Beijing Bastard (16 page)

I came back very late that night, and tipsy. My building was hushed. All the lights were out in the windows and the yard looked peaceful without its screaming children and little white dogs. A cat ran out into the light and then back again. The defensive mental armor I donned every time I'd gone out at night in New York was completely unnecessary here. Without it, the nights felt light and carefree. The few people who did come out were completely different than those who went out in the day, and as long as they weren't the police, I wasn't scared of them. I often saw two blade-slim women with identical haircuts and handbags walking slowly past, like two vampires. That night I walked in at the same time as two young Asian men with guitars strapped to their backs. One came right up to me.

“What's your name?” he whispered in English.

“Val. And you?”

“Marco.” He must have been in one of the ubiquitous Filipino bands that played Eagles and Beatles covers in the lounges of the city's hotels.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

We nodded covertly and went our separate ways.

I climbed up the stairs as quietly as I could. Stacks of cabbage, enough to last the winter, were piled up in the stairway and someone had started raising a baby chick in a Styrofoam box.

I began spending more time with Cookie and Rachel. It felt strange coming all the way to China to hang out with white Westerners but I had more in common with them than with most Chinese people I knew. I also envied them. Even though they stuck out like sore thumbs, there was a lightness to their existence in Beijing. While I tried to live as they did, a heavy weight inside always seemed to be pulling me
down.

F
eeling bloodied and bruised from jostling with
Beijing Scene
to stay atop the cutting edge, I decided to write an article for
City Edition
about the most uncool topic I could think of: Peking Opera. In opera's heyday, from the 1920s through the 1940s, opera stars were the pop stars of the day. Today the only people who watched were the older generation, people like Bobo.

I was interested only in traditional Peking Opera, not in the model operas with revolutionary themes sung during the Cultural Revolution when traditional opera had been banned. The born-again leftist in me could not overpower the idea that I had inherited from my family: that Chairman Mao and Communism had destroyed China. I saw traditional Peking Opera performers as the keepers of an old order, from a time when my family had thrived in China; my parents' imminent arrival no doubt exerted a subconscious influence on this choice of stories. After interviewing an opera performer named Mr. Yang who had quit the state-run troupe to pursue the slightly humiliating but ultimately lucrative work of
singing for money at a restaurant, I asked if he knew a traditional Peking Opera family I could interview.

“The Zhang family is perfect for you,” Mr. Yang said. “Their entire existence revolves around Peking Opera.”

So on an unusually warm September day a few days before my parents were set to arrive, I met Mr. Yang at the Feng Ze Yuan Restaurant near Tiananmen Square so he could take me to Teacher Zhang's house. He said I'd never find the house on my own. The restaurant was a big, gaudy affair at the foot of a modest street, onto which we turned. Meishi Jie looked like dozens of others in the old city, lined with cube after cube of tiny shops and restaurants and swarming with sights and sounds that screamed Old Beijing: weather-beaten shoe repairmen hunching in the shadows of buildings, white-smocked women steaming dumplings in huge baskets on the street, the
ring-ting-ting
of bells as bicyclists glided past in slow motion.
You are about to find what you are looking for,
the sweltering buzz of the street seemed to be saying
. The real China.

“During Peking Opera's golden years in the 1930s, Teacher Zhang trained under So-and-So, the legendary performer,” Mr. Yang explained in hushed tones as we walked. “He then trained his sons and grandson in the ancient art. China has gone through its ups and downs—you know about those, don't you?—but this family has persisted in practicing and performing traditional Peking Opera. To make ends meet, they now run a home-cooking restaurant in the bottom floor of the house that they've lived in since the 1940s.”

He veered into a restaurant only two tables wide. I followed. The restaurant was empty save for two men dipping their chopsticks into steaming plates of food and lazily waving away flies. The air was garlicky and humid. Mr. Yang made a beeline for the back and barged into the dim and cramped heat of the kitchen, past the stares of the cooks, and up a set of uneven wooden stairs soggy with years of rising heat and cooking oil. He knocked on the door at the top of the stairs and, without waiting for an answer, pushed it open and threaded his way through a maze of
small, lightless rooms. Each room seemed to have less fresh air than the last. He pushed open one final door and we emerged into a large room that was cluttered and dusty and full of people.

There on a platform bed at the far end of the room lay the unmoving body of an old man. His torso and head were bloated and bare, and a sheet covered him from the waist down. Gnarled hands rested near his face like a child's. His eyes, peering out from their puffy casings, looked in my direction. I felt a shiver of terror.

