Free Beijing Bastard by Val Wang Page B

one-story restaurants and shops, smells of buns steaming and oil frying, noisy, pushy crowds of shoppers, nothing special at the time. Now fewer people passed by and there were no sounds but the inane roar and beep of cars passing on the wide avenue. Bobo and Bomu’s demolished neighborhood was hidden behind the building and the knife in my ribs twisted suddenly: The house was really gone. Within the year, the ruins would be cleared and paved over, the apple tree gone forever, and the land my family had lived on for so long would be a parking lot for this building.
A parking lot.
Could it be any more clichéd? I took out my journal and vindictively wrote down the name of the building: the Beijing International Financial Center.
    I sat down by the entrance to an underpass and watched the fountains for the building being tested. Plumes bobbed up and down with frustrated jerks. I picked at a splitting seam on the sleeve of my orange jacket and pulled out some fluffy white ticking. As I let it fly away on the wind, I felt an unexpected stab of belonging to the house. Standing before this monstrous building with its vacant eyes, I wanted to tell the story of our houses. Who else would?
    I thought of all the gossip about my family’s courtyard houses I’d gathered in the past few weeks, mostly in the afternoons when Bobo napped and Bomu swept in circles, the air sparkling with dust motes. She told me that of course they had wanted to live in Great-Aunt Mabel’s pristine new courtyard house, but when it didn’t happen, they had acquired an apartment in the suburbs and traded it for another quarter of Xiao Peng’s small house. He had had only a quarter of it because years ago Bobo’s father had gambled away the other three-fourths of it. Not only had he been a gambler, but he’d also been a bigamist and there had been a lot of drama about which one of his two wives would inherit the remaining quarter of his house. The stories went on and on, full of betrayals and dashed hopes, our family ties bound and unbound through the houses.
    I’d also found out more about Nainai’s courtyard house. When Yeye and Nainai had fled in 1949, they’d entrusted the house to Nainai’s only brother, Bobo’s dad. The Communist government eventually took control of the house during the Cultural Revolution and started assigning families to live in the different rooms, ten in all. Even though the house had been legally returned to Yeye and Nainai, the families were still living there. Bobo had been taking care of the house since his father’s death, and if Nainai got a new house, I was sure Bobo and Bomu wanted to move in. I imagined living there myself. I was a pawn in a game of musical chairs much larger and older than myself.
    Several men in baggy suit jackets and mismatched pants stopped their bikes nearby, mesmerized too by the irregular bobbing of the fountains. Their faces were tanned and lined and their hair gray with dust; they had clearly come from the countryside to work on construction projects in the city. The clumsy slapstick of the plumes made me sad for what had been destroyed but I suddenly wondered if they saw the opposite: the extravagant promises of the future, majesty just practicing her steps. It was getting late and I looked at my wrist to find the time, forgetting that the day before I’d dropped my mom’s old watch on the hard tile floor of the courtyard house and the hands had stopped. Nothing I didwould make them start again. It was probably time to go home but I watched the fountains long after the workers left, partly to mourn the loss of Old Beijing and partly, truth be told, to avoid going back to the suffocating old courtyard house.
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    That weekend, I climbed into the passenger seat of a dinged-up yellow breadbox van, slammed the flimsy door shut, and told the cabbie, “To Maizidian!” I looked out the side