Beijing Bastard (14 page)

D
o-DOO-do, do-DOO-do, do-DOO-do!

I fished my small black beeper out of my bag and called the unknown number, asking the man who answered if he'd beeped 16386. I was impatient, as the magazine had to be put to bed that night. I was sitting in the design department finishing the layout of the Entertainment Guide.

“Wang Zhenluo.” The voice was deep and loud and jagged, as if the man's windpipe had been removed and replaced with an industrial-grade rock polisher.

“Wu Wenguang! How are you?”

“Still alive,” he said. Wu Wenguang was another one of the Sixth Generation documentary filmmakers I'd read about long ago and hoped to meet. Xiao Ding had introduced us, and Wu called me occasionally to get help with translations or just to check up on me. He seemed to like me because I was young and idealistic and wanted to write and make documentaries that told the unvarnished truth about China, once I
figured out what that was. If he had more in mind than that, I never found out. “What are you doing right now?”

“I'm at work,” I said, cringing slightly, knowing what was coming next.

“You're still at that job? Why are you wasting your time with a full-time job? How do you expect to make a documentary if you spend all day nailed to an office working on someone else's project?” he growled. I could picture him on the other end of the line: small glasses, bony angular face, wispy facial hair, looking exactly the part of an old wise man who has retreated to a mountain to regard society from afar. He was only in his forties, but I was young and to me he seemed ancient and full of wisdom. I swore I could smell cigarette smoke drifting through the phone line.

“I need the money,” I said, not wanting to say more in front of my coworkers, who despite their appearance of quiet diligence surely had their ears flapping madly. I wished I'd never told him I wanted to shoot a documentary.

“You need to go
freelance.
” Wu Wenguang said this last word in English with the stress on the second syllable. His English was a ragtag affair that he claimed to have picked up “on the street.”

“I'm not ready to quit my job.” I had no savings, no way to get a visa, no safety net. I was already living in a gray zone—now he wanted me to work in one too? I imagined telling my parents when they came that I had quit my job and was shooting a documentary.

“You're staying in that job for the sake of security. That's bullshit. You're young. You need your freedom.”

I laughed. Freedom
.
He said the word
ziyou
with a desperate reverence that made me laugh. Wu was an ideological hard-liner, not for Marxist-Leninism but for other pure ideals: Freedom, Truth, Art.

I laughed when he said I needed my freedom but something about it stuck in my craw. It was an inner state that we all sought, no matter what system we lived in. This was the voice I'd been waiting for, someone who would tell me to let go of other people's ideas for me and to follow my
own, not just about making a documentary but about everything. I needed someone to say that I could be anything I wanted to be in life, and mean it.

“Have you gotten yours yet?” he asked.

“My what?” He had been blathering on about something, his words tumbling out in his Yunnanese accent that wobbled higgledy-piggledy with the stress on all the wrong characters like a chair with a bum leg. My mom's family was from Yunnan too and I found the difficulty of his accent familiar and comforting.

“
DV
camera,” he said, saying the letters in English.

“No.”

“You should get a
DV
camera.
DV
is a revolution.”

“I'm broke, I told you,” I said. How on earth did Wu make ends meet? He had long since quit his job in state-run TV and seemed to spend most of this time making rambling, overgrown documentaries that screened exclusively at international film festivals.

“Plus the longer I'm here, the less things seem to make sense,” I said. “I'm not really a Flying Pigeon anymore but I'm not a Forever either.” Those were the two popular brands of bicycles in China and were how a Chinese woman categorized foreigners in a book I had read: The foreigners either fly away or they stay forever. I didn't want to be shallow and fleeting, but I also didn't want to be trapped here for the rest of my life.

“Don't make it out to be so complicated. You've been in China long enough and met enough people to be able to say something meaningful about China. I have this Italian friend who was just like you, here for years and always wanting to make a documentary. Finally he took a car trip with a Chinese friend and made a documentary about it. It was simple but deep. You could do the same thing.”

“Do you really think so?” Like Dumbo, I was desperate for my magic feather.

“
DV
cameras are not that expensive. Save some money and get one. Don't you want to join the revolution?”

Wu Wenguang was right. My job was becoming tedious and repetitive, and I had become slipshod and unreliable. I wanted to write more articles but I spent all my time calling up aquariums and shooting ranges, many of which wouldn't send me their information because they said they'd already sent it to
Beijing Scene,
and I was running out of steam to write entertainment blurbs. (“Remember the Rainbow Bar? We didn't think so.”) All that redeemed the job was the soap opera that constantly unfolded in front of my eyes. Someone had recently spotted our kleptomaniac ex-distributor Lu downstairs at our building sans front teeth and Sue had found out that our blood-slurping former web designer Scott had “assumed someone else's identity” in Texas years ago.

“What are you working on?” I asked Wu, hoping to draw fire away from me.

“I just finished traveling around the countryside shooting a documentary called
Jiang Hu: Life on the Road,
” he said. “I shot a group of traveling opera performers who live a
jianghu
lifestyle.
Jianghu
includes
anyone outside of society who travels around, including thieves, prostitutes, and, long ago, martial artists. The tradition is almost dead and I wanted to document it, so I traveled with the troupe for months, shooting hundreds of hours of footage. I wanted them to forget I was shooting, so I held my camera at chest level. I never once looked through the viewfinder. The picture is not pretty but my technique captured the essential
spirit
of the people.”

I laughed to myself, imagining Wu Wenguang lopping off heads like a bloodthirsty revolutionary in his zeal to record on his tape nothing less than the spirits of his subjects.

“Do the performers in the troupe have interesting stories?”

