Beijing Bastard (24 page)

Or maybe it was more like reading a play of a therapy session, except that no one in China went to therapy. Most seemed oddly unself-conscious of their own actions and emotions. An American friend of mine joked that therapy might catch on in China if people went in place of their neighbors and told the therapist in detail about their neighbors' deficiencies and problems.

As it went on, I started to feel swamped and yearned to lay my head down for a few minutes. But we needed to finish that night, so I slogged
along, working quickly. Her brother continued living with his mom, who sold her blood to be able to bring home extra treats like eggs or candy. He started getting into fights and going downhill at school. From my memory of her family photos taped onto the wall, her parents were average middle-aged Chinese people but her brother had a beautiful face touched with a faint hint of surliness or woundedness.

As he told his story, he became increasingly remorseful.

This is how it works: No matter how old you are,

as long as you do something wrong

you will feel ashamed for the rest of your life.

Mom has forgiven you for it.

There's no need for you to feel that way anymore.

A lot of things you don't understand.

I'm not happy; I've never been happy.

By this point, Yang Lina told me, both she and her brother were crying. The documentary had unexpectedly recoiled in her face and she said she regretted unearthing so many years of pain, especially her own. However, I had to imagine that reliving what she had never lived in person in the first place was the whole point of making it.

And her regret wasn't strong enough to stop her from instigating phase II of the documentary: showing her family the first part of the documentary and videotaping their reactions. Not only did they have to relive it when she taped the first interviews, but also they had to relive their and everyone else's reliving of it. Yang Lina called her camera her axe, and it did seem as though she was breaking her family apart more than piecing things together. Her project seemed downright sadistic.

Night fell. My apartment cooled off but she didn't put her clothing back on. We kept reading. She showed the edit to her mom and brother
first and they debated whether or not she should show it to her dad. Her brother thought she should. Her mom thought she shouldn't, for a number of reasons. She thought it was cruel, she didn't want Yang Lina to seek revenge for her, he was already lonely and sad. Finally, she admitted the real reason: She wanted to stay on good terms with him so he would pay for her house.

In the end, Yang Lina did show it to her dad. He contradicted everything her brother had said. He said he had never mistreated or abandoned him. He had never promised to take him to Changchun and had even given him a choice of whom to live with after the divorce. He had never called him a “cruel wolf,” not until years later at least. And the kicker: Her brother had only imagined their mom calling out his name when getting beaten. He had not even been in the room that day.

I was surprised to hear Yang Lina tell her dad she believed him.

My biggest fear was showing it to you.

If what Yang Xiaofan said was true, you would have a different reaction.

I'll tell you truthfully, what he said was all bullshit.

At times my conscience makes me think of him but that's it.

I only think of him from time to time.

Whether or not I think of him—what does that matter?

Not very much.

And that was the end. It was late when we finished. I felt bruised and tired, as if I had just been forced to break up a fight on a lurid Chinese version of
Jerry Springer.
I had seen where Yang Lina had come from. And I could see where she was now: sitting on my couch in only her underpants, the blank at the center of her own story. She was naked, but she had never seemed so mysterious to me as she did at that moment and must have been just as mysterious to herself. She didn't seem to know what to make of her own documentary. She said that when she had
screened it publicly, some people in the audience had bawled. Still others said that she was telling the untold story of so many people, especially now that divorce was becoming more common in China. But others had said the documentary was fundamentally flawed because it showed every relationship but the one between her and her family. She'd exposed everyone in her family but herself. Just as she'd been absent when the divorce happened, she was also absent from the documentary, except for that one flash in the mirror and what I assumed was several moments of off-camera sobbing in tune with her brother. Through him, she had tried to feel it, but in the end she had kept herself at a safe
distance.

I
jiggled the key impatiently. It wouldn't turn. I rattled the old wooden door. I had kept my key from the time I had lived with Bobo and Bomu because I liked to feel that this was my home too. Now why wasn't the darned thing working? I rang the doorbell but no one appeared. They
knew
I was coming over to see Xiao Peng and Xiao Lu's new baby. I peered through a crack into the courtyard. Nobody. Finally, I called them on my cellphone.

