Beijing Bastard (5 page)

I
walked nervously up and down Sanlitun. Just as Sue had said, it was the kind of dinky bar street you'd find in a second-tier city like Baltimore or Omaha. Having lived in Beijing on and off for fifteen years, she could pin down the squirming, fluttering city with the most offhand comment. To me, the city still seemed enormous and elusive. Baltimore or Omaha. I'd never been to either city but I could imagine its bar streets looking like this: narrow, only a few blocks long, and lined with nearly identical cubbyholes, each as scantily decorated with strings of Bud Light pennants and blue-and-yellow sunflower tablecloths as the next. Under a sunless afternoon sky, skinny, black-clad boys were lazily putting out white plastic tables for the evening.

The bars had sprung up like mushrooms in the embassy district three years before. First came alcohol and moneyed expatriates, then alfresco dining, rich Chinese men, beautiful Chinese women, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, prostitution, taxis, live bands, Western pop music, pirated CD and DVD vendors, mutton kebab stands, outdoor clothing stalls, and street children selling red roses. The street stayed awake for
hours after the rest of the city went to sleep. Sue told me the complaints of angry local residents had recently put an eleven o'clock curfew on the loud music and the outdoor tables. I was here because the bar street was on the brink of demolition. That was the rumor at least, the same one that reared its head every few months, Sue had said. The locals hated the bar street, and, more important, the government couldn't properly collect taxes from the cash-only bars; the street was doomed. This time it was for real. She had heard that the city government was going to demolish the bars and build a hulking complex called the Sanlitun Mansions. The demolition would devastate the social lives of thousands of expatriates. This was cover-story material.

The street may have been dinky, but friends who had been in Beijing since the early 1990s told me not to complain. Back then there hadn't even been a single restaurant open after nine o'clock at night. It was best not to get the old-timers started about Beijing's past. Veterans of the 1980s were even worse. Back then, Sue had had a sinecure as an English editor at a Chinese magazine and after work would bike furiously home to the Friendship Hotel and write her conspiracy novel (shelved long ago) and then go to the homes of her Peruvian friends and dance until late. Incontinent geriatrics could not have spoken with more nostalgia for the past than these people. I never imagined I would be sounding the same in a few years.

Sue had collected some facts—the strip generated almost five million U.S. dollars a year, etcetera—and my assignment was simple: Get the word on the street about the demolitions. Talk to both the bar owners and the disgruntled locals. See what they know and how they feel about it. My heart sank when I heard that. I had never done that kind of interview before, where I had to ask a complete stranger on the street to tell me intimate details of his or her life.
Hi, you don't know me, but have you heard that the government might demolish your livelihood? How do you feel about that?
I was a shy, fearful person who would rather get a tooth pulled without anesthesia than introduce myself to a stranger. Not to mention
that it had to be done in Chinese. Why hadn't Sue called my bluff when I'd said that I was fluent in Chinese?
Chinese.
I wanted to shake my fist at it. The very thing I had resisted learning as a child was whipping around and delivering a roundhouse kick to my head. For the first time, my livelihood depended on understanding it.

I must have walked up and down the street ten times, looking for the perfect bar to ambush. The Boys & Girls Club? Easy Day? Side by Side? I was reluctant to break the thin membrane separating me from the city. The afternoon light on the sidewalk was so gentle and the bars looked so gloomy inside. I could see one or two people rinsing glasses or hunched over calculators or just sitting there.
Baltimore or Omaha,
I thought.
Baltimore or Omaha. I can take this town.
Seeing a bar deserted save for a woman punching rapidly into a calculator, I plunged in and spewed out some questions in rapid-fire Chinese.

She looked up from her calculator. “Excuse me?”

My skin prickled uncomfortably but I just smiled weakly and repeated my spiel more slowly.

“Your Chinese isn't very good, is it?” she said before shaking her head no and returning to her calculator.

