Beijing Bastard

A humorous and moving coming-of-age story that brings a unique, not-quite-outsider’s perspective to China’s shift from ancient empire to modern superpower
 
Raised in a strict Chinese American household in the suburbs, Val Wang dutifully got good grades, took piano lessons, and performed in a Chinese dance troupe—until she shaved her head and became a leftist, the stuff of many teenage rebellions. But Val’s true mutiny was when she moved to China, the land her parents had fled before the Communist takeover in 1949.
 
Val arrives in Beijing in 1998 expecting to find freedom but instead lives in the old city with her traditional relatives, who wake her at dawn with the sound of a state-run television program playing next to her cot, make a running joke of how much she eats, and monitor her every move. But outside, she soon discovers a city rebelling against its roots just as she is, struggling too to find a new, modern identity. Rickshaws make way for taxicabs, skyscrapers replace hutong courtyard houses, and Beijing prepares to make its debut on the world stage with the 2008 Olympics. And in the gritty outskirts of the city where she moves, a thriving avant-garde subculture is making art out of the chaos. Val plunges into the city’s dizzying culture and nightlife and begins shooting a documentary about a Peking Opera family who is witnessing the death of their traditional art.
 
Brilliantly observed and winningly told, Beijing Bastard is a compelling story of a young woman finding her place in the world, and of China, as its ancient past gives way to a dazzling but uncertain future. | Val Wang is a writer and multimedia documentarian who has lived in Beijing, Baltimore, and Brooklyn. She now lives in Boston. |

Part One

Chapter One

I H_T_ CH_N_S_ SCH_ _ L

On the very first page of a book about Christopher Columbus that my dad is reading to me, there is a word I don’t know. I am squeezed next to him in the creaky maroon recliner where he does all his reading. Every new word opens up new worlds to me. This one has a long, slow sound to it and looks so different than it sounds.

“What is a journey?” I ask. He looks surprised and pauses before answering.

“A journey is a long trip,” he says.

“A long trip!” What a disappointment. But as we read further into the book, I see what he means. A trip is what happens when I go with my mom to the store, or when we visit my grandparents in Virginia, five hours away. But a journey is when you sail into uncharted waters searching for something you’ve seen with only your innermost eye. You cross perilous seas, lose half your crew to scurvy, and discover a place that will later be called America.

I’m not sure why this memory etched itself so deeply into my mind. Maybe I was starting to realize that my parents had made a journey like that years before. Maybe my dad had even told me that he too had come to America on a boat.

My parents had both been born in China in the early 1940s and just before the Communist takeover in 1949 had both fled with their families to Southeast Asia. Before the age of eighteen, they had immigrated separately to New York, where they met and married. They moved to Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s, and then months before my older brother was born in 1973, they moved to a beige colonial with brown shutters on a cul-de-sac in the D.C. suburbs, where I grew up and where they still live today. Throughout my childhood in the 1980s, as China opened up to the world, my parents promised we would visit the motherland when I turned thirteen.

They bought the suburban house and quarter-acre lot when it was no more than an empty field; the area had been farmland just years before. Our house had no past, only a future, and perhaps that’s how they wished to see their lives too. You can be anything you want to be in life, my mom always told us.

When asked in second grade to draw a picture of what I wanted to be when I grew up, I drew myself sitting by a sunny window, my fingers on the keys of a typewriter.

Shortly after moving into their new house, my parents planted twenty-nine white pine trees around the perimeter of the bare yard to separate the house from the identical houses around it, the saplings so tiny that my then-tiny brother accidentally trampled one to death, so the story goes. For years my parents had lived in small homes filled with too many people, and planting the pine trees was a grandiose gesture marking out the kingdom where they hoped to live happily ever after. Over the next twenty or so years, the pine trees grew taller than the house, shielding our yard from the sun and the neighbors. “Good fences make good neighbors,” declared my dad once. We were each proud in our own way of the dark line of trees. I liked the feeling they gave me that I was growing up in a forest.

