Beijing Bastard (15 page)

“I have a car.”

These were magic words I rarely heard in Beijing. I clambered eagerly into the passenger seat and we started the long drive out to her apartment on the western edge of the city. She was a terrible driver, absentmindedly
swerving all over the road, speeding, tailgating, turning to scrutinize me in busy traffic. She said she knew my boss Max from years ago, that she used to date one of his friends who lived in his dormitory.

“What was he like then?”

“He used to keep a monkey in his room and when he came home drunk, which was often, he would beat it.”

“He hasn't changed much,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I felt instinctively that if I told her about what I'd been through with Max, she'd understand.

“Wu Wenguang said you want to make documentaries,” she said sweetly.

“I do!” I said, not mentioning that I'd originally wanted to make a documentary about filmmakers like her. “But I don't have a topic yet and I don't have any equipment. It's just a dream right now.”

She turned to me again with an unexpectedly stern look on her face, her brows knit, and said firmly, “You can't stop dreaming. I have a camera and an editing machine.” My ears perked up. “You can use them whenever you'd like.”

I had another one of those moments when the sky seemed to crack open and blind me with the unbearably brilliant light of my future. You'd think I'd have learned to mistrust the grandiose promises of the universe by now.

“Really?”

“Really. I know you can make a documentary and I'll do anything I can to help you.” She wove erratically through the erratically weaving traffic. I trusted her words more than any man's. She turned to look at me as she accelerated toward a line of cars stopped at a red light, and as I braced myself for a bone-shattering crash, she declared emphatically, “I like you.”

“I like you too,” I said. I liked her recklessness, her generosity, the messy thrill of being with her. In my heart, I felt an instant bond between us—a rare feeling in Beijing or anywhere really. I'd never had an older
sister, and I'd always imagined it would be something like this: She would do the things I wanted to do a few years before I did and then steer me in the right direction. Though as I clutched the door handle and jammed on the invisible brake with my foot, I felt like the stodgiest of older sisters.

Her neighborhood, Qingta, felt more anonymous than mine, the buildings higher and blockier, and more stained with age, with no shops nearby. We climbed the concrete stairwell and paused before her door as she rummaged in her bag for her house keys. A magenta sign with four gold characters brightened up the dark wall and I sounded it out slowly:
a mi to fo
. Her two-bedroom apartment was similar to mine, its clinical rooms softened by girlish disorder. Papers and bags were scattered everywhere. Photos were taped directly onto the wall. A big off-yellow teddy bear lay on his side on a pink leatherette couch.

Off of the living room were two rooms, on the left her bedroom and on the right a narrow room filled almost entirely by the metallic bulk of an editing machine. With two monitors like heads perched on two tape decks like gaping mouths, it looked as majestic and dumb as an idol in the wilderness. To find such a thing in an apartment on the edge of Beijing in 1999 was nothing short of a miracle.

Yang Lina brought the machine to life and sat at the controls as I read along with the translation. It documented a year in the life of a group of old men who gathered in the same spot every day in her neighborhood, squatting on low stools, gossiping, not doing much. The documentary followed them through four seasons, starting in the summer when they searched for shade to sit in and swatted flies from one another's heads. They were salty old fellows in Mao suits who complained about everything: being nagged by their wives, neglected by their families, forgotten by the Communist Party and about how worthless they felt, fit only for the trash heap. (When one of their wives complained that he doesn't love her, the old man responded, “If I didn't love you, I would have strangled you long ago.”) The only thing they enjoyed was one another's company.

The documentary moved as slowly as the old men, as did our subtitling, which had to be completely redone. She had already distilled each long line of dialogue into its basic meaning in Chinese and I had to translate it into something that sounded like spoken English and would be short enough to fit on the screen. Xiao Ding's training was coming in handy.

By two in the morning, we hadn't even gotten through autumn. Everything in China took longer than I thought it would. She drove me home all the way across the dark and sleeping city
.

She picked me up again the next evening after work and as we drove past the exact place where her documentary had been shot, a chill shot through me. The documentary had consecrated a completely nondescript spot on the sidewalk, though the old men were no longer there. Through her film I was seeing a side of the rapidly changing city that was hidden in plain sight. It offered me one of the deepest understandings I had of the city yet.

She picked me up for two more days until the subtitling was finished. At the end of the documentary, one of the old men doesn't show up for the daily meeting and the others go around to his house, only to find out that he has died.

The credits rolled and I saw that she worked under another name, Yang Tian-yi, which she said was her Buddhist name. She had put only one reference to herself in the movie, an old man saying that she was the staunchest comrade of them all, arriving each morning before they did.

