Beijing Bastard by Val Wang Page B

Distributor Lu on the office phone. “Oh. My wife,” he’d say to no one in particular. Sue shook her head and said to me in English, “I went to his house once. It wasn’t the house of a married man. It was so squalid with a narrow dirty bed in the corner.” I thought Max and Sue were paranoid. That’s what happened when you stayed in China too long.
    When Max hung up the phone, the women in the office twittered around him like birds, begging to find out what had happened with the magazine. He grinned like a little boy.
    â€œSomeone slipped ‘yellow’ photos into our magazines.”
    â€œWhat are ‘yellow’ photos?”
    Jade looked at me as if I were five years old. Her Chinese was much better than mine, especially where certain kinds of words were concerned.
    â€œDirty photos.”
    The girls continued. “What did they look like? Are they going to bring them back to the office? Was it
Beijing Scene
again? Tell us, Max!”
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    The next day I went back to Sanlitun to find some angry residents. This time I brought Jade, who had a boldness that I lacked. We walked to the park at the southern end of the street, a patch of dirt dotted with a few sickly trees and park benches, and prowled about. Elderly people stood in small groups, rocking babies in bamboo carriages and gossiping. Like a lioness preying on weak gazelles, I pounced on lone stragglers. Most fulminated about the noise and the disorder of the bar street, but when I said I was a reporter, they clammed up and walked away. I got only one woman, who lived nearby but refused to give her name, to complain on the record about the stench of urine in her yard that greeted her in the mornings.
    Behind the bar street loomed brick apartment complexes. I popped into the yards of a few and rattled off, “I’m a reporter. Object to the bar street? No? Okay.” After a few rejections, I was ready to call it a day. I figured one quote about piss might be enough. Jade goaded me into trying one more place and we ducked into a yard on the east side of the street. The narrow space abutted the backs of the low bars and I could see how cobbled together they were. Exhaust pipes jutted crookedly from their backs and the corrugated tin roofs were dented and dirty. Two women stood outside chatting.
    â€œI’m a reporter. Object to the bar street?”
    One of the women lit up. “Yes! The bars disturb us. People get drunk and
bang-bang
break bottles in the yard. There are lines on the sidewalk that mark out the areas that are supposed to be left clear. Foreigners aren’t like Chinese people when they get drunk. They don’t bother to follow therules. They piss all over the place. People sit with their legs hanging over the line,” she said, gathering steam. It was true. Though I didn’t piss all over the place, I did feel like none of the rules—Chinese ones or the ones I’d left behind at home—applied to me here. She went on, “What am I supposed to do when I walk by? Kick their leg? I’m not going to do that. Chinese people have a long history of civility and politeness.”
    Civility and politeness? Was she referring to the spitting on the ground and the slurping of soup and the pushing ahead of people in line and the talking with one’s mouth full and the telling people to their faces that they’re fat and the dropping of gnawed-down bones straight onto the ground and the clipping of fingernails in restaurants and the stubbing out of cigarettes in the remains of one’s meal that I had witnessed in China? Actually, those things were cultural differences, not rude at all, and they were what liberated me from feeling as though I had to follow the rules here.
    â€œPlus these bars are built on three pipes. Do you know how dangerous that is?”
    â€œThree pipes? What three pipes?”
    â€œSteam heat, gas, and water.