Beijing Bastard (30 page)

I was glad to see that she had not stopped her dreaming.

As we waited for the bus, Wang's brother went back to buy popsicles and said the shop owners asked him why anyone would buy a house out here. The bus finally came and I gobbled down my sweet red bean popsicle before it melted all over my hand. Wang tried to get a 5 percent discount from Agent Wang, repeatedly saying she'd sent him all these customers. Her younger sister tried to persuade her to buy an even larger apartment—on the third floor, of course. Wang's husband sat silently. In the end, they didn't make any decisions.

As I held the bare wooden popsicle stick with my sticky hand, I watched Beijing's countryside roll by the window. It lulled me into a sense of peace, laced with a sadness that it would probably be gone the next time I came, whenever that would
be.

A
few workers arrived at my apartment one day armed with cardboard boxes, razors, and tape. They were led by a man in a polo shirt named Polo Ding. The movers dismantled my life in a single hour, putting it all onto a slow boat from China.

After they left, I sat down on the couch. The apartment looked exactly as it had when I had moved in that hopeful, frightening day years ago. Empty, just me and my two suitcases, as if those years had transpired in the blink of an eye. I thought back on all that had happened. This trusty apartment had seen it all. I would have been excruciatingly sad had I not been completely numb.

As I sat there, the emptiness of the room began bleaching out my memory and I feared that I would forget the Beijing of my twenties when I went back, just like every time I visited the States. Would getting on that plane delete all that had happened to me, like a tape erasing itself as it rewound? Would I forget whom I'd met, what I'd been a part of, whom I'd become? The city had made me, but I sensed the freedom of the last few years slipping away from me. I thought of the curse of the
fortune-teller: I'd constantly want to return to China but I would come back only once. I couldn't even begin to imagine how Nainai and Yeye, or my parents, had felt right before leaving China many years ago knowing they might never return.

Gretchen was leaving too, going back to study anthropology in New York. She said Big Sister Bao had recently shown up at her door, unbidden, wanting to buy her furniture for cheap. Somehow she'd sniffed out Gretchen's departure.

“She asked about you. She said, ‘After saving Miss Wang from the police, she doesn't even have the decency to say hi when I pass her in the yard.' She even did a little imitation of you mincing right by her,” said Gretchen, reenacting Big Sister Bao's version of my walk complete with a prissy pushing up of glasses. I felt bad. I would have said hi but I had no recollection of what she looked like, my memory having kindly deleted all but the shell of that experience.

Cookie was staying in Beijing. She would soon become a camerawoman, what she had wanted to be. She'd been sent to Pakistan for a stint already and was headed to Afghanistan when I left. She would eventually go to Iraq too. We said good-bye sadly and promised to meet again, if not in Beijing, then in New York or London, or Bombay or Ouagadougou. Somewhere. But as I sat there, I wondered if I would ever see her again.

I looked over a newspaper article I'd recently stumbled across, detailing a serial killer who had actually been loose in our neighborhood several years before. Starting the year I moved in, he picked up fourteen prostitutes in his white cement truck, some near the bridge over the Third Ring Road and some near the Rock 'n' Roll Disco down the road, and then brutally murdered them. The Beijing night hadn't been as tranquil as I'd assumed. He said he was filled with hatred for prostitutes after finding out his girlfriend of a year and a half was one. He had a fond memory of each of his victims: “Number Eight had the longest hair. Number Eleven had the shortest. Number Nine was the tallest of all. And the fattest one was also the one with the worst Chinese. I think she was
Russian,” the article quoted him as saying. Even before murdering her, the man had to stop and insult her Chinese. It was sick and strange. These women lived all around me but their lives were so different than mine, so truly dangerous.

