Beijing Bastard (17 page)

“Today's Peking Opera performers would never have the skill to perform the opera,” snorted Grandfather Zhang. “They treat Peking Opera as a job, not an art. A fourteen-year-old can perform better than they can. Look at my grandson. Look at how poised he is.” The grandson certainly was unnerving. In fact, all the family members who performed opera seemed wound like coiled springs. I would not have been surprised if they had started doing backflips across the large room. The house set me on edge.

The family had another grandchild, a girl, who was not in the least interested in Peking Opera. She sat lazily on the couch eating Dasbro brand potato chips, which came piled high in a bright tube just like Pringles. Zhang Laisheng's and Zhang Laichun's wives, if they had any, were not present.

I pressed on with my interrogation. I found out the sons each made a base salary of two hundred ninety-nine yuan per month in the state-run troupe, plus twenty to thirty yuan per performance. The combination of a bloated troupe and dwindling audiences meant that each month they performed at most ten times. In a good month, they would barely make eighty U.S. dollars. Satisfied with the details, I shut my notebook.

“You are getting only the skin and bones of opera, not the meat,” the grandfather roared at me.

“But I'm only writing a newspaper article,” I said.

“She's only writing a newspaper article, not a book,” yelled the grandmother. “She doesn't need to understand all of Peking Opera. She's just writing one story.”

“Even if I talked to you every day for ten years, you still wouldn't know anything about Peking Opera,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Are you willing?”

It seemed rude to reject such hospitality. I imagined years of rigorous physical training in Peking Opera singing and acrobatics, or hours of listening to arcane Peking Opera stories over cups of tepid tea. I agreed limply, but I suspected that we would never see each other again.

As I put my notebook in my bag, the invitations came from all sides. One son said fervently, “We're good friends now. A Swedish journalist also came to interview us, but we like you much more. You didn't come to interview us. You came as a friend.” The grandmother casually murmured to me that I was welcome to come again to visit.

“We're always home,” she said.

“Thank you very much. I will if I have time,” I said insincerely. Chinese people are incredibly hospitable; I had met people on trains who had invited me to their homes for Chinese New Year after only a fifteen-minute conversation. But such warm hospitality also set off alarm bells in my
head.

M
y parents looked wordlessly around their hotel room, taking in the sagging beds and peeling paint. They had arrived a week before their group tour started, on the day of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration on October 1, 1999. The Chinese government called the Communist takeover “Liberation,” and preparations for the celebrations had reached a fevered pitch. Right before my parents' arrival, the government had shut down the city's most polluting factories and the sky changed from its usual mealy gray to a brilliant blue. But beneath that beautiful facade lurked our side of the story: The date also marked the anniversary of my parents' exile from the country and the moment their lives had veered off course. If they hadn't left China, my dad would have stayed in the north, my mom in the south, and they would never have met in New York—and I wouldn't exist. The accident of my own existence seemed worth celebrating.

Bobo and our extended family had just left the hotel. We had all gone to the airport together to pick up my parents, per Chinese tradition, and thanks to Xiao Peng's friend had even bypassed security to wait at
the arrivals gate to catch my parents right as they got off the plane. Droves of strangers walked out first. When they finally emerged, we hugged and I felt relief, as if they were unaccompanied minors who might have missed their connections in Chicago or Tokyo.

“Hey, you put on a little bit of weight” were the first words out of my mom's mouth, then seeing the video camera in my hand quickly added, “Good,” as if she had meant it as a compliment all along. I had borrowed Anthony's video camera to record this momentous occasion and kept it running for most of their visit. I hoped it would force everyone to be on their best behavior, myself included. My parents hugged Bobo and Bomu and the moment brimmed with many years of unspoken emotion. My dad hadn't seen his cousin since he was eight.

“You didn't have to come to get us,” he said. “She could have come alone.”

“No,” said Bobo. “We had to come.”

“I told you twice not to come. I told her to tell you.”

“She did. Xiao Peng has a car; it's no problem.”

They each performed their half of the polite ritual flawlessly and I could see it put them at ease. They walked ahead of my mom and me and talked in a familiar way despite all the years they hadn't seen each other.

“We'll just come over to see you tomorrow. It's late now,” said my dad.

“Yes, tonight just go to your hotel to rest.”

“I meant, you didn't have to come tonight to pick us up.”

“No, no.”

My mom took another close look at me. “Do you floss your teeth?”

“Don't look at them, please.”

“Do you floss it?”

“Yes.”

“Why are they black?”

“It's the water. There's no fluoride. My teeth are embarrassingly disgusting.”

