Beijing Bastard (11 page)

M
y phone rang early Christmas morning with an especially festive jingle. I knew who it would be. But it wasn't just my parents, but also my brother; Nainai; my aunt, uncle, and cousin; plus various other relatives, twelve total, all together on speakerphone yelling over one another. “Merry Christmas!” “We wish you were here!” “Do you have plans tonight?” “What is the weather like?” I tried to answer their questions but in the pause after I spoke others rushed in with more questions. Finally I gave up trying to speak and just let their words wash over me. I was happy to be so far away so I could avoid answering questions about what exactly I was doing with my life. I hung up and lay back down in bed.

Several months had passed since my brunch with Zhang Yuan and he became oddly elusive about setting exact dates for the trips to Ürümqi or Rome and began ignoring my phone calls, which only made me call more. I had a dream in which he spoke perfect English and I wondered if he had been pulling my leg the entire time. I decided it was time to visit the film set in Tianjin and called him to let him know I would be doing just that.

One Sunday right after the New Year, I took the three-hour train to Tianjin with Jade. Zhang Yuan met us at a hotel, looking harried and distracted. As his driver took us to the set, he turned around in the front seat and told us about the film. Called
Going Home for New Year's
(or
Seventeen Years
in English), it was the story of a woman returning home for New Year's after spending seventeen years in jail for killing her sister. He talked absentmindedly, as if reciting rote interview responses for a reporter.

“Going home for New Year's is an incredibly important ritual for families in China. So there is already so much tension there. Then add on the years they haven't seen each other and her killing her sister. You really don't know if her family will forgive her,” he said. “It's a story that all of us who leave home live through. What do we find when we go back home for New Year's?”

“Mmmmm,” I said. On another day I would have found him profound. Today he seemed infuriatingly mundane. I wasn't just an average reporter. What about Rome?

“Max says you got permission to shoot in a prison,” said Jade, in her sauciest voice.

“Yes, the Ministry of Justice gave us permission to shoot in a women's prison.”

“Can we go into the prison?”

“Sorry, we shot those scenes last week.”

“Oh, too bad.” Jade pouted. “I really wanted to go to prison.”

We arrived at a brick apartment building and went into a ground-floor apartment with a hard concrete floor. The cast and crew were waiting for Zhang Yuan and he was quickly absorbed into the fray. The living room and kitchen were being used as the set, while the rest of the apartment was filled with cords and boxes. As the producers and technicians buzzed around the apartment, Jade and I sat on some big black boxes in the darkness of the balcony, waiting for the action to start. I felt moronic all of a sudden.

“I think he's hot for you,” said Jade.

“Today he's actually being cold. Besides, he's married.”

“So what? This is
China.
Everyone cheats on their wife here.”

“I'm not into married men.”

“Do you have the hots for him?”

“No, I don't think so. I think I want to
be
him.”

“Don't lie. I think you want to be
with
him. Are you really attracted to him? You have
weird
taste. He looks like Eraserhead or something.”

Zhang Yuan's fuzzy head loomed over everyone on the bright set and he looked so authoritative, pointing here and there. The actors wandered around, talking and laughing, one woman wearing a police uniform. We asked one of the crewmembers what they were filming today. He said they were about to shoot the last scene of the film: the reunion between the daughter and her parents.

Finally, Zhang Yuan called for silence and the actors took their places. Their faces suddenly became stoic and unemotional, just like a Chinese family's would be when something traumatic was about to happen. The daughter and the policewoman escorting her home entered and the reunion seethed with the tension of emotions felt but not expressed. Then suddenly the dam burst and the daughter collapsed into her father's lap, weeping and saying hysterically, “When I was in prison, I often missed my own father! But I couldn't remember what he looked like! In the end, I couldn't help thinking of you!” He forgave her in the most syrupy fashion possible like in those schlocky soap operas my relatives watched. They hugged.

