Beijing Bastard (22 page)

I understood his jab perfectly: I was too Westernized and should become more Chinese with Dashan as my role model. Some Chinese people, even ones I liked, called me a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Dashan they called an egg.

“I hope that you grow up to be a skillful, wise woman. You can't disappoint your parents,” the grandfather said. His frustration was palpable. “You make me anxious. You've come all this way to China. Just to chat is not enough.”

“I can learn things from chatting,” I mumbled.

“Oh,” said the grandmother in a loud voice. She shot me a pitying look. “She says, ‘From chatting I can learn things.'”

I cringed to hear my soft words shouted into the hearing aid.

“What have you learned?” roared the grandfather.

Lunch was ready. Steaming hot dishes were brought upstairs from the restaurant and I gladly moved my stool over to the table. I placed the camera on the table, left it running, and shook out my aching arm. Laisheng poured me some beer and I drank it down greedily. For himself, he took out an enormous plastic container of the local firewater
erguotou,
as big as a jug of cooking oil, and poured a generous glassful. Two liters of
erguotou
could certainly drown out a lot of family madness. Laisheng told me about a Japanese woman he had once met more than fifteen years before.

“She could only speak a little Chinese so I learned some Japanese. If you want to say she is beautiful or that you love her, you say,
Aishiteru
.
Sugoi kirei
is ‘I love you.'” He giggled again and poured himself more
erguotou
. “I'm embarrassed. Quickly, drink some more beer.”

He said he used to own his own restaurant and then became a seafood wholesaler. He said that the salt water had suffocated his marriage. “There is a saying in Chinese: ‘If a man has money, he'll learn wickedness. If a woman learns wickedness, she'll have money,'” he said. We laughed.

This was the first I had heard of his divorce. Both sons, it turned out, were divorced. They were the kinds of sons who would never detach from their family.
No woman would willingly be a part of this family,
I thought. It revolved unerringly around the patriarch, an ogre who constantly contradicted everyone around him, or at least always seemed to contradict me.

Laisheng said he had a new girlfriend and invited me to their new apartment on Cow Street, in the Muslim area of town. He told me about renovations he was making to his apartment and we idly watched a Hong Kong pop star on TV. At long last, I was less entertaining than the TV.

The door flew open suddenly. Laichun burst in, out of breath and with wild eyes. It took a moment to put my finger on why he looked so strange: His lips were bright with lipstick and the area around his eyes was ablaze with large swooshes of colorful eye shadow. I started in surprise until I remembered that he had just finished a performance. That explained his appearance, sort of.

“People kept staring at me as I biked home,” he said. I laughed. “But I didn't care because I knew I was biking here to see you. I biked as fast as I could.”

“Really!” I said, reeling from him as one would from the forced, melancholic hilarity of a clown.

After he had cleaned off his makeup, Laichun poured himself half a glass of
erguotou.
“Your Chinese has improved a lot,” he said.

“No, not at all,” I said.

“Your replies used to come really slowly. On the other hand, my English hasn't improved at all,” he said. “I still just know that one word.”

“Bye-bye!” chimed in Laisheng.

“You took it right out of my mouth.” The family roared with laughter.

“Miss Wang, drink up!” he said, raising his glass. I took a sip, leaving some beer in the glass. Any less and a refill would have been forthcoming. I quietly announced my intention to go. Between the grandfather's fulminations and Laichun's vaguely creepy aspect, I had had enough for one day. I turned off the camera. Laichun turned to me in horror, or mock horror, I couldn't tell.

“You can't go just as soon as I get here.” He then gave me a strange and mournful look.

I went to the bed to yell good-bye to the grandfather.

“It is not enough to just chitchat!” he yelled. He smiled his jack-o'-lantern smile at me as I tiptoed out.

I immediately called Cookie and we went out and got drunk. I told her about my afternoon with the Zhangs. I was just trying to shoot a vérité documentary about them but they were always quizzing me about things I had no way of knowing. Plus the air in the apartment was so stale and they had the gall to compare me to Dashan.

“That sounds like it could really do your head in,” said Cookie. “But you know what, pal? I don't think you should worry about it. It's fabulous that you're shooting this documentary. Just keep doing it!”

As the gin and tonics took hold, the sting of the day began to dissolve.

A few days later, I called Yang Lina to talk about my trouble with the documentary.

“The family seems somewhat uncomfortable with me there and I feel somewhat uncomfortable being there.”

“Give it time,” she told me.

“I want to capture their relationships to one another but they keep talking to me instead!” I said.

“Maybe your relationship with them is the real story then.”

“But that's not what I had in mind.”

“Don't worry too much. Just keep shooting.”