“You went every day?” I asked.

“Almost every day.”

“For how long?”

“Two years total.”

“How did you start doing it?”

“At the beginning, I saw the old men in the neighborhood and something about them really moved me. I had an instinct about it, so I borrowed cameras from people and started shooting them. You always have to follow your instincts.”

“Didn't you have to go to work?”

“Our work unit doesn't meet very often, only when we have to perform.”

The rest of the old men, she said, were now too frail to make their daily meeting and so stayed home alone. Though I was glad to be done with the subtitles, I was sad to leave their slow world. Wu Wenguang had been right—it was strange that this steady documentary about old men had come out of such an erratic flibbertigibbet who had never had big dreams about filmmaking and had never even watched many films. She had simply seen something that moved her and picked up a camera.

“How much does a machine like this cost?” I asked, running my finger around the plastic shuttling knob of her editing machine. I was turning Chinese, asking the price of everything.

“Twenty
wan,
” she said. Two hundred thousand yuan. I did some quick math in my head. With my salary, about eight thousand yuan a month, it would take more than two years to earn enough to buy that machine, if I lived in a cardboard box on the side of the road and ate only grubs and leaves. Yang Lina was a dancer in the People's Liberation Army troupe. It didn't add up.

“How did you afford it?”

“Oh, I didn't buy it! My boyfriend bought it for me.”

“You said, ‘I want an editing machine,' and he just went out and bought it?”

“Well, I started editing in those places you rent by the hour, but he didn't like to see me doing that. When he saw I was really doing this movie, he just bought it for me, and my camera as well.”

“And the car too?” China was supposed to be a Communist country, but some people seemed to be rolling in it.

“Yes.”

“What does he do?”

“He's in finance.”

“How did you meet him?” I felt embarrassed to be prying, but she
spoke completely matter-of-factly about him. She bustled around the apartment doing a version of cleaning that I was familiar with, just moving things from one place to another.

“He came to the troupe one day and he picked me out of a lineup of dancers,” she said, giving a naughty squeal and looking away, as if replaying the scene in her head. I imagined a back hallway of their theater, all bare and Communist-looking with heavy industrial fittings running along the ceiling, and the soft, beautiful heroines standing in a line as a man with a black pleather man-purse clutched under his armpit walked up and down, pinching their arms before making his selection. “We're all from the provinces and we all moved to Beijing alone, so we look out for one another. Whenever one of us meets a
dakuan,
we'll introduce him to whoever needs one.”

I acted cool, as if pimping for your friends was a completely common occurrence in my world too. The
dakuan
were the Mr. Big Bucks who zipped around town at night in their expensive black cars, talking loudly on their clunky cellphones, eating big dinners, always accessorized with a young, slim creature on their arm. I imagined the dancers sitting on silk pillows and eating bon-bons during the day, beautiful Communist heroines basking in the spoils of capitalism.

“Many of the dancers have married their
dakuan.
”

“Are you going to marry your boyfriend?” I noticed that she didn't call him her
dakuan,
so I didn't either.

“I really don't know,” she said with sudden solemnity. “He's very good to me. I'm always losing my house and car keys, so he made me ten copies of my keys so I'd always have extra. I'm always leaving my cellphone in cabs or restaurants and he always buys me new ones of those too,” she said, shaking her head at her own hopelessness. She was such a
xiaojie,
the all-purpose Chinese word that meant
young woman,
waitress,
and
prostitute
. I followed her into her kitchen and found it dusty and empty save for one small pot. She said the only thing she knew how to make was instant noodles. Then she dropped her voice to a whisper as if
letting me in on a big secret. “The men in my life have been very important and influential to me.”

I looked around at her apartment, which he no doubt paid for as well. No one in China seemed to marry for love.

I went over to her wall of photos. Taped up were close-ups of the tanned, leathery faces of the old men and a group photo of them at Tiananmen Square, where she had taken them on a field trip when she had owned a small breadbox van. Attached to their lapels were tiny butterfly pins with flapping wings that she had bought for them. There were also many photos of her family but no complete family photos, only duos and trios, with her younger brother. Many were of herself and I recognized the set of feminine poses I'd seen her strike already that day, like a deck of queens. The pin-up with flirty eyes. The displeased mother with mock knit brow. The theatrical nun with wide solemn eyes. She sighed and pointed to one photo.

