Beijing Bastard (23 page)

D
espite, or maybe because of, the spectacular implosion of my documentary, I had a golden summer. I lived the life of a
hunzi
, working only as much as I needed to and going out dancing every weekend. I felt as if I had all the time in the world. The tapes stayed safely tucked away at the back of a drawer.

The Brits were much better at championing the lack of ambition and better at being colonials than us Americans, and I spent many afternoons with them drinking cucumber-soaked Pimm's while pedal-boating around Houhai and Qianhai, the lakes in the center of Beijing. There was always an underground art exhibition to go to or a new bar opening. On the banks of Houhai, a small bar opened. Sparsely furnished with rattan furniture and huge-leafed plants, it didn't have a sign or even a name; everyone called it the No Name Bar. Out the window was Old Beijing—grandpas fishing or swimming in the lake, grannies sauntering by in super slo-mo. It was the romantic old image I'd had of China come to life and I began spending a lot of time there.

But the city in the summer was humid and heavily polluted, so
Cookie and I often escaped to the countryside. One time we took a bus to a temple west of the city to people-watch. Another time when an old friend visited, the three of us hiked up a crumbling section of the Great Wall and slept out on a parapet. We broke up a sign asking in English for an outrageous entrance fee and used it for kindling. Rising up from the darkness of a village below were the sounds of men talking and laughing as they drank. In the morning we followed the ruins of the wall along the ridge of the mountain until we reached the next village, which happened to have a small but functioning go-kart track. It was bathetic, like my life.

One day that summer as I was walking in my neighborhood, I glanced down the length of my street and I noticed that the tops of the tall trees lining the street touched and intertwined, creating a vaulted roof. In the sunlight, the leaves glowed a rich shade of green I'd never seen before in Beijing, and golden shards of light fell onto the cars and people speeding obliviously underneath. Locking eyes with the perfect tunnel of gold and green, I caught my breath.
My god, my street is beautiful,
I thought. But I never saw it like that again.

Cookie's father visited from India. She had always seemed like such an eccentric creature but we saw that she was a carbon copy of her dad: Both were gin-swilling foreign correspondents, both idiosyncratic, both like caricatures of themselves. They even had the same slightly bowlegged walk. He took in our neighborhood, Maizidian'r, with an amused eye and dubbed it Marzipan Street.

His visit coincided with the event of the summer: the rave on the Great Wall. We rode chartered tour buses up north of the city and climbed up a section of the wall to find our DJ friends in an open-air watchtower with their turntables going. House music thumped out over the mountains, and as we danced the night air was clear and cool on our skins. I had never felt more like an invading barbarian, or more giddy. Cookie's dad stood observing us for an article he was going to write for
Time,
and when it got late, he went to sleep in a nearby guesthouse. We
danced and drank until the sun peeked over the snaking line of the Great Wall, which hugged the ridge of a mountain as far as the eye could see.

Slowly, I started to wonder if my parents were right—that I should have a proper life with a proper job. My documentary had tanked, the artists were all starting to repeat themselves in the interviews, and it was time to be grown-up and have a full-time job with an official accreditation at a real Western newspaper, even if there was only so much you could say within its narrow columns. I applied for a correspondent job at one of the magazines I'd been freelancing for. The senior correspondent and an editor for the Asia desk took a look at my clips, asked a few questions about my experience, and then about my family background, as people do. I tried to paint as accurate a portrait of myself as possible, assuming they would see how lucky they were to snag a bohemian with street cred as gritty as mine. We sat at opposite ends of a long table.

The editor looked curiously at me after I'd finished talking and said, in an arch, half-joking tone, “You seem to have
drifted
to China and you seem to have
drifted
into journalism. Are you someone who
drifts
through life?” I felt as if he had slapped me in the face. But once I got over the initial blow, I found I enjoyed the tingle it left behind. It was proof that I had completed my transformation into a
hunzi
;
I had killed the nerd of my teenage years. Needless to say, I didn't get the job.

