Beijing Bastard (26 page)

I thanked her as obsequiously as I could and hoped she would release me soon. Now that it was just the two of us, she was the one I feared. What price would she demand for saving my life? Her face was shrewd and pinched and she started interrogating me. Where did I live? Who was my landlord? How much did I pay? What did I do for a living? I was too
shaken to lie so I coughed it all up like a baby, hoping that there would never be an occasion for her to turn against me. Much as she scared me, I also had to admire her; she was one of the wily ones who made the best of all the cracks and fissures that had appeared around her. She was one of the winners.

•   •   •

Cookie
and I, bored one beautiful fall Sunday, decided to bike to my Great-Aunt Mabel's courtyard house, the one the government had given her in recompense for the demolition of her old house, and which I'd visited when my parents came to town.

Several weeks before, Bobo had mentioned that Uncle Johnny was still trying to rent out the house. He said Westerners were willing to pay good money to live in a courtyard house and the prices were skyrocketing. They wanted to charge two thousand U.S. dollars for the sixteen-room house, he said incredulously.

Sixteen rooms. Two thousand dollars. Now that the city was ruining the grotty charms of Maizidian'r, it was time to move on. I asked some of the grannies if they wanted to go take a look at it. Splitting the rent six ways, we could easily afford to pay Great-Aunt Mabel what she asked and the house could even stay in the family. Some of us were considering living elsewhere for part of the year and a house like this would make it possible. One Saturday all of us but Cookie went to go see it; she was busy that day. Bobo met us there and let us in.
His loss might be my gain,
I thought.

The courtyard had been cleared of the ragged vegetation and was immaculately bare. It looked much bigger than the previous time. With the brick walls freshly painted gray and the door and window frames painted maroon, the house almost looked fake, like a showroom or a movie set. The only sign of life was the tall pomegranate tree spreading its branches over the courtyard.

We swarmed all over the house, claiming rooms, talking about what needed to be installed—flooring, a heating system, a kitchen and
bathroom, stronger locks—and imagining our fabulous new lives there. Cookie and another friend would take a corner of the massive south-facing living room for their painting and calligraphy and I would take the room with a small office. Maybe I would start to write for real. Maizidian'r was instantly forgotten and I imagined the next chapter of my life in Beijing. The Ugly Duckling becomes the Evening Swan.

“Your house is incredibly beautiful,” one of my friends said to Bobo. I hadn't told my friends the full story of the house, just that it belonged to my relatives and that Bobo was my relative.

“Yes, it is,” said Bobo, and added, with the brisk pride of a real estate agent, “As you can see, the original layout of the house has been preserved. The big northern room gets excellent southern light. None of the rooms are finished but Johnny will take care of that.”

He had hoped to live in this house and I wondered if he was also imagining which room would be used for what, how nice the sun would be in that south-facing room in the afternoon. He was obligated to help Great-Aunt Mabel and I don't know what he got in return, but I couldn't read his face. We thanked him and he locked up behind us. I went home and wrote an e-mail to Uncle Johnny, telling him I was ready to rent the house.

Several weeks later, I was still waiting for a response when Cookie and I made the half-hour bike ride out to the house. We passed under the thundering Third Ring Road, along wide streets with wide bike lanes, past the Second Ring Road, and into the narrow lanes of the old city. I couldn't remember the name of the hutong
,
so we biked around and around looking for it as swooping flocks of black birds whirred above us emitting their eerie call. The autumn light slanting through the turning leaves dappled the ground with shadows. The curves of the alleys had engraved themselves easily on my mind the first time and I soon located the house.

I had called Bobo but he had been too busy to come open the house so Cookie and I took turns standing on a rickety wooden cart, craning
to see over the wall into the house. Neighbors stared at us as they walked by, particularly at Cookie, who was wearing a pair of flowing red pants bursting with bold white swirls. A paunchy, middle-aged man in a blue smock stopped and I explained to him that my great-aunt owned the house and that we were thinking of renting it. He nodded in understanding and then asked if he could borrow Cookie's bike to run an errand for a neighborhood granny standing nearby. Cookie handed it over and he rode off.

“This house is empty,” said the granny, clucking in regret. So many other courtyard houses were filled with makeshift rooms housing a jumble of people.

“I know,” I said.

“The owner of this house lives over there,” she said, gesturing to a neighboring house.

“No, this house is owned by a relative of mine,” I said.

She didn't believe me and we argued back and forth good-naturedly until the neighbor returned. After thanking us profusely, he then offered us his ladder so we could climb into the house.