I slunk out and went into several more bars. Most bar owners waved me away. Capitalists operating in a Communist country, they were understandably cautious. I wouldn't have talked to me either. Eventually a few reluctant bar owners agreed to be interviewed. We wheeled around each other like Greco-Roman wrestlers: me asking carefully practiced questions and them giving cool, evasive answers that I didn't understand very well. Or, rather, the meaning of the words I didn't understand very well. But the actual sound of Chinese flooding into my ears sprang open an ancient trapdoor in my head that had long been rusted shut. I felt myself lying on a cot in my parents' room at Christmas as the clicking of mah-jongg tiles and happy yelling in Chinese floated up louder and louder from downstairs until suddenly everything went blurry and then darkness. I concentrated on looking as professional as I could, nodding
intelligently with my pen poised above my notebook, my face serious yet open, hoping they could not detect the faultiness of the vessel into which they were speaking.

“Jumin baoyuan de ting lihai,”
one man said. Translation:
Jumin
vociferously
baoyuan
.

“Ah, jumin baoyuan de ting lihai?”
I parroted back thoughtfully, fixing the line in my short-term memory before
discharging the contents into my notebook in a desperate pidgin of Romanized sounds and words translated into English and the occasional Chinese character. I would look up the words later. (The local residents vociferously complained.) I asked his name but he demurred.

“One day they say they're not going to demolish, the next they say they are going to,” he said with a shrug. “There's nothing you can do; you might as well let
mingyun
decide.”

Mingyun
is one of the many words for “fate” in Chinese, one of the more fatalistic versions, and while his statement at first sounded like weakness to American ears, somehow in this time and place it sounded like a pearl of the finest wisdom.

I headed back to the office. Peering into open office doors in our building gave me an enlightening glimpse into the inner workings of the state-run economy. A man read the newspaper while drinking tea. Women played ping-pong. Four people sat around a square table holding hands of playing cards, one with a fan of cards pinned to his forehead like a crown.

I shared a room with the art department and with Jade. I sat at a heavy, pale-gray plastic desk with a view of a tall ocher smokestack out the window. The industrial bookshelves that lined the wall behind me were all empty and the carpeting was thin and rough. The place had a stripped-down utilitarianism that said “newsroom” to me, like a place Lois Lane might work. The advertising saleswomen shared another room, and Sue and Max shared an office attached to a small conference room filled almost wall to wall by a huge glass table.

If I thought work would be a stabilizing force, it wasn't. I wanted to do my own stories but had no idea how to begin. The telephone is a journalist's best friend but not in China, which had no phone book. No way to find out someone's number unless you knew someone who knew them. And I didn't know anyone.

Max did though. He had started his career as a photographer, then opened a photo agency, MaxVision, that supplied Western journalists with photos, and now he was our boss, all without speaking much English. He was built like a bulldog, petite but tensely packed with muscle, and true to his name had a stable of high-octane personas each with its own complete outfit, like a Ken doll. Shutterbug Max had a many-pocketed khaki vest and a hat fit to hunt big game in. Sporty Max was poured into a casing of black spandex. Teutonic Max was in head-to-toe lederhosen. But underneath all Max's ready-made outfits, there was something unhewn about him. His head was as craggy as a granite statue, his nose bulbous, his few remaining teeth blackened and crooked. A man who had no money but did have apartments all over town (though none for me). A man with gonnegtions.

I'd heard that Max had access to photos that no one else could get, like those of a clandestine People's Liberation Army training facility that no one had even known existed. Max's photographs were all hard news photos, and he had even dated the CNN bureau chief for many years (though he insisted on referring to CNN and its ilk as “McNews,” one of his few English words). He set Jade up with another part-time internship, this one at the AP with his good friend Steve, a photographer. Max had been impressed when she let slip that she had worked as a dominatrix during college, just to make a little extra spending money.

Jade and I could hear Max barking orders in the phone, as he strode from room to room of the office, telling whoever it was to recollect all the papers and bring them back to the office, immediately. He had a strange smirk on his face. Something was always happening with the distribution. Last issue, the papers had all disappeared from the bars on
Sanlitun the day after they were delivered. Max and Sue suspected foul play. Either
Beijing Scene
was scooping up our papers after they were delivered or they had planted a double agent right in our office.