Gretchen and I were sitting around my apartment one day, talking about the wonders of our neighborhood, the chicken being raised on my stairwell, and the new fashion of wearing pajamas in public. The dot-com boom was in full swing and average, uninspired expats were coming back from New York with hundreds of thousands of dollars of venture capital that had been thrown at them over breakfast meetings.
The Onion
had also just started and we decided to take matters into our own hands and start our own online magazine,
The Marzipan Inquirer.

Who would read the publication, you ask? Our friends, probably, both the ones who lived in Maizidian'r and the ones at home who could never quite picture our lives. And tourists. Not the rich Western tourists
whom
City Edition
had been geared toward but the down-market tourists—Malaysians, Russians, Albanians—who stayed at the three-star New Ark Hotel in our neighborhood. I had seen them looking out the windows of their giant tour buses as they rolled down Marzipan Street, at what must have seemed a bleak landscape of blotchy socialist apartment buildings and run-down shops. I felt sorry for them, that this was their vacation. (Did they feel sorry for me, that this was my life?)

I began to write articles for our imaginary publication.

Marzipan Street Will Not Be Gentrified!: An Editorial

Interview with the Perambulator: Silent Walker Bares All in Exclusive Interview

Local Woman Wakes Neighbors with Arcane Chant, Again: “Dou! Dou! Dou! Dou!” Revealed as Name of Dog

Support Local Music: We're Not Amateurs, Says Lead Singer Marco, That's Just Our Band's Name

 

Who needed a proper job when the Internet had the potential to make me into a publishing magnate?

•   •   •

One
day, I saw Cookie with a great new haircut.

“Pal, I just went to that
gaoji
salon next to Green Lake Garden,” she said. “There's this totally wicked hairdresser there. I told her I wanted a messy haircut and she just grabbed my hair and started cutting. You know how most Chinese hairdressers take hours? She was done in fifteen minutes. I think she was trained by the French guy, Pierre or whoever.”

Green Lake Gardens was a
gaoji
housing complex in our neighborhood that was legal for expats to live in. We were the opposite of
gaoji.

“You went to Eric's of Paris?”

“If you don't get your hair cut by him, it's not expensive, maybe eighty kuai.
I'm telling you, pal—go to this woman, Wang Le. She's wicked! I mean, just look at me—aren't I a babe?”

Eighty kuai, or ten dollars, seemed outrageously expensive for a haircut, but if she was really a genius—

“And she even does tattoos. She showed me hers!”

Eric's of Paris was clean and sleek and full of pep, with none of the languor of a Chinese salon. Most of the customers were expats and the hairdressers spoke French as their scissors flew through hair. I was surprised by Wang Le's appearance. Her figure looked as doughy as a tired housewife's and her short wavy hair was tinted a light red, nothing special. A bevy of young men in black buzzed around her. Her pale, plucked, and oddly ageless face had no expression until I mentioned Cookie's name. She lit up and immediately ordered one of her boys to give me a head massage while washing my hair, another to hand me haircutting magazines to peruse, another to bring me water to drink.

“Cookie is so
huopo,
isn't she?” she said.
Huopo
.
The word was the bane of my existence. Meaning lively and open and free, it was everything that Westerners were supposed to be and everything I did not appear to Chinese people to be. My hair was a cornerstone of this
huopo
problem. A bad haircut helped me blend in, which had its advantages, but then I looked like a nice Chinese girl, which stung my vanity. But if I got the flamboyant haircut I wanted, I would stick out like a ridiculous Westerner who wanted the rock-star treatment in China. I had to choose. Blend in or express myself.

“I want the same haircut as Cookie. Messy.” I jabbed the air around my ears with my upright fingers.

“Are you sure? Cookie looks good with that spiky haircut because her face is round. Your face is angular so you should have a soft haircut,” said Wang, staring into my face. “Your haircut should strike a balance with your face.”

Had the bonsai found its master? I looked in the mirror and saw that my chin and cheekbones were rather pointy. But ultimately, the tree itself had to dictate its own form.

