Free Beijing Bastard by Val Wang Page A

shampoo packets and stacked with cigarettes, broken bicycles leaning against walls, an old woman waddling at an unbelievably slow and steady pace, like a tortoise imbued with ancient knowledge withheld from us moderns. Most people in the old city were napping, it seemed, and the usual clang and push of the hutongs was gone. A flock of dark birds cut a swooping arc through the gray sky, the whistles attached to their legs emitting an eerie, inexplicable call like the wind wailing through an amplifier. The mournful sound seemed the very essence of Old Beijing.
    People don’t rush around like they do in America. You’ll love it there.
I wanted to trust Nainai—Beijing was her city and she did after all live ina place called Leisure World—but she obviously had a mistaken idea of who I really was. I actually liked rushing around, liked charging nervously down the hutong as if it were a street in New York, as if there were somewhere really important I had to be. I wore my only fall jacket: a puffy polyester Windbreaker in bright safety orange with wide shoulders and a tiny waist, sealed shut with a bold asymmetrical zipper and cheerfully festooned with three or four tiny zippered pockets of various sizes. A friend in New York had pressed the jacket on me, saying it made me look like the Bionic Woman, but I didn’t feel very bionic in the gray hutongs of Beijing, only garish and out of place.
    Bobo told me Nainai had been the
xiaohua’r,
the school beauty, and I imagined a young and beautiful version of the Nainai I knew strolling in this very hutong
.
These gray houses were the exact same houses she had gazed at, this air the same air she had breathed, albeit less noxiously polluted. It wasn’t hard to imagine her here in the people I saw on the street: a baby in a big bamboo stroller, one of a herd of schoolgirls giggling over some secret thing, a young woman holding hands with a young man. Her presence was palpable in the hutong as if all the years between us had collapsed. Suddenly I felt my body crisscross straight through hers like one water drop passing through another. Her city, my city. Goose bumps stippled my arms.
    I crossed Naoshikou Dajie and found myself walking through a clear, flat expanse of rubble that had been Bobo and Bomu’s old neighborhood. When I’d lived there last year, no landmarks or street signs had remained and I’d navigated my way home through the bombed-out neighborhood solely by the curves the hutongs made on the ground. I retraced those familiar curves now, meeting no one along the way. Even the children who had played in the heaps of stones and wood were gone. I came to what had been their front door.
    Poof! The house had vanished, leaving only a scattering of gray stones and the apple tree, its leafless arms lifted in a lonely and bewildered pose. The pain I came to experience stabbed me, clean as a knife between theribs. The demolition had flayed off the walls of the house, laying bare our most intimate spaces for the whole world to see. Vaguely able to discern the outline of the walls, I rebuilt the house in my mind: Here was the courtyard that surrounded the apple tree, here the living room, the kitchen, the room I had stayed in when I visited. But the house was slowly fading into thin air with each moment that passed.
    I was ready to cry, but I knew better than to make a scene in public, especially over a house I had lived in for only a week. How very Chinese-American of me to feel sappy about a past I had been told about in a fairy tale and, worse yet, to kind of enjoy the feeling. How did my relatives feel? They had lived here for more than fifty years.
    I didn’t linger long in the rubble. I walked north to the Avenue of Eternal Peace where the new office building had recently risen, all silvery and modern. It looked peculiar and out of place, not unlike myself, I suppose, and forced on me a nostalgia for what used to be here: a jagged row of