Beijing Bastard (7 page)

I sat down by the entrance to an underpass and watched the fountains for the building being tested. Plumes bobbed up and down with frustrated jerks. I picked at a splitting seam on the sleeve of my orange jacket and pulled out some fluffy white ticking. As I let it fly away on the wind, I felt an unexpected stab of belonging to the house. Standing before this monstrous building with its vacant eyes, I wanted to tell the story of our houses. Who else would?

I thought of all the gossip about my family's courtyard houses I'd gathered in the past few weeks, mostly in the afternoons when Bobo napped and Bomu swept in circles, the air sparkling with dust motes. She told me that of course they had wanted to live in Great-Aunt Mabel's pristine new courtyard house, but when it didn't happen, they had acquired an apartment in the suburbs and traded it for another quarter of Xiao Peng's small house. He had had only a quarter of it because years ago Bobo's father had gambled away the other three-fourths of it. Not only had he been a gambler, but he'd also been a bigamist and there had been a lot of drama about which one of his two wives would inherit the remaining quarter of his house. The stories went on and on, full of betrayals and dashed hopes, our family ties bound and unbound through the houses.

I'd also found out more about Nainai's courtyard house. When Yeye and Nainai had fled in 1949, they'd entrusted the house to Nainai's only brother, Bobo's dad. The Communist government eventually took control of the house during the Cultural Revolution and started assigning families to live in the different rooms, ten in all. Even though the house had been legally returned to Yeye and Nainai, the families were still living there. Bobo had been taking care of the house since his father's death, and if Nainai got a new house, I was sure Bobo and Bomu wanted to move in. I imagined living there myself. I was a pawn in a game of musical chairs much larger and older than myself.

Several men in baggy suit jackets and mismatched pants stopped their bikes nearby, mesmerized too by the irregular bobbing of the fountains. Their faces were tanned and lined and their hair gray with dust; they had clearly come from the countryside to work on construction projects in the city. The clumsy slapstick of the plumes made me sad for what had been destroyed but I suddenly wondered if they saw the opposite: the extravagant promises of the future, majesty just practicing her steps. It was getting late and I looked at my wrist to find the time, forgetting that the day before I'd dropped my mom's old watch on the hard tile floor of the courtyard house and the hands had stopped. Nothing I did
would make them start again. It was probably time to go home but I watched the fountains long after the workers left, partly to mourn the loss of Old Beijing and partly, truth be told, to avoid going back to the suffocating old courtyard house.

•   •   •

That
weekend, I climbed into the passenger seat of a dinged-up yellow breadbox van, slammed the flimsy door shut, and told the cabbie, “To Maizidian!” I looked out the side window: My four relatives stood on the sidewalk like a family portrait, waving. I waved back as the van tut-tutted into action and we pulled away. I was free.

“Maizidian'r? The one outside of the Third Ring Road?” growled the cabbie in a voice straight out of a smoky gambling den. He had a flattop and the van smelled like a stale ashtray. He took a swig out of a brown-stained glass jar filled with tea that looked as if it had been steeping since the Qing Dynasty.

“Yes.”

“Which way do you want to go?” he asked. We were heading east on Xinwenhua Lu, a busy two-lane artery slicing through the messy, capillary squiggle of the hutongs. People squatted on the sidewalk, watching life pass by.

“Can we go by the Square?” To soar down the wide Avenue of Eternal Peace with the red walls of the Forbidden City on the left and the expanse of Tiananmen Square on the right would be like shooting an arrow straight through the beating heart of the Middle Kingdom, a glorious way to exit the old city. Plus I didn't know any other way, and I didn't want to reveal my unfamiliarity with the city's geography.

“Sorry, miss. Can't take that road in the daytime.”

“Well, you choose then.”

The
miandi
, or breadbox van, can no longer be found on Beijing's roads but at the time it was ten kuai for ten kilometers, the cheapest cab on the road. Banned on certain roads at certain times, it resembled a motorcycle chassis with a yellow loaf of Wonder Bread stapled on top,
with a motorcycle's legendary “feel” for the road. Every bump and jounce threatened to catapult me through the wide windshield about two inches in front of my face.

