Beijing Bastard (20 page)

The
Zhang family liked to call me on the phone. Sudden and demanding, their phone calls were usually invitations for events that were happening the next day. Often, I already had plans.

“Hello?”

“Reporter Wang? It's . . . Laichun.” The Incomprehensible Clown.
Increasingly, the phone calls were coming from him. I tried to dissuade him from calling me Reporter Wang, as I wanted the family to relax around me. He informed me that they were taking the grandfather out in his wheelchair the next day.

“So I'll go out with you?” I asked.

“It's not about whether you'll come or not. His health has been bad and we're taking him to the park.”

“Okay, I'll come,” I agreed.

“What time will you come?” he asked.

“Midday.”

“What time?”

“Ten o'clock?” I did what I could to be tolerant and rational, but I never seemed to know the right answers. He laughed. The acidity of his laughter set him apart from Laisheng. Laisheng was more of a giggler.

“What's so funny?” I demanded.

“Our lives are not alike. Our days have mornings and afternoons.”

I understood him to mean that I should come earlier, so I arranged a hurried borrowing of Yang Lina's camera and ended up going at eight o'clock sharp, just as they were carrying the grandfather downstairs.

The family members took turns wheeling the grandfather slowly down the hutong as the rest of the group bobbed around him like tethered balloons. I faced them, walking backward, and shot their procession. We turned onto wider, busier streets leading to the Temple of Heaven Park. When we arrived at a circle of dirt in an isolated grove in the park, Grandfather Zhang gestured with palms up to the empty space and said, “We have arrived at—”

“—our performance arena,” his relatives filled in with a murmur.

“—Metropolitan Washington.”

We all paused in puzzlement. I assumed he was trying to create a sense of pomp for me, but as usual, his true meaning was nearly impossible to decipher. Laichun took a nearby tree branch and swept dead leaves from the circle and then the grandson began practicing opera
forms from
The Ring of Heaven and Earth
. The grandfather sat bundled up under a tree and barked commands at him, ordering him to perform certain moves for my camera and critiquing his technique. I suddenly realized that, unlike my vision of the documentary, they wanted me to shoot a lavish extravaganza showcasing the glories of Peking Opera.

The trees were in fall bloom. In the quiet green, old folks practiced tai chi and other exercises in slow motion. I leaned back and tried to enjoy the show.

In the winter, the Zhang family called several times, but I always found an excuse to decline their invitations. I was busy writing articles, I said. Or my friend with the video camera was out of town. Or I was going home for a visit. In truth, visits to their house were disturbing. I didn't feel like myself there. I never said what I thought, only what I thought they wanted to hear, to avoid disrupting the harmony of their household. Just as my dad did to Nainai, or so my mom claimed. “If she told him that a black table was white,” said my mom, “he would just agree.” She, like me, preferred expressing her opinion. But for the first time, I knew how my dad felt. It was just easier to go with the
flow.

C
rowds of Chinese men in their stockinged feet, their vinyl shoes shucked onto the floor, sat in the departure lounge playing cards and yelling. They would have been smoking had they been allowed. Other people were clipping their toenails or posing for photos in front of the big picture windows. Our airplane sat docilely outside, getting slowly filled with suitcases and gasoline.

I was returning to Beijing after visiting the States, back to my parents' house in the suburbs and then up to New York to see friends. The house I had grown up in seemed smaller every year I went home and my parents unchanging. Despite all the progress I (and we) had made in China, time stood still there. “When are you moving home?” my mom kept asking, while my dad said, “You're not doing anything interesting over there, are you?”

Nainai was the only one interested in hearing about Beijing. I told her about how the city was now and how her relatives were doing. When I went to visit her apartment, I saw that in the middle of Yeye's old study that still held his desk and bookcases there now stood a square table with
a mah-jongg set on it. Nainai did seem different somehow, more lighthearted. Home in general felt light without the weight of Yeye. His death had left a power vacuum in the family that no one could or would fill. Nainai didn't seem keen to. My dad aspired to it but did it in middle manager–style, compiling address lists and forwarding
New York Times
columns by David Brooks, with none of the fear-inducing gravitas of Yeye.

I went up to New York, which was so seductive, so frictionless. I kept bumping into the ghosts of myself, versions of me who had moved into that rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side after college. I longed for dinner parties, for endless discussions about films, plans, and gossip. I wanted to have a room in Brooklyn with a desk by a sunny window where I wrote. Adventure, history, and truth? Was that really what I'd found in Beijing? All I knew was that both places couldn't exist in my mind at the same time; each was forgotten when I traveled to the other side of the world. The plane ride was a bookend holding everything in place, the dream between two realities. Or maybe it was the void separating the reality of America from the dream of China.