The suburbs allowed my parents to create for the first time an orderly world that they had total control over. The rhythms of our yard ran like clockwork. The forsythias were the first to bloom in the spring, then the three dogwood trees in the front and the petite red maple tree in the back. Summer brought perfect, perfumed roses, and sugar snap peas and tomatoes from the vegetable garden, and many empty hours for me to spend alone under the sheltering cave of the forsythia bushes, a space too small for adults. A big chive patch grew all year round. Cardinals and blue jays came regularly to the pine trees. While other families around us hired gardeners and landscapers, my parents tended the yard by themselves. My dad trimmed the hedges and aerated the lawn with a machine that made the rounds among the Chinese families in our area. My mom mowed and watered the lawn and put herself in charge of patrolling its borders. When rabbits began ravaging her vegetable garden, she chased down a marauding baby bunny and trapped it under a pail, oblivious to its mother’s screams, and let it go by a nearby creek. (“Who should be eating the crunchy snow peas—the rabbit’s baby or my baby?” she asked.) Hornets stung my allergic dad, and so she swaddled herself head to toe in protective outerwear, ripped their nest from its moorings, and threw it out with the evening’s trash. Once when mowing the lawn, she spotted a snake in the grass. My brother and I ran over to see, and he, with a vast storehouse of knowledge gleaned from the World Book, declared it to be a common, harmless garter snake. “Oh, a garden snake,” she said, and ran it over with the lawnmower. It was not wise to cross my mother.

My mom peppered my childhood with stories of her own childhood so fantastical and vivid I felt as if I’d experienced them firsthand. She remembered only snapshots from her early childhood in China: the frightening smell from her grandfather’s long opium pipe, the grand car that chauffeured her to kindergarten, the huge house built with money from the jade and timber trades. When she was four, in 1949, a cargo truck smuggled her and her family out of China in the middle of the night; she remembers struggling to keep her younger siblings quiet in the back. They carried nothing of value but the jade jewelry sewn into her mother’s belt. Her parents, having never worked a day in their lives, ran a teahouse called Airplane in Shwebo, Burma, as they raised seven children in a two-room house. Burma seemed even wilder than China: Poisonous snakes slithered free in the streets, green mangoes grew in her family’s backyard and were eaten sour and sprinkled with salt, an annual water-splashing festival took over the streets of the city.

For high school, my mom went to a Chinese boarding school an overnight train ride away in Rangoon. When she was a senior, a mysterious man called her, saying he was a friend of her uncle’s in America and asking her to meet him at a hotel, a nice hotel. Her uncle had left to study in America in the 1930s before she was born and when war broke out in China, his father had told him not to return. He had lost contact with his family in China and had heard only that they had fled to Burma, so when he found out his friend was going to Rangoon on business, he asked him to track them down. The man gave my mom her uncle’s address in New York as well as a gift from him, a small Gruen watch. She wrote him a letter, and several months later she flew to New York alone to live with his family. On cold winter mornings, while waiting for the city bus to take her to Queens College, she would buy a single bagel from the shop by the bus stop and hold it in her hands to warm them. Her parents and six younger siblings didn’t immigrate to the States until a decade later.

Her stories opened up amazing, faraway worlds that seemed a part of mine, even if they couldn’t have been more distant.

Many other Chinese immigrants had also moved to the D.C. area, and it allowed my parents to administer to my brother and me a nearly lethal dose of “Chinese” culture. As regular as church, we attended Chinese School every Sunday, from the first week of kindergarten to the last of high school, learning Mandarin Chinese. Potomac Chinese School was held in the rented classrooms of Herbert Hoover Junior High School, with my mom and other parents working as teachers doling out homework, tests, and report cards and ranking us as they had been ranked growing up.

On one test, I wrote I H_T_ CH_N_S_ SCH_ _L, Wheel of Fortune–style, and the teacher filled in the missing vowels.

I also performed in a Chinese dancing troupe whose signature piece, performed at the Kennedy Center and the National Theatre as well as at a random crab house off the interstate, was a lyrical evocation of tea harvesting, in which we plucked invisible tea leaves off of imaginary vines and delicately placed them into real straw baskets, in between sequences of trotting in a line, pausing, snapping open and closed sequined pink silk fans, and then trotting again. When our bookings fell in direct proportion to the waning of our cuteness, I immediately switched to karate, which my brother was already learning, and eight years and eleven broken boards later, I was a black belt. Of course I took piano lessons too, de rigueur for a proper suburban Chinese-American upbringing, and took tennis lessons because my parents had heard that the tennis court was where all the real deals got made in America.

