Beijing Bastard by Val Wang Page A

view of a tall ocher smokestack out the window. The industrial bookshelves that lined the wall behind me were all empty and the carpeting was thin and rough. The place had a stripped-down utilitarianism that said “newsroom” to me, like a place Lois Lane might work. The advertising saleswomen shared another room, and Sue and Max shared an office attached to a small conference room filled almost wall to wall by a huge glass table.
    If I thought work would be a stabilizing force, it wasn’t. I wanted to do my own stories but had no idea how to begin. The telephone is a journalist’s best friend but not in China, which had no phone book. No way to find out someone’s number unless you knew someone who knew them. And I didn’t know anyone.
    Max did though. He had started his career as a photographer, then opened a photo agency, MaxVision, that supplied Western journalists with photos, and now he was our boss, all without speaking much English. He was built like a bulldog, petite but tensely packed with muscle, and true to his name had a stable of high-octane personas each with its own complete outfit, like a Ken doll. Shutterbug Max had a many-pocketed khaki vest and a hat fit to hunt big game in. Sporty Max was poured into a casing of black spandex. Teutonic Max was in head-to-toe lederhosen. But underneath all Max’s ready-made outfits, there was something unhewn about him. His head was as craggy as a granite statue, his nose bulbous, his few remaining teeth blackened and crooked. A man who had no money but did have apartments all over town (though none for me). A man with gonnegtions.
    I’d heard that Max had access to photos that no one else could get, like those of a clandestine People’s Liberation Army training facility that no one had even known existed. Max’s photographs were all hard news photos, and he had even dated the CNN bureau chief for many years (though he insisted on referring to CNN and its ilk as “McNews,” one of his few English words). He set Jade up with another part-time internship, this one at the AP with his good friend Steve, a photographer. Max had been impressed when she let slip that she had worked as a dominatrix during college, just to make a little extra spending money.
    Jade and I could hear Max barking orders in the phone, as he strode from room to room of the office, telling whoever it was to recollect all the papers and bring them back to the office, immediately. He had a strange smirk on his face. Something was always happening with the distribution. Last issue, the papers had all disappeared from the bars onSanlitun the day after they were delivered. Max and Sue suspected foul play. Either
Beijing Scene
was scooping up our papers after they were delivered or they had planted a double agent right in our office.
    Beijing Scene
. Our mortal enemy. They were the original English-language rag in town, geared toward the wannabe bohemians who had decamped from dead-end lives in sterile, expensive Western cities in search of cheap rent and even cheaper beer in one of the final outposts of totalitarian chic in the world—where life had
meaning
. (Me, in other words.) They wrote exclusively about underground artists and Beijing street slang, all the things I wanted to write about. Getting shut down once by the government only added to their swagger.
    No one would blink twice if our distributor, Lu, turned out to be a double agent. He looked the part almost too perfectly: skinny and ratlike with greasy hair and shifty eyes. And people’s possessions had begun disappearing from the office in the few months since he had been working. Sorghum candy in my desk drawer began disappearing piece by piece, which I dismissed as the snacking of hungry coworkers, until the box was completely emptied. Others reported cash missing. And then a heavy pewter ashtray from Germany that Max was proudly displaying on his desk disappeared.
    A woman often called for