Free Beijing Bastard by Val Wang

dressing down. “I want kids today to feel ashamed, to feel pressure, to feel a crisis falling down on their heads. Chinese students are too shy. And China is too weak. The only way for them to learn English and for China to enter the world is to scream.” He had a plan for world domination starting with one thousand model families that would master one thousand English sentences. Eventually tens of thousands of families would be using Crazy School Bag, drinkingCrazy Cola, Crazy Mineral Water, Crazy Beer. Li leaned in to say, “They will be studying on my Internet, buying the refrigerator I suggest. I will be their godfather.”
    I faced Li Yang, silently wondering how this nerdy man was going to achieve his megalomaniacal dreams, but I could feel the eye of Zhang Yuan’s camera on me.
    After the event, we all—Zhang Yuan, his crew, Li Yang, Jade, and I—squeezed into Li’s Volkswagen Santana to go eat dinner. I was sandwiched in the backseat, almost sitting on Zhang Yuan’s lap. As we drove through dark, unfamiliar streets, I told them about the past month of living with my relatives in a courtyard house without a shower.
    â€œBut you have nothing to worry about,” I assured them. “I managed to get a shower yesterday.”
    â€œYou just showered, Zhenluo!” Zhang Yuan said, using my personal name impudently stripped of my family name, a practice reserved for close friends. “No wonder you smell so fresh!” His voice was deep and warm and slightly nasal, and I could feel his breath on my cheek. I looked at his face, inches away. Was he mocking me? Flirting with me?
    At dinner he sat next to me and continued in this jesting vein throughout the loud night of eating and drinking. To my surprise, he was nothing like the disaffected characters in his films and instead was the most charming and ebullient Chinese person I had ever met, with an ability to connect instantly with people, or at least with me. He seemed genuinely interested in hearing my stories about getting to know my long-lost relatives, but at the same time, his voice had a tease in it, like a line with a hook perpetually at the end of it, trying to reach me. The air at dinner was charged—Li Yang had the attention of a famous film director and a foreign journalist, Zhang Yuan and I had a good story on our hands and an oblique flirtation, and I was closing in on the future I’d dreamed of for so long. Talk zinged around the room like crazed bats and while Jade bantered easily, I struggled to keep up. I must have been easy to tease. Zhang Yuan said that he had a child on the way, and from that,I presumed the existence of a wife. His inaccessibility only increased his appeal.
    â€œI was interviewed the other day by this journalist, this sour woman with glasses . . . ,” Li Yang started saying, then saw me and apologized in embarrassment. I suddenly felt like the ugly duckling. I thought there was some sex appeal in the gap between my front teeth, my androgyny, and my skinniness. Except that in China, all the women were skinnier than me, none had short hair, and anyone who could afford them wore contacts.
    â€œI like women who wear glasses,” Zhang Yuan said with a funny crook in his voice, before taking my number.
    Later that night at home with my relatives, I told Xiao Peng that I had had dinner with his friend Zhang Yuan. He gave me an odd, unreadable look but said nothing.
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    There was one last thing I had to do before I moved out. I waited until Bobo and Bomu took their afternoon nap one Saturday and I set out for a walk. Though I knew what I would find, I went anyhow, the way you go to a funeral to confirm for your heart what your mind already knows.
    I hustled through the hutongs
,
past low purplish-gray walls, which are the outer hides of the courtyard houses. Gray walls, then an open red door, a small shop hung with strips of tiny