Beijing Bastard (21 page)

Cookie burst into the restaurant, wearing her phoenix-print knickerbockers. Her flaming red hair was wildly unkempt, beyond the point of fashionable, and her fanny pack was bulging like an overstuffed calzone.

“Are you a representative of the Underground?” John asked.

Cookie unclipped her fanny pack and sat down. “I
am
the Underground,” she said.

We ate our flavorless pizzas and drank our sour red wine. John looked around, taking in the dingy red-checked tablecloths and the Chinese waitresses struggling with the Italian names.

“Why do you like it here so much?” he asked.

We all thought for a second.

“This place is wicked,” Cookie said. She was still working for the international news agency and was becoming a professional at spinning the most lurid version of events. “There are police lurking everywhere and to get home I have to jump the fence in my compound, which is full of prostitutes and punks. A prostitute was killed there just the other day.”

“In your compound?”

“Yes, just inside. That's what we heard from Big Sister Bao.”

“Who?”

“The mafia don who runs my compound. Plus, the Chinese food here is smashing.”

John ate it up. I was starting to eat it up.

“We're all artists,” she went on. “Val here is shooting a documentary.”

“And Cookie is a modern calligrapher.”

“A modern calligrapher?”

“She rips and pastes colored paper to form huge characters and spray-paints characters on wood. She studied calligraphy at the Central Academy of Art before [McNews] claimed her soul.”

“You work for [McNews]?” John asked in surprise.

“I was in print, but I just moved to TV. I want to be a camerawoman,” she said. “And there's always a rumor of someone writing a screenplay.”

“I see. What else?”

“Cheap rent.”

“Tchotchkes.”

“Massage by blind people.”

“You know, I went there the other day and my guy wasn't blind.”

“Massage by mostly blind people.”

“Ladies Night. This bar nearby had free gin and tonics for women every Thursday.”

“They thought it would attract Chinese girls who could only drink one or two.”

“Not a bunch of sloppy Western girls.”

“We put them out of business.”

“We're
hunzi,
” said Cookie.

“What's that?”

“Like slackers.”

“I know what I like most about being here. Freelancing,” I said. “Freedom in general. I feel really free here.”

John started laughing. “You're from the United States of America and you come to the last huge Communist country in the world to find freedom,” he said, with a combination of pity and admiration that somehow pleased me.

“Funny old world,” said Cookie.

“You can find stories from the fringe,” he said to me. “You can become
Business China
's
gonzo reporter.”

I walked upstairs to my apartment, buzzed on the idea of our lives—or was it on the Great Wall wine that John had put on
Business China
's tab? I parted the lush red curtains to the balcony and stepped outside for a smoke. All the lights were out in the building across the street. I could see only the blue flicker of televisions in dark rooms and the aged yellow moon hanging in the sky. I stood smoking and listening to the velvety quiet of the night. A knot tied and tightened within me began to loosen. The quiet was interrupted every so often by the gentle rattle of an old taxi or the throaty purr of a luxury car. I saw a mule cart piled high with bricks gliding slowly down the street, a tired farmer at the reins and the hooves clacking a lonely tune on the pavement. The mules came out only at night when they were allowed on the Third Ring Road. A few years in the past, there had been no Mercedes on this street and a few years down the road there would be no more mules. But right now we were double Dutch jump-roping, all the strands of different speeds weaving together in a moment of synchronicity as perfect and fleeting as a heartbeat. A queen could not have felt more content surveying her kingdom. The farmer and mule slowly disappeared out of sight. I exhaled the last of my smoke into the night and went inside.

I
celebrated Christmas with Cookie and Emma, who baked a desiccated nut bread and invited over Chinese friends with whom we played a disastrous round of charades thanks to our dearth of shared cultural references. The millennium came and went. Winter became spring. My freelance career took off. After my tampon article for
Business China
, I did one on the bra industry, then another on the fur industry.

After a particularly infuriating phone call with my parents when they asked yet again when I was moving home for graduate school, I'd had enough. My mom had just gotten an e-mail address and I fired off an angry e-mail.

You and Dad are always doubting what I do and telling me I am doing the wrong thing instead of trusting that I am responsible and will find jobs to do that will support me and make me happy. You seem to think that if I went to law school or graduate school my life would instantly become better, but that's not
true. I understand that you're worried about me, but I wish you would support my decisions and be curious about my present life more than my future.

I readied myself for the impact of their response. Anything was better than their endless needling criticisms.

I LOVE YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE!!!!!! I will support you on all the decisions you made for your future. After all, who will know you better than yourself? Please keep writing to me, and tell me more about your life and work in China. I LOVE YOU TOO MUCH.

She forwarded it to my dad, and even he grudgingly offered his support.

The important thing is to find something that rewards you with satisfaction, peer respect, and financial security (whatever the order you would like). Launch yourself while you are young and energetic.

