Beijing Bastard (18 page)

•   •   •

The
night of the banquet with Party Secretary Li came. We arrived first and were led to a private dining room garlanded with rainbow tinsel. As I took a seat at the one circular table filling the room, my dad said, “Valerie, you can't sit there. The head seat is the one facing the door.”

Bobo assured him it didn't matter but after a look from my dad, I muttered, “Gotta follow the rules,” and ceded the seat to Bobo, who had invited everyone and was picking up the tab.

“American tables are always rectangular,” my dad said, before launching into a lesson about American seating hierarchies.

When Party Secretary Li arrived, we all leapt to our feet and they fought over who would sit where, until finally she took a seat between my dad and Bobo. She was a smiling, round-faced woman with a cylindrical coxcomb of bangs perched atop her head. She wore a seafoam green suit jacket and had a bright, precise voice.

During the dinner, punctuated by numerous toasts, Dad became
charming and full of jokes and Chairman Mao quotations but I could see that underneath he was profoundly uncomfortable. Chumming up with the Chinese bureaucracy was not his idea of fun and he did it only to fulfill his obligation to Nainai. He asked his scripted questions as ordered and Party Secretary Li promised to do what she could.

She told him that China had changed since he'd left and as the son of a Nationalist he had nothing to worry about. She said the government no longer “puts hats on people and whacks them with sticks”—old code words for labeling people politically and punishing them. “Policies are looser now.”

“If I were afraid, I wouldn't have come back,” he said.

•   •   •

The
next order of business was to visit the cemetery where our ancestors are buried. Nine of us went together. Wan'an Cemetery was far outside of the city, near Fragrant Mountain in the northwest. We bought flowers from a man selling them out of a van and signed in at the front gate; you had to know someone inside to get in.

As we waited in the rain for the gates to be opened, my dad asked Bobo in a hesitant manner I'd never seen before, “So, do you think yesterday went well?”

“Very well, very well,” Bobo said in a schoolmasterish tone that made us all laugh, even my dad.

“Are you the director or the leading actor of this drama? I can't tell,” said my dad, who must have been feeling like a bit player. I knew the feeling.

“Party Secretary Li, didn't she promise she'd get this done for you? I'll call her tonight. Once it's all arranged, we'll go see The Document tomorrow morning.”

Water dripped out of the many trees in the lush and overgrown cemetery. Birds squeaked loudly all around us, and the world felt damp and heavy. The burial plots stood shoulder to shoulder, a city of the dead, and most were family tombs, some guarded by fierce marble lions, others just
simple stones. As we walked through, Bobo pointed out the graves of relatives they knew and they traded gossip about them as if they were still alive. He pointed out the graves of famous people too, like the large ocher slab flanked by flower vases that marked the final resting place of Cao Yu, the playwright who had written
Peking Man,
the movie version of which I'd subtitled. Seeing his grave felt as meaningful as seeing my own relatives' graves; here was someone who had made stories out of the lives of the families buried around him, stories that would outlive us all.

Bobo said that our family grave had been defaced during the Cultural Revolution and Nainai and Great-Aunt Mabel had sent money to restore it. But Bomu muttered that after Nainai's brother passed away she had stopped sending money to the family. I never knew she'd even been sending money but it didn't surprise me. This story about the graves was one of the many stories I never heard until I came to China, most having to do with the Cultural Revolution: Our ancestors' graves had been defaced, our courtyard houses had been confiscated by the government, Bobo's youngest sister had committed suicide. No one wanted to talk about the past.

We finally arrived at the grave. The plot itself was as big as half a tennis court. At the back of the plot was a large gray tablet as tall as I was, engraved with Nainai's surname and the names of people running down it. The names at the center of the tablet were Nainai's father, a Qing Dynasty military general, and her mother. In front of the tablet were two carved plinths under which they lay and in front of that a simple concrete bench. Xiao Peng swept it and set down offerings: a plate holding a small pyramid of apples, another of peaches, another of Oreos. It being Mid-Autumn Festival, he also set out a plate of mooncakes. Dad set down the flowers.

