Building 46

By Massoud Hayoun

Building 46 draws its reader into the darkest, quietest spaces of China's vast capital. Set just before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this queer coming-out-and-of-age story explores the interplay between so-called Eastern and Western superpowers, between humans and halls of power, and between light and dark. It is a love letter to Beijing. It is an expression of love for its intellectuals, its imams, its waitresses, its foreigners, its wanderers, its middle-aged moms, its shadow men, its DVD bootleggers, its migrant labourers. It is a love letter to a people very different to their mono-dimensional portrayals in foreign correspondence. From the author of the award-winning and critically acclaimed nonfiction book When We Were Arabs comes a stunning, poetic fiction debut that aims to decentralise and destabilise the status quos of the anglophone book industry, to make room for a new and a fresh cannon of enthralling, delightful, and consciously political writing for an emerging and indignant generation of readers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darf Publishers
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781850773467

Book preview

Prologue

序幕

What happened in the dark quiet is up for interpretation. As with Chinese-English interpretation and its reverse, the best I can do for you are words approximating the full truth. You’ll have to take yourself the rest of the way.

First, you ought to know that Beijing is the world. A crush of people from far afoot, so vast and frenzied, pushed together so closely that the city lays bare the best and worst of people. That night, there were people from across China and around the globe, colliding in the breathtaking sea of human flesh that is the Xizhimen subway transfer, a station vast and overwhelming as transportation hubs in similarly crowded places like Cairo, Mexico City, and New York.

That night, in an alley far from Tiananmen Square, the Haidian District universities, the Chaoyang District bars, and Beijing’s other centres of gravity, you would have found it impossible to recognise the neighbourhood in question as a suburb of the Chinese capital. What’s more, there was a remarkable absence for miles around of the hubbub that once gave Beijing its shape. Even as the Olympics seemed to disappear that of Beijing which had been especially human — as it seemed to hush and polish away the loud, warm embrace the city had once been — this little corner of Beijing that is the focus of our attentions seemed to remain the same. Unruly. A question mark of a place, deceptively ordinary and peaceful. A perfect place for things to go unseen, unheard. Innocent-looking, it could have been the more shadowy corners of Central Park or Meiji Shrine or any such borderland between urban sprawl and the wilderness, the spaces where nature and its lovers have resisted asphalt. But that night, something obscured and jolting happened there.

In the calm of that Beijing suburb, nestled in an alley down the side of a small restaurant after closing was a little sedan. If the frenzy in that car startled, it was because it began not with a fracas but an exchange of placid, little platitudes between the driver and the passenger.

It’s hard to know whether what happened in that small vehicle was an act of love or violence, likely because that love or violence was shrouded in an unusual absence of light in an otherwise well-lit city. There were lamp posts a quarter-ofa-mile away in either direction along the road on which the restaurant was perched, and the alleyway, where customers were meant to park, stretched into the gloom just to the left of the establishment. So you would have needed some sort of special sight to see that there were two people sitting beside each other in that car, in one of the quieter zones of Beijing’s outskirts.

From outside the car, I am uncertain whether you, as an outsider, would have heard the banter that preceded the frenzy. Some cars seem to block out surrounding noise and keep quiet conversations in, which would have been welcome in Beijing, at that point constantly under construction. It was a decent car — a far cry from some of the dusty tin pickup trucks that ferried migrant labourers in and out of the capital’s centre, where they were busily building large stadiums on the ash heaps of what had been known to its admirers as Old Beijing.

Perhaps to have heard how things went down in the car would not have helped us to arrive at an accurate interpretation of events. Great pleasure and great pain sound the same. Ultimately, both feelings inspire cries in people — gusts of breath. If you possessed some sort of occult power of voyeurism, you would have been startled by the way one of the two people in the car pounced on the other. If you were an especially empathetic person, you would have heard the beating of their pulses ringing in your ears. You would have seen a decisive thrust, but even as a fly perched on the dashboard, you would have been hard-pressed to determine whether it had come from the person above or from the person below, perhaps then as a sort of self-defence. All you would have seen would have been the contorted look on one of their faces as a shock gripped the heart.

