Beijing 2015 | Beer and women

In the beginning, my relationship with Xie Yi was based on beer and women.

Back then, foreigners weren't allowed to stay in the homes of average Chinese citizens. But Lily's father was a military officer.

As long as I behaved, everything should be fine.

We arrived after dark. Xie Yi pulled up to the front door of the building and I was discreetly ushered inside with my bags. There was no sense in taking any chances, of being seen. Xie Yi quickly sped off to his own apartment -- his work done for the night. He had safely delivered the visiting American journalist whom his sister had begun to date back in Los Angeles. He had his own life to manage.

Even as a teenager, Xie Yi had carried a sense of self-assuredness. Maybe it was being the son of a military officer, seeing his father enjoy a sense of entitlement few other shared. Maybe he assumed that entitlement was also his for the taking, handed down through his DNA. His voice was already low, with a street gruffness. He smoked cigarettes nonstop like most Chinese men and seemed to have a way of silently sizing people up, like I knew he was evaluating me. He had a well-built rock 'n' roller's body, the kind that would look good in a pair of black leather pants and tight T-shirt. When he walked, he didn't so much lift his feet, as glide.

After Xie Yi drove off, I walked inside his parent's apartment, a first-floor unit in a five-story building. It was one of the perks of being a military officer; the family didn't have to climb steps day after day -- in the humid heat of August and cold of January -- in a building without an elevator, or even lights in the stairwells. And like everyday Chinese, they didn't have to ask for permission for me to stay there.

The flat was Soviet-style, utilitarian: four rooms joined to a main entryway. Lily's parents slept in the largest; Yuyu in the second and the third, after Xie Yi's departure, had been converted to an American-style living room with furniture focused around a TV. There was a galley kitchen and no dining room. For meals, the family pulled out a table in YuYu's room and ate there. The kitchen smelled like vegetables and oil, a comfortable lived-in smell. On the walls was a calendar and pictures of Qing Dynasty maidens, their lips thinly painted, cheeks rouged. 

Later, when Xie Yi began to make his fortune, he would renovate his parent's flat. As curious neighbors looked on, the construction crews added features unknown to middle-class Chinese: handmade curtains with fabric imported from Europe, ornate chandeliers and crown molding from America. Nothing could be made in China which, to Xie Yi then, signified substandard craftsmanship. Even the nails were imported.

On the night of my arrival, I saw it there by the kitchen door; the gift Xie Yi had left for me. A case of 20-ounce bottles of popular Yang Jing beer. It was a small but significant gesture: I had barely met Xie Yi, but his gift was intended to make me feel at home. We couldn't speak one another's language, but we already had this in common: Men drank beer, no matter what country they came from.

I popped two in the freezer and later fell into a deep jet-lag and booze induced sleep.

The next morning, a Saturday, the beginning of my first full day in China, I awoke early -- as I always do arriving in the East after a long cross-Pacific flight. The apartment was quiet. I looked out the front window to find an entire world of Chinese enterprise: The entryway to the apartment building was commandeered by a vendor who sold vegetables and dumplings from a cart. Just across the way, another entrepreneur repaired things: he straightened bicycle pedals, fixed cooking pots that no longer closed properly, mended ripped clothing. If it was broke, he fixed it. In neighborhoods like this, with people eeking out life in government-sponsored housing, throwing repairable items away was not an option.

Young girls rode past on bicycles, mothers pulled along tottering babies; the backs of their onesies open to show their small bums, so they could squat to pee. It was the thrum of daily life in a culture so otherworldly to someone from the suburbs in Upstate New York. I wanted to dive into it, like a pool, to see if I could swim -- or at least try out a few Mandarin phrases I'd learned. I threw on some clothes and stepped outside.

People stared, the way they always did back then. Even so many years after Mao's death and the so-called opening of the Middle Kingdom to the outside world, average Chinese saw few foreigners -- especially not here, in a traditional neighborhood. A few days later, I stood on a corner near the Shanghai train station with a swarthy man about half my size gawking up at me. It had been a long overnight train ride, and I was cranky.

I peered down at him and he up at me. A silent standoff.

I turned to Lily.

"What does he want?

She translated his response.

"I just want to look at you."

In 1995, that first summer in Beijing, I stayed with Lily's parents in their flat in one of the city's traditional neighborhoods, a collection of apartment buildings organized along tree-lined streets a few miles southwest of Tiananmen Square. The community was overseen by a low-level Communist Party operative who kept an office in a small building at the front gate, near a commercial drag crowded with dumpling shops and restaurants selling Peking Duck. Each day he eyed his domain, gauging everyone who came and went. Who belonged. Who didn't.

The people in the neighborhood wanted to look as well. In my own brazen Western way, I stepped up to introduce myself. I got in people's faces. "Ni hao! Wo shi Mei guo ren!" Hello, I'm an American.

A small crowd gathered. Shy at first, people responded. I was very tall. I had a big nose. They said a lot of things I didn't understand.

Just then, YuYu looked out the window and turned to her sister.

"He's outside."