“Yes,” she said. “Need to bleach it.”

I was excited for their visit, but nervous too. I had spent the last year in Beijing setting up a whole life away from their prying eyes and now it would be exposed to their scrutiny. Deliberately disconnected parts of my life were about to be set side by side. The police had recently caught Anthony just as he was returning home one night and kicked him out of his apartment. He had moved in with me, but I didn't say anything about him or our living situation to my parents. Every time we spoke on the phone, they still asked me when I was moving home.

I had booked them a room in a charming little hotel in an old courtyard house, with windows onto a communal courtyard. The lobby was very Chinese-y, decorated with lanterns and large paintings of peonies and furnished with wooden chairs and benches lavishly carved with flowers and mythical beasts. But all of a sudden their room looked run-down and decrepit, and I knew it would reinforce all their negative ideas about China being backward and dirty, a step down. I could see my dad silently shaking his head, regretting that he had ever left home. My mom, the more adventurous of the two, was trying to be upbeat and carefree. I couldn't imagine what it felt like to flee your homeland forever as a child, and then come back as an adult tourist, and I felt the complicated swirl of the moment. My teenaged anger at them dissipated; I felt protective instead. I wanted them to enjoy China, to feel connected to it, and to see what a hopeful place it was and how exciting it was for me to live here. We had somehow switched places—I was the one pushing the old country on some picky Americans. It was night and I hoped the courtyard would reveal its beauty in the morning.

They filled me in on some of the changes they had made to the house in Maryland: They'd replaced the old refrigerator, bought their first microwave oven, and bought a new front door that, even on the hottest days, would be cool to the touch. They'd replaced the kitchen table and the couch. They were planning to get the hardwood floors buffed and to replace the beige aluminum siding. I nodded absentmindedly, not wanting to think about the faraway house.

Anthony's parents were also visiting and he had booked them into the same hotel. They had arrived from Australia at roughly the same time as my parents, and in fact, I could see them in their lit room across the dark courtyard, getting settled as we were. I said nothing.

•   •   •

The
next day I met my parents for lunch before taking them to Bobo and Bomu's courtyard house. My dad complained about the water pressure of the shower and on the way over assured me, “I have the antidiarrhea drug, plus the napkin.”

Bomu poured tea and put out fresh dates as my parents distributed the presents they'd brought: vitamins, echinacea, earrings, Mauna Loa macadamia nuts, a Washington Redskins sweatshirt, a red envelope. They'd also brought a stack of family photos, mostly of groups of people standing in stiff rows.

“This is last year, the one-year anniversary of my dad's passing,” said my dad. “My little brother came from Singapore to be there.”

“He rushed over,” said my mom, who was eagerly crunching her way through the dates.

“In the background is the Lincoln Memorial. This one was last year in June when Chris just got his law school diploma—”

“And he said, ‘I'll take it to show Yeye. It'll give him comfort,'” said my mom. I leaned in for a peek. My brother stood flanked by Nainai and my dad behind our family gravestone with
WANG
emblazoned across it in English and Chinese, holding up his diploma. I seriously doubted that he had come up with the idea himself. Sounded more like something my dad would have cooked up, the filial son that he is. Or my mom, who has a performative streak.

My parents and relatives segregated by gender. Bobo sat in his easy chair and my dad on the couch next to him and they talked about our family's courtyard houses: who had lived in which house when, what year their children had immigrated to the United States or Australia. Of the
house we sat in now, Bobo explained which parts had been sold off and how it had been laid out originally.

My dad had trouble recalling the house as it had been then. “I remember coming to this house just once.”

“Oh, no. You came many times.”

Bobo's real aim was to talk with my dad about Nainai's house. When the government began returning confiscated houses to their owners after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Bobo wrote Yeye and Nainai and they mailed him a photocopy of the old Nationalist-era deed and a letter authorizing him to be their legal proxy. Bobo navigated the bureaucracy office by office to get the house back. He said he was becoming anxious because the demolitions were creeping closer and closer to the house and they had to decide what to do if it was next. He was happy to finally rope someone with an American passport into the process and he talked through all the technicalities as my dad took notes in a little notebook. He laid out the options: My dad could try to go to court and get another courtyard house like Uncle Johnny had for Great-Aunt Mabel or he could take cash. Bobo told him about Great-Aunt Mabel's new house: It had sixteen rooms and the courtyard was so big you could drive a car around in it. It was empty right now, awaiting renovations.

“Xiao Peng and Xiao Lu can live there,” said my dad.