I began to share a little bit more of my life in China with them, sending them clips and links to articles I'd written. I knew they weren't happy with my decisions, but they started keeping their complaints to themselves. But I still didn't tell them about my documentary plans, which proceeded in secret. I scraped together money to buy a video camera, a simple one-chip one, not like Yang Lina's three-chip monster. I was ready to really start making the documentary. But I didn't call the Zhang family. I wasn't as staunch a comrade as Yang Lina. When difficulties presented themselves, I just wanted to quit. The
hunzi
in me was fighting with the ambitious go-getter, and winning.

Then Laichun called one day to tell me his father was in the hospital
with heart trouble. My first thoughts were largely selfish. If the decomposing heart of the decomposing heart of Beijing gave out, my documentary was over. He was my ticket out of the workaday world of journalism and into the jet-setting stratosphere of art. I kicked myself for procrastinating. I thought about Yeye and the trite but true lesson I had learned from him: Once death came, you didn't get any second chances. I kept calling to check on Grandfather Zhang, and when Laichun finally told me he was out of the hospital, I made a date to drop by for lunch on the weekend. Laichun said I should come later because he had a midday performance, but I was adamant on coming for lunch. I wanted my visit to be a finite activity. A few hours would be enough to get some good footage without getting drowned in the morass of their family life.

Only the grandfather and the grandmother were home. I had never seen the house so quiet. The grandmother smiled politely and said that her sons would be home soon. They seemed excited for my visit. I took the familiar stool by the bed and saw that my article had been framed and hung on the wall next to the bed. I asked the grandfather about his health. He looked the same as he ever did. I turned on the camera and he immediately launched into a story that I didn't understand.

“A
meng,
when you sleep at night and you see your parents, your brother, see your home. This is called a
meng,
” he said.

“Oh, a
dream
. I know what that is.”

“They're not allowed to disclose their
meng.
”

“Oh, I see.” I had no idea of what he was talking about. But I trusted that the camera was taking it all down. I entertained myself by staring at his bald head while trying to connect the viscous words that oozed out of his mouth with the vivid opera performances trapped forever inside his mind. I realized that all the camera was capable of picking up were words, useless words. And the metronymic chirruping of the family's pet cricket. His eyes rolled past me and I thought he was falling asleep. The door opened.

“Look who's here!” the grandfather said. Enter Laisheng. The Chatty Warrior. The grandmother sprang into action. She began assembling the
fold-out table for lunch. I got up to help her, but she shooed me away. Laisheng put his leg up on a dresser to stretch and as soon as I pointed the camera at him, he turned on like a faucet. He began complaining about an upcoming performance he had to do as part of the reform of his state-run troupe. The performance would be graded on a scale from “excellent” to “subpar” and in the future the troupe would use the rankings to staff their performances. No longer would anyone be guaranteed work, even those with “excellent” grades.

To him, potential unemployment was just the next tragic chapter of a life that had never properly launched. He said had been born in the mid-1950s, right as what he called a “natural disaster” forced “food rations” on the country, stunting his growth. (Actually, it was “Mao's disastrous agricultural policies” that plunged the country into “famine.”) Just as soon as he was old enough to go to school, the Cultural Revolution started and he was sent down to the countryside to work. Separated from his family and denied schooling, he'd never been properly educated.

“If ‘descendants of the Yellow Emperor' don't understand the matters of the ‘descendants of the Yellow Emperor,' how can you say you're ‘descendants of the Yellow Emperor'? How can you say that you're Chinese?” he demanded.

I nodded. I shook my head. Who was the Yellow Emperor again?

He then spent three years serving in the army. Once he was finally back at home ready to perform, the only operas being staged were the revolutionary model operas, performed by troupes he had no way to join. “Now there are opportunities, but I'm too old. I can't take advantage of them,” he said.

“No need to talk about it,” said the grandmother, but the warrior was on the warpath already. She peeled a small mandarin and put it in front of me. I didn't want it, but I ate it, peeling apart the segments with my one free hand.

“Does your daughter like Peking Opera?” I asked Laisheng. She was the lazy fake-Pringles eater.

“I don't want her to learn. This is a terrible profession. You'd earn more selling bottled water on the street.” He launched into a confusing explanation of a Peking Opera story that ended with the pronouncement, “Those are
stories.
”

I nodded.

From the bed issued a roar, “Did you understand?”

“Um . . .” I couldn't tell if the grandfather was being helpful or mocking.

“He said it was a
story
about a benevolent emperor who came down south of the Yangtze to solve the problems of the people.” He said
“tanguan wuli,”
which I later found out was an idiom meaning “corrupt officials.”

“This is a
story,
” said Laisheng.

“I got that part.”

“Is it real?” asked the grandfather.

“No?” I answered. I had no idea where this was going.

“Someone once told me the recipe for success was seventy percent connections, thirty percent ability,” Laisheng said. “I'm over forty years old now and I'm still a
pusupusu caomin.
”

“What's a
pusupusu caomin
?” quizzed the grandfather.

“I don't know,” I answered. There was no use lying anymore.

“Literally a ‘common person in the grass,' it means just a plain old regular person, without any power.”