“Interesting stories? People's stories aren't interesting,” he growled. “What is interesting is people's
knowledge,
their
relationships,
their
attitudes.
Stories are shallow. Those things are deep.”

Deep. That word again. So high school. And yet . . . so true.

“Actually, that's why I called you today,” he said. “I'm doing the
subtitles and I need your help translating one of the folk songs. It's an exceptionally dirty song and my translator is a nice Chinese girl who is too much of a prude to translate properly. Plus to make everything harder, the government has censored many of the dirtiest characters from the dictionary and I have to make them by hand on my computer. These country people have such a rich vocabulary of dirty words and the government wants to choke it to death. They want to control how we think and feel. Can you believe how disgusting they are?”

I mm-hmmed, fiddling with the magazine layout on the computer. “I can help you translate it. Just fax the song to me.”

“Actually, that won't work. It's in a local dialect and I'll have to explain it to you, plus it has to go out to a festival tomorrow. Do you have time to translate it right now?”

“Why not?” This was not a country of people who planned ahead.

“And you're not a prude, are you? It is
crucial
that I get a really dirty translation. If you're not comfortable doing this, just say so.” I looked over at my coworkers tapping away on their computers.

“No, I'm not a prude.”

Translating was a painstaking process. He read the song to me line by line, first in their local dialect with the obscure slang, then translated it into Mandarin obscured by his thick accent. He explained the dirty parts and repeated it slowly to make sure I had understood him. I then repeated the lines aloud in Chinese. Saying dirty words in Chinese was like saying any other words to me, but the sound of them made my coworkers look up in alarm. I then read Wu back my English translations.

“Roll over and stick it in,” I whispered, suddenly shy.

“What was that last part?”

I cupped my hand over the mouthpiece and scrunched down behind my computer screen, glancing nervously at my coworkers, who were now as oblivious to the dirty English as I had been to the Chinese. I enunciated loudly and carefully, “Stick it in!”

“What?”

“Stick. It. In,” I said, blushing.
“S-t-i-c-k!
It! In!”

“Are you
sure
it's dirty enough?” he asked.

“How about ‘Roll over and stick your dick in. Your. Dick.
D-i-c-k.
”

“That's better.”

“Okay, read me back what you have.”

“Roll over and stick your dick in.”

“Deep. Add ‘deep' at the end.
D-e-e-p.
”

•   •   •

During
my first year in China I taught myself how to read Chinese with a textbook published by a state-run publishing house. I saw in the table of contents that there was one chapter on film and I turned to it eagerly. Aside from teaching me some useful vocabulary words, it taught me all I needed to know about the state of Chinese film under the Communists.

movie

film

documentary film

scene

parade

peasant

People's Liberation Army (PLA)

mouth

to shout

slogan

to hold up

placard

leader

to wave

to found

activity

gala party

youth

firecrackers

happy

“Ha ha, how useless!” I chortled to myself. “When will I ever use the words
documentary film
and
People's Liberation Army
in the same sentence?” But China always had a way of surprising me.

•   •   •

Wu
Wenguang called again a few weeks later.

“Wu Wenguang! How are you?” I said.

“Good, good. I just saw a fantastic new documentary film, called
Old Men,
about a group of old men who live in the neighborhood of the young woman who shot it. It is the best documentary I've seen in a long time.”

“Is it ‘deep'?”

“Very deep,” said Wu, not noticing my sarcasm. “It's amazing that this young woman made it. You would never guess by her appearance that she had this documentary in her—she's actually a dancer in the People's Liberation Army dance troupe.”

“What? Are you kidding?” The People's Liberation Army is the largest standing army in the world, ready at a moment's notice to crush all enemies of the workers' paradise. I had no idea they had a dance troupe.

“No, no. Talent really blooms in the most unexpected places,” he said. “Yang Lina asked me to help her find someone to polish the English subtitles. I thought of you first. Are you interested?”

“Of course I am.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight is fine.”

“Have you quit your job yet?”

“Soon, soon.”

I went downstairs after work and looked around. The only person standing outside was a woman I thought far too attractive to be a documentary maker. I was expecting someone serious and maybe a little sour,
like a female version of Wu Wenguang. This woman was cartoonishly beautiful: Her eyes were big and bright, her lips rosy, and her cheeks as full as apples. I gave her a quizzical look.

“Wang Zhenluo?” she asked. She smiled to reveal crooked front teeth.

“Yang Lina?” With those ruddy cheeks and her curvy physique, she did look like a robust revolutionary heroine. I could easily imagine her performing a ballet with a gun in her hand, playing a peasant girl who had thrown off the shackles of oppression and joined the Red Army. Underneath the soft appearance of those heroines always lurked a steely core.

“Thank you so much for helping me. I just realized today that I need this done in three days to submit to a film festival, and someone told me the English translation I got is just terrible but I don't read a single word of English. It won't take long to fix, just a few hours. Wu Wenguang said you are the best translator in Beijing,” she said, her words rushing at me like a waterfall. “I don't know what I would do without you. You are saving my life. You really are my rescuer. Really.”

She dished up a long-lashed look of gratitude. I expected nothing more than a gruff—if deeply felt—thank-you from most people in Beijing, and the limpid pools of her eyes rendered me utterly defenseless.

“Oh no, don't thank me. I'm just happy to be able to help you,” I said, and began walking.

“Really, I am completely helpless without you,” she said, shifting into a breathy tone that caught me in midstride.

“Stop, stop. Let's go,” I said, angling toward the road to catch a cab. She stopped me and pointed at a white Volkswagen Santana sitting in my office building's small parking lot.