“Really?” we asked.

“I've done it before,” he said. “No problem.”

We readily agreed and he came back with a tall A-frame ladder and together we maneuvered it so we could climb up one side and down the other into the courtyard. As we scrambled over he laughed and said that in England, where his son had gone to study, this kind of thing would probably be illegal.

Touched by an illicit magic, the courtyard looked even larger this time. I could just see Qu Qu'r padding around the place as if he owned it. The old pomegranate tree was just beginning to drop its leaves and the ground was covered with the brown husks. I showed Cookie where she could do calligraphy and where I would write. The neighbor, who likely felt responsible to show China to the foreigners, picked two pomegranates off my great-aunt's tree and presented them to us as gifts. The
forbidden fruit felt heavy with the secret of our day. We climbed out and biked home. I put the pomegranate on my washing machine and waited for Uncle Johnny's e-mail. It sat there full of promise like the fateful pomegranate that Hades gave Persephone.

A month later, his reply came. “Sorry,”
he wrote, “but I have decided to rent the house to an Angolan-Korean couple.” I was furious. I realized that he had never intended the house to stay in the family. He had wanted a piece of real estate, nothing more, and I got a taste of how Bobo felt. I wondered how years of this kind of treatment sat with him. Perhaps if I'd eaten the pomegranate I would have been cursed—or blessed—to spend half of my days on this side of the world. As it was, I was free to go.

Later Bobo told me that Uncle Johnny didn't end up renting the house to the couple. He said he preferred renting it to a company. Families are too much trouble, he had said. They come and then they go, one after another. I remembered my sentimental urge, years ago, to write about my family's houses, and now I felt it again. I understood that vengeance can be an equally powerful source of inspiration.
I want to write stories that will last longer than your house,
I
thought.

B
eijing was changing. The edge of the city pushed farther outward. The Fifth Ring Road opened and the government initiated a five-year plan to relocate a third of the people living in the old city to apartments in the suburbs and to preserve only twenty-five small zones of hutongs. The pace of demolitions picked up.

Beijing went into overdrive to win the 2008 Olympic bid. Ten thousand children jump-roped in unison on Tiananmen Square to support the bid; People's Liberation Army soldiers climbed the Great Wall. The government declared the official color of the city gray and when the bid committee came to inspect the city, they spray-painted the grass green. Beijing won, of course, and erupted into a rapturous party. And a few months later, China entered the World Trade Organization. Once that happened, the city felt palpably different, as though a page had been turned. Gone was the feeling of zany, zigzagging promise; all the energy suddenly started moving in the same direction, toward the money. I could just picture all the bright-eyed business majors in the States learning Chinese as they'd learned Japanese in the 1980s.

Cookie got an official journalist's accreditation and a raise and was kicked out of her apartment. She and Emma moved to a more expensive apartment in the old city. The three-story buildings of her compound in Ju'er Hutong were built around a central yard in the style of a courtyard house but were separated into apartments with modern conveniences. The place had won international social housing awards and was teeming with young expats. We had always refused to live there and made fun of people who did. Who needed to be overcharged to bask in the romance of Beijing's past, in its feudal tranquility? But Cookie loved it. Just as she used to rhapsodize the squalor of Marzipan Street, she would not stop talking about the beauty of the old hutongs and bragging about her two balconies. Becky moved back to the States. Even after everyone else moved away, after the dot-com bubble crashed and
The Marzipan Inquirer
became a vague memory, Gretchen and I stayed in the neighborhood. Even there, life continued to change in minute ways. When the monthly gas and water meter check rolled around, a stranger dressed in a jumpsuit holding a clipboard knocked politely at my door, calling out his mission, and issued me a computerized slip with instructions to pay at the bank. Then he left, strangely uncurious about my apartment. I felt like a relic of a lost time but life was easy and time passed quickly.

Then 9/11 happened, and I felt as if I had been roused from a beautiful dream and forced to stare into a rippling infinite void. A string of thoughts detonated in my mind: America was over—I could not go home—I would become a nomad, one of those people who wander homeless through whatever country will have them. I knew people in Beijing like that: Leo the engineering grad from years ago, as well as an anti-Marcos Filipino stranded after Marcos declared martial law. But America wasn't that much a part of the world yet. After my worst fears about its demise didn't come true, I just wanted to go home.

Even though Beijing felt like home, I started looking for a way out. I had to face facts: I was a Flying Pigeon, born with wings and cursed to be free. Home would never be a single place I could point to on a map.
But the city exerted a powerful magnetic effect on me and I needed an equally persuasive reason to leave. An idea that had hung patiently around the edges of my mind came front and center: I wanted to be a writer.

