Who knows what could happen?
I hobble back toward the Hummer, squinting in the hazy sunlight.
Meimei leans against the car, striking a pose. Waiting for me.
“Are you feeling all right? You took a while.”
“Oh, yeah, you know. Yidianr la duzi. But I’m fine now.”
She stares at me through her designer shades. Why do I get the feeling I’m not the only one playing detective here?
“Happy to hear.” She gestures toward the Hummer. “Ready to go?”
“Sure,” I say. “Hey, we have any of that coffee left?”
Because whatever the game is, I’m pretty sure it’s on.
We drive another couple of hours, through plains with checkerboard fields and clusters of skinny five-story buildings topped with weird silver-I don’t know what they are. Weather vanes? Antennae? Decorations? A bunch of globes of different sizes topped by crescent moons, skewered on a pole like some aluminum chuanr. I’ve seen them before, and I’ve always wondered, but I’ve never gotten around to asking anyone about them.
“You know, that was a crazy party at Tiantian’s place,” I finally say.
I might be imagining it, but I think her coffee cup pauses for a second, just before it hits her lips.
“Was it?”
I do my best sincere chuckle. Which is probably not very good.
“Yeah. I mean… I saw some kind of weird things.”
She sips. “Such as?”
“Oh, just… people having a little too much fun. You know? And it was still pretty early when I left. I’m guessing things just got crazier.”
“Oh,” she says, and she seems to settle back into her seat. “Yes, I think I left right after you.” Then she laughs. She doesn’t sound too sincere either.
“Yes, people like to have fun,” she says. “And… it can get crazy sometimes, when you can do whatever you want.”
We pass through a city I’ve never heard of that feels like it goes on forever: an anonymous collection of apartment blocks, skyscrapers, commercial buildings, a stretch of luxury-car dealers, Lexus and Mercedes. This part of China, there’s a lot of small manufacturing. Maybe they specialize in something here, like shoestrings, or bra hooks.
Then the countryside again. Green fields. Those five-story, skinny houses with the silver ornaments on top. Low mountains in the distance.
Finally we roll into a town. No skyscrapers here. Just low-slung businesses in beat-up concrete and white tile, dusty, uneven streets. Knots of people going about their business, buying shoes at a run-down shop with sale! signs, lining up for snacks at an open window: Bowls of noodles. Steamed buns.
Sure doesn’t look much like Hollywood.
We head out of the main drag. The street widens, the buildings thin. Now we’re in an area with what look like warehouses or small factories, lined up like Lego bricks. There are billboards with photos and drawings of traditional Chinese furniture. Maybe they make it here.
In the middle of all this cinder block and corrugated metal is an expanse of gleaming red-and-grey marble.
“Not a very good hotel, but the best one in this town,” Meimei says.
“Cool,” I say. I hope she’s paying.
“Do you have anything you want to drop off?” she asks.
“No, not really.”
I mean, all I have is my little daypack with my laptop, a few pairs of underwear, and a clean T-shirt. Not a lot to carry. And I don’t leave my laptop in a hotel unattended. Ever.
“Then, after we check in, do you want to go to the filming base?”
“Sure,” I say. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
It looks like we’re going to a theme park, or to some huge temple complex: high red walls, a row of ticket windows topped by a peaked tile roof, signboards with maps of the area and prices of various attractions, a huge expanse of parking lot. People, almost all Chinese, wait in lines to buy tickets. They make money here off tourism, like Universal Studios, I guess, except there’s no Jurassic Park ride.
“We can’t take the Hummer inside,” Meimei informs me. “But we can have an electric cart, I think.”
I nod. I’m kind of distracted. I had to show my passport to register at the hotel, and it’s never been clear to me if there’s some kind of central database where all that information goes.
If it’s just local, I should be fine. But if it’s national?
What are the odds that Uncle Yang would be plugged into that system?
It’s probably just local, I tell myself. For all the hukou and ID checking they do here, you’re always reading about how people wanted for a crime in one province hide out in another, because the different PSBs don’t talk to each other.
Nobody’s that organized. Not China. Not the US.
Yet.
The driver lets us off by this big red gate that looks like the entrance to the Forbidden City off Tiananmen Square, except no giant painting of Chairman Mao. My written Chinese sucks, especially when it’s traditional characters, but I recognize this set of gold characters on blue: ming/qing imperial park.
Inside the white arched entry are steel rails guiding visitors into several different lines: team passage, individual passage, and vip channel.
That last one would be us.
Inside, a wide expanse of browning grass gives way to a bricked path leading up to a red gate that is a dead ringer for the Gate of Heavenly Peace at Tiananmen. On the way there are stalls where you can shoot fake machine guns or arrows at targets, a sort of bumper-car ride where the lone guest reclines in his little car and texts on his cell phone, giant cardboard cutouts of famous movie stars that you can pose next to. Tourists cruise around in pedal-powered carts with yellow canopies.
We get an electric golf cart. I let Meimei drive.
“So where are they filming?” I ask.
“Further away. In the old Qing/Ming village section.”
“What’s the movie about, do you know?”
“Not really. I think maybe they are using a story taking place in the past to comment on the present.” Meimei raises an eyebrow and rolls her eyes. “So common.”
We cruise up the path past the fake Forbidden City. It looks pretty good from a distance, but when you get up close, you can see the peeling paint on the red walls, the concrete in place of marble walkways, crumbling plaster on the “brass” statues.
Meimei has to stop several times to study a map-“I’ve never been here before,” she tells me, and this place is big. The fake Forbidden City has courtyards and palaces and galleries like the real one; there are temples and guard towers, an imperial garden with giant rocks and artificial streams. A couple of times we pass groups of tourists dressed up in court costumes, posing for photos. I hear a blare of recorded music, a show going on to entertain the visitors, “Qing soldiers” on horseback performing in a dirt arena-but parts of the complex feel deserted. You’d think there’d be a squadron of teenage security guards in polyester uniforms, but no.
Finally we hum past a big crane thing, and I see giant lights with petal-like flaps on tall stands, translucent white sheets stretched on rectangular metal frames to diffuse the light, two cameras on dollies. Meimei pulls the cart up against a wall, and we get out.
A village set, grey brick buildings. Crews carrying messenger bags and wearing belts weighed down with equipment and walkie-talkies move lights. A makeup girl adds some dirt to the face of an actress wearing bloody rags and helps her to her feet. The actress takes her place by a fancy-looking gate-the front of a mansion, it looks like.
“Zhunbei!” a woman with a megaphone yells. “Ji zhu!”
Get ready. Start cameras.