Growing up, we spent a lot of time with my dad’s extended family, a rigidly hierarchical Confucian family headed by Yeye, my grandfather. He was a classic patriarch—arrogant, overbearing, awe-inspiring, never attired in less than a three-piece suit and hat. When I saw Ayatollah Khomeini on TV thundering angrily at masses of people, I mistook him for Yeye, just doing his day job as a history professor. Yeye made no secret of the fact that he liked my brother more because he would carry on the family name. (My mom, on the other hand, made a point of treating us equally.) My brother, as the Number One Son of the Number One Son, bore a heavy burden to live up to the values exemplified by Yeye: hard work, integrity, filial obligation. I, as the youngest of the clan, felt pulled in two directions: Of course I wanted to measure up but I also wanted to poke fun at their pious values and disrupt their precious order. Youngest siblings are natural contrarians; subverting the rules of the family is one of the few ways we can wield power.

Yeye would always demand I answer the same question: “Are you Chinese or American?” I thought it a silly choice, but because I knew he wanted me to say Chinese, I always said American.

China seemed impossibly distant. Yeye had been born in Hunan, like Chairman Mao, but instead of becoming a Communist became an ardent Nationalist. He had studied his way out of the provinces, first to a top university in Beijing, then abroad in the 1920s, earning a doctorate in comparative government from Columbia University. He returned to China in the 1930s to help build the new nation. Once when visiting Shanghai, he was invited to dinner by a friend and his wife, who brought along her younger sister to accompany him. Smitten, he invited the three of them out for dinner again the next night. After the young woman returned home to Beijing, he followed a few days later to ask her father for her hand in marriage. They married, bore three children, and, after moving around the country with the Nationalists, returned to Beijing and bought a courtyard house in 1946. Then just before the Communists took over in 1949, the family fled, first to Hong Kong briefly, then Jakarta, Indonesia, for almost a decade, where Yeye edited The Free Press, a Chinese newspaper. In the late 1950s, he moved the family to the States, leaving them on the Upper West Side of New York while he taught at universities around the country. Nainai took the English name Lily. Her older sister, who went by Mabel, made it to the States via Macau and also ended up on the Upper West Side, several blocks away. She too had left behind a courtyard house in Beijing.

Yeye eventually found a position in the history department of Hampton University. Every Easter and summer vacation, we went to visit them in their little green bungalow in Hampton. Nainai always had a box of fresh brownies ready, crisp on the top, tender inside. For Christmas, they came to our house, and as Nainai lay on the guestroom bed reading the Chinese newspaper, I would climb in with her and point out all the familiar characters that jumped out at me from the gray blur of stories. She would sing me Chinese songs in an exaggerated, old-timey voice that made me laugh. But she also had a sternness that intimidated me. When I was six and out with her alone, I was too scared to ask to go to the bathroom and ended up soaking the faux sheepskin lining of my boots.

Yeye had constant conflicts with my parents about what language to speak to us at home. He lectured us about using “ear training” to learn Chinese, while my parents spoke English to us out of fear that otherwise we would fall behind in school. They spoke mostly Chinese with each other. I am embarrassed to say I mocked Yeye’s accent, parroting his “eaah training.”

Though my family had succeeded in making a life in the States, I always wondered about China. Poems and myths I read in Chinese School implanted in a secret compartment of my mind hazy images: a boat on a lake at dusk . . . a festival . . . I was there, lighting paper lanterns and setting them afloat on the lake . . . ghosts of drowned women rising from the water . . . My family also watched National Geographic specials about China together; I was haunted by an image of a live monkey’s head held in a vise, cracked open like a coconut and its brains scooped out and eaten fresh as a roadside snack. The romantic and the ghoulish mixed into a potent brew in my mind and I was eager to see this place in person. I imagined that it would be like visiting a large museum of ancient civilization that would cleanly elucidate some deep truths about my family. I was thirteen in the summer of 1989; after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, my parents never spoke again about visiting China.