“This was me at my most beautiful age, twenty-five,” she said. She stood with her back to the camera posing outside near some spring blossoms, wearing a long, sleeveless magenta dress that luridly hugged her curves. A thick braid hung down her back and she looked over her shoulder at the camera, smoldering with virginal chastity. She looked like she came straight out of the countryside, though I would never have said that. I was a good leftist with none of my dad's ugly bourgeois derision about recent Chinese immigrants he found too rustic.

“I don't really like this photo,” I said. “You look too—”

“Rustic?”

“Yes. I was embarrassed to say that,” I said. Now, at twenty-seven, her hair was chopped to her shoulder and the look in her eye had become much more knowing.

“Don't be,” she said. “You're twenty-five now. You're at your most beautiful. I forgot to ask you earlier: Are you looking for a boyfriend?”

“No.” I was actually twenty-three, and I wasn't the type to go looking for love like a sad beachcomber sweeping the sands with a metal detector. If love wanted to find me, I was right here.

“Because I have an ex-boyfriend I think might suit you. He's a good man and he has a good job at Motorola. He lives out in Tongxian but don't worry—he has a car. Do you want to meet him?”

“No thanks,” I said. I was American, a liberated woman who was going to make it on my own, even if I had neither of the two things I had learned from Yang Lina that one needed in order to make a documentary: time and money. I just had to find those, choose a topic, hone my abilities to be
kuanrong
and to use
lixing,
and I was most of the way there. “But can I really borrow your camera one day?”

“Yes,” she said, picking it up. It was an expensive three-chip camera. “My axe.”

“And your editing machine?”

“Of
course.”

T
he city was full of manic energy in the months leading up to the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which had happened on October 1, 1949. Periodically the newspapers and TVs would announce a
jieyan
and the police would seal off the Second Ring Road, barring anyone from going in or out of the area for a few hours as they did a dry run for the great military parade. Gigantic empty floats would roll down the Avenue of Eternal Peace bound for Tiananmen Square. Fighter jets flew in perfect formation past my office window.

The year 1999 was also the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and well before June 4 the square was completely shrouded in construction scaffolding and closed to the public.

The city began cleaning up my neighborhood of Maizidian'r. They leveled the dirt sidewalks and set down intricately patterned concrete tile. They demolished some of the hairdressing salons that lined the street, along with some small restaurants and convenience stores, pirated CD shops, and boutiques catering to girls with cheap tastes. I came out of my
building one morning to find the police swarming around the
baozi
seller. Her barrel was lying on its side, the coals spilling out onto the sidewalk. The police were yelling at her and she looked scared, a few tears streaked down her face. I never saw her again.

An inexpensive Italian restaurant called Peter Pan took over the shop fronts where she had been. Unlike most of the restaurants on my street that were dim and grimy and whose doors were hung with dirty plastic flaps, Peter Pan was bright and clean with big windows. I wrote a scathing review of the restaurant for the magazine (“Instead of being a symphony of starch and cheese and grease and tomato sauce, the pizza tastes like a pizza muffin made cautiously on a saltine”) but every day when I came home, people I knew would be inside the lit fishbowl eating like starved guppies.

Moral pollution had to be cleaned up too. The police began crawling around the neighborhood like olive-skinned cockroaches, checking identity cards at gates and systematically going door to door to
saohuang,
to sweep out decadent elements like prostitutes and foreigners. Everything took on a suspicious look. A white van with police license plates slowly cruised the street with its door provocatively slid open. A small swarm of young policemen on bikes pedaled up and down the street. A traffic light went up at the intersection by the New Ark Hotel and at night a red-armbanded officer wielding a red light saber would be posted there trying unsuccessfully to stop people and check their identity cards.

The construction of the Fourth Ring Road neared completion, pushing the edge of the city outward.

I started dating Anthony, the dark-haired man from the art gallery, whose accent turned out to be, in his words, “overeducated Australian.” He had earned a law degree but had forsaken a proper career at home to come to Beijing and work at an art gallery run by a fellow Australian. He lived nearby, also in a questionably legal apartment, and he said his parents were also planning to visit during the fiftieth-anniversary celebration.

I began to go along with him to help him translate as he interviewed
Chinese artists for magazine articles. His Chinese was terrible. He tried to take lessons, even got a tutor who he heard was a semifamous but washed-up writer from the 1980s whose books had been translated into French and who had fathered a child who now lived in Paris with his
maman.
Anthony enjoyed being tutored by a fading literary luminary, but for reasons I can't remember—did Xu Xing come to lessons drunk? did he talk about sex too much? did Anthony lack entirely the gift of learning languages?—he wasn't learning much and fired him. Anthony's lack of language skills embarrassed me and I wondered why I was merely doing the translating instead of publishing articles myself, but he was charming and kind and would sing to me as we walked around the city together at night. And after being alone for so long, it was a relief to have someone to eat dinner with, to accompany me to buy a bike, to wake up next to.

