Beijing Bastard by Val Wang

don’t know me, but have you heard that the government might demolish your livelihood? How do you feel about that?
I was a shy, fearful person who would rather get a tooth pulled without anesthesia than introduce myself to a stranger. Not to mentionthat it had to be done in Chinese. Why hadn’t Sue called my bluff when I’d said that I was fluent in Chinese?
Chinese.
I wanted to shake my fist at it. The very thing I had resisted learning as a child was whipping around and delivering a roundhouse kick to my head. For the first time, my livelihood depended on understanding it.
    I must have walked up and down the street ten times, looking for the perfect bar to ambush. The Boys & Girls Club? Easy Day? Side by Side? I was reluctant to break the thin membrane separating me from the city. The afternoon light on the sidewalk was so gentle and the bars looked so gloomy inside. I could see one or two people rinsing glasses or hunched over calculators or just sitting there.
Baltimore or Omaha,
I thought.
Baltimore or Omaha. I can take this town.
Seeing a bar deserted save for a woman punching rapidly into a calculator, I plunged in and spewed out some questions in rapid-fire Chinese.
    She looked up from her calculator. “Excuse me?”
    My skin prickled uncomfortably but I just smiled weakly and repeated my spiel more slowly.
    â€œYour Chinese isn’t very good, is it?” she said before shaking her head no and returning to her calculator.
    I slunk out and went into several more bars. Most bar owners waved me away. Capitalists operating in a Communist country, they were understandably cautious. I wouldn’t have talked to me either. Eventually a few reluctant bar owners agreed to be interviewed. We wheeled around each other like Greco-Roman wrestlers: me asking carefully practiced questions and them giving cool, evasive answers that I didn’t understand very well. Or, rather, the meaning of the words I didn’t understand very well. But the actual sound of Chinese flooding into my ears sprang open an ancient trapdoor in my head that had long been rusted shut. I felt myself lying on a cot in my parents’ room at Christmas as the clicking of mah-jongg tiles and happy yelling in Chinese floated up louder and louder from downstairs until suddenly everything went blurry and then darkness. I concentrated on looking as professional as I could, noddingintelligently with my pen poised above my notebook, my face serious yet open, hoping they could not detect the faultiness of the vessel into which they were speaking.
    â€œJumin baoyuan de ting lihai,”
one man said. Translation:
Jumin
vociferously
baoyuan
.
    â€œAh, jumin baoyuan de ting lihai?”
I parroted back thoughtfully, fixing the line in my short-term memory before
discharging the contents into my notebook in a desperate pidgin of Romanized sounds and words translated into English and the occasional Chinese character. I would look up the words later. (The local residents vociferously complained.) I asked his name but he demurred.
    â€œOne day they say they’re not going to demolish, the next they say they are going to,” he said with a shrug. “There’s nothing you can do; you might as well let
mingyun
decide.”
    Mingyun
is one of the many words for “fate” in Chinese, one of the more fatalistic versions, and while his statement at first sounded like weakness to American ears, somehow in this time and place it sounded like a pearl of the finest wisdom.
    I headed back to the office. Peering into open office doors in our building gave me an enlightening glimpse into the inner workings of the state-run economy. A man read the newspaper while drinking tea. Women played ping-pong. Four people sat around a square table holding hands of playing cards, one with a fan of cards pinned to his forehead like a crown.
    I shared a room with the art department and with Jade. I sat at a heavy, pale-gray plastic desk with a