I cringed. This wasn't the Zhang Yuan I knew. His films were understated, cynical, ironic. His films didn't have happy endings and they didn't celebrate the redemptive power of family. Family, for all its promises of unity, was supposed to be full of betrayal, like the mother who abandons her son in
Mama
or the father whose alcoholism breaks up his family in
Sons.
What was redemptive was Art. I blamed the censors.

At a break in the shooting, I told Zhang that I needed to go and
asked if his driver would drive me back to Beijing as he had promised. It was late and I had to work the next morning. He was busy and barely gave me a glance.

“Actually, the driver's not going back tonight,” he said. “He can drive you back early tomorrow.”

“But I have to be there by nine o'clock. Max is bringing his friend from
The
Wall Street Journal
to come critique our magazine. He said I absolutely have to be there.” Sue was in the States for the holidays and I was the only editor in town.

“You'll be there. Just go sleep in my hotel room.”

I scowled. “Sleep in your hotel room?”

“We're going to keep filming all night,” he said. “It's fine.”

So Jade and I went and slept in his room, each in a single bed. Very late that night, he came in and I woke up. He politely sat and read for a while as I peeked at him through half-closed eyes, then finally he crawled into bed with me. Ahhh. This was the Zhang Yuan that I knew secretly existed, less the esteemed film director and more of a bastard. I looked across the pillow but could barely make out his features in the dark. His face looked fleshy and tired. He flung a rubbery arm around me and slurred, “Zhenluo,” and began whispering unintelligible nothings into my ear and stroking my head. What I wanted had finally zoomed up into my face, but up close, it didn't look so good. I wasn't a cheap film groupie who played mistress to someone else's fickle, doughy-faced husband who made corny films—not with my friend sleeping in the next bed over, anyhow. If Jade hadn't been there, I wonder how I would have felt and what might have happened. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

When I woke in the morning and looked out the window, all I saw was soft whiteness. A damp fog had descended on the city. Had last night all been a dream? Next to me was the bear-like, slumbering form of Zhang Yuan. Nope. I got out of bed, roused the sleepy Jade, and made
Zhang Yuan call his driver. As soon as he had, he fell back asleep. I shut the door softly behind us.

As we drove, the fog became thicker and thicker and as we were about to enter the highway, we saw that the taillights of the car in front of us glowed a faint rosy pink.

“We can't go any farther until the fog clears,” the driver said, as he pulled off onto the shoulder. I looked at my watch: six thirty. I was barely going to make it as it was.

“But I have to get back!”

“Miss, look at this fog. There's nothing we can do.”

“Okay, okay.”

We sat quietly as the car was enveloped in a puffy whiteness. Needling through the fog was Max's voice telling me to find a way back to Beijing, to do whatever it took to get back. But something wicked in me told me to stay put and just be lost in the dream of last night. The bright lights of the set, the dark room, the arm around me, the words whispered in my ear. It was a relief to not have to try to see into the distance, calculating things and being rational. Because once I got back to Beijing, it would really be over with Zhang Yuan. And with it my idea to do a film about filmmakers.

We finally got back in the afternoon. Max was furious.

“Where the hell were you? There wasn't a single editor here when my friend from
The
Wall Street Journal
was here. Do you know how embarrassing that was for me?”

“I'm sorry! We were in Tianjin last night and the fog was so thick we couldn't drive on the highway until after noon.”

“Why didn't you take a train?”

I stood dumbfounded. “The fog . . .”

“What were you doing in Tianjin?”

“Visiting the set of Zhang Yuan's film.”

“Zhang Yuan's film! You are unbelievable.” Brought out into the light
of day, the fluffy stuff of my dreams solidified, cracked, and crumbled to dust. He thrust the tape recording of the session at me and ordered me to listen to it, gave me a beeper with the admonition to carry it with me at all times, and stormed back to his office.

Our art director came over. “You didn't miss much. That guy's main piece of advice was: more sex,” she said. “He was one of those white guys who comes to China and gets all excited about sex shops and prostitutes. I just thought, ‘Well, go visit them yourself.'”