“No, I'm sure that's what I want.” I was ready to let out the inner Val, even if it meant attracting a lot of attention. Or looking like the outer Cookie.

Wang Le worked quickly. I could see she was getting frustrated with my hair. Stiff and stubborn, my hair is resistant to “casual” haircuts. I needn't have worried about looking like Cookie. The end result puffed around my head like a football helmet.

“Oh.”

“Why don't you dye it? Totally black hair is unfashionable these days.”

“No thanks.” I kept waiting for her to show me her tattoo, but she never did.

O
ne day Yang Lina called out of the blue and told me she was done with her second documentary and asked if I would help her polish the subtitles that night.

Months had gone by without contact with her. The last time I'd seen her she had also summoned me for help with a translation. I'd gone to Sanlitun to meet her and she'd greeted me with a pronouncement: “You are so pure and old-fashioned!” We'd sat outside under an umbrella in the spring air sipping juices like
xiaojie
s and watching people walk by. Yang Lina never drank alcohol or coffee or smoked cigarettes. She had pulled a book out of her bag and put it on the table. It was an elementary French textbook.

“I'm studying French now!” she said triumphantly.

“French! I thought you were studying English.” Speaking English was one of the “three musts” for a young modern in Beijing, the other two being driving a car and using a computer.

“I gave that up!” she said, and told me that a film professor in France had seen
Old Men
and secured her a scholarship to go study
documentary production at his university. She was supposed to leave in a few months.

“That's fantastic,” I said. Her life was really taking off. I imagined her having a string of affairs with rakish French men, all with broody five-o'clock shadows and a taste for the exotic. She would finally settle on one who could keep her in the manner to which she was accustomed and they would jet back and forth between Beijing and Paris with their adorable bilingual, mixed-race baby. I had met her boyfriend once. He was completely unremarkable, just your standard-issue Beijing
dakuan—
brush cut, dark zip-up jacket, man-purse sprouting from his armpit—just as I knew he would be. His face was dull, verging on the brutal, and we regarded each other with polite suspicion. “I know you don't think he's handsome, but he's very good to me,” she had said.

Maybe she was right and I was old-fashioned, and my attempt to work for what I earned was outdated. She was the modern one and I was the relic of the past. Maybe I should go out on that date with her ex-boyfriend Mr. Motorola.

“Zhao Liang told me that I should be paying people for the subtitles they do for me,” she said, of our mutual friend. “I never thought about such a thing before.”

“That's probably a good idea. It is a lot of work,” I said. Most filmmakers I did subtitles for paid a token amount, just to acknowledge the help, but she, who had much more money than most, had never even mentioned remuneration of that kind. Every time she called, she needed something from me and she always needed it right away and it always took longer than she said it would and all she gave me in return was a smile—and yet somehow I felt like the luckiest person in the world to have the chance to help her out. She was just one of those people.

“I bet you'll like France,” I said. “I took some French in high school and I've always wanted to go.” I opened the textbook to a page showing a cartoon of two fresh-faced French youths, one inviting the other out for coffee. One was named Valerie. I pointed to the name.

“Did you know that this is my English name?”

“This name?”

“Yes.” I felt like Clark Kent casually letting her in on my secret identity, the American part of me that shed my uptight exterior and performed heroic feats while dressed in spandex.

She said in her sultriest French accent, “Wah-leh-lee? So sexy!” Her giggle turned into a heavy sigh. “French is hard. I don't really study.”

“Once you get there, it'll be easy.”

“I just don't know if I should go. People keep asking me if I've started my second documentary and I haven't. I threw all of my passion into the first one and don't know which direction to go next. Something more personal, maybe.”

“But going abroad is such a huge opportunity. You can't give that up.”

“Everything has just happened so quickly,” she said. When we finished with the translations, we sat sipping our drinks, lost in our own thoughts. No one who walked by the café was in a hurry. I liked that about Beijing but I wondered if I would still be here long after Yang Lina had left, subtitling other people's movies, taking my time with life, and getting nothing done. I had been in China three years now and showed no signs of moving home. Beijing was my home now.

