Beijing Bastard Read Free

imperious matriarch full of dissatisfactions she could communicate with a single look.
    When I dated a boy who resembled in my mom’s eyes a Hispanic drug dealer and whose radical leftist parents were getting a divorce because their open marriage was falling apart, my mom routinely hung up on him when he called our house, riffled through my journals seeking dirt, and once delivered a succinct four-word safe-sex talk to me:
Don’t ruin your life
. My parents sensed me going my own way and instead ofloosening their grasp, they tightened it. The “drug dealer” had actually been a straight-A student who eventually went to Harvard, though my mom had accurately sniffed out his beliefs in wanton drug use, free love, and Marxism. After my parents caught me alone at his house, something snapped in our relationship. Being Chinese was obviously the root of my problems, and so I began to hate all things Chinese, or what I imagined to be Chinese.
    I went off to a liberal arts college, where I became a leftist, a feminist, and a vegetarian; shaved my head; and veered off the doctor/lawyer trajectory into English and Women’s Studies. My parents insisted I go to the number-one-ranked liberal arts college, instead of to my first choice, Oberlin (ranked twenty, down from fourteen), which my dad likened to “marrying an alcoholic and going on a honeymoon on a sinking ship.” While I was away at college, he frequently sent me photocopies of Ann Landers columns that he found relevant to my life. One letter I particularly remember came from a dad who wrote in wondering how to deal with his daughter whom he characterized as “very smart but with no common sense.” “No common sense” my dad had highlighted in yellow and underlined twice in red. I too was an avid Ann Landers reader and my personal favorite column came from a young Asian-American woman who wrote in wondering how to deal with her parents who kept her under virtual house arrest. The letter had been signed, “Oppressed, Repressed and Depressed.” I clipped it out and taped it into my journal. I don’t remember what advice Ann Landers gave either of them, probably to seek counseling. But that wasn’t our way, to say our problems out loud to a total stranger.
    In short, the peace my parents had found in the suburbs was not mine to inherit. I didn’t feel as though I belonged there, or anywhere yet, and I itched to travel to exotic places far away to look for what was missing in my life.
    So I went to Sweden. I went in my junior year of college, taking a break from the manicured New Englandness of Williams College, but tomy dismay found it was even cleaner, colder, darker, and more orderly than the places I’d come from. The alienation I felt from my family seemed to extend to the rest of humanity and I spent most of my time watching films alone. One night I went to see a film purely because I had deciphered in its description the words
kinesisk rockstjärna
—Chinese rock star. There wasn’t much to
Beijing Bastards.
You could take a character from column A, put him or her in a setting from column B, and make him or her do something from column C, and you’d pretty much have it.
A
B
C
hooligans
concrete apartments
drinking
rock star Cui Jian
rock concerts
fucking
knocked-up girls
train tracks
cursing
    But the film opened an escape hatch into a world mirror opposite of the version of China I had grown up with, where we were all nerdy, overachieving droids with no errant desires of our own who lived out the script as it had been handed to us, marching through the Ivy Leagues into respectable professional careers.
    I had rarely put any thought into what contemporary China was like, and when I did, it took a huge mental leap to imagine the farmers and petty bureaucrats of my supposed motherland—even my own relatives seemed impossibly foreign. But to my surprise, I recognized myself in those characters