1989 called
China/Avant-Garde
that showed at the official National Art Museum of China. It was the culmination of the 1980s, a decade of unprecedented political and cultural openness, and the government had laid down just three rules: nothing political, no pornography, and no performance art. So of course one artist set up an installation consisting of two phone booths with a mirror in between them and came one day, stepped into one of the phone booths, and fired a gun into the mirror. The government shut down the exhibition, and avant-garde art, like avant-garde film, went underground and overseas. The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened four months later. News of underground exhibitions in Beijing now spread only by word of mouth.

When a record nineteen Chinese artists made it into the Venice Biennale this year, 1999, the appetite of the international art market was
truly whet for Chinese art. As more galleries and curators came from the West to pluck artists out of obscurity, more and more artists poured into Beijing from the provinces. The artists and the curators were trying to get the market to move past art that was recognizably “Chinese.” The godfather of the avant-garde, curator Li Xianting, once asked in an essay whether Chinese art was merely “an eggroll at an international art banquet” and an outraged collector wrote back saying, “Are we looking for an eggroll? We're more sophisticated than that.”

But were they?

I interviewed the assistant at the Red Gate Gallery, a young guy named Anthony, who said in a dashing accent I took to be British, “There was a big kick-up last year about a
New York Times
write-up of the
Inside Out
show in New York. It was very much still talking about Mao and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Chinese artists got really angry. They're insisting on giving their own interpretations of the work rather than simply conceding to what Western audiences have to say about them.”

I nodded, thinking how nice his voice sounded and how dark his eyes and hair were. Then he used the words
soiree,
hoi polloi,
and
anarchy
in the same sentence, and so I took his number.

The article made it onto our cover and I began getting invitations to new exhibitions and gallery openings. I liked being around artists and seeing China and the world through their eyes.

It was around this time that my parents confirmed that they had booked spots on the group tour. They were
coming.