So I dug the tapes of the Peking Opera family out from the back of the drawer, forced myself to watch them, and wrote a story about it. I sent the story out with applications to writing programs in the States, and waited.

Offhand things my parents had said came back to me. My dad told me, just once, that he had wanted to be a writer but his dad had forbade him to, and he had become an engineer instead. My mom told me that at boarding school she had published stories that were thinly veiled fictionalizations of the lives and loves of her fellow classmates. She'd even fictionalized her own name, giving herself the nom de plume Bai Yun, or White Cloud. She said that if she hadn't had to worry about getting a steady job after college in New York, she wouldn't have majored in math but instead done something more artistic. What would they have become if they could have stayed in China? What would China have become?

Suddenly a hidden dimension of our story seemed to reveal itself: By becoming a writer I was doing what they had never had the chance to do, what they had sacrificed so I could do.
You can be anything you want to be in life.
I had taken them at their word and maybe it wasn't only their disapproval I was shouldering, but also their hopes for me, and their fears and envies, which were a much heavier burden to bear, if also somehow easier.

And the more I saw of the changes sweeping through Beijing, the more I understood how my parents' peripatetic lives had left them with a feeling of perpetual instability, even after their house was paid off, their children through college, and their retirement account plump. Their decision many years ago to move to a house in the suburbs with no history began to make sense. A place whose story you were free to write, a place that would never break your heart.

Then one day an e-mail came out of the blue from my dad.

Subject: White Pines

A crew of nine arrived Saturday around 7:30 am. In 10 hours they chopped down 27 trees and fed the branches and trunks into a shredder which filled six truckload of mulch for dumping. Sad to say that the yard looks now bare and empty. The shade provided by the branches is gone. We have to get used to the sun light and clear unobstructed view of neighbors' houses. It was gut wrenching to see the 27-year growth ended in mulch in seconds in the shredder. They will be back soon to finish the two biggest trees, grind the stumps, and prune the dogwoods in the front. Since they gave us one of the lowest bid we had to be a little more tolerant and patient. Those Hispanic day laborers were hard working and dedicated.

Heat and humidity returned to Washington after we enjoyed a reasonably mild summer.

I was furious with my parents the next time we spoke on the phone.

“There was nothing we could do,” said my dad. “That many pine trees don't belong to this small lot. The yard can support maybe five trees, small trees. Pine trees are too big. We learned it after twenty-five years, unfortunately.”

“Aren't you sad about it?”

“I miss the look of the trees, but I don't miss the pine needles dropping that I have to scoop it up,” my mom said. “Sooner to later it's going to drop on someone's house—that house or my house. It was just going to make more trouble for us.”

“There's no use being upset about it,” said my dad. “There was nothing else we could have done.”

“Why couldn't you have just let the branches fall where they would and let the roots bore into the house?” I asked. I was proud of our pine trees for being too grand to be contained in a trim suburban plot and of my parents for daring long ago to dream so big. And I also had to admire their instinct to adapt to change, which twenty-five years in the suburbs had not dulled.

•   •   •

Eric's
of Paris closed and I followed Wang Le to her new salon, willing to give her another chance. The salon was a dingy space attached to a three-star hotel, and I got a slightly better haircut for about half the price. It still looked helmetlike but was coming closer to the thing that I couldn't put it into words. Business was slow and Wang Le seemed depressed to be there without any French atmosphere or lively expatriates.

The next time I called, the salon said she had moved on, so Cookie and I followed her to yet another new salon. The price went in half again. She kept moving farther and farther south in the city, a move that usually meant one's fortunes were going south too.

The salon was located on a dusty side street across from a construction site. It had the same shoddy look as my original neighborhood salon, but Wang was still wearing her Eric's of Paris T-shirt. It was summer, hot, and she immediately had her boys bringing us water. Even her coworkers looked familiar. A Cantonese hairdresser named A Di had a pompadour of crispy reddish hair and long pinky nails. I watched as he coiled, pinned, and sprayed a woman's hair into a French twist at the back of her head. When he was done, he twirled her chair around and I saw with horror that her smiling face was framed by long, stiff ringlets. Wang whispered to Cookie that she was getting four thousand yuan a month, almost five hundred U.S. dollars, just to be a salon consultant. She didn't even have to cut hair. Half of the salon was for haircutting and the other half for massage. Fleshy middle-aged men sat with closed eyes as young women stroked their faces or tattooed their backs with their tiny digits.