The rest would have been unclear to you, even as a nonparticipant in the car, because it had come to pass in the most intimate space between two bodies that had gravely misunderstood each other.

In Beijing, it is difficult to find the dark quiet that made this sort of embrace — if it could be called that — possible. The unusual silence of a sedan parked down an alleyway, off of a dark suburban road. It was as though whatever happened in that vehicle had been planned for a very long time. Maybe from the moment the driver and passenger had met, one or both had been quietly plotting this.

To better interpret exactly what happened, we must shift our focus to another space that like the alley was exceptionally dark and quiet — also with a few remarkable exceptions.

1. Ping Pong Room

乓球厅

From the moment Sam Saadoun first passed the ping pong room of Building 46 in autumn 2007, he was intrigued by it. He had passed it when he first arrived at the Grand Hall of Building 46 to register for class. At that point, he noticed the ping pong room’s strange doors, the peculiar darkness behind them. But then he quickly forgot the ping pong room, until he found himself taken with and by it. Even as Sam sat, one of the two bodies in the small car in an exceptionally dark and quiet Beijing alleyway, part of him would remain locked in the bowels of Building 46.

The ping pong room of Building 46 is located in its basement, down two flights of stairs, past two separate doorways, the first with a flimsy set of saloon-style swinging doors, then down the flights of stairs, a single sturdy metal door leading to it. A thick damp in the air down in the ping pong room muffles some sound, like a hand firmly clasped over the mouth. But does it drown it out entirely? No. Even a gagged mouth makes a humming noise. Try it.

If you did hear the sound of the ping pong room, down in the basement of Building 46 — assuming there is sound there, on occasion — what would you hear? Would it be the clack, clack, clack of wooden paddles hitting a small plastic ball? Would you hear people calling scores? Or would you hear people settling scores — people hidden from view? No one seemed to know for certain, back when Sam found himself asking. Still, the question bears asking.

The ping pong room was removed from the frenzy of activity in Building 46 and, beyond it, Beijing. That is to say, the ping pong room is a singular quiet place in one of the world’s most eternally awake cities. Would you hear a cry coming from the ping pong room, if you passed by it on the ground level? What sort of cry might you hear? When people play passionate, physically exhausting tennis on TV — even just table tennis — they seem to let out absurd cries, like little bursts of breath that sound alternatively like terror and orgasms. Building 46 had, of course, seen its share of sex; it was infamous for it among the more prudish people at 伟大大学 - Wei Da Da Xue - Wei Da University, where the building was located. Agony and ecstasy sound so similar. Which might you hear, if you could hear the sounds of the ping pong room?

What’s more, if you are an especially curious person, would it be possible for you to welcome someone down to the ping pong room — the 乓球厅 - pang qiu ting, as it was called in Chinese — and play a round against the bare concrete walls, so you could listen to what human life sounds like down there, as heard from the ground level of Building 46? Would anyone you know — anyone normal — agree to go down there, alone? Worse yet, if you asked the wrong person to help you hear such sounds, if such a thing is possible, would they inform a higher-up who would put some sort of block — a physical barrier or an actionable rule — between you and the ping pong room for good, to be certain you’d never know the answers to these questions?

I may as well just ask: Would you go down to the ping pong room so I could hear the sound of it? I’ll understand if not. But what if I went down with you?

Building 46 was typically abuzz with activity around the clock, but that was not immediately apparent to its own inhabitants. The building was constructed in such a way that each of its many moving parts were sequestered from each other. You could not hear what transpired in the building’s little restaurant from the dorm rooms, and you could not hear what was happening in the classrooms from the ping pong room. And yet there was quite a lot happening throughout the building, always. With the exception of birth itself, all of life’s stages seemed to transpire in Building 46, which was for the most part comprised of foreigner dorms. The dorms were a veritable petrie dish of human bacteria. Late at night, the foreign students would ascend to their rooms — often drunk, according to the staff’s accounts of the debauchery that the university had welcomed from outside China. And there, in their rooms, very modest affairs with no heat to fight the blistering winds from the Gobi Desert and certainly no air-conditioning to cure them of their bodies’ natural embarrassments, they would loudly copulate, as the campus staff would tell it, often in hushed tones, with the exaggerated oratory peaks and valleys of Beijing radio theatre. And then the foreigners would shower — often together, the campus staff was sure to note — in communal showers made of asphalt and corroded metal.

