Both are amazingly true about THIS books title and the cover. Based on both I feel I must get my hands on it and read it cover to cover, with hopes that the story is good, but we'll get to that later. Firstly, the title is Beijing Bastard! And lastly, here's the cover. Take a few minutes to enjoy all it's nuances then read on to get an exclusive interview with the Author, Val Wang, as well as a synopsis of the book.
A Conversation with Val Wang, author of BEIJING BASTARD
What inspired you to write this book?
From the moment I arrived in Beijing, the city as I found it, as it had been for decades and even centuries, was in the process of disappearing. I lived for my first month with relatives I barely knew in a courtyard house in the old city and it gave me both a unique vantage point onto the city and an instant emotional attachment to it. The city was at a special moment in its history and there was an urgency to capture it before it vanished beneath the wrecking ball. But as the city was disappearing, another city was emerging and in this moment of transition, people seized the opportunity to create new lives and identities, and I wanted to document this as well. Young expats, artists from the provinces, entrepreneurs, we all both feared and thrived on the uncertainty.
What made you decide to go to China? How did your family react?
While many people assume I went to China to “search for my roots,” the truth was quite the opposite. I went to China as an act of rebellion, to make a life for myself far away from the stifling expectations of my family and to somehow turn myself into an artist. Chinese, unfortunately, was the only foreign language I spoke! The irony that I went to China to make that new life is not lost on me.
My parents weren’t happy at all. They thought I was throwing away my top-notch education and all the opportunities it afforded me in the States. To them, moving to China was a step backward into a past they’d worked so hard to leave behind. I can see now that part of it was their fear of opening the wounds of their own exile and immigration. Me living there forced them to confront their relationship with China and in the end, allowed them to forge a new, hopefully positive relationship with it.
What do you find is the most common misconception Americans have about China? Why do you think that is?
You wouldn’t believe how many people tell me that they find China “mysterious.” This is a very old idea about China, about the East, that it is an Other, a foil for how the West would like to see itself – rational and knowable. This idea of China as the Other seems to have special currency now that the country’s ascent threatens America’s dominance in the world. But really, Chinese people are just like you and me, they experience the same yearnings, fears and other assorted human emotions.
How did your upbringing prepare – or not prepare – you for what you found in China? How did living with your family at the beginning of your time in China set up your time in Beijing?
Growing up in a Chinese immigrant household gave me the language skills and basic level of cultural understanding to make China feel somewhat familiar and navigable when I arrived. But I pretty soon realized that the immigrant version of China I’d grown up with wasn’t the same as China itself, which felt foreign. I’ve heard it said that immigrant communities tend to preserve the values and ideas that are actually in flux back in the “old country.” This was especially true for China, which was in a state of upheaval when I got there. I thought I’d find this really uptight place but instead I found somewhere wild and chaotic, and just to my liking.
Living with my family in a courtyard house gave me a very visceral attachment to the old city and made the costs of modernization very personal to me, right from the start. I felt like I had a stake in how the city developed. It also let me know that my intention to move to China to get far away from my family and their Confucian psychodramas was not going to happen in the way I’d planned. I’d moved to the wrong place to do that!
What drew you to the contemporary Chinese artists and what did they have to say about China?
To me the artists symbolized freedom. To see people living in a repressive society and finding a way to say what they wanted, how they wanted, was inspiring. Plus, living in China was disorienting and it was hard to trust any stories, either from the state-run media or the Western press. Artists got to tell the truth, their truth, about how they saw China and the world. Visual artists expressed the alienation that many people in China were feeling, especially young people. Documentary filmmakers told stories about how modernization was radically altering intimate relationships. Their insights helped me to decode what was going on in China and in turn taught me how to craft my own vision of the country and the world. In many ways they became my surrogate parents who told me it was okay, even good, to be an artist.
Beijing is a character in this book – how would you describe its personality and are there character traits that have survived the successive waves of modernization?