Suddenly and without explanation, she said, “Deep down, I know that my boyfriend is not the one I am going to marry.”

As she drove me home, she floated an idea for her second documentary: the everyday life of a Chinese lesbian. She asked me if I knew any lesbians.

“Yes, I went to this secret lesbian meeting once in someone's apartment.” I thought back to the meeting. The women I met there had not been flashy people and I imagined the sexy, curious dancer making a real splash in their midst.

“Lesbian love is so pure,” she said, turning to look at me in busy traffic.

“Lesbian relationships are
not
that simple,” I said.

After this meeting, she didn't call me for months or even return my phone calls and I guessed she didn't need help with anything. Or had she left for France already? I finally got her on the phone and she told me she wasn't going abroad anymore. She had everything she needed here in China to make documentaries. She had finally started her second documentary but was having trouble with it and didn't want to talk about it. All she would say was that she was flying between her parents' cities, tormenting them. We arranged to go to a dance performance together, but when I waited for her at the theater door on the appointed night, she called to say she couldn't make it. That was the last straw. Of all the things she offered me, the only one I really wanted was her friendship but it was obviously too much to ask for.

So when she finally called to ask me for help with the subtitles, she sounded apologetic. A mutual friend had already done the translation and the polishing would be easy, she said, just an hour of work. She needed it that night. And she'd pay. Of course I said yes.

It was a hot summer day. She picked me up from the supermarket in her car, bearing flowers, and was as giggly, infectious, and mildly patronizing as ever. As she watched me cross the street lugging a heavy bag of kitty litter through the thick summer air, she warbled one of her usual assessments. Today I was “serious and adorable.”

At home, Yang Lina sat curled up next to me on my couch. She had her “worried face” on, and as I read the transcript, her glance flickered between my face and the sheaf of papers in my hands, trying to gauge the quality of the translation by my expression. I must have looked peeved. She was so fucking predictable.
Just an hour of work.
This one mutual friend had been born in Beijing, schooled at Eton, and was now back in Beijing hanging out with his punk friends. The documentary,
Home Video,
was about Yang Lina's family, and he had remade the characters in his own image: When they weren't “rather this” or “quite that,” they were cursing up a storm. Reading the transcript, I wanted to laugh uncontrollably, or cry. We had hours of work ahead of us.

“How is it?” she asked, her eyes wide with worry. I liked to see her anxious and questioning; it was a nice reversal. Normally, it was she who told me how things were.

“The translation is—” I paused and gave the transcript a casual shake and pointed to a random page, where her glance followed. “Terrible. We need to start over. Do you have the original Chinese subtitles?”

“I should have just had you do it in the first place,” she said, the wide eyes of her “worried face” narrowing and her brows knitting to make her “impatient face,” a much more familiar look. Watching her was like watching a slide show demonstrating common female emotions.

She stood up abruptly. I noticed her outfit for the first time. It was bland, a man's white button-down shirt, two sizes too large and rolled up at the cuffs, with khaki shorts, but she was the kind of woman who could look stunning even in a potato sack. Her cheeks were flushed with annoyance and she left to go to our friend's apartment to retrieve the original Chinese transcript, leaving me fuming in the muggy summer heat.

She returned soon. I let her in and saw that she was panting and that her cheeks were blushed like a ripe peach.

“I came back as fast as I could. I ran up the five flights,” she said, thrusting the transcript into my hands and pushing up the sleeves of her shirt. We went back into the living room and sat down, but she sprang up immediately and declared, “I'm hot!” I picked up the remote control as imperiously as I could and—
beep-beep-beep
—upped the air-conditioning a few notches.

