Beijing Bastard (28 page)

“It was too crowded,” said Bomu, laughing.

But Xiao Peng was serious. “It was too crowded, but life had a mood that was important.”

“People had feelings for each other,” she said. “People took care of each other.”

“Our living conditions are much better now, but if you ask how that time was, it was also really good,” he said. “There's nothing specific that's worth recalling. There's nothing that's negative either. Life is just like that.”

Xiao Peng was still a character straight out of
Beijing Bastards,
a tough guy who never made a big deal out of anything. Owning a house, owning a story, or not owning either—what was the difference?

He was right, in a way. Some of my questions were stupid. I was
asking an outsider's questions and making a story out of something that was just life. I thought of the things that they didn't need to explain to me: the feeling of biking through the hutongs at dusk or of stumbling into a freezing outhouse at three in the morning, the smell of burning coal, the taste of warm
baozi
and the fear that they are stuffed with human flesh. Living in these courtyard houses had made me feel a part of my family as nothing else had.

I wondered where my relatives would live when this house was demolished, which would happen eventually. Bobo and Bomu were getting used to the idea that they would be exiled from the old city where they had grown up. They had gone to look at newly built villas in the suburbs, modeled on the kind of suburban house I'd grown up in.

“Not bad,” Bobo said. “But the prices are ‘not bad' too.”

Bobo and Bomu had lived through so much; the demolition of their homes and their way of life was just the next thing that they had to adapt to. I tried to adopt their equanimity about it, tried to see what was happening less as destruction and more as change, a mere swapping of set scenery that we would improvise new lives in, but I couldn't. I felt more ready than ever to leave. And actually, they were leaving too. We were all ready to start over in America.

•   •   •

Without
telling Bobo and Bomu, I visited Nainai's courtyard house before moving back to the States. I wanted to talk to average Beijingers who lived in a
zayuan'r
, who didn't have relatives in the States, and who didn't own their own houses. I didn't tell my relatives because I didn't want them coming along and censoring what people had to say. I went also because I wanted to know some history of Nainai's house from the people who had actually lived there.

I found the house, just north of the Avenue of Eternal Peace. The front door was open and I walked in cautiously. I knew what to expect this time and the place looked merely rundown, not heartbreakingly ruined. It was the end of summer and the house seemed to be peeling apart
from the heat, layer by layer. At the end of one corridor, an old couple sat on stools in the shade, fanning themselves. The woman asked me what business I had there. I explained that it was my Nainai's house—yes, she was in America—and I'd come to take a look. She asked me if I was related to the man who took care of the house. Yes, he's my Bobo, I said.

I asked the granny if she liked living here. Her middle-aged daughter, wearing a housedress and round metal glasses, came out carrying a metal pail. The granny said she liked it, yes. Her daughter disagreed, saying, “There's no shower or bathroom. It's cold in the winter, hot in the summer. It leaks. I don't like living here.” The roof, originally a sea of gentle upside-down-U-shaped tiles, was patched haphazardly. Her mother conceded that it leaked.

“We have to pay for all repairs by ourselves,” the daughter continued, and her mother was forced to agree again. Her daughter added, “This house is beyond repair.”

“Beyond repair,” echoed the mother, but her affection was unwavering. “It's convenient to go in and out.”

They told me they'd lived in the house since the Cultural Revolution.

“There must be some stories from then,” I said.

“We've forgotten all the stories a long time ago,” said the daughter.

“All of the stories?”

“What stories are there?” she said. “They let us live here, so we live here.” It reminded me of what Xiao Peng had said about not feeling anything when the old house was destroyed because it hadn't belonged to them. None of us had anything else to say. The daughter filled the bucket from the outside spigot, the water drumming loudly onto the metal. I asked their surname and they said Fang.

On the way out, I met a girl with pigtails wearing a strawberry-print dress. Around eight years old, she'd been living in the house for two years and liked it because it stayed cool in the summer. She kept two white rabbits in a plastic crate outside her door. I helped her feed them some lettuce, took her picture, and then left.

Bobo and I talked about what was going to happen with Nainai's house. He didn't want to be her proxy when demolition time came. He would rather my dad or uncle come in person to deal with it.