Beijing to me is a stubborn granny, loquacious and full of complaints, sitting on a tiny stool watching the world go by and gossiping with her friends. I imagine that during the time I lived there she started exporting knock-off Ming Dynasty furniture, and in the years since I left she has taken up hip-hop dance and started her own local troupe that tours the region. The tiny-stool days are in the past for her, but her equanimity and her resilience are not.
Have you been back to China since you left? What were your impressions? Do you keep up with the people in your book?
I’ve been back a number of times. The first few times were pretty miserable – there were whole swathes of the city that I didn’t recognize, and didn’t particularly like, and I was still grieving about being gone. But when I went back for the summer in 2008 to work during the Olympics I was finally able to accept that China was going to keep changing, and that I could have a part in it if I was willing to accept that nothing there could be counted on to stay the same. China is more a part of the world now and the rise of capitalism has raised the overall standard of living, but for all of the gains, there are also losses, often of intangibles. Many of my Chinese friends in the city complain that their lives that revolve around work and money feel empty and that no one has the time to hang out with friends anymore, all of which sound suspiciously like the complaints of friends in New York or other large metropolises around the world.
I keep up with most of the people in my book, though one notable exception is my filmmaker friend Yang Lina, who’s gone through tough times since I left and who even mutual friends can’t find. I am still in touch especially with my family, though of course I don’t call them as much as I should. In fact, I owe Bobo, my uncle, a call this week. I’ve got to remember to do that.
Rebelling against parental expectations is a major storyline of your book. Now that you are a parent, how do you think you will raise your children? What do you hope their relationship with China is?
My time in China was a paradox: I went to rebel against my past but of course the harder you run from something, the harder it chases you, and I ended up having to look questions of family and expectation and disappointment in the face. Parenting is full of similar ironies: I resented going to Chinese School every Sunday growing up but now I’m sending my sons to a Mandarin-immersion day care. I tell myself that the difference now is that it’s possible for my children to go back and forth. I plan to take them soon to visit China so they can begin a relationship with the place, which I hope they’ll want to continue on their own as they get older. I hope to raise them with less rigid expectations than my parents had for me but maybe everyone needs to rebel against their parents, at least a little?
What do you hope readers will take away from reading Beijing Bastard?
I hope readers feel like they’ve gone on an epic, swashbuckling journey through turn of the century Beijing, from doomed courtyard houses in the center of the old city through underground art exhibitions on the fringe, meeting along the way a fascinating and funny selection of its residents they had no idea even existed, like a People’s Liberation Army dancer turned avant-garde documentary filmmaker, all seen through the eyes of a young Chinese-American woman trying to find her wings and fly while weighted down by 5,000 years of Chinese history and the expectations of anxious immigrant parents back home. That’s all I want.
Synopsis:
A humorous and moving coming-of-age story that brings a unique, not-quite-outsider’s perspective to China’s shift from ancient empire to modern superpower
Raised in a strict Chinese-American household in the suburbs, Val Wang dutifully got good grades, took piano lessons, and performed in a Chinese dance troupe—until she shaved her head and became a leftist, the stuff of many teenage rebellions. But Val’s true mutiny was when she moved to China, the land her parents had fled before the Communist takeover in 1949.
Val arrives in Beijing in 1998 expecting to find freedom but instead lives in the old city with her traditional relatives, who wake her at dawn with the sound of a state-run television program playing next to her cot, make a running joke of how much she eats, and monitor her every move. But outside, she soon discovers a city rebelling against its roots just as she is, struggling too to find a new, modern identity. Rickshaws make way for taxicabs, skyscrapers replace hutong courtyard houses, and Beijing prepares to make its debut on the world stage with the 2008 Olympics. And in the gritty outskirts of the city where she moves, a thriving avant-garde subculture is making art out of the chaos. Val plunges into the city’s dizzying culture and nightlife and begins shooting a documentary, about a Peking Opera family who is witnessing the death of their traditional art.
Brilliantly observed and winningly told, Beijing Bastard is a compelling story of a young woman finding her place in the world and of China, as its ancient past gives way to a dazzling but uncertain future.
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