I
looked in the mirror one morning and realized with a sinking feeling that it was time to get my hair cut. My artfully shapeless hair had become truly shapeless. Finding a hairdresser is hard in any city. You need someone who can prune away from your unruly bonsai anything that is not the essential you of that exact moment. There were many hairdressing salons on my street, all with the same basic look: a bare cube big enough for only one or two haircutting chairs, a tatty curtain hung at the back. One or two heavily made-up young women stared out in boredom. Most were empty during the day. Once I saw a man actually sitting in one of the chairs.
A real hole in the wall
, I couldn't help thinking. The ladies had skills, I was sure, but they weren't the ones I was looking for. Other shops lining the street catered to their needs, some selling skimpy, glittery clothing and fake eyelashes, others selling prophylactics and sex toys.

There was only one salon in my neighborhood that I was sure wasn't a brothel. It was a basement shop staffed by a handful of what looked through the fishbowl window to be diminutive glam rockers, men and
women all identically clad in tight, shiny black clothing and all sporting puffy mullet cuts dyed different shades of dirty orange. Most of the haircuts I saw on the street looked so utilitarian: long straight falls pulled back into thin ponytails, shapeless bobs, stiff permanent waves. The best haircuts I saw were the crude pageboys on the ruddy farmer women who drove their donkey carts into the city. The mullets were a pretty radical look for Beijing circa 1999 and one that inspired slightly more confidence than the prostitutes. And so I went there.

The salon was big, with ten haircutting chairs, all empty. A TV hung in the corner of the salon, blasting Cantopop karaoke videos. The place smelled sour and burnt, but it was too late to turn back. The staff had already whirred lazily into action. One of the women led me to a chair, washed my hair, gave me a long head massage, then sat me down in one of the hairdressing chairs. I took off my glasses.

One of the men came over to pin on a bib and scrutinize my hair. The boss, who had been watching carefully, came and pushed him out of the way. He was tall, the only one of them taller than me, and had short, well-styled hair (still black) and a not-unhandsome face. He also had a disturbingly long pinky nail, which came in handy when it came time to part my hair. Make it look messy, was all I told him.

He began snipping cautiously, hair by hair. The other hairdressers sprawled out in the empty chairs and warbled along sporadically with the music in Cantonese, which was so cloying that my teeth felt as though they were rotting just listening to it. He cut so slowly that eventually the songs started to repeat themselves. I squirmed in impatience. When he finally finished, I put my glasses back on and looked in the mirror. Puffy on top, with a wispy frill of hair in the back like a lacy bed ruffle. I looked exactly like them.

“Oh.”

“It's very feminine,” he said.

“Not where I come from.”

“And where is that?”

“America,” I said, “and looking feminine is not what I want anyhow.”

“Why don't I dye it for you?” he asked. I could see them kidnapping me, their perfect clone, and transporting me back to their home planet. No thank you. I had him hack off the fringe in the back, paid my twenty kuai, and left. At two dollars fifty, at least it wasn't an expensive disaster.

The salon was around the corner from my house, so I passed by often. Some days the boss would be outside tinkering on his big red-and-white motorcycle and he would rev the engine when I walked by and throw me saucy looks. I rolled my eyes. But after that first disastrous haircut, I went back a second time and a third and fourth. There was something I enjoyed about my monthly cameos. Everyone greeted me like an old friend and the boss always pushed his peons out of the way to cut my hair. They peppered me with questions. What was I doing in Beijing? Did I like it? And had I ever ridden on a motorcycle? I countered with questions of my own and found out that they were all from down south and had moved to Beijing together and all lived together in the same apartment. And all day long in the salon, they pickled in the saccharine brine of endless Cantopop together. What a life. Like a sitcom, the kind where everyone kind of looks alike, gets along, and talks about nothing all day long.

Each time, I came out with another bad haircut and I swore it was the last time, but I just wasn't ready for a messy breakup. In my neighborhood full of families, my young and single hairdressers who had come to the city from afar were the closest I had to kin.