“Do you mind if I take off my shirt?” Her request wasn't wholly unreasonable. Even with air-conditioning, my top-floor apartment felt like the inside of a pizza oven by the end of the day. I asked her if she wanted to borrow a T-shirt. She didn't. She wanted to take her shirt off. What could I do? I wanted to get started. She unbuttoned the baggy white shirt, shook it off, and stood in the middle of my living room with completely bare breasts. She looked at me expectantly. I thought at least
she'd have a bra on. I wanted to get started because she wanted the subtitles done that night and I knew how long it took to—

“Do you mind if I take my pants off too?” Was she au naturel under those khaki shorts too?

“Go ahead.”

She shimmied out of her pants and I saw with relief that she had underwear on. She gave a sigh of pleasure to be liberated and settled herself back on the couch. I handed her back the Chinese transcript, which she held in front of her small and upturned breasts. She looked so pleased with herself, and at my discomfiture. I told her to read me the first line. The first part, she said, was the opening text on the screen.

I am the daughter. I was fourteen when my parents got divorced.

My brother was thirteen.

I wasn't living at home then, so there were certain things I didn't understand.

My curiosity led me to start interviewing them, separately.

Ten years before, divorce had been very rare in China and no one in her family had spoken about what happened. Wanting to piece the story together, she said she had gone into the interviews innocently, expecting them to be about dredging up other people's feelings and not her own. The rest of the transcript was just line after line of dialogue and she had to explain to me who was saying what.

“This first part is with my mom. I went to my parents to ask them if I could interview them for the documentary. I went to see my mom first.” She snuck a peek at her breasts. I struggled to keep my eyes trained on hers and not to stray south.

“Where does she live again?”

“Qingdao.”

“What does she do?”

“She runs a haircutting studio now.”

Her mom readily agreed to be interviewed, but her little brother, who
also lived in Qingdao, was more reluctant, saying that she was about to unwittingly spark a “family war.”

“And last I went to see my dad. He's in Changchun.” They were Northeasterners. Northeasterners scared me. Unlike Beijingers, who have a reputation for fighting by hurling empty threats at one another and wearing down their opponents by talking them to death, Northeasterners are known for cutting the crap and just beating you senseless.

She said her dad was the hardest to convince. He said her mom was going to tell a pack of lies and her brother was a lost cause whose later years of life would probably have to be filmed from behind bars.

In the end, all three agreed to be interviewed. She said she shot the whole thing with the camera in her hand, deliberately trying to give it a homemade feel, unlike
Old Men
. But as with her first documentary, she had tried to be invisible in
Home Video,
and she said you caught only one tiny glimpse of her in a mirror.

It turned out that Yang Lina's brother, Xiaofan, who was nicknamed Dayong, played a central role in the divorce. He had witnessed their mom walking with a man he didn't know and betrayed her to his dad. He said he had been under the impression that after the divorce his dad would take him to the big city, Changchun.

Her dad began talking about a day prior to the divorce.

I said again, “Would you get up? I'd like to talk.”

“So what if I don't?”

Those were her exact words.

I remember it clearly, all my anger just sprang up,

so I pulled her on the ground

and started to whip the shit out of her with my new belt.

I glanced over at Yang Lina. Her intent expression hadn't changed one bit, as if her dad had just recited what he had eaten for dinner. I felt sick to my stomach and wondered if I should say something, but what would I say?

“Then I asked my mom about it,” Yang Lina said.

“She wasn't uncomfortable talking about it?”

“No, she's very open with me.”

I looked in the mirror and couldn't recognize myself.

My face was all swollen.

Think about the belt whipping my face, my butt, my back—

there were black stripes all over.

Then her brother told his side of the story, which revealed another betrayal.

When I was still in the room, Dad held Mom on the ground.

“Dayong, Dayong,” she called for me three or four times in a row.

It was heartbreaking, as if she was begging me.

But back then I really believed that Mom deserved a lesson.

The documentary continued in this he said/she said/son said–style, telling of the day of the divorce and the day her dad moved to Changchun, alone. Her brother said that instead of taking him along, their dad had called him a “little bastard” and a “cruel wolf” before leaving. Reading the transcript was like watching a police interrogation, ten years after the crime, a domestic
Rashomon.
Yang Lina had probably been watching some Kurosawa too.