“Hi, are you home? I'm outside the door.”

“Oh, that's
you
outside!” said Bomu.

“You can hear me?”

“Yes. We heard the rattling and thought someone was trying to break into the house. We were scared.”

“No thief, just me!” I said, and we started laughing. We got along famously now that we didn't live together anymore, though I knew they thought I didn't call or visit enough. “My key isn't working.”

“Oh, we changed the locks months ago. You might as well throw out that old key.” They had just gotten back from a six-month jaunt to the
States, visiting their daughters in L.A., Great-Aunt Mabel in Seattle, Nainai and my parents in suburban Maryland, and an old student of Bobo's in Philadelphia who took them to New York City for the day.

Bomu came to the front door and I followed her through the courtyard into Xiao Peng's side of the house. He was out but Xiao Lu was there in their small living room, washing their son, Sanbao, in a big plastic tub. A tape of Buddhist chanting played in the background. Per the fashion among young people in Beijing, Xiao Peng and Xiao Lu had taken up Buddhist practices, adopting Buddhist names and playing tapes and burning incense at their small Buddhist altar draped with saffron-colored cloth.

I went back to Bobo and Bomu's side of the house. The TV was on and Bobo was in his big easy chair, leaning back with his pant cuffs hiked up high and his hands on his knees. I took my old position on the couch. The heaviness that used to accompany a visit to their house was gone. After the Zhang family, they seemed normal, loving. Bobo's sternness had defrosted, as had my testiness. I felt almost jovial. And why had this room seemed so claustrophobic when I lived here? It was a grand room with tall and wide windows.

We looked through the photos from their trip. There wasn't a single candid shot among them, or a smile. Bobo and Bomu posed grim-faced under the statue of Lincoln at his memorial, next to the charging bull on Wall Street, on my parents' suburban lawn pushing the lawnmower. The people in the photos were so unlike the ones sitting next to me laughing and offering pronouncements about each place: L.A. (“The air's so clean and there are so few cars!”), suburbia (“Beautiful, but you need a car to go anywhere.”), and New York City (“So chaotic!”). They spoke happily about being reunited with Nainai after more than fifty years. My dad had reported that the meeting had actually been slightly anticlimactic after their years of constant phone contact.

I envied them, spending half the year in the States and half in Beijing. It seemed ideal. They also had a whole book of happy photos of their
youngest daughter: her posing in front of a car, her posing in a flouncy wedding dress. She was finally married.

After we finished looking through the photos, Bomu left to practice with her neighborhood dance troupe, which was learning a new North Korean dance, and Bobo returned to his TV show. Singers, one after another, came in their street clothes onto a vast stage bedizened with large gold stars and as garishly lit as an intergalactic landing strip. They sang opera songs, rather badly. My time with the Zhangs had not cultivated my palate for Peking Opera, but this was worse than usual.

“What is this?”

“China's First Annual Amateur Peking Opera competition. This is Day Two.”

“Day Two? It goes on for two days?”

“No, five days,” he said, looking excited at the prospect.

“Why didn't you compete? I bet you sing better than these people.”

Bobo threw back his head and laughed. He and his friends regularly got together to play and sing opera songs and, like the Zhangs, had even rented out a theater for an amateur performance. When he showed me the videotape, he'd had to point himself out. He was swaddled in a thick brocade outfit, his face thickly painted. We watched him teeter violently around the stage in his platform shoes until he lost his bout with gravity and toppled over. I had never told him about Grandfather Zhang, whom I think he would have had a lot of respect for. For a while I had been seeing the Peking Opera family more often than I saw my own, but it had been more than half a year since the end of my documentary. Once in a while the Zhang family still called my cellphone and though it made me feel like a cold-blooded strangler, I simply muffled the phone until the song silenced itself.

