Beijing Bastard (9 page)

“Okay, okay,” said my dad. Extremely frugal, they always cut me off once they had gotten the main gist of what I was saying. They seemed to call just to know that I was still alive.

“When are you coming back home?” asked my mom.

“I'm not really sure. I sort of like it here. There's a lot to write about and—”

“No, no, no,” my dad cut in, with his favorite phrase. “Why don't you go to graduate school?”

“We can help you with the tuition.”

“I'm not really sure what I would study. I'm kind of
doing
what I would only be studying about in the States and—”

“How about law school?”

“Mom!”

“Anyway, do you remember your elephant foot plant?” she asked.

“Of course I do.” I had picked out the elephant foot plant almost twenty years before, when both it and I were only as high as my mom's
knee. I had always wanted a little sister, or a pet, to lavish attention on, order around, and mold in my image. I had to settle for the plant. For years I had watered and cared for it and watched as it grew from a giant, squat bulb into a tall cascade of strappy, flowing leaves.

“It died.”

“What do you mean it died?”

“The leaves turned brown. I tried to repot it but it didn't like the new soil.”

“Were you watering it?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Twenty years is a long time for a plant to live, Val.”

“Oh, I can't believe it's gone. I loved that plant.”

“You were too far away from home for too long.”

“Are you
sure
you watered it? Plants don't just die, Mom.”

“Okay, okay,” said my dad. “We have to go.”

“Well, bye then.”

“Bye, love you.”

“Love you too.”

After we hung up, I sat thinking about my elephant foot plant, which had always seemed to have such a strong personality. It was a hardy, unruly plant whose narrow, sharp-edged leaves would cut you if you handled them wrong. But those same leaves tapered down to wisps at the end, making the whole plant look like a head of long green hair. I imagined my mom slowly depriving it of water and watching as the leaves turned brown and shriveled. But I didn't think she was capable of that. She was right. Twenty years was a long time for a plant to live, and everything has its time to go. I too had been repotted, and only time would tell if I would fare better than my plant.

I lay in bed staring out the window. My bedroom was a makeshift brick hovel with a tin roof, which was freezing in the winter and would be boiling hot in the summer, like a Parisian garret. My landlords had
built it on the roof. The walls of the room were blotched with water stains, black and degenerate. Two huge windows formed one corner of the room and out of them I could see the cylindrical brown top of the Hotel Kunlun where Zhang Yuan and I had had brunch.

Any time I felt fear or despair over the life I was living, I just looked out the window at the hotel and the word
harbinger
popped into my mind—of good, of hope, of the future. Like a daffodil after a long winter.
I will make my own documentary
, I thought.
I will. I will work hard, save money for a camera, do what it takes.
The unspoken end of the thought went,
And then my parents will finally be proud of me.
I would never have spelled this out, nor would I have dared consider the consequences of not succeeding.

M
ysterious sounds echoed into my apartment from the stairwell outside: a long metallic screech ended by an abrupt clang, low hissing, dull menacing thumps, a sound like a strand of beads breaking and spilling all over the floor. I sat alone in my apartment one Saturday night, the High Holy Day of Partying stretching out bleakly in front of me. And now a horde of angry ghosts was trying to break into my apartment. I tried to identify the sounds: security doors slamming shut, trash falling down the chute and hitting bottom, feet shuffling upstairs, giving a hard stomp on the landings, but the beads breaking—that one I couldn't figure out.

I heard someone climbing upstairs, stomping three or four times to activate the stubborn light sensor on the fourth floor. (The sensor on my landing was the exact opposite, set off by no more than a stealthy footfall.) I could picture the stairwell out there—dark and grim and full of things most sane people would have thrown out: birdcages with broken bars, toilet bowls blackened by dust, half-rusted bicycles. Then came loud voices on the landing, so I went to the peephole. It was like watching a tiny
movie: I saw my neighbors—husband, wife, and teenage daughter—going into their apartment and shutting the door. Suddenly the light in the scene was snuffed out, my peephole plugged by the wide thumb of someone who was clearly a maniac. His hands would be around my throat next. I yelped and the sound activated the light again, making me realize I had been terrified by nothing more than the light timing itself out.

I called Zhang Yuan, but he didn't pick up. From the window onto the air shaft came a man's voice soaring in off-key karaoke grandeur into the final aria of the
Titanic
theme song.

In between the frightful and ridiculous sounds, there was something even worse: a silence more silent than anything I'd heard in my entire life. At home, I'd found the voices of my parents deafening.
You can be anything you want to be in life. We saved money since the day you were born to send you to college. You're spoiled. You've never eaten bitterness in your whole life. Do you know what we got for our birthdays growing up? One bowl of noodles. Life is suffering. You had a happy childhood, didn't you? Work harder!
The contradictory voices of my friends only confused me more.
Val, you work too hard. Just do what you want. What would happen if you just took their car and went out for a drive? Why do you keep your true self so hidden from the world?