I wondered aloud if Nainai would choose a new house or cash. I said I preferred for her to choose a new house. It would be wonderful to have a courtyard house in Beijing that I could always return to. Choosing cash would mean that our hold on the land was gone and would disperse, dollar by dollar, out into the world.

“Are you going to come take care of the house? Who's going to come?” Bobo asked. “It's better to just get a lot of a little bit of money and give it to Nainai.” He paused, unsure what constituted a lot or a little bit of money anymore, to an American or a Chinese person. Or what constituted enough money to compensate for the loss of your family home, the loss of your last toehold in your homeland, the loss of a life you never got to lead. “She'll be able to spend the money for two years,” he said, and laughed bitterly. “You could even negotiate,” he said, and the thought made him laugh again, this time not as bitterly. “Your Chinese is good enough.”

“I'm too young,” I said, chiming in with my own laughter. No one in the government would take me seriously.

He didn't protest and we left it at
that.

R
ight before moving back to the States, I called Wang Le's cellphone to check that she was still at her latest salon so I could get my last haircut. She told me she had just quit the day before, without further explanation. I was dismayed. How could I go back to the Cantonese hairdressers of the world right before I moved home? She offered to do a house call.

“No, that's too much trouble,” I said. “I'll come to your house.”

“But my house is so run-down; it's a
zayuan'r
,” she said, and added, “I'm embarrassed to have you come over.”

“I'm not embarrassed if you're not embarrassed,” I said.

“Well, then, I'm not if you're not,” she said.

“You don't like living there?”

“It's terrible, we hate it.”

A bell went off in my head. Of course. Here was the family I had been looking for. I told her about my project and asked if I could interview her and her family. She readily agreed.

“You don't mind talking on the record?”

“I'll tell you everything. What do I have to hide?” she said. “Come in the afternoon so you can eat my husband's dumplings.”

She picked me up at the intersection of Dongdan, one of Beijing's oldest and busiest shopping streets, and a road so new that I wasn't sure it even had a name yet. Cars hurtled down the fresh, unmarked pavement. We turned off into the hutongs
and headed toward her house. Old people sat outside on tiny stools, gently fanning themselves in the heat. Children and cars were the noisiest things around, yelling and honking and vexing one another's passage through the narrow hutong
.
Inside the house, the passageway was only a wingspan wide and we walked along over loose tiles set crookedly into the earthen ground and wooden planks laid over pools of standing water. She kept repeating the same apologetic refrain, “It's so ugly, so dirty.”

Seven families lived in the house and for privacy had covered over windows with old newspapers or calendar pages and hung doors with bead curtains made of popsicle wrappers folded like origami and hooked together with paper clips. We saw no one until Wang's next-door neighbor came out in his wifebeater tank top. He didn't say hello. Wang's family had just a small corner of the courtyard to themselves. On top of a tarp-covered mound was a pile of drying pumpkin seeds, crawling with flies. Wang's husband, tall and genial, greeted me from the doorway.

We entered their space, just one tiny room crammed with beds: On the left side of room was a bunk bed and on the right were two single beds that had been pushed together to make a larger bed; in between them was only a narrow gap. The room fit together like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle: The top bunk was stacked high with large cardboard boxes, and on other high shelves more boxes reached up toward the lofty ceilings. Concrete floors made the room feel chilly and dank even though the summer air was stifling. By the door was another small bed on which Wang Le's ninety-two-year-old mother-in-law, skinny and toothless, perched cross-legged. I almost didn't see Wang's son, who was wedged
into the corner behind the bunk bed, playing a computer game showing brown brick dungeon walls.

“This is my son. He's twenty-two,” said Wang. “Do you think he's too fat?”

After we drank some orange soda, Wang pulled down a box full of her haircutting supplies and we went out into the courtyard to prepare for my haircut. She ordered her husband to boil water to wash my hair, and when the shampooing was done, I rinsed it over a painted metal washbasin on a stand, which he emptied into a tall metal pail. The pail, in turn, would have to be emptied in the drain outside. Her husband noticed the flies crawling on the pumpkin seeds and yelled to the granny that he was throwing them out. She had been peering out of the window at our activities.