It was during my teenage years that my relationship with my parents fell apart. I found the hermetically sealed environment of our suburban home suffocating, my go-go Chinese-American lifestyle of nonstop studying unbearable, my parents ceaselessly dictatorial. The community I’d grown up in was stifling—everyone knew whose children went to Harvard and whose got pregnant, whose families were getting ahead in America and whose were falling behind. My successes or failures were theirs as well, and nothing was ever enough for them. It turned out that we could be anything we wanted to be in life—as long as it was a doctor or a lawyer. My older brother followed all the rules; he got into an Ivy League college and would go on to be a lawyer, support Republican tax cuts, and never date. For a while I copied him exactly. I earned my black belt, attended a math and science magnet school, became the editor of my high school newspaper. Though I mimed the right actions, my heart wasn’t in it. All I knew was the simple urge to do the opposite of what I was supposed to do: date white boys, talk nonstop on the phone, agitate for a driver’s license. I idolized Georgia O’Keeffe and had a crush on Andre Agassi and imagined myself their lovechild: an ascetic, passionate being trying to break free from the repression of the East Coast and a world where deals were made on the tennis court.

At around this time, Yeye and Nainai left Virginia and moved into an apartment in a retirement community not far from us and they added to the chorus of disapproval; in fact, Yeye must have been its original source, as my parents’ successes and failures ultimately reflected back on him. When I was present in the room, they criticized me in the third person. It was their job to talk and mine to listen. Nainai stayed in Yeye’s shadow for the most part and bore the brunt of his increasing irascibility. I remember being confused when he called her a fantong, or a rice bucket, until my mom told me it also meant “imbecile.” But Nainai never became meek. She had been born into a wealthy, educated family in Beijing and to show for it carried herself with a haughtiness I later associated with native New Yorkers. The gentle and humorous Nainai of my childhood faded away and in her place was an imperious matriarch full of dissatisfactions she could communicate with a single look.

When I dated a boy who resembled in my mom’s eyes a Hispanic drug dealer and whose radical leftist parents were getting a divorce because their open marriage was falling apart, my mom routinely hung up on him when he called our house, riffled through my journals seeking dirt, and once delivered a succinct four-word safe-sex talk to me: Don’t ruin your life. My parents sensed me going my own way and instead of loosening their grasp, they tightened it. The “drug dealer” had actually been a straight-A student who eventually went to Harvard, though my mom had accurately sniffed out his beliefs in wanton drug use, free love, and Marxism. After my parents caught me alone at his house, something snapped in our relationship. Being Chinese was obviously the root of my problems, and so I began to hate all things Chinese, or what I imagined to be Chinese.

I went off to a liberal arts college, where I became a leftist, a feminist, and a vegetarian; shaved my head; and veered off the doctor/lawyer trajectory into English and Women’s Studies. My parents insisted I go to the number-one-ranked liberal arts college, instead of to my first choice, Oberlin (ranked twenty, down from fourteen), which my dad likened to “marrying an alcoholic and going on a honeymoon on a sinking ship.” While I was away at college, he frequently sent me photocopies of Ann Landers columns that he found relevant to my life. One letter I particularly remember came from a dad who wrote in wondering how to deal with his daughter whom he characterized as “very smart but with no common sense.” “No common sense” my dad had highlighted in yellow and underlined twice in red. I too was an avid Ann Landers reader and my personal favorite column came from a young Asian-American woman who wrote in wondering how to deal with her parents who kept her under virtual house arrest. The letter had been signed, “Oppressed, Repressed and Depressed.” I clipped it out and taped it into my journal. I don’t remember what advice Ann Landers gave either of them, probably to seek counseling. But that wasn’t our way, to say our problems out loud to a total stranger.

In short, the peace my parents had found in the suburbs was not mine to inherit. I didn’t feel as though I belonged there, or anywhere yet, and I itched to travel to exotic places far away to look for what was missing in my life.

So I went to Sweden. I went in my junior year of college, taking a break from the manicured New Englandness of Williams College, but to my dismay found it was even cleaner, colder, darker, and more orderly than the places I’d come from. The alienation I felt from my family seemed to extend to the rest of humanity and I spent most of my time watching films alone. One night I went to see a film purely because I had deciphered in its description the words kinesisk rockstjärna—Chinese rock star. There wasn’t much to Beijing Bastards. You could take a character from column A, put him or her in a setting from column B, and make him or her do something from column C, and you’d pretty much have it.