On the exterior, Building 46 looked like a caricature of a low-level Soviet government building. Eight storeys tall. Windows dotted an unadorned block-style building that wrapped around a large patch of grass with signs forbidding people from treading on it that no one, Chinese or foreign, obeyed. On either side of the grass, the building’s arms extended, so that viewed from the front, it seemed Building 46 would pick you up and put you in one of the cubbies behind the little windows. The architecture of this building could make you feel insignificant and oppressed or inspire you to feelings of belonging that could cure the loneliness of the absolute capitalism you’d known in your own country. You could become one of the many sequestered parts of Building 46, in the frenzied Charleston of human bacterial exchange happening there.

In the frequent nighttime power outages of Building 46, in the dead of night, you could see flashlights moving from room to room, from outside on the grassy field below or from your spot in one of the embracing arms of the building.

Through the building’s entrance was a spacious hall with a small office for the building attendants and a janitor’s closet. Flanking those rooms were a series of large Chinese flags and Wei Da University’s own standards, laying limp among a few folded chairs, abandoned, awaiting a grand occasion that never seemed to present itself but that remained forever just out of reach in the minds of Wei Da University administrators. Nearly all of those administrators were, of course, Party members, and all of those Party members tried at least to appear more or less purposeful in their approach to the future.

Past that first foyer was a broad staircase that led to the upper floors. Behind that staircase on either side, the building continued, a long narrow corridor that was typically empty of activity. The back part of the building had its own entrances — each part of the building could be reached without passing through that corridor, and people seemed naturally inclined to avoid it. That is perhaps because it was especially dark in the corridor, even in the daylight. There was only just enough sunlight to turn the corridor a cool periwinkle in the summer at midday. There were no windows. And no security cameras.

Toward the end of the corridor were the two dilapidated swinging doors that did not extend from roof to floor, two withered planks of wood on hinges replacing what had likely been a regular door. These two saloon doors were held together with a piece of wire through some makeshift holes. Past those doors and down two flights of stairs and then behind the heavy metal door was the ping pong room that is the object of our wonderment.

Behind the corridor, still on the ground level, past the odd doors leading to the ping pong room was the Grand Hall of Building 46, where the university’s Department of Foreign Students of Chinese held orientation, registration events, and placement testing. In a corner of the Grand Hall was the small restaurant. That door looked a bit like a utility closet. There was another, more clearly marked entrance to the restaurant on the building’s exterior.

Up the stairs before the isolated corridor were the students’ rooms, and at the centre of each floor, flanked by dorm rooms on either side, there were classrooms. There were also administrative offices tucked into odd corners of the building and the offices of some professors, not just in the Department of Foreign Students of Chinese, but regular Wei Da instructors whose own departments had put their offices there, either due to lack of space in the relevant departments or as a sign that they were, for any number of reasons, losing at the rat race that Wei Da was for teachers and students alike.

The Department of Foreign Students of the Chinese Language was a bit of a joke. The engineers, for instance, frequently suggested that enemies transfer to the Department of Foreign Students as an attack on one’s character. Any Chinese speaker can teach Chinese, was their meaning. They of course ignored that the instructors there had devoted years and great effort to learning pedagogical methods and contemplating the structure of a language that the engineers considered a mere vehicle to convey their own science. But the engineers were not totally wrong; Chinese classes for foreigners lasted for four hours a day at most, unless students opted to do more schoolwork that was unlikely to translate to credits in their home countries, unless they came from places like Singapore and Pakistan, where China was well-respected. That is to say, universities in the so-called West were unlikely at the time to accept Chinese credits, even from a top university.