Just the week before, I had bumped into Yang Lina as she was dining alfresco with a group of people at Le Petit Paris on Sanlitun. I hadn't seen her for a while. A mutual friend had told me that she had cheated on Xu Xing with a Palestinian, stopped working on her third documentary, and was staging an experimental play with her new boyfriend. She had gained a lot of weight, he said, and now wore these shapeless Palestinian dresses. When I saw her on Sanlitun, her face did look fuller and she wore a colorful dress shaped like a tent. I told her I was leaving soon and I wasn't sure when we would meet next. We talked about the Olympics and wondered where we would both be in 2008.

“I'd like to come back then,” I said.

“Oh, you'll come back,” Yang Lina said with a giggle. “You'll bring your husband and kids!”

“In six years?” I said. “I won't be married then, much less have children.”

“No, you'll be on your second husband by then,” she said, and we both laughed. It was much more likely that she would be the one divorced and with a child. Yang Lina had been like a big sister to me, in the true sense of the word: helpful, condescending, bossy, a force of nature to look up to and to differentiate myself from. I would miss her.

One recent afternoon I had also dropped by the No Name Bar for the last time and had been surprised to see Zhang Yuan scouting locations for his new film. We said hello. I tried to be cold and dismissive but when he turned his attention to me, I just wanted to sit down and tell him everything, about the home I'd made in Beijing and the pain of giving it up, but also about my relief to be leaving, and how the twin feelings of exile and escape mingled strangely together. I even felt tempted to tell him how much he had meant to me so many years ago. To avoid doing that, I asked
about his new film. He told me that it was a romance called
Green Tea,
about a bookish young woman with glasses who is pursued by a guy—a bit of a bad egg—who's intrigued by her mysterious inner life. He paused to clock my reaction. In his eyes was that old teasing look that I could swear was saying,
Resemble two people we know?
Or was his look saying,
A little presumptuous of you to think my film is about you, no?
It was confusing. In any case, it didn't resemble my version of the story at all, which would go a little more like this: Lonely tomboy stalks loutish director who has been using her for publicity but who becomes repelled by her desperate fantasizing. All that had happened between us, and a sharp memory of my naïveté slashed into my gut, sickening me a little. I'd come a long way since then. But before I had time to say anything, he'd disappeared into himself as quickly as he'd appeared. Had he just been pulling my leg again?

Back on the couch in my apartment, I saw Qu Qu'r creep into the room, belly to the floor, sniffing from side to side and squawking in bewilderment. Something was missing. He remembered, and with him by my side, hopefully I would too.

I went to see my relatives to say good-bye. We reminisced about my living with them long ago and they kidded me one last time about how much I had eaten at that first meal. I told Xiao Lu about the fortune-teller's curse and she said, “Do you know why you won't come back so often? Because you will be married with children, and it won't be so easy.” I took photos of Bobo and Bomu out in the courtyard. They posed under a tree, ramrod straight and smile-free, but once the shutter clicked they relaxed and started laughing, and I snapped again. The two photos are like “before” and “after” shots of our relationship. They went inside and I sat down for a minute on the brick planter I'd sat on in the dead of the night so long ago. I looked up at the apartment building looming above and heard in my ear the ghost of Elliott Smith's voice, which seemed so sad and so untrue.

There's nothing here that you'll miss

I can guarantee you this is a cloud of smoke

•   •   •

That
Christmas was the first I celebrated with my family in five years. Being back in the States made me uncomfortable; it was like being dead, or asleep. My long-coveted thrift-store outfits were waiting for me in the closet, but putting them on made me feel twenty-two again, as if my old self was waiting there for me, and so I left them on their hangers. My parents didn't ask any questions about China and it seemed they wanted to erase all the years I'd been away, all the distance I'd put between us. I'd gone so far from home to develop away from their scrutiny, and now I was upset that they hadn't witnessed my development and didn't know who I was.

My mom's comment about the adventurous spirit that we share has been added to her canon of stories. We both went halfway around the world alone when we were just young women. “She's just like me,” she says, and not just about our adventurous spirit. We are also friendly, outgoing, and any number of other positive character traits of her own that we don't actually share. There is more wishful thinking than anything else in her observations, though I do believe I got from her my instinct for turning every tiny thing that happens to me into a story.