We veered into the hutongs and the familiar walls rose around us like a maze. The
miandi
barely fit down the narrow passageway and the cabbie honked noisily at the snarls of bikes and people in our way and swore steadily. Despite all the life that rattled between and behind its walls, the hutongs were deeply peaceful, like a place airlifted out of the past. I was going to miss living here.

“Miss, you're not a Beijinger, are you?”

“No, I'm not.” I wondered if he were about to take me for a ride.

“I could tell from your terrible accent. Where are you from? Korea?”

“America.”

“America?! You don't look American! You look Chinese.”

“Well, I'm American.”

“How is that possible?”

“Just is. I grew up there.”

“So who were those people back there?”

“My relatives.”

“I knew someone in your family had to be Chinese. So you're
meiji huaren.
” American-born Chinese.

“Sort of.” This was the number one conversation people loved having with me in China. I wasn't in the mood to explain the subtle but crucial differences between
American-born Chinese
and
Chinese-American.

“No ‘sort of' about it. You are a
meiji huaren
. So you've come back to China to
xun gen
.”
To search for your roots.

“No, I'm not coming
back
to China. I'm not from here. I'm American. And I'm not coming here to
xun gen.
” Couldn't he see that I was
fleeing
my roots with only the clothes on my back and my two suitcases? “I'm coming here to
xun . . .
”
I racked my brains for the word I was looking for.
“Maoxian.”
Adventure. I punched my fist triumphantly in the air for emphasis.

The cabbie laughed. “Miss, you're not half bad. You smoke?”

“Sure,” I said, and he handed me a cigarette, lit it, then lit his own. We smoked in silence.

I read somewhere that Westerners typically cast themselves as the protagonists of their own memoirs, while Asians are usually bit players in theirs, one mere star in a great constellation. I had gone abroad intending to have swashbuckling foreign adventures and to get as far away as possible from turgid family psychodramas with Confucian overtones. As I told Yeye repeatedly years ago, I was American! But I had made one fatal mistake: I had set the story in China, where my family's past worked as an undertow, pulling me in directions I was powerless to fight.

We crossed over the Second Ring Road, which flowed under us like a river of cars, and turned onto a wide avenue clotted with vehicles of all sizes driving like maniacs and honking peevishly. But no one was actually going all that quickly, and the whole scene was at once manic and leisurely. Cranes floated high above us, wheeling slowly over the green-clad skeletons of half-built buildings. Pollution and exhaust hung heavily in the air and the avenue looked unpleasant to walk along. But people did. There were people everywhere, ambling along the sidewalks, stuffed into buses, biking shoulder to shoulder in the bike lane. Their faces looked gray and sad. Hatched from the protective cocoon of family, I could feel myself shrinking as a sea of strangers spread itself around me.

I thought of my two suitcases in the back and how little ballast they provided for my life. Back in the States, I had crammed them full, but hardly anything had fit. Just a few novels and mix tapes, a small album of photos, a year's worth of tampons and Wellbutrin, and a tiny but rugged wardrobe of clothing that could withstand the corrosive pollution and tiny washing machines of China. When I thought about the ugly clothing that I'd brought in lieu of my thrift-store treasures, the baggy Lee corduroys and misshapen sweaters I was stuck with now, my mind suddenly flashed back to the Sunday afternoons of my childhood, when I had worn my ugliest clothing reserved especially in a bottom drawer for
that hated day's main event, Chinese School. Now every day was going to be like Sunday.

But tomorrow! Tomorrow I was having brunch with Zhang Yuan, the director of
Beijing Bastards.
Just yesterday he had called me at the office. “Zhenluo, I'd like to invite you out to brunch at the Kunlun Hotel; it's a five-star hotel.”
I'd protested, saying Max made us pick up the tabs when we did interviews and he'd kill me if I went somewhere so expensive. “Don't think of it as an interview then. It's my treat.” It was true; I'd gotten all the information I needed from him at our first meeting.
My life was now beginning for real.