“This is the great Teacher Zhang Mingyu, who was once a talented and famous opera star,” said Mr. Yang with a deferent sweep of his hand. “Go ahead and talk to him.”

I accepted a stool by the bed and introduced myself. He made no response. “I'm here to interview you. About Peking Opera.” Was he conscious? I nervously mumbled my questions all in a row: How had Peking Opera changed over the years, had how their family adapted, what about the restaurant downstairs? He gave a slow smile with a mouth full of jack-o'-lantern teeth. His wife, a diminutive woman with a short graying haircut, had been buzzing around the room, first putting the kettle on to boil, then squatting down to scrub clothes. She came over and plugged in his hearing aid.

“You're going to have to speak louder,” she said to me in a grainy voice. To him, she yelled, “She's a reporter writing a story about Peking Opera!”

I took a deep breath and repeated the questions in my loudest voice, grimacing at the sound of my flat American accent. His wife yelled into his hearing aid, simply, “She wants to know about Peking Opera in the glorious days before the Communists took power!”

His voice came out in a wheezy, growly puff, its forcefulness taking me by surprise: “So, you're interested in Peking Opera!” One of his middle-aged sons poured me some tea.

After many repeated yellings of questions and answers, I teased out the bare bones of his story. He had started as an apprentice when he was
seven and had grown up to perform in Tibet and Russia. As he spoke, his wife took out yellowed programs to show me and tapped the glass on the nightstand by the bed, under which were trapped photos of a young and virile Grandfather Zhang posing in his opera outfits, here with a spear in his hands, there with his leg high in the air. His pale face, painted white with full mascara and lipstick, looked furious.

“And when did . . . ?”

“Teacher Zhang was a performer of martial operas,” explained Mr. Yang. I imagined his supple body, enrobed in a heavily brocaded costume, doing backflips across a stage. “He fell during a performance in 1963 and was paralyzed.” He had lain in this bed since then. The bed was pushed against the wall, leaving a large practice space on the floor. From this position, he had trained his sons and grandson in Peking Opera, barking out commands as they practiced in the room.

His two sons, Zhang Laisheng and Zhang Laichun, ricocheted around the room like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, cleaning up, doing stretches, refilling my tea. Both were performers in the state-run Beijing Opera Troupe and were in their forties. Both were short, blockily sculpted like gymnasts, and inexplicably tanned. They listened closely to my interview.

The high-ceilinged room was insulated from the hutong outside by a balcony crammed with birdcages and old boxes, and only the sliest light could find its way through the dusty windowpanes. The room was warm and stuffy with the musk of stagnant flesh and urine and I began to feel dizzy. Teacher Zhang's wife spoon-fed him rice porridge and tea, wiping his mouth with a cloth when most of it dribbled out.

I imagined him lying in this bed for more than thirty-five years while the world outside the window changed and changed again. Cultural Revolution. Reform and Opening Up. Tiananmen Square Massacre. Capitalism. He'd missed it all. Even his language seemed to be frozen in time. Arcane words wheezed out of his mouth and fell to earth before reaching my ears. He seemed pleased to have a captive audience who had never
heard his stories before and he talked endlessly. Nodding occasionally, I began to slip into an interview coma. I took a deep breath that succeeded only at filling me with sadness. I let out a noisy sigh.

“Do you understand what I'm saying?” he roared at me.

I glanced in fear at the pale face of fury trapped under the glass. “Most of it,” I said. “If I don't, I'll ask.”

The family started asking me questions that began with the usual
You're not a Chinese person, are you?
that so many people always asked, as if I had somehow stitched together an intricate disguise from the skins of real Chinese people. Usually I responded in my snippiest tone that I was American, but I wanted the family to like me, so I said I was a
meiji huaren,
an American-born Chinese. The grandmother led the interrogation.

“Do you miss home?” By
home
they meant my family.

“Not really,” I said. Seeing the horrified looks on their faces, I hastened to add, “But some days I do.”

“Don't your parents worry about you?”

“Not really,” I lied. “They've come to expect the unexpected from me.” I thought they would smile, but they only looked troubled.

“How old are you?” one of the brothers asked. “You look very young.”

“I'm twenty-four,” I said indignantly. “I can take care of myself. We do that in America after we're eighteen.”