Bobo's sister traced her finger down the family tree, through Nainai's generation, down to her own, stopping on her own name, carved already into stone. It gave me goose bumps. Nainai's name was also carved next to her brother's, and I thought of our family headstone in Maryland that
also had her name carved onto it, above her birth year with a hyphen dangling off of it. Talk about being divided—half in China and half in America, half in this life and half in the next already. The tree continued down to Xiao Peng's generation; his name was there, as was that of his older sister in L.A., but the younger sister's wasn't; Bobo's sister didn't say why. I was thankful not to see my own name staring out at me.

Bobo said that due to space considerations the government had decreed that no more graves were to be dug in the cemetery. Even the people whose names were on the tombstones would have to be cremated. If they wanted to, they could sell off the unused sides of the plots to another family to bury their dead. The real estate of the dead was as much in demand as that of the living.

After a bit of
you go first, no you go
jostling, Bobo got down on his knees in front of the offerings. With his palms on the ground, he inclined his torso all the way down, his forehead touching the ground, then up, three times in a kowtow. Then rising stiffly he bowed three times from the waist. He stepped to the side and my dad came up. Bobo mimed the movements for him. We took turns in order of seniority, with me last. I found it difficult. At the moment my head went down, I sensed the amount of humility it would take to do this fully, and my neck strained upward, not wanting to submit. I saw that while my mom performed with theatrical solemnity, she too had the same problem.

I hoped they weren't going to make us talk to our dead ancestors, as they had made me talk to Yeye two years before as he lay in a coma in a brightly lit intensive care ward. I thought back to what the fortune-teller had said about Yeye. Had he really died disappointed? I knew he was disappointed in his three ungrateful grandchildren, none of whom had earned a Ph.D. as he had or spoke much Chinese. I never felt as though I lived up to his expectations.

But something odd had happened at his last Christmas dinner, during my senior year in college. He was uncharacteristically quiet and as I looked across the holly-festooned tablecloth at his stooped form, I saw
something I could barely believe: There was actually a soft look in his eye, and I swore I saw something ineffable pass over the table from him to me. It felt a lot like the gesture of approval I had been waiting my whole life for from him. I wasn't sure of what I'd seen, but when he became sick the next month, it made sense that he had known the end was near and had finally shown his hand. Not wanting to interrupt my studies, my parents forbade me from coming home to visit him in the hospital until Spring Break, after everyone else in the family had already visited. When I got home, we drove straight to the hospital. “Just talk to him,” said my mom as we stood over his bed. “He can't hear us,” I'd said. I'd been tongue-tied and embarrassed and had mumbled a few things. My mother had stepped in and told him in a clear, chipper voice that Val was standing here and that she was about to graduate from college and was going to China in the fall. I'd nodded mutely. Shortly after we got home that night, the hospital called to say that he had passed away. The last words he heard on this earth were that I was going to China. Unless he didn't hear it at all.

According to the traditional Chinese custom of ancestor worship, when your elder dies, the cycle of obligations that constitutes your relationship to him or her doesn't end—it just kicks into a higher gear. You care for their graves, and in return, they bring you prosperity and good fortune, and your success glorifies them. But if you neglect them, they become vengeful “hungry ghosts” bent on your destruction, and your failure then reflects back on them, bringing shame and disappointment. It is a vicious, never-ending cycle.

I wasn't sure how much my family still believed in these ideas after all that they had gone through, all that China had gone through. All I knew was that we went to bow before my ancestors' graves and that I felt Yeye's presence in my life every day. I felt watched and judged but I also felt part of something strong, something that had survived.

Yeye's death had an unexpected effect on my family—all my closest relatives suddenly seemed like complete strangers who had no connection to me whatsoever. I realized we had all related to one another through
him, and when that nucleus disappeared, we flew apart like errant electrons. Whenever an old person exits or a new person enters a family, everything changes.