“You have to try the face massage!” said Wang, pushing me toward
the chairs and ordering one of the women to massage my face with coconut lotion, but midmassage, she grabbed my hand and asked, “Do you like to eat noodles?” The three of us flew down to the basement where a cook was making
zhajiang mian.

“My husband's
zhajiang mian
tastes much better than this,” whispered Wang between slurps of noodles. “He puts much more meat in it. They're stingy here. And this has no taste because they forbid us to eat garlic during work.”

Cookie and I feigned dismay at this rule.

“Actually, it's a good idea. If you want to be cultured, you shouldn't be breathing garlic in customers' faces,” she said. “Anyhow, you should come to our house; we're in a courtyard house not far from here, and my husband will make
zhajiang mian
for you.”

We went upstairs. When Wang suggested that Cookie dye her hair, she eagerly agreed and soon it was a reddish color that pleased them both.

When it was my turn, Wang scrutinized my face, pulling my short hair in all directions and letting it fall. She said that if I wanted my hair to stick up straight, I should get a perm. A perm! Bad adolescent memories surfaced.

“Not with curlers, just with foil on the ends.”

“No, no perm.”

“If you don't perm your hair, it won't stick up.”

Then all of a sudden, I said yes, and the next thing I knew my head was covered with a bumper crop of foil-wrapped sprigs of hair, and toxic chemicals were burning through my scalp. Afternoon sun flooded into the salon and I couldn't tell if that funny feeling in my chest was extreme peace and happiness or a panic attack gathering steam before erupting.

Wang took out the foil, rinsed my hair, and sat me in front of the mirror. I put my glasses on. My hair stuck straight up, but in a crinkly, crispy sort of way that seemed to be the hallmark of this salon. I looked as if I'd been electrocuted, then deep-fried. All I could think was,
Damaged, damaged, damaged.

“It's called Exploding Fireworks,” she said proudly. “Really
huopo.
”

I nodded, trying to hide my crushing disappointment. I could always shave it in the morning.

“Do you know how you should do your hair in the mornings? You should take a pillow like this,” Wang said, holding the imaginary pillow flat on outstretched arms as if presenting us with a crown, “and rub it all over your head.” She bent down and thrashed her head around wildly. “It makes great effects.”

“She's completely mad,” said Cookie.

But the next day I looked in the mirror and somehow, my hair didn't look half bad. Angular and jarring and unbalanced. Every day I grew into the haircut more and more, and by the end of the week, I felt as though I belonged to myself finally and not to some tribe of Cantonese karaoke stars. At the eleventh hour, Wang Le had divined my inner character and even when people stared at me on the street, I didn't care.

•   •   •

I
called my parents with the news that they'd been waiting for since I moved to China.

“I got into grad school!” I said. “I'm moving back in the fall.”

“Oh, Val, that's wonderful,” said my mom. “What are you studying?”

A tiny part of me wished I could say law or medicine but mostly I was delighted to tell the truth. “Writing.”

“Journalism?” asked my dad.

“No, creative writing. I've been
doing
journalism for the last five years, remember?”

“Oh.”

“Where?” asked my mom.

“At Johns Hopkins.”

“Close to home!”

“Yes,” I said, not sure what
home
meant anymore. I had deliberately chosen a place close to both my parents and New York but I wondered if it would be too close for comfort.

“We can help you with the tuition,” she said.

“No need. I got a full scholarship. Plus a stipend.”

And with this, I was at least partially redeemed in their eyes. And I felt relief. My double life had become more tiring than it was worth, and like with many things one hides from others, my desire to write had been hidden from myself as well. I had mixed feelings about returning. China was where the best stories were, not to mention my entire life and all my friends and contacts, but to write about it, I needed some distance. I was willing to barter my Beijing life for what I wanted more: a writing life.

The chair of the writing program said he didn't support the writing of memoirs, only traditional nonfiction, so what was I planning on writing about? I panicked. I hadn't infiltrated the inner circle of Falun Gong leaders or taken up the cause of any political dissident or exposed any humiliating government scandals. Nothing important had happened to me in five years. I'd been a
hunzi,
befriended a few artists, failed to make a documentary. How could you write about that?

What's more, I found out that I had mistranslated a long time ago and the foundation on which I'd built my life was shaky.
Zixun fannao
does not necessarily mean “seeks trouble for oneself”—it can also mean “worries oneself over nothing.” Instead of finding adventure, history, and truth in China, had I merely been plumbing my own anxieties, neuroses, and self-deluding fictions?