It was quite remarkable to the foreign students themselves how they had applied to study at the increasingly world-renowned Wei Da University only to find themselves sequestered to its Western-most edge, in a sort of half-humorous symbolism. Many of the students who could afford it lived closer to the bars in the university district. There were students from around the world living in the dorms at Building 46. There were Koreans, Japanese, Spaniards, Senegalese, Cameroonians, Pakistanis, French, two Swedish sisters, a Tunisian. The vast majority of Wei Da’s many American study abroad students lived not at Building 46, but a 15-minute walk from campus, in a gigantic luxury apartment complex called Dai Er Fu - 代二富 that had a Subway Sandwich, a 7-Eleven, a McDonald’s, and a coffeehouse that served American-style breakfasts called Honeybib.

It was astounding to Chinese people — instructors, building staff, and others — how many of the students who lived in Building 46 had sequestered themselves from what was happening around them. For instance, many foreign students ordered delivery from a nearby 24-hour McDonald’s, totally unaware of the little late-night restaurant on the ground floor. But their obliviousness was not the students’ fault, entirely; they had been blissfully unaware of the realities transpiring in Building 46’s other sequestered parts.

The students were also distracted by the luxuries of their situation. The exchange rate for students from well-to-do countries was favourable at that time, before the internationalisation of the yuan, at the moment just ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and China’s foray into the wild world of soft power once monopolised by Hollywood, a foray bedazzled with pomp and spectacle. You could come from a bourgeois American family and buy an outfit a day for $5 in Beijing. You could go to a fancy restaurant in the Chaoyang foreigner district and order a bit of everything for $20. For middle-class foreign students for whom money was suddenly little or no object, few slowed their roll long enough to play ping pong in the ping pong room — or to at least go down there and try.

If they did go down to the ping pong room, its peculiar blackness would soon elicit a great many questions. For instance: What if the blackness there was a kind of all-consuming love? What if everything we’ve been taught about the dark is a lie? What if it’s the light that should be terrifying? What if terror is a kind of joy?

We’re taught — in our engendering toward capitalist pragmatism in the so-called West and our engendering toward socialist realism in China — that magical spaces only exist in the imagination and its kin. If you passed such a curious thing as the two saloon doors in the lost corridor and you possessed the ability to appreciate odd, little things, and you began to imagine the world of the ping pong room, you’d be an imbecile not to go down there.

That’s all to say, Would you go down to the ping pong room? For us both. One of us has to go down there to know what sound can come from that most curious hollow in the belly of a behemoth. If you won’t go alone, which is admittedly wise, I’ll go too. Let me take you down there. Give me your hand.

2. Starlight

星光

The woman Sam was told to call Ayi was by all appearances a run-of-the-mill Beijing mom. But she reminded him of the poetic lady gangster in a movie that set his adolescent heart alight.

In Wong Kar-wai’s film Chungking Express, Lin Qingxia portrays a mobster who for Sam was like living verse. She is surrounded by trash. Her white mob boss boyfriend is a shadowy marionette who casts her like a stringed puppet into a treacherous underworld of drugs and violence. He is cheating on her with a bar-back floozy. Lin’s character wears a blonde wig, sunglasses, and a raincoat. She is unknowable. She is also deliciously indifferent — unimpressed by life, even at its most precarious. There is a dignity in her nonchalance. She cares to live, or she would not run as she does from her would-be assassins through the streets of Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui commercial district. She won’t be made a fool for life. Perhaps it was because Sam felt himself too childish and emotional that he admired the gangster’s restraint.

The beauty of a few lines of the gangster’s dialogue, noir and fantastique, helped to fuel Sam’s study of the Chinese language in his first year of undergrad at Golden State University in Los Angeles. Lin’s character ambles down a bustling avenue lit by Hong Kong’s characteristic neon lights, and she says,

Chinese: 不知道什么时候开始，我变成一个很小心的 人，每次我穿雨衣的时候，我都会戴太阳眼镜，你永远 都不知道什么时候会下雨，什么时候出太阳。

Pinyin (the standardised pronunciation of the Chinese in Roman alphabet characters): Bu zhidao shenme shihou kaishi, wo biancheng yige hen xiaoxin de ren, meici wo chuan yuyi, wo dou hui dai taiyang yanjing, ni yongyuan dou buhui zhidao shenme shihou hui xiayu, shenme shihou chu taiyang.

English: I don’t know when