A tiny girl came onto the stage clutching a microphone, which looked as large as a can of tennis balls in her hands. Pert and innocent as a pebble, she squinched up her face as if in dire pain and began singing with all her might.

“She's the youngest competitor. Only four years old,” Bobo said. “Her story has been in all of the newspapers.”

I could imagine the state-run newspaper touting her—as well as this competition—as proof that Peking Opera had a future. I thought of Grandfather Zhang lying in his bed, frothing.
The benevolent emperor came down south of the Yangtze to look into the condition of Peking Opera. This is just a
story
. Do you believe it, Miss Wang?

“What song is she singing?”

“A part by Lin Chong in a story called the
Wild Boar Forest.
Do you know
The Water Margin
?”

“Yes, sort of.” One of the masterpieces of Chinese literature about a band of outlaws . . . in some dynasty . . . long ago.

“Lin Chong is an honorable man, a military officer who is framed because a corrupt officer wants his wife. In this scene, he is being escorted through the Wild Boar Forest by soldiers who've been hired to kill him. He later escapes but his wife commits suicide and he eventually becomes a bandit to avenge her.”

“You would never guess that by looking at this little girl.”

“Usually the rulers are the good characters but when they're corrupt, the everyday people or the outlaws are the ones who become moral. The world gets turned upside down.”

“What kind of role is Lin Chong?”

“A
lao sheng.
”
Of the four main character types in Peking Opera, the
lao sheng
is the eldest and most dignified. That constipated face had been her attempt at dignified gravitas. The world really was turned upside down. Little girls singing
lao sheng
roles. Old men lying in bed as helpless as babies. She finished her song and the crowd erupted in loud applause. I asked Bobo if her performance had been good. He said yes, but his yes was cautious—she was just a gimmick, after all. Good singing takes years of practice and a deep understanding of Chinese history, that much I did know.

At home, I went searching for an article about her. One Chinese
website gushed that “from the first note of her song, the love and hate in her voice were unmistakable.”

•   •   •

Suddenly,
the Zhang family called me several times in one week. I didn't pick up, but knowing what I would hear on the other end, I resolved to the next time.

Of course it was Laichun, the clown, even though he refused to identify himself. He spoke in the slow, slightly demented (drunk? damaged?) way that I had come to expect of him. My stomach twisted at the sound of his voice.

“How is the family?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said, and slurred something incoherent. Finally, he told me that the grandfather had passed away the month before. I offered my condolences. He apologized for being too grief-stricken to call sooner. We left it that I would go to their house if I had time. I thought back to Yeye's death and the way we had all spun out of orbit like planets released from the sun's grip. I wondered if the Zhangs would be happy to find their own lives now or if they would be completely lost without their North Star.

He called back a few hours later. “Didn't we [something-something]
earlier?” he asked in a tortured tone, his voice catching right at the crucial word.

Even though I had no idea what I was agreeing to, I said, “Yes, yes, we did.”

“You'll come visit if you have time?”

“Yes, I'll come if I have time.” I wished I could go to their house and pay my respects but I couldn't. What had happened between us had hit too close to home, and I couldn't bring myself to revisit it, or them. Not yet.

I read that construction had started on a hundred-million-dollar Peking Opera theater inside the Second Ring Road funded solely by local businesses. I could envision the twelve hundred seats of the clean and well-heated theater filled with crowds of young people, the same ones
who could be seen around town wearing Chinese silk jackets embroidered with gold phoenixes and dragons, who were interested in injecting a quick, painless dose of their own history into their packed schedules. I imagined child stars singing
lao sheng
roles with all the love and hate that four-year-olds can muster. There would even be a museum in the theater, displaying photographs and sculptures from Peking Opera's history, and I could imagine an enterprising person going up a narrow alley near Tiananmen Square, finding the Zhang family, and re-creating their room in the theater, just to make sure that the past is really past. More likely, when their street is demolished along with the rest of the old city, the Zhang family will just disappear like ghosts into an anonymous concrete apartment like mine on a desolate road on the edge of town.