Beijing Bastard (8 page)

And the magazine containing the apartment listing? It would hit the streets
tomorrow.

I
woke with confusion to find myself in a strange bed with sun coming in through the window. I was in my new apartment. And I was having brunch with Zhang Yuan in a half hour. I hurried to take a shower, my first in a long time. My whole body itched, my face had broken out, my skin was dry and cracked, my hair was matted—I couldn't wait to get clean. If this meeting with Zhang Yuan wasn't an interview, I wondered, could it be considered more of a date?

My new shower was a hose that dangled from a pipe in the bathroom. I shucked off my clothes and ran shivering into the kitchen and turned on the water heater—
click, click, click
—until a blue flame came on with a tiny roar. I rushed back into the bathroom, turned the metal valve open, heard the water rush, and watched as the thin yellow hose bucked upward—straight onto the bare lightbulb. Smash! Tiny shards of glass rained all over me as the hose continued to whip madly around the small, dark bathroom. I shut off the water and after checking for both of my eyes (yes) and for blood (no), I stood silently for a minute getting colder and colder. There was no time left to clean up the mess. I brushed
the shattered glass out of my hair, stepped around the shards on the floor, and got dressed, donning last my orange Bionic Woman jacket, which looked much better on the fringes of the city than in the center. I might not be clean but at least I looked good.

The hotel restaurant was quiet and spotless and bright, both deeply soothing and oddly jarring after the life I had been living at my relatives' house. Tall windows opened out onto a manicured garden. I felt cleansed by the mere proximity to cleanliness and light.

Zhang Yuan guided me to a table. The brunch was a buffet and I loaded my plate with bagels, eggs, and bacon and filled a thin white teacup full of coffee. The food was delicious. The caffeine, the light-filled room, and the sound of silverware clanking on plates made my head swim.
I am sitting here having brunch with Zhang Yuan.
He looked like a giant Muppet, tall and huggable with a frizzy shock of hair and shiny button eyes. I hung on his every word.

“China is a great place to be a writer because here is where the craziest stories in the world are. You won't find a guy like Crazy English in America. You could write a whole book about him. You have very valuable ‘international muscle,'” he said. “Do you know the secret to being a documentarian?”

“No,” I said, leaning in to catch the holy words as they fell.

“To be
kuanrong
and to use
lixing.
”

“Oh, I see,” I said. “Actually, I don't know what those things are.” Since he didn't speak any English, he wrote the characters for me on a scrap of paper. Later, when I looked them up I learned they meant
tolerant
and
rationality.

He said that Crazy English had started out as just another documentary project but had become fraught as it forced him to confront his own inability to speak English and to ask uncomfortable questions about his own personal failings. Was it his shyness that was holding him back? Was the only way to overcome his weakness to yell, “I am strong!”? He said that when he was filming a huge rally in Hunan Province, Li Yang had
called him to the stage and introduced him as a world-famous film director.

“I was completely tongue-tied with embarrassment. I couldn't say a word, even in Chinese. I was overcome with a feeling of
zibei,
” he said, of inferiority. “Then I started to wonder: Is a fundamental part of being Chinese to feel inferior—to the people around you, to the rest of the world?”

All month at my relatives' house, I had felt swaddled in layers and layers of cotton, furiously trying to triangulate between what people said and what they meant. His words pierced through my confusion, showing me the possibility of speaking directly about China and about what was in one's heart. All the things that I hadn't said all month bubbled to the surface.
I couldn't stand living with my relatives but now that I've moved out, I feel all alone. I tried to shower this morning but the lightbulb shattered all over me. Everything seems so difficult. I miss home. I'm scared.
Zhang was a good listener, tolerant and rational. He told me to stop worrying.

“You have a home here now,” he said. “Are you afraid of people in America forgetting you? You'll have your own life one day, have children.”

“I don't want to get married!” I said wildly. The American women in the office, all in their thirties and married or engaged, had spent a half hour one day exchanging stories of their marriage proposals. I found it hard to believe that this was a viable topic of conversation for liberated modern women to be having and even harder to believe that one of them had gotten engaged on the steps of a church in Tuscany at dusk.

“You will one day,” he said.

“It's hard here,” I said. “I have no old friends here.” Starting over was not liberating or glamorous. Sure, I had escaped the stale circle of New York, that ambitious gaggle of college graduates moving into lofts in Williamsburg or brownstones in Park Slope as if it were their fifth year of college and getting their starts in publishing or video production. I had
struck out into a whole new world, but my own personal world was still as expectant as an empty shoebox.

“Sometimes new friends feel like old ones,” he said.

“Almost,” I said with exaggerated mournfulness.

We figured out that we had both lived in New York the same summer a few years before. We had both been lonely, both zigzagged aimlessly around the city, both watched a lot of films. Our slug trails had no doubt crossed. We agreed that New York was the best city in the world.

“If only we had known each other then,” he said, the tease of his words lost on me. Taken seriously, the words were perfectly calibrated to touch the tender heart of a young woman. Something ephemeral and precious was passing between us like a current of electricity. A vision of the future was coming into focus.

I remembered my mom's warning about men on the hunt for a green card, and as I sat there, my relationship with Zhang Yuan progressed quickly and unexpectedly in my head. Ours would be a classic tale: American girl meets Chinese director, he divorces wife, marries her for a green card, they live turbulently ever after. It would be a deliciously ambiguous affair. Was he using her? In love with America? Or with youth? Was she using him for his stardom to realize her own artistic dreams? Would they fall in love or would it end in tears? Or both? Marriage proper was for squares, but marriage for a green card made me swoon.

“You're a very beautiful girl,” he said.

I jolted out of my reverie, annoyed at his clumsiness. Beauty wasn't the point. Art was. We were artists. Equals. I was eccentric and messy, just like him. We were connected by something loftier than looks, I was sure of it.