“Do you know what a
mayi
is?” asked Laisheng.

“Yes, I know what an
ant
is.”

He became livid. “I'm just that ant. I'm just that grass on the plain.” After a moment, he said softly, “Don't say too much. I don't want to lose my job. When I'm supposed to practice, I practice. When I'm supposed to perform, I perform.”

“Say what should be said and don't say what shouldn't,” the grandmother said to me. “All of the things about connections. We all know it, but there's no need to say it.” She began talking about a story she'd seen
on the news about a provincial leader who had been executed for taking bribes.

I had trouble following their instinct for allegory, for using the past to talk indirectly about the present, or for using animals to talk about people. They had to practically spell it out for me: The leaders were not benevolent; they did not care about solving the problems of the people, and anyone who said differently was parroting fictions. Their state-run opera troupe, from the highest level down, was corrupt. Those with connections rose to the top, and the ants, even those who were the true heirs to the art, stayed in the grass.

We sat quietly. The grandmother cleaned the grandfather's ears with a cotton swab, then cleaned her own.

“I want to ask you, Miss Wang, what else do you want to learn?” said the grandfather. “I want you to ask questions.”

“Actually, I'm fine with just chatting,” I said in my most cheerful tone of voice, trying to defuse the tension that my presence seemed to generate. Why couldn't they just relax and stop putting on an act for me? “I'm not here as a reporter anymore.”

“Your foundation is very thin,” reproached Laisheng.

I remembered what he or his brother had said to me a while ago and I repeated it defensively now. “My life is about going many places and seeing many things, not like you. You only know one thing: Peking Opera.”

“So you know Peking Opera through and through from your one visit today, right?” asked the grandfather.

“That's not really my hope.” I groped for a way to deflect his scrutiny. I didn't want to be the center of attention. If I could have directed the scene, I would have been a fly on the wall and the curmudgeonly grandfather would have uttered wise, salty pronouncements about life as the grandmother muttered rueful asides, and they would have bickered among themselves in a way that illuminated the richness and complexity of a cultured Peking Opera family. But instead they just plopped me on a stool in the center of room, lectured me with obscure stories, and slung insults at me when I didn't understand them. Why were they being so
obstinate? I'm sure they asked themselves the same question about me. Maybe that drunken relative rubbing his belly after dinner had been right—a foreigner had no way of understanding a family this deep.

Any sensible person would have walked out of the room. But despite—or probably because of—our discomfort, I felt I was onto something. But I would never have had the courage to stay in the room had I not had my camera there as protection.

I tried to explain my vision of the documentary in simple terms. “I'm not only interested in Peking Opera. I'm actually more interested in your family, in your lives. Your everyday lives.”

Silence.

I squeaked out, “Our lives are not alike.”

“Not alike?” the grandfather boomed.

The room reeked of urine and coal smoke. Spending too much time with Chinese families made me dizzy and, occasionally, gave me migraines. I stared wistfully at the TV, wishing we could just sit and watch it together. I had come to think of the act of communal TV watching as the highest expression of intimacy in a Chinese family.

“Do you know that foreigner on TV who does cross talk?” asked the grandfather.

“Dashan,” I said with an angry sigh. I hated Dashan. Cross talk is a traditional comedic art in which two men stand on a stage and engage in rapid-fire, pun-laden exchanges, and “that foreigner” was Mark Rowswell, a.k.a. Dashan. Supposedly his Beijing accent was so perfect that if you closed your eyes you would mistake him for a real Chinese person. But open them and you'd see a tall, sandy-blond Canadian with glasses whose blubbery lips were perpetually parted in the smile of ingratiating naïveté native to North American nerds. Dashan was now cashing in on his fame by starring in commercials for miracle pills that claimed to clear up spotty skin and regulate sleep patterns. “Yes, I've seen him.”

“This is like
chaocai,
” said the grandfather. “Do you know what
chaocai
is?”

“Yes, I know.” Stir-frying a dish.

“You take a pan, pour the oil in, cut the
cai
: the onions, garlic, meat. You put them into the pan and
chao
it, add some soy sauce, then put it onto a plate and on the table. This is a complete thing, isn't that right?”

“What are you trying to say?” I asked. I had had enough of their riddles and circuitous stories.

“The dish is cooked and I'm sending it to the table for you to eat.” Here he paused for effect. “My meaning is to tell you a
complete thing.
But you just want to put in some onions, some meat, some potatoes—you don't even use a pan, you just boil them in water. It's not like a thing at all. I want you to go home and say,
I came to China and met a Zhang Mingyu who told me how Peking Opera developed and how to tell folktales.
” He squinted. “Are you interested?”

“I'm interested in whatever you have to say,” I said wanly. Someone had ripped out my backbone and replaced it with grape jelly.

We paused in frustration.

“Do you like Dashan?” I asked. Every Chinese person likes Dashan.

“I don't like him.”

“Why not?”

“I like his
thinking,
his
erudition.
Do you understand?”