One night I grudgingly went to dinner at Peter Pan with Anthony and two of his British friends. One of them was Cookie Cousins, the calligrapher whose show I had gone to months ago. I couldn't believe I was meeting her at last. We ate on the roof, from which we could see down into the yard of my building. I was surprised to hear Cookie say that she worked at an international news agency, translating stories from Chinese newspapers into English. Mostly about coal mine accidents, she said. Her dad was a journalist too and had helped her get the job. She said she had grown up all over the world—she had been born in Tanzania, then lived in Pakistan, then Thailand. Her parents were in India now. She had been named after an American whom her parents had met on a train.

“But Cookie is really an artist,” said Rachel, who had moved to Beijing recently from Hong Kong to start a new contemporary art gallery in a courtyard house. “A calligrapher.” Cookie said she was experimenting with spray paint now. I looked at her hands. She was tall, but she had tiny hands.

I was also surprised to find out they lived in my neighborhood, in a big compound next to a deserted lot, accessible only through a narrow
dirt lane that wound past a row of hair salons and a hospital specializing in treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

“Today my washing machine broke with all the clothing in it, and I had to go see Big Sister Bao to get it fixed,” said Rachel.

“That's the good thing about having no washing machine,” said Cookie. “Xiao Pan, our male
ayi,
does it all by hand. He has to scrub the cream off my knickers by hand.”
Ayi
was the all-purpose word for everything from
housecleaner
to
nanny
to
auntie
.

“Cookie!” said Rachel. “Anyhow, she told me, ‘Big Sister Bao will take care of you.' She actually said that!”

“Who is this Big Sister Bao?” I asked.

“She's this woman resembling a small ferret who brokers all of the deals in our compound,” said Cookie. “She finds apartments for people like us, collects rent, pays off the police, repossesses furniture when people leave, all of it. She's a nosy bugger—she knows who lives where and how much we pay and what we do for a living.”

“Every month, to pay rent I take a fat wad of cash over to her apartment and she asks lots of questions.”

“I can't tell her who I work for, so I say I'm teaching English,” said Cookie.

“No doubt she skims a bit off the top,” said Rachel. “Her nest must be pretty well-feathered.”

“Why don't you just pay your landlord directly?”

“I've never met them,” said Rachel. “She says they've moved down south of the city into cheaper apartments—they just basically live off of the rent we pay, like twenty-five hundred kuai a month.” Most people in Beijing made around one thousand a month.

“What a great scam for all of us,” said Cookie.

“Sometimes I wish I didn't know my landlords,” I said. “I came home last week and found them there running a load through my washing machine. They said they thought I'd be out. Then a few days later I dreamed I found a Discovery Channel camera crew in my living room
that my landlord had let in, thinking I was out at work. I told them to get the hell out and then a helicopter flew right by the window.”

The night air was sweet and cool. People in my building had finished dinner and were coming out with their yappy Pekinese dogs to take in the night. The Perambulator was out perambulating and I pointed him out to my new friends. I told them about Bowl Cut and Screaming Granny and Horrible Boy. They told me about the characters in their yard, and my ears filled with the narcotic sound of British accents that would ring in my head until I fell asleep.

•   •   •

Yang
Lina had looked close to home to find a subject for her documentary and I realized that my neighborhood was a veritable treasure trove of topics. I could make a documentary about hairdressing salons and call it
Salon
. Or one about the small shops and call it
Boutique
.

I went by one day to see my hairdressers but they were gone. I peered into the darkened salon; everything was still intact inside.
They probably just migrated back south for a spell,
I thought. I walked by every day, expecting to see them inside busy doing nothing, but a sad, creeping feeling grew. I was never, ever going to tear down the avenues of Beijing on the back of the boss's crotch rocket with the wind whipping through my mullet. Within weeks another set of hairdressers appeared who looked pretty much exactly like my old ones, as if someone had ordered up another six-pack of Cantonese Glam-Rock Hairdressers. Though nearly identical, they were complete strangers.
Tres bizarro,
I thought. It was time to find a new documentary topic, and new hairdressers.

A friend who was in her thirties and who somehow maintained glowing skin and sleek hair in Beijing's dry and polluted sandstorm climate recommended a salon across from the Indian embassy.