Bobo laughed heartily as if my dad had told a good joke, then turned to me to ask half in jest if I knew anyone who might want to rent it. I laughed too, but then asked how much rent would be. Around two thousand U.S. dollars, he said. At almost ten times my current rent, it seemed like a fortune.

Bobo said the big problem with Nainai's house was the tenants. The house was a
zayuan'r,
literally a “mixed house,” which more than ten families occupied. Some of the families actually lived there and others just squatted in the hopes that they would be compensated when it was demolished. Bobo collected—and kept, I think—the nominal rent from
them and fielded their irate phone calls asking for repairs that no one had the money to pay for. How would we get them out? Who was responsible for remunerating them if the house got demolished—the government or Nainai?

Bobo said that to help grease the wheels, he had set up a banquet with the Xicheng District party secretary of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, who had helped Uncle Johnny secure his new house.

“I'll introduce you as a Nationalist—”

“The descendant of one,” my dad clarified.

“I'll tell Party Secretary Li your dad was secretary-general in Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party.” I assumed this would be a strike against my dad, not for, but I figured Bobo knew what he was doing. “At dinner, you just bring up one request,” said Bobo, before feeding Dad the script for the evening. “‘We very much thank the government for returning the house to us after the Cultural Revolution. I hear from my cousin that there's a document in the Beijing archives and I'd like to ask your help in arranging to see this document.'”

Bobo explained that the document, which I began think of as
The Document,
stipulated that if Nainai returned and established residency, the government was required to return the house to her empty. “If they let you see The Document, you say to them, ‘May I photocopy it for my mother to see?'” Here Bobo let out a nervous laugh. “If they don't let you, it's okay. Take down the filing number. It will come in handy when it comes time to demolish the house.”

My dad looked miserable. I remembered the warning he'd given me about people doing favors for you and expecting favors in return. In dealing with the house, he wanted to follow carefully in Uncle Johnny's footsteps but Uncle Johnny was an immigration lawyer. What did my dad, a midlevel manager at IBM, have to offer?

Bobo took out the old title encased in a shiny red folder and we handed it around.

The women—Mom, Bomu, and Xiao Lu—sat to the side talking about an assortment of safe topics, like the impossibility of losing weight. Mom is a talented ink-wash painter whose work adorns the rooms of the house I grew up in, and she explained how the artist had done the calligraphy hanging up on Bomu's walls—with a slow preparation and a fast execution. She also trotted out some of her favorite stories, like the time when my journalism teacher in high school had asked if the editor in chief two years before me who shared my surname was my brother (he was) and I'd said, “No, I don't have a brother. How could you think someone so ugly was my brother?” She still found my effort to step out from my brother's shadow hilarious. Mom was also still nonstop eating dates. “I haven't eaten fresh dates since I was a child,” she said. “I was four when I left but I still remember the taste.”

In an aside to me, she said, “I'm so glad we made it to China. I didn't think Dad was going to be able to leave Nainai.” Since Yeye's death two years before, things had changed at home. I was gone, for one, and my brother had moved back to D.C. after law school to work. My parents had begun spending Saturdays with Nainai and my dad's conscience made it difficult to leave her even if his sister came to fill in. “Every single Saturday, we cook for her and we clean. I drag my whole vacuum cleaner over there. It's okay to leave her for two weeks.”

“How is she?” I asked. “Is she okay without Yeye?”

My mom dropped her voice. “They say some women have a second life when their husbands die. She plays mah-jongg every week with her friends in the building. Actually, she couldn't be happier.”

My dad had immigrated to the States with his entire family and lived with them until he got married and is filial in a way that would make Confucius proud. But I suddenly realized that my mom enjoyed sacrificing her own freedom for her elders as little as I did. And actually my parents were not the unified two-headed beast they had merged into when I was in high school, but in fact were quite opposite: my dad pessimistic and reticent, my mom optimistic and ebullient. Though one trait
they do share as the eldest siblings in their respective families is the conviction that they are always right.

Xiao Peng asked my parents, “So what do you think of Beijing?”

“I've found that drivers on the road don't really follow the laws here,” my dad said sternly, causing Bobo, Xiao Peng, and me to burst into laughter.

That night when I dropped them off at the hotel, my dad told me he had avoided the outhouse the entire time we had been at their house. I tried to convince him it wasn't so bad, but he said it was no problem so long as you drank nothing.

We returned to Bobo's house every day. Just like during my first visit to Beijing, relatives swarmed in from all over the city to see my parents. They gossiped about all the relatives not present. There was so much talking, so many banquets. Everyone made the usual jokes about how much I had eaten at that first meal years ago, and like they had to me years ago, they piled food onto my dad's plate, even against his protestations.