Authors: Val Wang
At the next stop, an old woman got on, and instead of choosing the seat that was mathematically calculated to be the exact farthest away from me and everyone else as possible, as someone in New York would do, she sat right next to me, her leg touching mine. I recoiled as if her fist had punched through a glass wall separating us. Between the subway snugglers, chatty cabdrivers, and nosy relatives, the lack of privacy in China was both a lot to adjust to and all too familiar. I scooted over. After riding the loop line halfway around, I exited the subway and headed up a street lined with beeper shops for the short walk home.
The street was alive at this hour. Rush hour traffic in cheerful primary colors jammed the four-lane street: yellow breadbox vans, tiny red cabs, and navy-blue Volkswagens were all weaving madly, straddling two lanes, tailgating, lollygagging, rattling, and honking noisily. Hulking red-and-cream city buses wheezed slowly down the street and in their shadows darted lithe little turquoise-and-white minibuses that illegally plied the same routes, a ticket taker always hanging halfway out the door yelling the bus number and hustling people on and off the bus. In the bike lane filled with leisurely cyclists, a horde of androgynous teenagers in matching school tracksuits swooped through. As saccharine love songs
blared from shop speakers, I jostled with grannies hocking loogies onto the sidewalk and paunchy men in thin pants clutching pleather man-purses and talking on big cellphones. I was instantly part of the mad flow without having to exchange a word or even a glance with anyone.
Today the city had opened itself to me, but with each step closer to home, I felt my family closing back in. After our altercation this morning, I knew the food on the dinner table would be laced with corrosive, gut-twisting guilt.
Just before turning the corner to the house, I saw a noodle shop and suddenly veered in. I took a table at the back, away from the big picture windows, and ordered a bowl of beef noodles. The beef was thinly sliced, the noodles jagged and yellow, and the broth salty and hot and swimming with scallions. I ate happily, savoring my privacy and the fact that no one in the world knew where I was right then. My only company were the two glassy-eyed waitresses next to me, listlessly watching a TV that hung in a corner; on it the two unsmiling anchors of the national news sat stiffly in their bouffant hairdos against a blue background. I watched people pass by the window in the distance. It was the first time I'd felt relaxed in days.
I thought back to the first time I'd met Bobo and Bomu, a year earlier, and how much had happened since then. Shortly after I'd moved to Tianjin, six of my relatives rented a van to come visit me and we went out for a big banquet lunch. I then proceeded to, as family legend has it, eat them all under the table while they looked on in shock that such a tiny woman could fit so much food in her stomach. A Chinese banquet host is required to load food onto a guest's plate, and while most know to leave a little bit on the plate, I thought the polite thing to do was finish everything, especially when it was so delicious, so they kept piling on more food, and I kept eating it all. My gluttony at this meal has passed into lore. I had already started falling in love with China before the lunch, but meeting them made me feel as though I truly had an anchor here. I began plotting my move to Beijing the next year.
The month after their visit, I took the three-hour train to Beijing and stayed with Bobo and Bomu in a large courtyard house, not the one they lived in now but a much bigger one down the street on Qianbaihu Hutong that they said was about to be demolished. Both houses were in Xidan, a quiet neighborhood of small hutongs
,
or alleyways, in the southwest corner of the old city a short walk from the Forbidden City.
Relatives came from all over the city to meet me. Some of them had evidently met me when they visited the States years ago. Bobo's sister I remembered, mostly because she had brought me a pair of dangly earrings. She told me she had lived in Great-Aunt Mabel's old apartment in New York for a year, the same apartment I lived in years later. Though she was a doctor in China, she had made a living in New York by wrapping dumplings for restaurants in Chinatown. She spoke no English, and when the phone in the apartment rang, she would pick it up and say her one English phrase, “You speak-a Chinese?” If the answer was no, she would hang up. My balding great-uncle with chipmunk cheeks I didn't remember. He pulled out a photo of us sitting together on a park bench somewhere in America. I examined it. That was him (same chipmunk cheeks, more hair, fewer liver spots) and that was me (cute, oddly self-possessed, legs too short to reach the ground), but the photo brought back no memories. I felt shocked, as if I had been leading a secret life with these strangers all these years and only now was my past coming to light.