Beijing Scene
. Our mortal enemy. They were the original English-language rag in town, geared toward the wannabe bohemians who had decamped from dead-end lives in sterile, expensive Western cities in search of cheap rent and even cheaper beer in one of the final outposts of totalitarian chic in the world—where life had
meaning
. (Me, in other words.) They wrote exclusively about underground artists and Beijing street slang, all the things I wanted to write about. Getting shut down once by the government only added to their swagger.

No one would blink twice if our distributor, Lu, turned out to be a double agent. He looked the part almost too perfectly: skinny and ratlike with greasy hair and shifty eyes. And people's possessions had begun disappearing from the office in the few months since he had been working. Sorghum candy in my desk drawer began disappearing piece by piece, which I dismissed as the snacking of hungry coworkers, until the box was completely emptied. Others reported cash missing. And then a heavy pewter ashtray from Germany that Max was proudly displaying on his desk disappeared.

A woman often called for Distributor Lu on the office phone. “Oh. My wife,” he'd say to no one in particular. Sue shook her head and said to me in English, “I went to his house once. It wasn't the house of a married man. It was so squalid with a narrow dirty bed in the corner.” I thought Max and Sue were paranoid. That's what happened when you stayed in China too long.

When Max hung up the phone, the women in the office twittered around him like birds, begging to find out what had happened with the magazine. He grinned like a little boy.

“Someone slipped ‘yellow' photos into our magazines.”

“What are ‘yellow' photos?”

Jade looked at me as if I were five years old. Her Chinese was much better than mine, especially where certain kinds of words were concerned.

“Dirty photos.”

The girls continued. “What did they look like? Are they going to bring them back to the office? Was it
Beijing Scene
again? Tell us, Max!”

•   •   •

The
next day I went back to Sanlitun to find some angry residents. This time I brought Jade, who had a boldness that I lacked. We walked to the park at the southern end of the street, a patch of dirt dotted with a few sickly trees and park benches, and prowled about. Elderly people stood in small groups, rocking babies in bamboo carriages and gossiping. Like a lioness preying on weak gazelles, I pounced on lone stragglers. Most fulminated about the noise and the disorder of the bar street, but when I said I was a reporter, they clammed up and walked away. I got only one woman, who lived nearby but refused to give her name, to complain on the record about the stench of urine in her yard that greeted her in the mornings.

Behind the bar street loomed brick apartment complexes. I popped into the yards of a few and rattled off, “I'm a reporter. Object to the bar street? No? Okay.” After a few rejections, I was ready to call it a day. I figured one quote about piss might be enough. Jade goaded me into trying one more place and we ducked into a yard on the east side of the street. The narrow space abutted the backs of the low bars and I could see how cobbled together they were. Exhaust pipes jutted crookedly from their backs and the corrugated tin roofs were dented and dirty. Two women stood outside chatting.

“I'm a reporter. Object to the bar street?”

One of the women lit up. “Yes! The bars disturb us. People get drunk and
bang-bang
break bottles in the yard. There are lines on the sidewalk that mark out the areas that are supposed to be left clear. Foreigners aren't like Chinese people when they get drunk. They don't bother to follow the
rules. They piss all over the place. People sit with their legs hanging over the line,” she said, gathering steam. It was true. Though I didn't piss all over the place, I did feel like none of the rules—Chinese ones or the ones I'd left behind at home—applied to me here. She went on, “What am I supposed to do when I walk by? Kick their leg? I'm not going to do that. Chinese people have a long history of civility and politeness.”

Civility and politeness? Was she referring to the spitting on the ground and the slurping of soup and the pushing ahead of people in line and the talking with one's mouth full and the telling people to their faces that they're fat and the dropping of gnawed-down bones straight onto the ground and the clipping of fingernails in restaurants and the stubbing out of cigarettes in the remains of one's meal that I had witnessed in China? Actually, those things were cultural differences, not rude at all, and they were what liberated me from feeling as though I had to follow the rules here.