She continues to tell the one about the mysterious man with the gift of the Gruen watch, though it has become
A Timex, wow!
and she has added some extra details withheld from me before.
I was young and stupid and instead of asking him to meet me in the lobby, I went up to his room.

To my surprise, Nainai and I formed an unspoken bond. In the years since Yeye's death, she had mellowed and I saw a new side of her personality: impish, gently ironic, knowing. I wondered who she had been before she married him. She could still communicate with a single look but her message was now one of love and acceptance. She took a shine to Qu Qu'r, calling him my
mao erzi,
or cat-son, and filled me in on the latest gossip about our relatives around the world, all of whom she kept in constant touch with.

One afternoon she and I sat at the kitchen table of my parents' house,
looking out the sliding glass doors at the neat backyard in its wintry bareness. Where the pine trees had been were now short holly bushes, which my parents said would grow tall enough (six to eight feet) to block the view of the neighbors' yards but not tall enough to endanger the house. My mom told me the hollies were called China Boy and China Girl. My parents had finally mastered suburban moderation. I asked Nainai about her courtyard house in Beijing. She refused to open her mouth when a tape recorder was running and I had to wait until she wanted to speak.

“It's very terrible shape. What to say about it?” she said in English. “You've been there. You tell me about it. What it's like now?”

“It's run-down,” I said. “I want to know about it before, its history.”

“History?” she said. “No history.”

“Did you have a car?”

“Of course!” she said.

“What kind of car?”

“It was a jeep,” said my dad, listening nearby.

“No, how can you remember?” she said. She told me they had had a car and a chauffeur. They also had a cook, a nursemaid, a laundress, a maid, and a doorman.

“A doorman?”

“Who's going to answer the door and the telephone otherwise?” she asked. Even now when the phone rings at home, Nainai instinctively orders people to pick it up. And having a cook would explain why the only dish of hers I remember from my childhood is brownies. “Your daddy used to wait by the door for Yeye to come home from work. He would sit in car . . . ,” she said, then switched into Chinese. “He would ride in the car just that short way from the door to the garage.” She corrected my dad. “The jeep was in Qingdao, not Beijing. I used to drive the car. The American soldiers stationed there weren't used to seeing a young Chinese girl driving a car. Cars back then weren't automatic. I was always stalling out and the American soldiers would yell, ‘Hoo hoo!' I was so
nervous I stopped driving. Then the Nationalists left and it was all over. The cars we just gave away.”

She didn't know what she was going to do about the house when it got demolished, whether she would take the cash or try to get a new house. She almost sold it a few years ago, but the owner of the adjacent house wouldn't sell, so the deal was off.

“I don't want to sell the house now,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked hopefully.

“The house is very”—she searched for the word—“
zhiqian
.” Valuable. Bobo had told her the house was in a good part of the city with high real estate prices. He would be visiting in the spring and they could discuss it further then. She said he would be bringing a video that showed both the house that she lived in before she was married and the one she lived in after she was married.

“You never saw the video?” I asked. “I thought he sent it to you years ago.”

“No, I've never seen it. Have you?”

“Yes, I saw it.”

“What does it show?” she asked.

I paused, unsure of what to answer.

Unexpectedly changing the subject, she told me about an article she had just read in a Taiwanese newspaper about six people in Taiwan who received organs from the same organ donor. One got an eye, another a heart, another a liver, lungs, a kidney. The woman who got the eye could see again. I nodded impatiently, anxious to return to our conversation, but in her own way Nainai had never changed the subject. She said the six had originally all been strangers, but their families all knew one another now. They are like family, she said, because they all received something living from the same
donor.