“What?” she yelled back.

“I'm throwing out your seeds!”

“Why?”

“There are flies all over them.”

“Oh, flies,” she said. “All right.”

He went inside to prepare dinner and Wang Le covered me with a red haircutting apron and began to cut. As she jerked my hair to and fro, I could see the crooked flagstones below and the sky and the large tree above. The summer day loosened its humid grip and the air was perfect. I mentioned this and Wang seemed surprised.

“You think it's nice out here?” she asked. She complained that it was too small. “If I took a stool and sat out here and you took a stool and sat out here and we stuck out our hands, we'd be able to shake.” Mosquitoes started biting our legs, but the haircut, as usual, didn't take very long. We rinsed my hair out again in the washbasin and went inside to eat, leaving my fallen hair on the ground.

They had set up a folding table between the door and the beds and offered me the seat of honor on the bed. Her husband brought out a steaming plate of pork and celery dumplings. Though I knew it was
hopelessly sentimental, I couldn't help but glow from my al fresco haircut, the deliciousness of the dumplings, and the overall romance of hutong
living.

Wang and her husband started talking excitedly about the new apartment they wanted to buy. This was my cue to take out my recorder and ask them what was wrong with living in a courtyard house. So many things, it turned out. The beams of the house were rotting. You could see the sky through the crumbling roof, and rain poured down into the house, as did dirt. Rats ran
huala huala
on the roof at night. The room was stifling in the summers because there was no air circulation, but if you opened the door, the mosquitoes came in. The drains didn't drain and there was nowhere to shower. Every night around nine o'clock, the room reeked of excrement.

They were living in this room only temporarily while the government demolished and reconstructed the courtyard house that contained their original room. There, the beams had rotted to the point that they feared the house collapsing and killing someone. That house had been built during the Japanese occupation in the 1940s and had never been restored. Wang's husband's family had been assigned to live there in 1957, and the rent, thirty yuan per month, had barely grown since then.

“They should have knocked these houses down a long time ago,” said Wang. “They're not fit for humans to live in. Nowadays, the doghouses that rich people buy are more beautiful than these houses.”

Her son complained that the government cared only about its facade, about fixing up big avenues and restoring relics and temples while the common people went hungry. I wondered what he and Wang's husband did for a living, if they did anything at all.

Their old neighborhood sat right behind the International Hotel, a five-star hotel on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. “From the International Hotel, which is so magnificent, you can look down into our one-story houses, which are just like slums. If the government wants to improve its facade, it should fix the slums,” said Wang. “Your face is so magnificent, but the back of your head has rotted away.”

To demonstrate this discrepancy to the people in the hotel, she wanted to hang a Chinese flag on the roof of the house. I had no way of telling her that the guests in the hotel, looking down at the flapping flag, would miss her furious irony and see only a charming scene. Half of the time, I myself idealized the courtyard houses as a peaceful and humane escape from modern life.

She said if you wanted to shoot a movie about the past, you could just bring over the crew. “You don't even have to fix it up. You can immediately come and shoot this scenery that we've inherited.”

The Beijing government had stipulated that each person should have a minimum of 160 square feet of housing, but the four of them together lived in a room that was not even 200 square feet, and they complained that no one in the government had come by to investigate. Why should they bother? Wang said she had a friend who was married to a Communist cadre and they had plenty of houses.

Wang's son had burned his hand while working as a cook and, lacking health insurance, was out of job. China's cradle-to-grave housing and health system was unraveling as a result of state-run companies downsizing in preparation for China's entry into the World Trade Organization, and her son was among the many laid-off workers who idled their days away, living off meager savings and hoping things didn't get worse. He complained about a news broadcast he had recently seen; one segment said China's basic economic level had reached the “moderately well-off” level, while the next was a story on people starving and suffering from some natural disaster.

Wang started lamenting, “The Communist Party spreads such beautiful propaganda. What do you mean Beijing's population has reached the ‘“moderately well-off” level'? This is fucking bullshit.” Gone was my charming hairdresser and in her place was a Beijinger with years of pent-up grievances.

“Oh no, she's gotten started,” said her son, laughing.