“Hey, do you know my cousin Xiao Peng?” I asked.

“Who?”

“I mean Xu Peng,” I said.
Xiao Peng
meant “Little Peng,” a name only the family called him. “He took classes at the Film Academy.”

“Oh . . . Xu Peng!”

“You know him, then.”

“No, never heard of him.”

I realized that Xiao Peng had probably met Zhang Yuan only a few times, if even that. By being American, I had leapfrogged him again. That odd look he had given me when I told him I'd met Zhang Yuan had probably been envy. But in a way I envied him. He had grown up in that old house in the old city. He knew all its hutongs by heart. The cookie-cutter suburbs where I had grown up were not a place you could really call home. The arbitrary curves of its streets were not worth memorizing or returning to. In a strange way, I had inherited my parents' condition: exiled from the motherland and searching for a place to call home. Even the middle-class American upbringing they had provided couldn't protect me from those questions, from that past.

“What's next for you?” I asked Zhang Yuan.

“I'm going to be shooting a feature film soon, a big one.”

“About what?”

“A girl who goes to jail for seventeen years for killing her sister and then is released and comes home for New Year's. This is the first film I'm doing officially.”

“What does that mean?”

“My script had to be cleared by the censors. It's already been approved.”

“Did they cut much?”

“Not too much. We even have permission to shoot inside a women's prison.”

“Where?”

“Tianjin.”

“I lived in Tianjin last year!”

“Perfect then. You should come visit the set.”

•   •   •

The
next day I sat down at my computer in the office to write the Crazy English story. I stared out the window at the smokestack belching out
lacy black puffs. The winter sky was a pallid industrial gray with only a bright smear where the sun should have been.
You have a home here now.
Meeting Zhang Yuan was further proof that the city wanted me to stay.
You're a very beautiful girl.
I couldn't get his words out of my mind.

I could see down into a schoolyard where elementary school students wearing identical tracksuits were standing in razor-straight rows doing synchronized calisthenics, their arms all outstretched like Christ. They were slowly and silently drawing tiny circles in the air in near unison as if underwater, or hypnotized. They were lead by their gym teacher Lao Li, the guy who doubled as our night watchman. Sue said she had come in early one day and caught him with a lady caller, who he claimed had come to “borrow a book.”

Jade teetered in on platform shoes. “How was your date yesterday?” she asked with a suggestive lift of her neat, thin eyebrows.

“You mean my interview?” Something about Jade made me want to say or think the exact opposite of her.

“What-
ever,”
she said. “Did anything interesting happen?”

“We talked about making films and New York and, you know, life.”

“That's it? Did he pay, at least? You know my philosophy: I just think, ‘
What
can he do for
me
?'”

•   •   •

The
next week, my phone at work rang. It was Zhang Yuan again. He invited me to a bar to make sure I had all the material I needed for my article. I couldn't bring myself to tell him I had already finished and that most of the parts involving him had been cut.

We met that night at the Pretty Bird Club, a former underground bomb shelter that had been converted into a fairy wonderland nightspot, complete with little wooden bridges, swings hung from the ceiling with rope, and hidden nooks shaped like tree trunks. When I arrived, I was surprised to find he was not alone.

He had brought his friend Xiao Ding, a film producer who spoke impeccable British English, to make sure there were no
misunderstandings between us. It had the opposite effect. Xiao Ding was a proper-looking man with rimless glasses and thin hair pasted to his forehead. Instead of carrying a satchel made of leather or canvas, he toted around all his belongings in a plastic bag. I felt as if we were being chaperoned by Zhang Yuan's tax accountant.

We all chatted politely for several hours. At the end of the night I exchanged business cards with Xiao Ding and we all parted coolly. I felt confused—had I imagined all that had passed between Zhang Yuan and me during brunch? Was his interest in me all business?

In any case, we began talking on the phone every few days. My ideas about making a documentary were on hold; finding comfort and connection were much more urgent tasks, and he was the first person I'd found in Beijing whom I could really talk to. In return, he flung outrageous invitations my way: He would fly me out to a Crazy English shoot in Ürümqi in the far west of China, or out to Rome (which wasn't New York, he said, but wasn't too bad) where he would be doing postproduction on his next film, or would get his driver to bring me to Tianjin to visit the film set. The world was opening up in unforeseen ways. I fantasized madly about these trips, but any details beyond the setting—a desert hideaway, the Forum at dusk—were left fuzzy. They floated distantly on the horizon, where things always look better.

I kept my relationship with Zhang Yuan a careful secret from my relatives, who called occasionally to check up on me. If they had known what I was doing with a married man—whatever it was I was doing—they would have alerted my parents in the States, no doubt provoking an international incident of epic proportions.

•   •   •

When
my phone rang at home on a Sunday evening, I knew right away who it was. My parents always called on Sunday mornings, their time, before my mom went to teach Chinese School and my dad to play tennis in the courts next to the school, as they had been doing since before I could remember. I instantly pictured the classrooms of Herbert Hoover
Junior High School and heard the droning sounds of Tang poems or ancient folktales being read in unison. Their calls were always filled with the latest gossip from their circle of friends, usually news about their children, who was going to what medical school, that type of thing.

“Hello?” A pregnant, international long-distance pause followed.

“Hi, Val!” said my mom, then my dad. They always got on the phone together. My stomach tightened at the sounds of their voices.

“Hi,” I said. “How are you?”

“Everything is good at home. How are you?”

“Fine.” I never confided my thoughts to them and I imagined their horror if I told them the truth about my life. The loneliness. The strange love affair. Even this apartment would even have upset them.

“How's your job?”

“Great! I'm starting to research this story about the government forcing American companies to take down their billboards on this avenue for the fiftieth anniversary—”