But the film opened an escape hatch into a world mirror opposite of the version of China I had grown up with, where we were all nerdy, overachieving droids with no errant desires of our own who lived out the script as it had been handed to us, marching through the Ivy Leagues into respectable professional careers.

I had rarely put any thought into what contemporary China was like, and when I did, it took a huge mental leap to imagine the farmers and petty bureaucrats of my supposed motherland—even my own relatives seemed impossibly foreign. But to my surprise, I recognized myself in those characters on-screen and, through them, the filmmaker who had created them. I was young and alienated too, also drifting without narrative, and like the filmmaker, I just wanted to find a way to get the moment down on paper—by writing, by filming, by any means necessary.

Back in the States, I stumbled across an article about the “Sixth Generation” of filmmakers in China who shot gritty underground films in Beijing, including the director of Beijing Bastards, Zhang Yuan. The filmmakers had even written a manifesto that declared their aim: “To present a more truthful and more expansive document on the life of the Chinese people.” After making Beijing Bastards, Zhang Yuan was labeled a disseminator of “spiritual pollution” and the government banned him from making feature films. To avoid censorship, the Sixth Generation directors all made films without official permission, funded mostly by Europeans and screened only outside of China, mostly in Europe.

These filmmakers became my heroes. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to make films like them. I liked the way that having a camera in my hand gave me an excuse to poke into people’s lives and go where I wasn’t sure I was welcome. Everyone I knew in New York was starting to shoot their own documentaries with these affordable new digital video cameras.

When Nainai’s older sister offered up her apartment in New York to her relatives the summer before my senior year, I eagerly took her offer. It was a rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side where Great-Aunt Mabel had raised her family after they immigrated to the States more than forty years before. The lease was in the name of a Chinese man long dead; the rent was two hundred and seventy-three dollars a month plus the cost of an anonymous cashier’s check. She was moving to Seattle to be near her son Johnny. I planned to live there that summer while interning at a publishing house and then move back after graduating, but without notice she “sold” the apartment to a perfect stranger for a thousand dollars. Having robbed me of my ancestral rent-controlled birthright, Great-Aunt Mabel then had me live with this person, her false heir—a horsy Chinese-American woman with an ugly boyfriend and a bad temper—for the entire summer and instructed us to tell anyone who asked that we were her granddaughters.

After graduating, moving back to New York was the logical next step, but I balked. Without my rent-controlled apartment, the future seemed like a terrifying void of boring office jobs and unfulfilled dreams. Even finding overpriced housing was deathly cutthroat. I’d heard a story of a friend of a friend who’d had to resort to desperate measures: She had an inside person working at The Village Voice who would call her before the paper went to press and whisper to her the details of apartments for rent, and I didn’t know anyone at The Village Voice. Plus, I’d lived in New York long enough to know that the city was just like a guy I was dating there: shiny and mesmeric as mercury and just as elusive. Slipping away right as I reached for it. I longed to be somewhere I could touch and be touched by.

Around this time I read Things, a novel by Georges Perec about a young couple that decamps from their blissful life in Paris and moves to Sfax, an obscure seaside city in Tunisia because—as I carefully copied into my journal—because Paris had become “a shrunken universe, a world running out of steam, opening onto nothing.” It was exactly how I saw life in New York unfolding if I moved there. Perec went on: “Puns, boozing, walks in the woods, dinner parties, endless discussions about films, plans, gossip had long stood in for adventure, history and truth.”

Adventure, history, and truth. I liked the sound of that.

Suddenly, I knew beyond a doubt what I was meant to do: Go to Beijing, find the filmmakers, and make a documentary about them. I wanted to kick my nerdy upbringing to the curb and chase that vision of myself that had flitted across the screen in Beijing Bastards. Imagine the street cred I’d have if it worked out! This wasn’t a plan that anyone with any common sense would have hatched. Luckily, I had none.

When my parents heard the news that I was moving to the country they’d fled almost fifty years before, they were less than happy. Things may be different today, but in the late 1990s no one in their right mind was moving to China.

“How about graduate school in English, Val?” asked my mom. “A job in publishing in New York? You had that summer internship.”

“It was great because it helped me figure out that I didn’t want to work in publishing in New York.”

“What is your Five-Year Plan?” my dad demanded, as if I ran my life like a socialist dictatorship.

