Beijing Bastard Read Free Page A

on-screen and, through them, the filmmaker who had created them. I was young and alienated too, also drifting without narrative, and like the filmmaker, I just wanted to find a way to get the moment down on paper—by writing, by filming, by any means necessary.
    Back in the States, I stumbled across an article about the “Sixth Generation” of filmmakers in China who shot gritty underground films in Beijing, including the director of
Beijing Bastards,
Zhang Yuan. Thefilmmakers had even written a manifesto that declared their aim: “To present a more truthful and more expansive document on the life of the Chinese people.” After making
Beijing Bastards,
Zhang Yuan was labeled a disseminator of “spiritual pollution” and the government banned him from making feature films. To avoid censorship, the Sixth Generation directors all made films without official permission, funded mostly by Europeans and screened only outside of China, mostly in Europe.
    These filmmakers became my heroes. I wanted to meet them. I wanted to make films like them. I liked the way that having a camera in my hand gave me an excuse to poke into people’s lives and go where I wasn’t sure I was welcome. Everyone I knew in New York was starting to shoot their own documentaries with these affordable new digital video cameras.
    When Nainai’s older sister offered up her apartment in New York to her relatives the summer before my senior year, I eagerly took her offer. It was a rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side where Great-Aunt Mabel had raised her family after they immigrated to the States more than forty years before. The lease was in the name of a Chinese man long dead; the rent was two hundred and seventy-three dollars a month plus the cost of an anonymous cashier’s check. She was moving to Seattle to be near her son Johnny. I planned to live there that summer while interning at a publishing house and then move back after graduating, but without notice she “sold” the apartment to a perfect stranger for a thousand dollars. Having robbed me of my ancestral rent-controlled birthright, Great-Aunt Mabel then had me live with this person, her false heir—a horsy Chinese-American woman with an ugly boyfriend and a bad temper—for the entire summer and instructed us to tell anyone who asked that we were her granddaughters.
    After graduating, moving back to New York was the logical next step, but I balked. Without my rent-controlled apartment, the future seemed like a terrifying void of boring office jobs and unfulfilled dreams. Even finding overpriced housing was deathly cutthroat. I’d heard a storyof a friend of a friend who’d had to resort to desperate measures: She had an inside person working at
The
Village Voice
who would call her before the paper went to press and whisper to her the details of apartments for rent, and I didn’t know anyone at
The Village Voice
. Plus, I’d lived in New York long enough to know that the city was just like a guy I was dating there: shiny and mesmeric as mercury and just as elusive. Slipping away right as I reached for it. I longed to be somewhere I could touch and be touched by.
    Around this time I read
Things,
a novel by Georges Perec about a young couple that decamps from their blissful life in Paris and moves to Sfax, an obscure seaside city in Tunisia because—as I carefully copied into my journal—because Paris had become “a shrunken universe, a world running out of steam, opening onto nothing.” It was exactly how I saw life in New York unfolding if I moved there. Perec went on: “Puns, boozing, walks in the woods, dinner parties, endless discussions about films, plans, gossip had long stood in for adventure, history and truth.”
    Adventure, history, and truth. I liked the sound of that.
    Suddenly, I knew beyond a doubt what I was meant to do: Go to Beijing, find the filmmakers, and make a