A
fter a year in Baltimore, I moved to New York. I finally had the room in Brooklyn—two rooms, actually, one a study with a desk by a sunny window where I wrote. Or at least tried to write. The sounds of the neighborhood clamored for my attention: horns and sirens and gunshots and music, dogs barking, ice cream truck jingling, neighbors laughing and yelling, kids whooping as they popped wheelies, drug dealers hooting like birds. Every Sunday, and many weekdays as well, a neatly bearded West Indian man in an immaculate olive suit and hat would wheel his amp under my second story window to warn all within earshot about the Second Coming of Jesus. “Boom-shallack!” I scribbled into the margins of a draft. “My heart shall not fear!”

To my surprise, my parents became China junkies, joining group tour after group tour and seeing all the parts of their homeland that they had never seen before. But my relationship with them remained vexed, as they continued trying to micromanage my life via telephone.
How many blocks do you live from the subway? When it rains, are there big puddles? When is the book you are writing coming out?
One day my mom called to tell me about a PBS documentary she'd seen about Chinese-Americans
who had moved to China to work, starring people I knew from my time there. “Why don't you do something like that?” she asked.

I had the shell of a new life but my heart was still living in the past. After a few years of writing, I decided that it was time to visit Beijing, even if I dreaded seeing what had changed and even if the new city would overwrite the one that had existed in my mind since I left. My boyfriend, Graham, was also coming, a few days after me.

When I walked out of the airport into the humid night air filled with cigarette smoke, I felt as if I had come home. I might have been gone for weeks instead of years. I wasn't even jet-lagged. Yet the differences made themselves known quickly. No one tried to offer me an illegal cab ride into the city and the dour primary color palette of the homegrown cars on the streets had burst into a rainbow of shiny imports. Even the wheezing red-and-cream city buses were gone, replaced by chipper green, yellow, and red electric buses. All I could see was the new: new office towers, new malls, new cars, new companies, new restaurants, new spas, new bars, new bar streets, new streets, new young expats. Beijing was growing up. In many ways the city had become a more cosmopolitan, probably more interesting place with more points of view and more connections to the outside world. But a yearning for all that was missing tugged at me. Entire neighborhoods were gone. Gone was the wild, enchanted feeling that hung over the city in those days. Gone was the tranquility of the No Name Bar—its success had spawned a whole street of gaudy imitators who brought neon signs and noisy drunks to the lake. Gone also were many of my friends. I kept half expecting to hear my phone ring and for Cookie to be on the other end asking me to meet her at the Lao Beijing restaurant in our old neighborhood, but she lived in London now.

I took a walk on my first day there, forgetting that Beijing was not a city for walking. Down dusty streets past construction sites, competing with cars for space on the road, not recognizing any of the buildings around me, and forgetting how the streets connected to one another, I walked and walked as the muggy August air wound around me. Defeated
and desperately thirsty, I stumbled into an old neighborhood, the kind that used to be everywhere in the city. Narrow lane. Brick houses with leaky tile roofs. Tiny restaurants containing only ten tables. I bought water from an old man chain-smoking alone in his tiny shop. There were bicycles and bike repairmen and a man sleeping on a big piece of cardboard, a chess set sitting next to him untouched. I had never been so happy to hear someone hocking up a juicy loogie or to smell the ripe, fetid stink of a public toilet. I caught a glimpse of myself in a passing pane of glass and saw that the tomboy I'd been writing about had disappeared and been replaced by a woman with long hair, wearing a skirt. On the brick wall of a house at the edge where the neighborhood abruptly ended, someone had painted big black characters reading
,
A BIG VILLAGE HAS BECOME
A SMALL VILLAGE.
I took a picture and moved on.

I went to find the people I'd been writing about. When I called Yang Lina, I was not surprised to hear an automated voice tell me it was an “empty number.” I got her new number from a mutual friend and visited her in a new apartment she'd bought. The intervening years had been difficult for her: She had gotten married, had a daughter, and gotten divorced, and hadn't made any more documentaries. Running through her usually bright, strong voice was a new note of sorrow. Money had made everyone in her generation crazy, she said. It had ruined their lives. Her mother was raising her daughter up in the Northeast, and she was starting on a few new documentaries, mostly about groups of women.