“That's true,” chimed in the other brother. “She is independent of her family.”

“Are they supporting you?” asked the grandmother.

“I have a job,” I said. “I'm a reporter.”

It was time to regain control of the interview and get out of the house. I turned back to the grandfather and shot off another awkward volley of questions.
Why aren't people going to see opera anymore? How much are your sons paid in the troupe? When did you open the restaurant?

The grandfather didn't answer any of them. He launched into a monologue that was, as far as I could tell, about the crucial importance of the genealogy of Peking Opera stories and the influences of regional
opera styles on Peking Opera, among other topics. I made chicken scratchings on my pad, pretending to take notes. Did I already have enough for an article? I had no idea. The sons had been watching my efforts with pity and one volunteered that they had opened the restaurant in 1984.

1984.
I wrote that down.

“Life is easier now but singing opera is still hard,” he said. A quotable line! Finally someone understood what I needed for my article. I wrote it down and the son took the cue. He started complaining that of the thousands of operas that existed—most dramatizing historical folktales, ghost stories, and classical novels—only thirty or forty were still being performed now. The brothers' state-run troupe made its money by performing for foreign tourists the most blood-racing fight scenes culled from these operas, calibrated to inject a quick and painless dose of Chinese culture into the tourists' packed schedules.

“They perform only a fraction of the original operas nowadays. What good is that?” said the grandmother with sudden acrimony. “Who can perform the original operas anymore? Who's cultured enough to appreciate them?” She saw me scribbling in my notebook and hastily added, “Don't quote me. I don't know anything about opera.”

“Did you understand what I said?” roared the grandfather again.

“I did,” I said.

“Explain what I said to you!”

A constellation of family members constantly came in and out of the room, all revolving around the body on the huge bed, all interjecting their opinions about Peking Opera, correcting and censoring one another. I wrote down what I could understand. I wondered which of them actually lived there, as several single beds were scattered around the room. Like most Chinese families I knew, they seemed loath to throw anything out and the room was crusted over with the detritus of decades. The walls were covered with brush paintings from calendars of years past and faded New Year's decorations that had once been shiny red and gold. Molded
Buddha statues in many colors held court in glass-fronted hutches. Plastic soda bottles containing mystery liquids were scattered around on different surfaces. This was the real thing, all right, and I couldn't wait to leave.

I spent two hours there that first day. Eventually, the family members gathered around the grandfather and flipped him over, which I took to signal the end of the interview. My head was spinning. The grandmother welcomed me back anytime.

Picking up my notes the next day, I found them completely illegible—a smattering of Chinese characters, English words, and crude Romanizations of sounds I thought I'd heard. I had no story. With dread I made the long trip back to their house a few days later for a re-interview. Forget conversing this time. I was a journalist. I needed cold, hard information. Names and numbers.

The house was a beehive of family activity again. The grandmother was there, the middle-aged brothers were there, as were a few teenagers. The grandmother eyed me warily as she escorted me to the stool by the grandfather's bed. I sat down like a heavy weight. His eyes lit up and he said he had never seen a young person so dedicated to Peking Opera.
Surgical strike,
I thought.
Surgical strike
.

“I have just a few more questions,” I said in my loudest and firmest voice. “I want to know about
one
opera that has survived through the years. Why did it survive? What parts are performed nowadays? What is the basic story behind it?”

The grandmother yelled into his hearing aid, “She wants to know about one opera that has survived through the years.” She looked at me and asked, “Is this your meaning?” I nodded and she repeated the question several times into his ear.

He launched into a story about when the family had staged a one-night performance of an opera that hadn't been performed
since 1949.
1949.
I wrote that down. The year the Communists took over China.
His story might not be so off the mark. As he spoke, I took furious notes. He described training his fourteen-year-old grandson for three years in the
technically complex opera, which involved twirling poles and rings on his arms and legs. He had trained seven other performers, rented a theater for a night, which cost more than a month's wages for his sons, printed programs, and performed the opera.

“The title?” I asked. They wrote down the characters:
.
Later, I found it meant
The Ring of Heaven and Earth.
The grandmother pointed to a teenager sitting in the corner, the grandson who'd performed the piece. I smiled at him, but his expression—imperious with eyes that bore into me like drills—did not register any change. She then showed me a video of the performance. The old opera hall was only half filled with an audience of friends and family. This family was perfectly tragic. Or was that tragically perfect? I couldn't have scripted their lives better.