I was determined to prove Grandfather Zhang wrong. I could learn things about Peking Opera. Though I had one of the world's foremost experts on Peking Opera at my fingertips, I began trawling the Internet for information. I learned that the Yellow Emperor was the ancestor of all Chinese people and that there was some debate as to whether he was an actual man who had led a prehistoric Chinese tribe or merely a mythic immortal with the body of a dragon. I learned about an old opera superstition forbidding the utterance of the word
meng
backstage because of Yu Meng, a legendary jester who impersonated a famous scholar in the year 403 BC. I learned that every detail of Peking Opera has a fixed and formal meaning. For instance, the flicking of a sleeve expresses disgust and the asymmetrical face paint of the
jing
character type indicates a criminal character.

•   •   •

One
of the artists I interviewed for the Texan's art website had a cat who was pregnant. When I asked what he did with all the kittens, he said that he gave them away to lonely artist friends all over the city, and named which artists had which tabbies. I suddenly realized that I too wanted a cat so that I could be part of his feline family tree. By this time, I understood the importance of being part of a lineage, that there were families other than the one you were born into that you could belong to. I began
fantasizing about my cat. A girl cat, of course. Neurasthenic. Spooky. Prone to unexplained hunger strikes and possessed with the ability to read minds and converse with the spirits.

The call from the artist finally came. His cat had given birth a few weeks before, as had her equally profligate daughter. I went over immediately. Eight kittens gamboled around the courtyard, each as tiny as a human palm. Most were white, which I didn't want. One was a calico, a girl, bright-eyed and sensitive but already claimed by another artist. The one remaining kitten was an aggressive orange ball gnawing on a vine with a stubborn look on his face.

I took him.

In the mornings, as I interviewed people over the phone, he sprinted around my room, chewing on every cord in sight and pouncing on invisible foes. I named him Qu Qu'r, meaning “cricket.” When I sat down to write, he would climb all over me, up my arms and onto my head, where he would try to perch. If he wanted to play, he nipped my ankles and meowed until I stopped working. At night in bed he did laps around my head. I wasn't getting much sleep, and secretly, I was disappointed. Brawny, blunt, and down-to-earth, Qu Qu'r was not the cat I had ordered up in my mind, and I resented the musky dose of
yang
energy he injected into my house and the way that he scrutinized every single thing I did. I withheld my full affection from him, hoping he'd change.

Then one day I realized that I could either wish he were a different cat, or I could accept him just as he was. And I saw that while he watched my every move, like other family members I'd lived with, he passed no judgment. One neurasthenic female per household was probably enough. To accept him fully was revolutionary. Eventually, he began to sit quietly in my lap while I typed, and when I came home late at night, he ran joyfully to the door to greet me.

M
y phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Haluo'r?”

I knew the voice on the other end of the phone. Laichun. The Incomprehensible Clown again. The clown character in Peking Opera, I had learned, is the only opera role that can break out of history, allude to current events, and speak in colloquialisms.

He laughed and said in Chinese, “Miss Wang?”

“Oh, hi.” I switched into Chinese too. At least he had stopped calling me Reporter Wang.

“This Tuesday is my mother's birthday. We want you to come celebrate with us.”

“Is there a party?”

“No, come whenever you like.”

Laichun's voice filled me with dread. I meant no thanks but I said okay. Why did I go back? Filmmaking ambition, partly, but something
more powerful. I returned to a guilt-tripping family to whom I would never measure up like spent blood returns to the heart.

It turned out that there was a party, a lunch that I was going to miss because I came in the early afternoon. I brought an ostentatious bouquet of flowers. Overcooked vegetables and slices of meat floated in the cooled soup of the hotpot. Without the unifying distraction of eating, the usual mob of family members sat around limply.

“Welcome, welcome!” said Laichun, leaping up.

I gave the grandmother the flowers.

“What a big bunch of flowers,” she said wearily, perhaps dreading the disruption that I inflicted. Sometimes she seemed like the only sane one among them. “How much did they cost?”

“You can't ask that! She's a foreigner!” said Laisheng. He let out a satisfied burp.

“Miss Wang!” roared the grandfather, and then fell silent. The grandmother poured a cup of tea and fed spoonfuls of it to him. I turned on my camera.

“Do you know why there are no bathrooms among the 9,999 rooms in the Forbidden City?” the eldest brother with the half-paralyzed face demanded of me.

“No,” I said.

He didn't tell me. He told me instead about a style of Peking Opera that was developed by sword-wielding bodyguards who had worked during the reign of the Empress Dowager Cixi. After losing their jobs when guns were introduced at the end of the Qing Dynasty, they went down south and started a kind of dance that eventually became added to Peking Opera. I nodded eagerly, excited for a Peking Opera story that wasn't long-winded and incomprehensible. The grandfather began snoring. We looked over at him and laughed.

The two brothers carried on a conversation about me right before my eyes, as usual.

“She's not a reporter anymore, is she? She counts as a friend of ours,” said Laichun in a strangely lugubrious voice. “I don't understand.”

“She just likes to hear old stories,” said Laisheng.