My silent new apartment started growing on me. Even the mysterious sounds echoing through the air shaft off my kitchen had a routine of their own: Old men hocked phlegm in the mornings, chopsticks clickety-clacked together as they were washed after mealtimes, and almost constantly, a boy was caught in a screaming match with his grandmother. I dubbed them Screaming Granny and Horrible Boy. I even began recognizing them in the yard outside: Screaming Granny was a small and shrewish old woman and Horrible Boy was a child with a big head and a
wispy tail of hair hanging down his back. Other neighbors started to take on distinct character too, such as the Perambulator, a bald, hulking old man with heavy-lidded eyes, who every day shuffled slowly, slowly around the neighborhood with a cane.

Our yard was always filled with middle-aged
xianren—
the loafers, idlers—who gathered at all hours of the day, playing badminton or mah-jongg, walking their tiny white Pekinese dogs, watching everyone going in and out, as if they lived in a village where nothing much happened. They sat on old sofas that always stayed in the yard. My neighbor and the woman with the bowl cut, whom I nicknamed Bowl Cut, were often out there together. They had missed out on a proper education because of the Cultural Revolution and now they were being laid off from their state-run jobs. I thought of them as a lost generation. Bowl Cut, perpetually clad in her elephant-emblazoned pajama set, was one of the few who greeted me, even occasionally asking if I'd eaten or warning me not to go out too late at night. There was someone whacking women over the head with sticks, she said, robbing them and leaving them for dead. For some reason I chuckled. China's not so safe anymore, she said sternly.

After her turn to check the meters had passed, other neighbors took theirs, thus beginning a notorious monthly routine: first a light rapping like a snare drum on my locked security door, then an angry banging and rattling, and then finally the yell, “Open up! I know you're in there!” Was it the police? Or just a meter checker? I never opened up. Some learned to announce themselves, some left notes in my door, while others resorted to cornering me as I slunk in and out of the building. They would have a curious look around my apartment and ask me questions about what I was doing in China. I asked the same of them but none of us ever gave a straight answer.

My nightmares about the police persisted, but they took on an increasingly surreal cast. I dreamed one night that the police were going around to every apartment, banging on the doors and checking to see how much soybean milk each resident had drunk.

One day as I walked down the stairs of my apartment building, I saw the door of the apartment below mine close hastily, and so the next time I bumped into my neighbor across the landing I asked her if she knew of someone moving into 401.

“Someone said a girl who works in a karaoke bar down the street moved in last week,” she answered.

“Karaoke bar?”

She shot me a look as if I didn't know what happened at a karaoke bar, aside from off-tune singing.

“Is she from Beijing?” I asked.

“Would a girl from Beijing be living here? I think she's from Sichuan,” she said. I could almost hear her explaining what kinds of girls came from Sichuan to Beijing, the
capital
of China, to work in karaoke bars, but she just gave me a humored look. “You don't understand, do you?” She looked as if she'd said too much and shut the door. My neighborhood was a haven for the undocumented—not only Westerners but also Chinese people, particularly girls who came from places like Sichuan to work in places like karaoke bars.

Just outside of my gate was a young woman who tended stacks of small bamboo steamers, which sat on a large metal barrel filled with hot coals. Every morning on my way to work, I bought a steamerful of
baozi
from her. The woman's face was fresh and unlined but as she emptied ten tiny
baozi
into a wafer-thin plastic bag, I noticed her hands were as chapped and wrinkled as an old crone's. Winter in Beijing was gray and cold and the bag warmed my hands as I walked. I ate slowly, trying to make the
baozi
last the entire twenty-minute walk.

One morning I was suddenly struck by an image of my mom warming her hands with a hot bagel on a cold New York morning, a story she had told me many times. I knew my parents had emigrated to the States and worked hard so that I wouldn't end up back in China, warming my hands with pork buns. Our lives had a sick, sweet symmetry that they did not seem to appreciate.

As I walked into the office and popped into my mouth the last
baozi,
my coworker saw me and shot me a look of disgust.