In the center of the courtyard of the house stood an apple tree, taller than the house itself and loaded with fruit. From a bough of the tree hung a cage with two small yellow birds. Bobo brought out a rough-hewn wooden ladder and we all took turns climbing up and throwing the apples down to a bedsheet held below like a trapeze net. Standing in the spacious courtyard, I felt connected to the basic elements of life: Above was an open canopy of sky, below were solid gray stones, and on all four sides was the wooden house, dark and warped with age. Just being there gave me a thrill, like I was stepping right into one of Nainai's epic family dramas, the ones on videotape that she kept on constant rerun at home
with the families fighting and scheming in their huge, pristine courtyard houses. This house was less than pristine, but to me it was beautiful, and when I told Bobo so, he looked pleased.
“My own small piece of heaven and earth,” he said.
A traditional courtyard house, it had four wings: They lived in the tallest northern wing, cooked in the eastern, and let me stay in the entire western wing, Xiao Peng's old room. The southern wing was vacant and it was there that I took sponge baths with boiled water, just letting the bathwater soak into the concrete floor. I had to tie the door shut with a rag.
Xiao Peng and his wife, Xiao Lu, lived in a quarter of a small courtyard house ten minutes down the road, which they had to share with three other families.
After that first trip, I went back many times during the year I lived in Tianjin. Sometimes I would tell them I was coming to visit and cancel at the last minute, and they would call me a
xiao pianzi,
a little cheat.
Each successive time I visited them that year, more and more of their neighborhood had been demolished. They said the government was reclaiming the land to build an office building. People moved out of their houses and earthmovers came, their claws ripping through the quiet, old houses as if their walls were made of tissue paper. When I visited, Bobo and Bomu wouldn't let me stay out past ten o'clock at night because, they said, you never knew who could be lurking in the rubble of razed houses that surrounded their own.
But as the year went on, they still didn't move out and for some reason they wouldn't tell me why. Neither would they tell me where they would go when they did, only that they were debating between a courtyard house in the old city and an apartment in the suburbs. “No, we don't want to move,” they said. “Because we're old people and old people like living in old houses
.
” They had gone to see an apartment in a tower block on the outskirts of the city and Bomu had pronounced it “asymmetrical, lopsided, terrible, like a pigeon's cage.” Bobo had said, “Too many stairs. Too few friends.” They didn't seem to mind that the courtyard house
didn't have a toilet or even an outhouse and that they had to use the public toilet out in the hutong.
I minded. The public toilet was a brick building surrounded by a moat of fecal odor so pungent it stopped me in my tracks at the door. I held my breath and forced myself into the dark chamber, where the smell kicked in the doors of my senses with a strong boot. The space was open and slats had been cut into a concrete floor. I squatted and added my contribution to the lot in the trench below. Once in the toilet I saw an old woman with sagging breasts wearing a T-shirt that read,
I'M JUST HERE F
OR THE BEER.
The toilet
was
something of a party scene in the mornings, full of neighborhood grannies squatting and reading their newspapers at a leisurely pace, seemingly oblivious to being marinated in a foul miasma. As for me, I did my business as quickly as possible and fled before gagging or passing out. I always left with the sense that my delicate brain chemistry had been irrevocably altered.
Bomu apologized profusely for the inconvenience and dropped her voice to confide, “This house used to have a bathroom years ago.”
“Why doesn't it now?”
“Long story.”
I waited for her to tell it, but she didn't.
I visited one last time in the summer to look for a job, contacting Western newspapers as well as the two English-language magazines in town,
Beijing Scene
and
City Edition
. I gave the editors a story I'd written about a man in Tianjin who'd started a league for American-style football.