Now that I was in Beijing, I suddenly had so many questions for him about what the city had been like in his day, what his life had been like. I had lost my chance. And I had no way of telling him what it was like now or that my Chinese had improved a lot, thanks to all of the “eaah training” I'd undergone at home. My only consolation is that he knows my news already or had even played a part in me going to China.

As we were cleaning up to go, Xiao Peng asked if I was hungry and offered me one of the apples. I was disgusted. Wasn't that like eating the bodies of our relatives? Like the wafer and the wine? He laughed and said it wasn't like that at all, as he took a big bite of the apple.

•   •   •

The
next morning, instead of going to see The Document, we went to visit Great-Aunt Mabel's new courtyard house. The hutong was thick with the call of food vendors and Bobo had to shove out of the way two tricycles and two bicycles blocking the doorway so we could enter. The courtyard was like a jungle inside, with vines hanging from the eaves and from a lopsided trellis, semidead trees languishing in pots, weeds straggling up from between the bricks on the ground. One big tree loomed over it all. The house itself was in good shape, and when we went inside the rooms, we saw they were big and high-ceilinged. We walked through all sixteen empty rooms, our voices bouncing loudly off the concrete floors and dusty plaster walls. Bobo said Nainai's house had twenty-two rooms, and if she exchanged it for a different one, it would be even bigger than this one.

As I stood between my mom and Xiao Peng, she said to him, “Two or three years of living here is enough for Val,” hoping for his corroboration.

Xiao Peng smirked and said, “But China's so big, there are so many places you haven't gone to visit yet.”

On the drive home, Bobo said that he'd gotten a call from Party
Secretary Li that morning. She had corroborated the existence of The Document but said it was in a repository that only someone from a
danwei,
or work unit, someone like her, had access to. But seeing it would be no easy feat even for her—she would need explicit written permission from the head of the Xicheng District Housing Management Bureau. Bobo counseled holding off on seeing it until there was an impending demolition.

My dad asked in a hesitant voice, “What does The Document say again?”

“That if the titleholder ever returns to China and establishes residency, the whole house will be returned to you, empty. Why are there tenants there now? Because you haven't established residency.”

“If I want to do that, does it mean I have to live here, long-term . . . ?”

“No, you don't have to move here. But when it gets demolished, and you're negotiating with them, you put The Document right in front of them and say, ‘Here! You must give me an empty courtyard house. And you take care of the tenants. I'm not taking care of the tenants!'” Bobo gave a big smile, and slapped “The Document” into his open palm with triumph. I never understood how, if it was so hard to see The Document, Bobo knew its contents so well. “Do you understand?”

Dad nodded grimly, then smiled with his mouth only. “I understand. I understand perfectly.” He paused. “So I don't have to establish residency here.”

“No, no.”

“But if I don't, there's no way to chase out the tenants unless it gets demolished.”

“Right.” Bobo thought it would happen in the next five to ten years. “The most important thing is that when it comes time to demolish this house, they know that the owner is an overseas Chinese and that they won't be able to dismiss you so easily.”

I wondered what Nainai would want to do. I suspected that she
didn't want the connection with Beijing anymore. She was never coming back, and even if she did, she would no longer recognize the city she grew up in. I suspected she would probably take the cash.

Bobo, of course, didn't mention his own wishes for the house. Did my parents suspect Bobo's hope to live in the new house? Did he even have that hope, after what had happened with Great-Aunt Mabel's house?

•   •   •

I
took my parents to the
City Edition
office, introduced them to my coworkers, and showed them the magazine, pointing out the masthead with my name on it. My mom looked proud but a little puzzled to see the desk and computer where I spent most of my days, far away from her. My dad didn't look unduly impressed but he did seem reassured to meet Sue and to see that another sane, intelligent American had made the same decision I had to move halfway around the world from her family to work on a two-bit magazine. Sue asked about the Peking Opera story, which was scheduled to be the cover story of the upcoming issue, and I told her that due to the re-interview I needed more time to finish it and we should probably push it to the next issue. She disguised her annoyance as best she could.