“Five years?” I said. “I can barely think about the next five minutes!”

“Why go to China? Do you know how dirty the bathrooms are there?”

“I thought you would be happy. You made me learn Chinese growing up and whatnot.”

“You were pampered growing up,” said my mom. “You’ll see when you get there.”

“You’ll hate it there,” my dad assured me.

Before I left, each took me aside for a private talk.

“Val, I want you to watch out for men who will want to marry you for a green card.”

“Oh, Mom,” I said after I’d stopped laughing. “I don’t even like Chinese guys.”

Her expression shifted. “Val, don’t be so close-minded. If you find a nice one who you think can make it in America, don’t say no just because he’s Chinese. Keep an open mind.”

My dad warned me about corruption. “China is a place governed by relationships, not by the law. People will do favors for you and expect you to do favors in return,” he said. “Your Yeye had hated that about China and you have no experience dealing with it.”

I nodded.

“Plus, the customer service there is terrible,” he said. “Terrible.”

To them, me moving to China was a step backward that would unravel all the work they’d put into my life. They had achieved the Chinese-American dream: steady job, house in the suburbs, children through good colleges. I was supposed to repeat the pattern. I didn’t tell my parents that my dream was to make a documentary, to be an artist.

My dad also told me that Nainai still owned a courtyard house in Beijing. He had lived in it for two years of his childhood and all he remembered was that it was located on a wedge of land between two roads. He didn’t know much more than that.

As for Yeye, he found out on his deathbed that I was going to China; I never knew what he thought about it. I know only that he believed he could never go back to China because as soon as he stepped off the plane he would be captured and executed, even though we told him that anyone who might kill him was probably already dead.

The only member of my family who wholeheartedly approved of my decision was Nainai. “Life is slower in China. People don’t rush around like they do in America,” she said in a tender voice I wasn’t accustomed to hearing. “You’ll love it there.”

Chapter Two

Fresh Tensions in U.S.–China Relations

I awoke with a start.

“Zao,” said Bobo. Good morning. I was lying in bed, earplugs in my ears, airline eyeshade over my eyes, but they were no match for the big color TV two feet behind my head, which Bobo had just turned on, loud. Bobo is Nainai’s eldest brother’s eldest son and was the relative in Beijing with whom she kept in closest contact. When I had moved to Beijing the week before, Bobo had graciously allowed me to stay with his family until I found my own apartment. He, his wife, their son Xiao Peng, and their daughter-in-law Xiao Lu lived in half of a small courtyard house in the old city. I slept on a folding cot in the living room.

“Zao,” I croaked out. I pulled off my eyeshade and looked at my watch. Six o’clock. Zao means both “good morning” and “early.” Early. Way too early for the TV to be on that loud. I lay still. My cot was wedged between the TV and a long couch that was covered in a sheet as if its owners were away on a long trip. The room had high ceilings, and across from the couch were a wide window and a tall door trimmed in lime green, which opened onto a walkway that opened onto a courtyard. Morning light straggled in and the air was heavy with coal soot. Bobo and Bomu were dressed and ready to go, except that they didn’t ever go anywhere. They were both retired teachers in their sixties and seemed to spend most of their time inside this dim, cluttered room watching TV, as if making up for a whole lifetime lived without it. Bobo is my dad’s cousin, and his turning on the TV briefly reminded me of my dad’s long-ago habit of waking me on Saturday mornings by flashing my bedroom light and clapping crisply, but Bobo seemed even sterner and more unyielding than my dad, with no apparent soft spot in his heart for me. Bomu was equally formidable. Slim and beautiful, she had big, sad, quietly judgmental eyes and she rarely smiled.

On the surface, we were excruciatingly polite to one another. Though I had always been the rebellious one in the family, with a flick of the switch into Chinese I had been instantly transformed into an obedient daughter who said whatever she sensed the other person wanted to hear. I could tell that my relatives were thinking much more than they were saying too, and the air was close with unspoken feelings.

“Not going to work today?” Bobo asked. I should have sprung lightly out of bed, but this morning I had had enough of the role-playing. I had come to China to get farther away from my family, not closer, and had somehow ended up living with these humorless old people who were proving to be a concentrated version of all the irksome traits of my parents. Plus, the house’s indoor plumbing was limited to a cold tap, so I