“I may be poor, but I used to be a pretty cultured person. But if they
don't let me be cultured, I'll curse them. I can't take it anymore,” she said. She turned to her husband and said, “You worked for the Communist Party for thirty years and what did you ever get? Since we were young, the Communist propaganda has always said that we are living under the red flag, growing up in the heat of the sun. Up until now, I have yet to taste the sweetness.”

She said they had just put a deposit down on a three-bedroom apartment in a newly built compound south of the city. The 990-square-foot apartment cost around one hundred thousand yuan, just over twelve thousand U.S. dollars. Wang showed me the advertising flyer, which someone had handed them on the street. It showed a bird's-eye view of a cluster of around twenty buildings, edged by green fields. Above the buildings was a blue sky filled with clouds, and the following text was superimposed on it:

People who live in the city all dream of, at the end of a busy day at work, returning to a space that they can completely call their own: home. But faced with unattainably high prices, your dream may just turn into an illusion. Qin Yuan will help you to transform your dreams into reality. The low price of 1,130 yuan per meter will move you greatly.

They were planning to visit the apartment the next day and buy it before the price went up. The way it worked, they told me, was that developers would sell apartments while they were still building them and use that money to finance the construction of later buildings. Unbuilt apartments were the cheapest, then bare concrete apartments, then renovated ones, and so on. But it was a delicate balance; the newspapers were rife with stories of people who bought early and were cheated by unscrupulous developers who ran out of investment money and were never heard from again.

I asked if I could go with them and they agreed. The compound,
almost an hour's drive south from the western edge of the city, seemed achingly far away, but it was the best they could afford with the little bit of money Wang had saved from years of work. She wasn't happy about it.

“Beijingers don't want to leave Beijing. To grow up in Beijing your whole life and, in the end, to be chased into the mountains—” she said, not knowing how to describe the horror of their exile. After the Cultural Revolution, the countryside symbolized a place of hardship where city people were “sent down” as punishment. “They are making us into peasants. And now the peasants, or people with power or influence, can come into the city.”

“Peasants at least have land that they can work on. If we go out there, we'll have no work to do. How about this: We go and ‘Develop the West,'” her husband said, referring to the government's plan to offer subsidies to those willing to move from China's richer coastal areas to the underdeveloped inner regions. “Give me some land then—”

“We're not afraid of hardship,” she cut in. “We'll work the fields!” I had a vision of Wang in her Eric's of Paris T-shirt and perfectly made-up face hoeing in a bean field.

She turned to me and, in another fit of wild dreaming, pitched an idea of opening a salon in the States.

“You can be the boss and I'll work for you,” she said. “I can cut hair all day long. We can make lots of money and come back to China to spend it! I have about ten more good years in me. What do you think? What kind of invitation letter do I need?”

“I think it's very difficult to get such a visa. I don't . . . I've never done it before,” I said.

Her husband looked embarrassed. “It's not that easy. You have to prove how much money you have in the bank, in U.S. dollars. You have to have a business plan. And now America is restricting Asian and Middle Eastern visas.”

“Well, just look into it,” said Wang. “Think of all the money we could make.”

Wang's entrepreneurial spirit had taken her a long way. She started cutting hair when she was twenty-one and after ten years of working in one of Beijing's large state-run salons, she quit and opened her own salon. The year was 1987 and Deng Xiaoping's “reform and opening-up” policy encouraged private businesses. Wang's salon was the first shop on a new commercial strip on the north side of Beijing. She decked out the tree in front with strings of tiny lights and opened for business. Working long hours, she earned about thirty times her old salary. Wang kept on top of new trends, learning how to stencil in eyebrows and to do tattoos. After ten years of owning her own salon, she was hired at Eric's of Paris.

After four years at Eric's of Paris and then hopscotching through various salons, she had somehow become one of the Beijingers who just idled at home. It didn't fit her character.

“If I had the chance to go to the U.S., I would definitely go,” she hinted. “It's not that I want to forsake my country, but I'm
kanpo hongchen.
” Disillusioned with human society. The idiom alluded to the tradition of people retiring to the isolation of the countryside to live a monastic life. “But I'm not willing to go be a monk or a nun. I want to live life.”