The farther we drove, the wider the streets got. Soon we were barreling down an eight-lane highway that ran on a flyover above the city. The Third Ring Road. The meter clicked above ten and began ticking steadily upward. The city sprawled out on either side of the road. The Hot Spot Disco, marked with a giant bull's-eye. A single silvery skyscraper. A mausoleum laced with a filigree of unlit neon spelling out
KTV
: karaoke. In between were old Soviet-style concrete apartment blocks with rows of blackened balconies that seemed to trumpet a message of socialist realism: Comrades, life is suffering. The day was sunless and stern. Moving to Beijing suddenly seemed like the wrong idea. While the hutongs of the old city had been built to human scale, the wide roads we drove on now were meant to dwarf us lowly mortals. The scene was magnificent, squalid, and beautiful all at once.

“What's America like? Better than this, I bet.”

“Better than this? No way. It's not like the streets there are paved with gold. People care only about money. It's meaningless. I prefer being here.”

“People here are starting to just care about money too.”

“Not everybody.”

“No, but this place is changing.”

We eased off the highway and made a right onto a narrow road lined with small shops and restaurants. Large trees arched above. The shops here were flimsier than in the old city, the air dustier, and the sidewalk
appeared to be made of packed dirt like a frontier town. And people on the street looked even sadder. After living protected inside the old city, here I felt dangling and exposed.

“Miss, this is Maizidian'r. Let me know where to stop.” I looked around and tried to remember. Large restaurant on right. Bathhouse on left. We were close. Smaller shops: hairdressers, skinny restaurants, a sex shop.

“Stop! It's here!” I said, gesturing to a five-story brick building behind a row of shops. The cabbie pulled up to a tall black metal gate. I opened it and he took a right into a narrow drive behind the building, which had twelve entryways. Just inside the gate was a small office from whose gloomy interior peered a granny wearing a red armband, mentally noting my arrival.

“Be careful coming home here at night, miss.”

“Why?”

“There are men clubbing women over the head with
gunzi
this big,” he said, holding his hands apart the length of a baby crocodile. “Then they're stealing their purses.”

“Thanks for the advice.” He sounded like my parents, in whose vision of the world everything was fraught with danger: Walking in a city at night could lead to mugging and rape, dating boys to pregnancy, driving a car to a deadly crash. But Beijing was quiet and peaceful at night, with none of the undercurrent of violence I expected from a big city.

We unloaded my two suitcases, I paid him, and the
miandi
backed out with a series of growls and rattles, leaving me all alone. I entered the dim concrete stairwell and lugged my suitcases one by one up to the fifth floor. I leaned against the wall in exhaustion as I unlocked the sturdy metal security door and then the inner wooden door. Ahhh . . .

But I wasn't alone! Someone was in the foyer, coming toward me. I jumped. She jumped. Then I realized that it was only me, reflected in a gigantic mirror that ran the length and height of the tiny, gloomy foyer. I pulled a string and a doughnut of light on the ceiling crackled on; the
foyer was suddenly huge and lit like a school cafeteria. The light was not kind on my double's face: She looked so unsure and so serious dragging her luggage across the threshold into her new life. All the layers of her clothing were mismatched and the right arm of her pilly green sweater was dusted with fine white powder. Her posture was terrible.
Your mom is right
, I thought.
You do look like a bag lady
. I bared my teeth at her and she smiled back prettily. I turned off the light.

I walked the length of the apartment, from the snug bedroom on the left, down the hallway on the right, past the kitchen and bathroom, and into the large living room at the end, filled with an assortment of ugly furniture. Light filtered in through the dirty windows of the balcony. Out on the concrete floor of the balcony sat piles of my landlord's junk: boxes, paint rollers, a giant naked plastic baby doll. I sat down on the slippery blue couch. Fluorescent lights, cold tile floors, painted concrete walls. Objectively, the apartment was kind of depressing, but as I sat there, I recalled the hooligans in
Beijing Bastards
living in an apartment just like this. You could choose instead to see it as raw and true. Stripped to the essentials. Free of the smugness of courtyard houses and brownstones. I saw that there could be relief in living on the margins, outside of history. There could be a home for the outcast in me, right here.