“Ask for Li Bin,” she said. “He's a genius.”

I slid open the door and walked into an oasis of quiet. No Cantopop here. Sitting in the waiting area was a young Chinese woman with perfect nails and hair as long and smooth as water who did not look in need of a
haircut. I, on the other hand, looked like a yeti at the tail end of winter. To complete the look, my teeth had recently gone mysteriously black.

“Is it possible to get my hair cut by Li Bin?” I asked the receptionist with my frostiest smile. She looked at me in amusement.

“Today?”

“Yes, today.”

“No. You need an appointment for him.”

I sat down and assumed my most aloof look, pursing my lips and floating my eyebrows upward as if to say to no one in particular, “Oh, really?” Li Bin came over to the reception area. It was obviously him—the leonine hairdo, the Rico Suave manner—and my waiting area companion glided out of her seat for an air kiss. He led her away.

I took a look at the salon. The circular room was frosty white and minimalist. Haircutting chairs orbited a hair-washing throne, which was partitioned off by a translucent curtain and was exuding the delicate scent of aromatherapeutic shampoos. Beijing had a lot of smells, many odors and miasmas, but scents were rare, and the salon felt as if it were floating high above the city in a bubble of luxury and calm.
Places like this are dangerous,
I thought. The world outside became even harder to live in afterward.

In a few minutes the receptionist introduced me to Xiao Cai, a slight man with glasses, more a mortician than a stylist. After a hair washing, he led me to a chair. I asked for a short and messy haircut. I moved my hands wildly as to evoke a thunderstorm, a gazelle in flight, anarchy. He nodded. I took off my glasses and closed my eyes prayerfully. When I opened them and put my glasses back on, I saw a big wave of hair sweeping imperially across my forehead. I had aged ten years in the chair. I looked like the Empress Dowager.

“It's called the Evening Swan,” he said. Maybe I could grow into it, I thought. Grow up a little. Make fancier friends. Go to dinner parties. Who was I kidding? The whole reason I was in Beijing was to prolong my adolescence, or to finally have the one I never actually had. To live
heedlessly. Avoid respectable, full-time work. Drink too much in dirty bars. That was not a job for the Evening Swan.

•   •   •

Beijing
had many bars but the fashionable crowd was big enough to keep only one bar at a time packed full. For a while it was Half Dream, a bar run by Jin Xing, China's most famous transsexual, a globetrotting modern dancer and choreographer whose M-to-F surgery had been videotaped from start to finish by Zhang Yuan. Decorated in burnt sienna hues and filled with oblique statuary, Half Dream had the seedy, highfalutin atmosphere of a Roman bath. Then came Vogue, a dark cavern of white frosted glass that personified the L.A. of my nightmares, and the Loft, a carbon copy. That summer it was the Havana Cafe, a Cuban bar built on an empty patch of cement north of the Workers' Stadium and run by a French-Algerian DJ who had told me before it opened that one successful Latin dance party he had thrown full of “crooowds and crooowds of people” had inspired him to open the bar.

I met Jade there. We picked our way around huge sacks of dirt outside, on which slept exhausted construction workers, through the bar whose walls were covered with lurid murals of Havana at sunset, and onto the patio. There were indeed crowds and crowds of people here, expat and Chinese, standing shoulder to shoulder and all trying to get the attention of the harried waiters so they could yell the one magic word:
mojito!
Suddenly, my beeper went off. I pushed my way to a phone and called the unknown number. It was Cookie.

“Where are you right now?” she asked.

“At the Havana Cafe.”

“Smashing. I'm coming over to hang out.”

She showed up soon afterward in a pair of calf-length knickerbockers in a loud fuchsia-and-green phoenix print with her peroxided hair spiking every which way; it looked less like bedhead than the result of a fork stuck violently into an outlet. She was an exotic cockatoo in the company of gray pigeons, and people stared at her as she walked in. The
room seemed to grow brighter when she was in it. She downed a mojito and we talked about how we'd both made our way to Beijing. She said she had studied Chinese in college and loved all things Chinese, especially Chinese men.

“Really?” I asked.

“I think they're sexy!” she said.

Jade and I wrinkled our noses.

“Why?”

“They're hairless and sleek. Like dolphins. I dated this one artist. He was married. Actually he was about to get a divorce. The first night he took off his pants and underneath he had on bright orange long underwear.” She laughed uproariously. I thought back to Max's red briefs, and knew we would be friends. We count this night as the beginning of our friendship.