Laichun turned to me morosely and said, “Don't bother explaining. It's better this way.”

The clock chimed three o'clock. The grandfather let out an animal sound in the background. The older brother said, “Emperor Yongzheng died in the bathroom of the palace, so after him, the imperial palace didn't have a bathroom anymore. It's just that simple.”

The grandfather woke up and immediately challenged me to name all the gates of the ancient city wall. I couldn't. He snorted in derision and began a slow trip about the inner wall naming the nine gates. I didn't mention to him that he had named Qianmen twice and forgotten Andingmen. He then recited all seven of the outer gates. I listened as patiently as I could without the heart to remind him that the old city wall had been demolished almost fifty years before.

Laichun looked at me significantly. “I don't even know what to say to you.”

“What do you normally talk about with one another?” I asked. “Why not talk about that?”

The family started leaving. Laisheng left to go to the theater. He checked with me to make sure he had the English pronunciation of
ten yuan
right. His job that night was to stand outside the theater dressed up as the Monkey King and to ask foreign tourists if they wanted to have their picture taken with him for a fee of ten yuan.

Laichun sat on a small single bed on the far side of the room. I sat next to him. Here was my chance to capture the family's quieter, more intimate moments. Greenish afternoon light slanted in. I pointed the camera at him and he began talking about the beauty of sculpture.

“China has urban sculptures now. There's one in Qingdao called
The Wind of May,
” he said, his description conjuring up the image of an
enormous red metal soft-serve ice cream. “You should go and see it. Right now it's—”

“March.”

“It's almost May. Imagine the wind in May and then go see this sculpture. It'll be good for you.”

“Maybe I'll wait until May to go,” I said.

“From an artistic perspective, I think about it this way,” he said, a secretive, knowing look passing over his face. “Wind.”

“Wind?”

“Wind.” He stared off into space. The grandmother fussed with the birdcages before going into the other room for a nap. When he started speaking again, it was slowly. “Miss Wang, you should come more often.”

“I'd like to.”

“You only come when I call you.”

“That's not true.”

“I told you already, we're friends, right?”

“Right.”

“I've told you more than once: I don't want to take shortcuts. Facts are facts. People make things into things they're not. I'm just a performer.”

“What?” His voice was heavy with portent and I didn't like the turn this conversation was taking.

“What was your impression of me the first time you met me?”

“The first time?”

“It was on a screen.”

I dimly recalled seeing a scratchy video recording of someone's Peking Opera performance. “Oh, I think I remember. But nothing too clearly.” I turned the camera away from him and pointed it at a washbasin across the room still containing a dirty washcloth from the morning, as if to shield my eyes from the car wreck that seemed to be unfolding in slow motion.

“But what were your impressions?”

“I told you I didn't have any impression. Why do you keep asking?”

He let out a laugh. “‘I didn't have any impression.' That's good. I had an impression of you. I became damaged.”

“Damaged?”

“My impression of you damaged me. You forced your way into my mind and I became spoiled.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sometimes I wonder—where has she gone?” he mused. “Didn't she say she was coming over? My mind has problems. What should I do about this?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't you think I'm damaged?”

“No, I think maybe you don't meet many new people.”

“Maybe you are like a painting that has entered my mind.”

“Maybe.”

“I always wonder where she is. My heart has settled into this position. This is not good. Is this good?”

“This?” I wondered how I had missed the signs. The repeated phone calls. The alarming levels of enthusiasm at my visits. The crashing disappointment at my departures. His face with the clown mask he'd been in too much of a hurry to take off.

He laughed again, acid and sad. “This is your response? This is not good.” He got up and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

I sat there alone, the video camera still running. His confession made me ill. With it, he had yanked me over the final threshold into their family's most interior room, where my self receded to the point of terror and I became, if only for an imagined moment, part of their family.
Sometimes friends become so close that you treat them like family
. Had he truly imagined I would become his blushing bride? Or was the opposite true—had the clown used me, in that same moment, to break out of family and out of history? He must have felt suffocated by his family too, and my life of floating around must have looked enticing. An escape. I shut off the video camera.

I tiptoed past the sleeping grandfather, back through the lightless rooms and the skinny restaurant, and out onto the anonymous, forgiving street.

•   •   •

I
called Yang Lina to tell her what had happened and she burst into laughter that surprised and irritated me.

“That is so great,” she said. “He fell in love with you?”

“Yes. It wasn't great. It was horrible,” I said. Why had I been expecting her sympathy? “I can never go back.”

“You have to go back!” she shrieked. “That's a great story.”

“That's the end of the story,” I said firmly. “I'm not going back.”

“You had no idea the whole time?”

“I had no idea.”

“You are too adorable!”

Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of time at home brooding over what had gone wrong. Yang Lina was right. I had been hopelessly naïve. How had I not seen it coming? Why had I thought I could just squat in the Zhangs' lair, shoot some footage, and emerge unscathed?