I wasn't eager to go back and face my life in Beijing. Sick of the Entertainment Guide and longing to have more time to do my own stories and shoot my documentary, I'd wanted to go freelance for a while (Wu Wenguang's voice never stopped needling me from within), but I'd never dared. Right before my trip to the States it had happened abruptly, at Sue's instigation. I'd avidly agreed but now I realized that
freelance
was just a polite word for unemployed. I had actually been gently fired. While I was in the States, a friend had e-mailed to say he'd seen Anthony out with another woman. We broke up via a very pricey phone call. I had nothing to go back to: no job, no boyfriend, just the nub of a documentary. I was panicked and dreaded exiting the airport and feeling the tugs on my sleeve of drivers pestering me to take their illegal taxis, and the whole rigmarole beginning for another year.

I told my friend in New York who had given me the orange jacket long ago about how frustrated I was to be returning again to China
because it made me feel as if I were doomed for all eternity to retrace the trajectories of my parents and grandparents. It made me feel so determined by my family's past. She looked at me kindly and with a dash of pity for my obliviousness and said, “We all are, Val.”

At some point in the airport, the entire crowd rose, unbidden by any announcement, and rushed the gate.

•   •   •

In
the breach that Anthony left, new friends entered. I discovered that my neighborhood was actually full of young expats, mostly women, whose stories were startlingly like mine. Cookie lived there with her friend Emma, Rachel lived nearby, and they knew some other Brits, plus a woman who worked at
Beijing Scene
. Cookie somehow knew Gretchen, the woman from the lesbian meeting, who defrosted significantly after she found out I wasn't actually a lesbian, and Becky, who had taken over Anthony's old job at the gallery after he quit to work as a lawyer. We all spoke Chinese, had come to China alone seeking adventure, and found life on the rough-and-tumble fringe of the city to our liking. Most of us had short hair, none to my recollection wore makeup, and everyone's teeth had gone black like mine. They were much more like me than Jade, and I found myself drifting away from her.

Trading stories of our apartments, we found we all heard the same mysterious noises, like the pipes being playfully clanged on and the pearl necklace breaking and spilling its beads, which began to seem more amusing than menacing. We all also had girly neighbors who left their apartments in the evening and came back very late at night. The ones across the landing from Becky's apartment had even chosen English names and she was frequently woken in the middle of the night by the sound of banging and a young woman yelling, “Carol!
Kai men'r!
” Open up!

Inspired by my new friends' apartments, I asked my landlords to clear their belongings off the balcony, save for the giant naked baby doll. I painted the walls of the balcony orange, bought a few plants, and moved a chair out there. It wasn't such a bad place to hang out.

After the big fiftieth anniversary passed, I'd realized there wasn't much to be afraid of in my building. The neighborhood grannies outside my building grew to tolerate me, even occasionally greeting me as I went in and out. I got used to living with a constant, low-grade fear of the police. The policeman still sat regularly outside my gate, but after several times of seeing a woman come up to him, I realized that he was just waiting for his girlfriend like any old schmo.

Flattering ourselves that we were as feisty and devil-may-care as the Chinese grannies living in our compounds, my friends and I began calling ourselves “the grannies,” a name that stuck.

Cookie and Emma's apartment became the epicenter of our social life. We ate almost every night at a neighborhood restaurant called Lao Beijing, or Old Beijing, and after dinner, we went to their apartment to watch pirated VCDs that always cut off the last two minutes of the movie, or went out dancing or to the local gay bar, a bare-bones affair called the Drag-On located on a dirt road heading out of town.

Unfortunately, the police were often posted at the gate of Cookie and Emma's compound, demanding identification from whoever came in and out. With vigilance, avoiding them was easy. We just went around back and scrambled over a wall to get in or out. We told ourselves we would rather live in Chinese housing with its faulty plumbing, nosy neighbors, and fear of the police than in sterile expat housing or in the sentimental hutongs of the old city. Gretchen even took a novel approach to her local policeman; instead of hiding from him when he periodically knocked, she would invite him in for a chat over instant coffee, the kind that came in a packet with sugar and milk included. He never turned her in.

This corner of the world was grimy; it was where urban construction grit met dirt that blew in from the countryside. Things combined in a way we had never seen before and the neighborhood felt as if it belonged to us.

A reporter came from Hong Kong to expose the underbelly of Asia's up-and-coming capital of sin and had written for a British newspaper
about Maizidian'r with its casual brothels and police crackdowns and growing population of Gen X expats, the newest lost generation. Forget Prague. Beijing was the Paris of the twenties of the
late
nineties. Emma's mother in the UK read the article and called her in a panic for her safety. Maizidian'r had made it.

One day, I likened our lives to those in
Beijing Bastards
and Cookie made a noise of disgust. “That was the worst movie, Val,” she said. “Full of wankers.”

Cookie knew artists from her time at the Central Academy and Becky and Gretchen worked for rival art galleries, and so we all got invitations to underground art events. The invitations were strictly word-of-mouth and the events were always packed, everyone hurrying to see it before the police shut it down, which happened once in a while. We often found ourselves crammed into a cab looking for an obscure venue, each more unfindable than the last.