One reason I'd traveled so far away was to break out of everyone's orbit and to be able to say,
This is
my
life, this is
my
story,
my
toilet jury-rigged with dental floss by
me
.
I had no idea how vast and empty the world would seem. I sent my mind out as far as I could—into the dark city and the dark countryside rippling out to mind's end beyond that. It didn't touch anything familiar or comforting, just silence, fear, loneliness, as if all the love had been sucked out of the world. Sitting there felt hollowing and painful and mysterious—like some kind of meditation or fasting. Either I'd get stronger or just go crazy.

What did having a nervous breakdown even look like? From the name, I assumed it involved falling down on the floor and twitching like a bunny's whiskers until someone noticed and put you in a quiet rest
home for weary women in the countryside, with beautiful manicured lawns and bars on the windows. But somehow I began to suspect that it might be something subtler, like your insides slowly melting into undifferentiated glop, the conversations you had with yourself becoming increasingly animated, and the food in the refrigerator rotting, as the world around you ticked obliviously along.

If I could have cried, I would have, but I never cried in China. Instead, I took a piece of white cardboard and began writing
VALERIE
all over it, again and again, each letter a shape with no meaning.

•   •   •

The
next Saturday night, the phone rang.

“Hello?
Wei
?”

“Val! What are you doing right now?” asked Jade.

“Nothing.”

“We're going out to the Den. Tonight is Eighties Nite. I cannot wait. Do you want to come?”

“I don't know. Eighties Nite?” It didn't make sense to me to come all the way to China to listen to '80s music from America. Plus, the darkness outside seemed so forbidding, as if the world simply dropped off beyond the walls of my apartment.

“You can't just stay home.”

“I can't be bothered to get dressed and get myself into a cab.”

“I'm in Steve's car. We'll come to pick you up.”

“Well . . .”

“They'll buy us drinks.”

“Who's ‘they'?”

“Max is with us too.”

“Okay.”
No
was my normal social instinct—I am my father's daughter, after all—but new in town, it was time to say
yes
to everything. Jade was an excellent role model. Though raised by Chinese immigrant parents, she had not a shred of my self-abnegation.

“We'll be at your door in twenty minutes. Be ready.”

The Den was dark, crowded, and smoky. Upstairs a DJ was spinning hits from the '80s. “My Sharona.” “Take on Me.” “Material Girl.” Young Westerners danced in sweaty clusters. Now it was only the '90s—much too early to be nostalgic for that era. Standing awkwardly at the edge of the bar, my life didn't seem so different yet.

“What do you want to drink?” yelled Steve over the music. At least there was booze now.

“Long Island Iced Tea,” Jade instantly said.

I waffled and Max cut in. “B-52s for both of us.”

After Steve went to the bar, Max turned to Jade and said, “When I got you the internship with him, I didn't think you'd jump into bed with him!” His angry tone of voice was belied by a big grin.

Jade rolled her eyes. Steve was a ruggedly handsome New Zealander who had been working as a photographer in Beijing for almost ten years. After a few days of riding around in his jeep with him as he took pictures, what she wanted most was to hang out in his apartment in the diplomatic compound and watch cable TV.

“I just cannot be a photographer in this city without a car,” she said. “Do you expect me to ride the bus everywhere?”

Steve came back with the drinks. He handed Jade hers and then gave Max and me shot glasses with blue flames shimmying above dark molten liquid. How did this work? Steve came back with a beer for himself and two tiny straws for us.

“Quickly,” said Max. I watched as he slurped his shot down, then I did the same. I expected it to burn and tear on the way down but it was surprisingly sweet, and I could feel my head pop open a crack. I noticed that Max's pinkies were mere stumps. Jade took one sip of her drink and handed it back.

“
Tell
them to put some
liquor
in it.”

“I'm sure it's fine,” said Steve.

“Fine, I'll do it myself,” she said, and made a beeline for the bar.

After a few more drinks, the air began to liquefy and I began to feel
a feathery connection to others in the room. In the dim corners of the bar, strangers began groping one another. I danced. The past began to seem further and further away.

On the way home, my cab was stopped around the corner from my apartment by a man in a green army overcoat and red armband. A Chinese-looking woman traveling alone at night in the neighborhood aroused suspicion. I rolled down the window. He ordered me to get out. I refused. I was suspicious of him too. Was he was really a police officer? And would it be better if he were or if he weren't? Behind him was a raucous crowd of men squatting and smoking and playing cards. He opened the cab door and ordered me to show him my identity card. I refused again, saying I didn't have one. I wasn't Chinese.

“Not Chinese? Where are you from?”

“I'm American.”

“You can't be American. Americans all have blond hair and blue eyes.” Now was not the time for a history lesson about immigration. My hands shook as I pulled a photocopy of my passport out of my wallet and thrust it at him. Someone had advised me to keep it with me for occasions like this.

“Look at my American passport.”

“This isn't a real American passport.”

