Alan Goldfein

The Ballad of Beijing Alan Goldfein

Arthur Becker, 44, writer, Lufthansas to Beijing-from Frankfurt. American Jew (Berkeleyite but married to a German professor [Jutta]), he has lived in Heidelberg for over twenty years. There are two reasons why Becker has flown to Beijing: His son, Mick (Mick-ah-yell) attends Peking University (still known for some reverent reason by that ancient pre-Mao name). The Turgenev father-son anguish (in this case, a German kid with a Jewish-American dad) have caused Mick to escape any further conflicts (there have been many), plus China (as Mick says) has these days magnificent universities devoted to business, marketing, etc.-and the kid is now about to marry this Hung, a classmate. . . Becker has also made his way to China because he has killed Doctor Fritz Strobel, an old professor-mentor of Jutta's, and still a vociferous (on the super-sly) Nazi. Becker hadn't planned to take the man's life, but . . . Beijing is Capitalism City: Bling Town and The Burg of Barbarity. Example: Ricky Rubalcava, an "entrepreneur" from Havana, "imports" that impoverished Caribbean town's surplus of Fifties U. S. autos, now for the fancified Beijingoisie. Skyscrapers shoot up as rapidly as ICBMs, the scrambled poor-in-the-streets beneath remind Arthur of those sprawled in The Bowery. Circumstances bring Becker to an underground: Tibetans persecuted not unlike (thinks Becker) Jews in old Berlin: Nyemo, a Tibetan, a thief, a non-Buddhist, a sentimental hothead not unlike Arthur Becker (going against Tantric Tibetan-type here-but there's plenty of this in Beijing), Nyemo has cuckolded Becker's son Mick with his fiancé Hung. Becker hates Nyemo, and, as a Jew in Germany, even today's Germany, he also identifies with the victimized Tibetan -Becker even wishes that his Mick could be more like him. Hung's father, Jin Jianxin, is a civil libertarian, once jailed, highly respected-but he also "enjoys" the hardgloss patina of a man who might well have written The Art of the CHINESE Deal. Hung loves Mick (in her way); and she loves Nyemo (in her way). Jin Jianxin, that brave social reformer, must employ his tightrope cunning to have Nyemo dispensed with-and it is a rather deadly "dispensation". This sleight-of-hand is the moral behavior of an ombudsman? How does the "good" man justify what he has done to the Tibetan? Becker is torn between moralities-especially as government enforcers come after him for his association with the rebel Tibetan. Under heavy psychic pressure, Becker returns to face his own murderer-fate in Germany.