“You eat those?” she asked. “Street food is filthy.” She then took great pleasure in telling me that a few years ago they had caught a
baozi
seller from the countryside whose
baozi
had been stuffed with human flesh—right in the Xidan District where she and my relatives lived.

City Edition
continued to be a shaky mast to lash my life to. While our art director worked alone in the office late one night with the goateed web designer Scott, he subjected her to a confession that he had participated in blood-drinking rituals in Florida years ago. He claimed blood didn't actually taste so bad. He was dismissed and a laptop disappeared with him. Soon thereafter I returned to the office one day to find Sue yelling at Distributor Lu and telling him to leave and never come back. He was the thief in the office and that wasn't the worst of it, she said. She may have been paranoid but Beijing seemed to confirm one's hallucinations.

Max decided to bring his fortune-teller into the office. “She's the real thing,” he said. “From the countryside.”

Everyone wanted a turn. Sue went in first, then other coworkers. Each came out seeming as though she'd looked a ghost in the eye. She was eerily accurate, they said. She knew the exact date someone's parents had gotten into a car accident. She knew someone else had had kidney surgery and she said it had happened without a knife because she'd probably never heard of laser surgery.

She spared no one.

“If you give birth to a boy, you'll die in childbirth.”

“You will be a young widow.”

“You had an affair,” she said to the husband of a couple sitting before her and in the shocked silence that ensued she said, “But it's okay because so did she.”

Everyone was reevaluating their lives in the light of what she had told them. She told Sue and Max that their company would never make money because the building had been built on the site of an old temple.
They had to move out of this building as soon as possible, but for a temporary fix, she skewed all the desks at weird angles.

When I went in for my session the next day and sat next to her on a couch, I saw she had the stocky build and ruddy complexion of a farmer, and the same impassive stare, as did a buddy she'd brought. The enormous glass table that had filled the small conference room was gone. Max shrugged when I asked about it. Bad feng shui,
he said. She asked my birthday in the lunar calendar, slowly examined my palms, then looked me dead in the eye, as if seeing straight through to my soul or thinking deeply about what she was going to have for lunch. Her eyes lost focus and she began to speak cryptic rhymes as her hand tapped out a rhythm on the towel on her lap. When she came out of her trance, she and her handler interpreted what she'd seen on the other side.

She said I'd never be very rich but I'd never be very poor either. I'd stay in China for three to five years. After leaving, I'd have a constant desire to return, but I'd come back only once. When I was twenty-seven, I would meet my mate, who would be three years my senior and more successful than me. She told me I was doing the right thing, walking the road of culture, and that I should work at a TV or radio station. Most of what she said was vague because, she said, I was so young and my future so full of possibility. The Chinese idea of fate is less like a sneak preview of a movie already shot and more like a treatment for an as-yet-unmade one, especially near the beginning of life. It was up to me to make what I would of it. I confess to being disappointed.

However, she did say some clear and damning things about my personality—that I am very smart but afraid of everything, that I have a surly, inflexible personality, and that I
zixun fannao,
which I translated as “seeks trouble for oneself.”

“Is there anything I can do about this?”

She shook her head no. I figured if I couldn't change it, I might as well make it the bedrock of my new idea of myself.
Seeks trouble for oneself.

Then she started telling me about my past. She knew I wasn't born
in China, that I had come one year before, that I had one older brother. Check, check, check.

“Someone in your family was in the government. Your father?”

“No.”

“Your grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“I see him very clearly. Well, he died disappointed.”

I wasn't unduly impressed. Fish around in most families that had fled China and you'd find someone who had been in the government. And didn't everyone die disappointed?

•   •   •

The
phone still rang each Sunday evening and my stomach would drop out as I prepared for the onslaught of self-doubt that my parents' calls would instigate. I was amazed that these feelings could be effortlessly transmitted halfway around the world on a thin metal filament. Now, not only was everyone's offspring going to medical school, but they were also getting married.