On that visit, Bobo and Bomu's house had been an island in a sea of deserted, half-demolished shells and piles of rubble. Bobo told me that they woke up one morning and found that someone had crawled over their wall at night and slept in the courtyard. It was during that last visit that I pried the truth out of them: The house didn't belong to them but to Great-Aunt Mabel, who now lived in Seattle. They had been living in and taking care of her house for almost fifty years and were stalling to give her lawyer son Johnny time to negotiate with the government for a new courtyard house. He could do so because Great-Aunt Mabel held an American passport.
When I moved to Beijing in the fall, I had expected to find Bobo and his family ensconced in Great-Aunt Mabel's new courtyard house with an entire wing set aside for me. Instead, they had moved to Xiao Peng's small courtyard house, somehow acquiring another quarter of it from one of the three families. No one had uttered a single word about what had happened to the old house.
Back in the restaurant, I finished the last of my noodles, paid, and left.
“Manzou,”
the waitress said automatically, as they all did when you left a restaurant. Take it easy.
Coming home, I wove around dark objects in the small courtyard. From the outside, the scene in the lit living room looked so peaceful: Bomu and Xiao Lu were clearing the dishes as Bobo sat in his easy chair watching the same news broadcast that had been on in the restaurant. Chillingly, it was the only show on TV. He looked older and more tired than my dad, as if life had been harder on him. After standing outside for a few minutes, I tiptoed in. My cousin Xiao Peng was nowhere to be seen. The room buzzed with tension.
“Where have you been?” Bobo demanded. His daughter-in-law Xiao Lu averted her eyes in embarrassment for me. A teacher of deaf children, she was quietly empathetic.
“I ate with people from work.”
“You should have called.”
“I know.”
“You let two old people worry about you.”
“Sorry.”
“We told your Nainai we would take good care of you in Beijing,” he said.
Taking care of me. I knew what that meant. Keeping me close to home for the opportunity to scrutinize and then mock me. My amusing behaviors supplied them with a constant stream of entertainment.
Did you see how much she ate at that first meal? We couldn't believe our eyes. Ha ha ha!
Did you see the big shoes with the hard toes in her room in Tianjin when we went to visit her there? We thought she was living with a boy. Ha ha ha!
Did you hear how much she paid for that coat? Ha ha ha!
The ties that bind
, I thought.
And gag
.
Bobo narrowed his eyes, pursed his lips, and leaned back, and I knew a lecture was coming. His finger came up into the air. “And about this morning, you shouldn't be so irritable. My comment was just the kind of give-and-take that Chinese people engage in.”
I felt frustrated. Being good made me dishonest but being honest made me insubordinate. It dawned on me: This was how family worked. These strangers, who would have otherwise elbowed me in the face to get on the bus ahead of me, instead picked me up at the airport, took me in, fed me, and gave me a cot to sleep on and a chamber pot to piss in at night. And in exchange, I had to behave. I apologized and sat down to watch TV with them. Bobo softened the blow of his lecture with a piece of flattery, saying he had recently told Nainai how quickly my Chinese was progressing.
The TV news gave way to one of the interminable soap operas they loved watching, this one featuring people in flowing clothing who swished slowly in and out of old houses and galloped around on horses and did pretty much what we do nowadaysâfeel anguished over betrayal and lost love, go on quests for obscure but valuable treasures, get angry and smash things. At least it wasn't one of the full-length, one-camera Peking Opera performances that Bobo got glued to for hours. Bobo then called Xiao Peng's cellphone and told him to come home immediately. I was gratified that someone else in the family was acting worse than I was.
A sooty white kitten tottered in from Xiao Peng's side of the house and I went over to pet it, happy to feel something warm, soft, and alive under my hand.
During a commercial break, I asked the question that had been on the tip of my tongue since returning to China. “Was the courtyard house at Qianbaihu demolished over the summer?”
Bobo and Bomu both looked up sharply. “Yes,” he said. “Demolished.”
“When?”
“About a month ago.”
“It's just gone?”
“It's just gone.” The sword had finally dropped. There was no sadness in the room, only a chill.
“That's sad.”
“There's nothing to be done.”