From October 2001 through October 2011, I wrote the back page column for that’s Beijing magazine and, when ownership changed, its successor publication, The Beijinger. The column was called “Ich Bin Ein Beijinger,” and while it was often satirical or humorous, I occasionally published more serious pieces. This is one of those — a short piece of fiction intended to be read as a parable about China and its relations with the outside world at a time when Beijing had already grown palpably more assertive, surly, and often quite frustrated in its relations with the U.S. in particular. It still works, I think, today.
I was traveling from Thursday to Tuesday, with four full days of that time spent driving back and forth between my home in North Carolina and Madison, Wisconsin, where I had to help my daughter move her stuff into storage and take her home to Chapel Hill. On those (rare) occasions when I’m unable to put out a new essay each week, I may occasionally republish something from the archive: pieces written for The China Project or for other publications. Back next week!
My next-door neighbor’s father and my father knew one another as boys, from the War years they spent together in Chongqing. On my first visit to Beijing in 1981, when we were both gangly teenagers, I remember sitting with Xiao Zhao at a tedious banquet in the Friendship Hotel. I can still hear him practicing English with me: “A cup of coffee,” he would say over and over again. About six years ago, we reconnected, and in 2009 he helped Fanfan and me get a great rental deal at our apartment, where he owns a unit next to ours. He had originally been renting it out, but a year or so ago, he sold his other apartment in Fengtai and moved in next door.
I like Zhao, though I’m not sure we could ever be close friends. It’s as much out of respect for him as out of obligation, or old family ties, or just plain neighborliness, that we’ve made him a part of our lives. He drops in often, and is unfailingly generous with appropriate holiday foods—mooncakes, sticky rice in lotus leaf, rice flour dumplings, what have you. He’s an engineer by training, and a talented one I gather, based on his exalted position at his company. Magazine pieces praise his business acumen and his work ethic. He’s also very good with his hands. Before he moved in, he worked night and day renovating the place top to bottom, and he’s justifiably proud of the efficient use of space in his design and the clever cabling, even if some of the fixtures and furnishings border on the ostentatious.
“My old neighborhood was very local,” he told me once as we surveyed his handiwork, “without all these foreigners around.” He paused, and smiled at me: “Did you imagine a Chinese could live like this 30 years ago?” he asked, pride and awkward status-consciousness both in evidence.
Zhao is either widowed or divorced. There’s evidence for both surmises, and I’ve not quite gotten up the nerve to ask him directly. He’s talked about his late (or ex-) wife before with me: he actually brings her up with some frequency, and it’s clear that he’s conflicted and still tormented by her. He’s by turns spiteful and warmly nostalgic when he speaks of her. In one breath, and with no awareness of any irony, he’ll wax admiringly about her deep knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine and laugh contemptuously about her superstition. Whatever happened between them, or whatever happened to her, it seems to have involved a foreigner. At times you’d think she ran off with one; at others, you’d be forgiven for thinking that she’d been raped and murdered by one.
A relation of his — an adult male cousin of his mysterious erstwhile wife, I’m given to believe — lives with Zhao. He’s stone-faced, with the erect posture of a military man. He’s almost freakishly muscular. In the early mornings, when we happen to share an elevator, he stares at himself in the mirror and flexes as we descend, completely unselfconsciously. He practices wushu in the commons outside the building. Many of the neighborhood boys stop on their way to school to watch, and some to imitate, this unsmiling man. He speaks no English and Zhao has intimated that he has no interest in, or particular liking for, the foreigners who live in our compound.
The problem with living next to Zhao is that the walls are thin, and we can hear Zhao when he disciplines his son—a not-infrequent occurrence. It’s painful to listen to, but I don’t know the full context and try not to judge him, but my own children hear it and recently in their games, Zhao shushu and his scary cousin, who can sometimes be heard loudly repeating Zhao’s chastisements, have become bogeymen. My foreigner neighbors certainly talk about it with me when we’re at the playground watching the kids, and they don’t shirk from the word “abuse.” One couple even knocked on the Zhaos’ door one night, and Zhao lost it, letting fly a torrent of invective we could hear with embarrassing clarity. The whole subject of parenting and the exercise of parental authority is now one that I’m loath to bring up with him. He can be very thin-skinned; I’ve learned that there are topics you simply don’t broach with him unless you’re ready to meet the pugnacious beast beneath that thin skin. As for Zhao’s 13-year-old son, he’s hard to read: He’s a high-achiever, plays violin well (thank God given the thin walls) and has always gotten into good schools, and while he’s unfailingly polite to me, I see the devil in that kid’s eyes — which I find myself thinking wouldn’t be there but for Zhao’s “tiger mother” parenting style.
Zhao’s interested in dating, he told me recently. He’s got some money, he’s dressing better, he’s been hitting the gym, and he’s trying to quit smoking. Zhao is plenty erudite. He can spend a whole evening talking history (as long as it’s China’s), or the finer points of Tang and Song poetry, or Dream of the Red Chamber, or Romance of the Three Kingdoms. This can, alas, get tedious at dinner parties when some of my expat friends are there, too — and it generally doesn’t help when I’m trying to set him up with a woman. He tells me he’s not at all interested in dating foreign women, but then he’s obviously resentful when they show no interest in him. Although he’s clearly a very proud man, and one of no mean accomplishment, somehow around women — Chinese or foreign alike — he simply fails to project confidence. He’s stiff, defensive, and shows none of the easy, often earthy humor that comes so naturally to him when it’s just us.
“Don’t try so hard,” I tell him. “Be yourself.”
“Actually,” he answers, “I’m being exactly myself.” And I worry that he’s right.