When development began in earnest in Beijing, migrants from around China flocked to the capital city for jobs of all sorts. There was money to be made and when young people did not pass their university entrance exams—or didn’t take them in the first place—they viewed Beijing as as good a place to make money as anywhere else in China. Xu Zechen sets his novel Beijing Sprawl in pre-Olympics Beijing on the outskirts of the city where four young men originally from a small town in Zhejiang province live and work.
High school dropout Muyu, the narrator, is only seventeen and has come to Beijing to work for his uncle, Thirty Thou Hong, which refers to the number thirty thousand. The uncle sells fake IDs under the auspices of a firm that handles seals and documents. Muyu and his friend Baolai work for Uncle Hong while their two roommates Xingjian and Miluo work for another man who also sells fake IDs.
We worked only at night, to avoid getting arrested. The squinty, watchful eyes of security guards and police officers were everywhere, and they’d nab whomever they could. They’d all be asleep by the small hours, though, even in the wealthy district of Zhongguancun. The two of us boldly wrote and stamped our message on walls, bus stops, overhead bridges, stairs, even on the street itself. Sanitation workers would wash away our words, and we’d rewrite them.
When they are not working, the friends can be found on the rooftop of their apartment building on the outskirts of Beijing, eating donkey burgers, playing the card game Ace of Spades, and talking about love and other coming of age issues. In that pre-moble phone age, they communicate with others mainly by pager.
Beijing Sprawl is a novel in stories, and each centers around a different adventure Muyu and his friends encounter. In the first, “Six-Eared Macaque”, Muyu’s friend Feng Nian jogs in his business suit to save time between his morning run and the start of his workday each morning.
Besides worrying about getting to work on time, Feng Nian is troubled by a reoccurring nightmare in which he’s a six-eared monkey with a tight chain around its neck. In this nightmare, the monkey Feng Nian feels increasingly strangled as its handler pulls on the chain.
The dream was always the same, with minor variations: If he rode a bicycle one night, he’d juggle the next, or do two or three tricks at once. The other difference was that he found it increasingly hard to catch his breath when waking up. Which is to say, he came slightly closer to strangling each night. He’d feel the handler sling him over his shoulder by the chain, like a bundle or a sack, a little more violently each time, which a little more force…Feng Nian was certain that if he didn’t wake up when he did, he’d surely stop breathing altogether.
As luck would have it, Feng Nian the person becomes betrothed to the daughter of a monkey handler back in Huajie, Zheijang, his hometown as well as that of Muyu and their other friends in Beijing. Feng Nian is already in his early thirties and it’s no longer socially acceptable for him to be single.
In “On the Rooftop”, the friends continue to play Ace of Spades and talk about the women they like. Baolai has his eyes on a particular woman in their neighborhood and tries to page her, to no avail. One night Muyu thinks he spots her as three rough-looking men try to apprehend her. Baolai tries to save her even though he cannot successfully take on these three bullies. Some of the other stories also show the ways in which the friends try to help others.
People like Muyu and his friends may seem invisible in a sprawling, modern city like Beijing, but Xu and translators Tiang and Abrahamsen show that they have as much of a pulse on the city as the more well-to-do characters more typical in novels and memoirs. As Muyu narrates later in the book:
The buildings in western Beijing are low to the ground. Life there was held low to the ground, too. From my elevated seat I felt I could see the whole world clearly.
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.