As for the subjects of my own documentary, I no longer kept in touch with the Zhang family but I did wonder what had happened to them. One afternoon, I took a walk down their street; the narrow alley had been widened several years before, and now the small shops and restaurants on both sides were in the process of being demolished and the whole area remade into a pedestrian-friendly shopping and hotel district designed to mimic the intimate dimensions of the original neighborhood. I stood outside their restaurant and looked up into their apartment above. It looked emptied out, the windows flung open to the street.

Wang Le's number was also disconnected and Cookie told me the last she heard she was working at a salon “on that really long road which was
chai'
d and made into a modern road” that ran parallel to Wangfujing. I spent an afternoon biking down the road, poking my head into all the hair salons asking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. All this thinking about her made me want to cut my hair short. A branch of the British salon Toni&Guy had recently opened and I went there instead and emerged looking like any woman with a pageboy whom you might see on the streets of London or New York.

Graham arrived and I took him to see my relatives. They were refreshingly unchanged. They still lived three generations all together in the same courtyard house and we still sat and watched TV together and they still made jokes about how much I'd eaten the first time we met years ago. The newborn baby had transformed into a rambunctious little boy who, as we sat quietly talking, rode his scooter in circles around the room at top speed, barely missing the TV, people's toes, and the stools with glasses of tea perched on top. And Xiao Peng, who played a Game Boy all through dinner, seemed to be shrinking in years. Though my relatives and Graham had no common language, they liked one another, as I knew they would. They accepted him more easily than did my parents, who didn't mind that he wasn't Chinese but couldn't help disapproving of us living together. Bobo took us to see another courtyard house that Uncle Johnny had bought, which he had renovated impeccably and then rented out to the Inner Mongolian provincial government.

While I kept pointing out to Graham all the new things he should ignore, I began to see that many of the city's particularities had remained the same. The city still moved with the same drowsy, frenetic pace of life as before, and Beijingers were still gruff and loquacious with the same take-it-as-it-comes attitude. Under the new upholstery of the city, an indestructible something had endured. Graham noted gently that perhaps it was as much the passing of my own youth that I mourned as the city itself.

In 2008, I returned to Beijing for the summer to work for NBC News during the Olympics. The fortune-teller's curse: broken.

Cookie was also going to be there for the summer and we decided to live together. Bobo told me the tenants in Nainai's courtyard house had finally been evicted (more details than that were not forthcoming) and I told him I might want to live there with my friend that summer, so I went with him and Bomu to see the house. We walked in and I saw that the courtyard was wide-open, all the makeshift rooms in the center having been demolished. But the house was a wreck. The yard was filthy, trash strewn everywhere, red firecracker papers dotting the ground. Half the roof tiles had fallen off, and where they hadn't, tall yellow grasses sprouted straight up. Laundry was strung across the courtyard, and Bobo casually mentioned that a friend of his was living in the house to look after it. Not to worry, he said, they'd left the best room for me. The grayish walls of “my” room were blotched with water stains in some spots and patched with newspaper and checkered cloth in others, and dust lay thickly on every surface. Even after a good mopping the place would still look pretty grim. The toilet was predictably small, dark, and pungent, the squatter merely a slat cut in the concrete floor, and needless to say, there was no shower. I didn't disguise my unhappiness with the situation and Bobo smiled and laughed in a way that made me feel he was disguising other emotions. This wasn't the gentle, fictional Bobo I'd been spending so much time with in my writing, but the real one. Prickly and still a mystery in many ways. I met his friend, a man whom my dad would have characterized as rustic, with crooked teeth and an unctuous smile, and I understood that I would be living with him the entire summer, as well as with his friend, a sesame cake maker. On the way out Bomu mentioned a policeman lived there too. It's safer with him here, she assured me. I suddenly had a pang of compassion for Uncle Johnny.