One time we arrived to find a blindfolded man standing on a pedestal, naked save for his cloth-wrapped penis onto which a bird was attached via a string. Another time we found a woman sitting on the floor cradling a blotchy fetus and guiding a transfusion tube flowing with oil into its mouth. She was one of the young artists from that first underground exhibition I'd been to the year before, who all used human corpses procured from morgues in their work. It was hard to tell what they were trying to say with their work. Were they expressing the absurdity and degradation of the human spirit in a totalitarian regime? Trying to win a gross-out competition started in the West? Having a laugh at our expense? Even when I interviewed them and asked about the materials they used in their art, they issued only the most gnomic pronunciations. “What did Lu Xun say?” they said, referring to the famous Chinese writer. “‘The earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.'” Chinese art was the new avant-garde, pushing the shock value of art just beyond what artists in the West could or would do.

At one exhibition, I bumped into the Texan art collector, who was
happily chomping away on a cigar. He said he'd quit his job at Motorola and was going full bore on his website about Chinese contemporary art. His Chinese wife's solid job at an American multinational financed his quixotic schemes. He boasted that he had the blood of both the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Texan horse thieves running through his veins, and I could see both the noble and ignoble at work in him: His website gave China's best artists international exposure, and if it enhanced the value of his own art collection, so be it. His hustle was typical of the art scene, in which critics doubled as dealers and artists invested in lavish catalogs in the hopes that they would find their way into the right hands half a world away.

When he told me he was in the process of staffing up his website, I told him I'd just gone freelance and he offered me what I considered the perfect gig: Every week I would call up an artist and arrange a time to interview him (always a him) and then go to his house and talk for a few hours about his life and work. Then we'd go out for dinner and get drunk, and occasionally he'd try to get me to stay overnight, and I'd refuse. (The Texan hadn't mentioned this part of the gig.) I'd go home and sometime in the next few days write up a small profile, and after I'd interviewed all the artists in one genre, would write a longer wrap-up piece. My meager paycheck was more than enough to make ends meet.

For a series on video artists, I interviewed Song Dong, an artist who combined video with performance work. He began by shooting a video of himself eating noodles as he watched TV, and then projected the video back onto his bare torso as he sat facing a mirror trying replicate his own behavior. The resulting video of his performance is eerie; most of the time his past and present selves are slightly out of sync with each other but once in a while the two snap together, and you feel a jolt. Song said, “In China, you are always taught to experience other people's lives, what it's like to be a peasant or a factory worker, but you are not taught to know your own life.”

For his next piece, he took the same concept but instead projected
onto himself a video of his father talking about his past as a Communist cadre. A Communist cadre and a contemporary artist; in the way their faces mismatch and meld into a grotesque third being you can feel the distance between them, the tension. The father talking and the son listening. But again there are those brief moments when the two faces nest perfectly and become one, and when they came, tears sprang into my eyes. I told Song how moving I found his work. “In Chinese families, it's rare to have flesh touching,” he said. “This was my way of having contact with his flesh. His history, after all, is mine too.”

His history, after all, is mine too.
Those were words I never forgot.

•   •   •

I
began nervously writing my first article for
Business China,
about tampon companies trying to break into the Chinese market. A friend had introduced me to the editor, a Bostonian named John, who liked my pitch. That week, he happened to be coming up from Hong Kong to meet his writers, of which I was now one, and I took him for a drink at the city's oldest rock club, Keep in Touch. John was on the prowl for the inside story and he listened with hungry eyes as I rattled on about sexual modesty, the sanitary plastic fingers enclosed in the tampon boxes, the fact that while only 1 percent of Chinese women used tampons, 73 percent said they experienced discomfort attributed to the use of crappy sanitary pads, and that panty liner sales had jumped 1,024 percent
in the last year
. Tampon companies were running ads with ballet dancers reassuring women that tampons were an “appropriate protection.” When I finished talking, John said it was a terrific story. Send it next week. Then he turned the conversation to the lives of young expats in Beijing.

“What can you show me?” he asked.

“My neighborhood's not bad. It's a red-light district,” I said.

He nodded eagerly.

“You can meet my friends too.” I called Gretchen and Cookie and told them we'd be going to Peter Pan. We walked up the Third Ring Road, onto Maizidian'r Street. “See Arnie? That's a brothel. See the
hairdresser? That's a brothel. See that sex shop? Hey, do you need any pirated DVDs?”

Gretchen arrived first. John asked how we had ended up here. I explained that I wanted to write and make documentaries and here was where the craziest stories were. Gretchen explained that she was here on a Fulbright studying contemporary Chinese art and interning at an art gallery on the side, though she seemed to spend most of her time shopping. And how had we had met? Gretchen explained that had we met at a meeting of Chinese lesbians where I had been faking it and she had not. Lesbians! John was intrigued. Was this the Underground he had been hearing about? Ah, the Underground. We nodded mysteriously.