“No, it's a pho-to-co-py of a passport,” I said with more arrogance than I felt. I was bold with liquor and the tide turned swiftly. “And how would you know? You've never seen an American passport before. I bet you can't even read it. Can you read English?” Like a cornered animal, I had become mean. He stood there, turning the paper over in his hands, unsure of what to do next. He tried to order me out of the cab again. I saw an opening, one that could even leave him some face.

“Besides, my Chinese is this terrible and you still think I'm Chinese!” I said in my heaviest American accent and snatched the photocopy back, while slamming the door and telling the cabbie to step on it. The cabbie chuckled and muttered something about a narrow escape. I got to my gate and ran inside.

That night, I awoke to hear a police helicopter pulsing noisily outside my window. I got out of bed and rushed to the peephole of my front door. Red pointer lights crisscrossed outside; a thin beam of red shone straight in and blinded me as a swarm of officers began to push the door down. The latch on the inner door kept coming loose and I kept slamming it shut. I was terrified for the small girl I was babysitting who was asleep in the bed. The police pushed at the door again, and this time I couldn't shut it. They flooded in. I yelled and woke myself up. I lay in the dark, shaking. Slowly, I raised up to look out the window, sure that the helicopter would be out there hacking the air to pieces, a policeman's murderous face mere feet from mine in the cockpit window. There was no helicopter there, only the dark cylinder of the Hotel Kunlun in the distance topped by a steadily blinking light. And no girl I was babysitting, aside from myself.
Harbinger, harbinger, harbinger,
I thought as I lay back in bed, trembling.

A few hours later, a rough banging at my door jarred me awake. This time I knew it had to be the police. Who else would be banging at my door at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning? My head was splitting and I pinched myself to make sure I was really awake. I lay still with my head and my heart pounding in unison, silently thanking Constantine for the security door, a heavy metal frame reinforced with thick grating. The inner door, of warped and ill-fitting wood, would have given way with one swift kick like in my dream.

My landlord's words—
you never know who it's going to be
—came back to me
.
The week before, Landlord Ma had come to collect my first month's rent—a thick stack of hundred-yuan notes. She was short and solid and full of suspicions about the country people invading the city. Her husband looked the same; they could have ribboned at a husband-and-wife look-alike contest.

“Do you have any friends like you who are also looking for an apartment?” she had asked. “We have another apartment just downstairs from yours. We own both, and both are legal to rent out.”

“Legal to rent to
foreigners
?” I had responded. I wanted to clarify my own situation. Beijing supposedly had strict laws forbidding foreigners from living in Chinese housing but no one knew the exact rules. And no one knew what would happen if you were caught—a hefty fine, eviction, prison time, deportation? Fortunately, looking Chinese made it easier for me to avoid the police dragnet so by “like you” I took it she meant
Chinese face, Western purse strings.
She evaded my question and I feared that maybe I'd made her lose face, though she'd never tell me how or even let me know that I had.

“By the way, never open the door for anyone. You never know who it's going to be,” she had said. Later that week, I came home one night to find a policeman in crisp olive from head to toe sitting outside the gate of my building. Just the sight of his lapel decorated with sadistically colorful pins started my heart thumping. I had read in the Western press about prison torture in China and had seen with my own eyes the rough and unsmiling way the police handled illegal touts. Not pretty. He stared at me as I walked in.

I lay in bed, hyperventilating quietly, while a hand tried the door, rattling the metal handle impatiently, then banging again, a low, hard thumping surrounded by a halo of loose metal sounds. After a pause, I heard the door across the stairwell unstick itself and open with a whoosh. I rose silently and tiptoed to the peephole. A plump woman with a jagged bowl cut whom I'd never seen before stood with her back to me. She wore a silky blue pajama set emblazoned with golden elephants and was exchanging something with my neighbor, a stocky woman. I couldn't hear my neighbor too clearly, but she seemed to know that I was a young woman living alone, that I looked Chinese but was foreign, and something about higher rent. I heard the woman with the bowl cut say, “Hong Kong.”

“She comes home late,” said my neighbor. “I wouldn't feel safe if my daughter were living alone.”

She frowned, shook her head, gave a little smile, and shut the door. I crawled quietly back into bed.

I grouped all my neighbors in together with the nosy grannies wearing the red armbands stationed in the little office by the front gate; they observed everyone who came in and out and would report any suspicious activity back to the local police. I tried to spy on my neighbors too, peeking into their apartments when I passed by open doors. Often, three generations of a family were stuffed into the same space that I lived in alone. Televisions blared loudly and the stairwell often smelled of fresh cigarette smoke.

•   •   •

One
winter morning, a key turned in the lock of my heavy security door as I stood inside lacing up my shoes, about to go to work. I froze in fear. The logical response was to run out to the balcony and hide quietly until whoever it was had looted from my apartment whatever they wanted and left. But fuck it. I was tired of freezing in fear, scampering, and hiding. This was
my
house! I took a deep breath, readied myself to bust some karate moves if necessary, and flung open the inner door just as the outer door swung open. I stood face-to-face with my neighbor sheepishly holding my keys in her hand.