A scramble ensued. I was given the Vaudevillian hook, quickly returned to the apartment, scolded that I was not to venture outside without someone knowing. Lily's father was taking a risk; didn't I get it?

For days afterward, whenever we ventured out, I would leave first; hustling, head down, eyes straight ahead, outside the neighborhood gate and past the gaze of the Party functionary, where I would meet up on the street nearby with Lily and her sister.

Years later, in 2001, when I brought my parents to Beijing, we pulled the same stunt on our first morning at the apartment: We rose early and, as the family slept, ventured outside. I was anxious to show off this strange new kingdom first-hand. Lily and me were married by then; I was now somehow part of this culture. I had a Chinese wife.

From the start, things did not go well.

Within minutes, the Party hack approached us as we stood outside the building entry way, watching the morning commotion. He asked my name. Who were we staying with? What was his name again?" He took out a small notebook. Lily emerged from the apartment, just in time. There were a few tense pleasantries and we three were immediately ushered back inside. Would I ever learn?

On that first trip, I became the butt of jokes with Lily and her sister. My Chinese so bad, my willingness to learn, despite my obvious linguistic limitations, so high, that I was an easy mark. The girls taught me a few new phrases. I knew I was being had, but went along with the gag.

We would be eating with friends and the girls would urge me. Say it, say it.

I hardly needed prompting.

"Zhu-ti-er. Zhu-yi-ba-er. Zhu-zhua-er."

Pig's tail. Pig's feet. Pig's knuckles."

People burst into laughter. I acted like I didn't know that I was reciting what was seen by my audience as a fool's rhyme. Hey, it's one of the first tenets of comedy: Anything for a laugh.

I eventually developed my own comedic schtick. Whenever we were on the street, at bus stations or tourist haunts, the saleswomen would head right for me, the supposed rich foreigner, pushing their trinkets and wares into my face.

I quickly concocted a phrase I used as my defense, one that stopped them in their tracks.

"Bu-yao. Bu-hao. Bu-dong. Mei-you-qian."

"Don't want. No good. Don't understand. Don't have any money."

On that trip, I got to observe Xie Yi and his place within the family -- like that of a little prince. He had rebelled early, dodging school, earning a reputation as a young hooligan. His father beat him, but to no avail. Along the way, he developed a firm set of street smarts. His goal: make money. His father, seeing that his now-grown son was following the country's new path toward capitalism, sat back and let him go, as if to say: Let's see what he can do. If he fails, then he'll listen.

With his two older sisters, Xie Yi also held sway. The night after my arrival, he threw a small dinner party at his parent's place to which he invited several male cronies. He want out and splurged, buying cases of beer and bottles of "bi-jou," a white-hot Chinese liquor that burned the throat, along with expensive fish and shrimp. It was my first insight into the relationships between the sexes: All of Xie Yi's four friends brought dates; not their wives, but girlfriends.

I questioned Lily. Did she know the wives? She did? Then how could she just sit there and act as though everything was OK?

Her response was one I would hear again and again in China: the act of accepting what you cannot change.

"Mei-ban-fa," she said. "What can I do about it?"

Later, drunk after way too many large bottles of beer, Xie Yi stayed at the apartment after his friends left. I went to sleep, allowing Lily some private time with her brother. The next morning I learned that he had been angry with her. That evening, at the party, he had watched her peel a shrimp for me, while ignoring him.

"It's not right," he said drunkenly. "You will have many boyfriends. But you only have one brother."

His jealousy soon faded, once he got to know me. For the rest of that trip and on succeeding visits, we fell into an easy rhythm. In a group, we relied on Lily to translate. But left alone, we struggled to converse in our own limited way, mainly hand gestures and stammering until we put across some simple point. 

Xie Yi saw how I was transfixed by the lithesome Chinese women we'd pass on the street. He'd watch me gawk and laugh. One day, on a trip to the Great Wall, we stopped for dumplings. Xie Yi hopped out of the van and I followed. A woman passed. My head turned. Xie Yi smiled and confided in English. "Young girl. Good."

A bond was forged.

The sisters would laugh, saying they could read our minds as Xie Yi and me walked down the street together: I was girl-gawking. He was thinking about how to make his first million dollars. And it was true.

But Xie Yi and I differed on almost everything to do with women. He liked city girls; tall, slender ones. I preferred  their country cousins -- girls of good agrarian stock, much shorter but often with more shapely bodies. They were also friendlier than the more distant urbanites, many of them from families who had lived in Beijing for generations.

In China, city dwellers still look down those from the countryside, whom they refer to as "nong-min," or bumpkins.

I once saw Xie Yi and his friends ogling a Playboy magazine. To them, any woman with blond hair, whether European or American, was a goddess. I teased them, saying they had the most beautiful women on the planet right here under their noses. American women were selfish, I said. They would never go for a Chinese man. So why bother lusting over what you can't have?

But I knew why they did. I was doing the same thing every day on the streets of Beijing.

For Xie Yi, the idea of true beauty continued to come in tall packages. It was a preference that would one day complicate his life.