The Dissident Read online

  The Dissident

  NELL FREUDENBERGER

  For my parents

  Contents

  1

  I was not meant to be a dissident. I was…

  2

  Cece should not have bought the bear claws. She was…

  3

  When she got home from Joan’s, Max was sitting on…

  4

  It was a relief to step into the dark interior…

  5

  After Phil moved to New York, nearly ten years ago…

  6

  As she sat in Olivia’s bedroom, immaculate and ready for…

  7

  The last time I saw Meiling, she was living alone…

  8

  I had come to stay with X in Beijing after…

  9

  A recurring trope in the landscapes of the old masters…

  10

  Joan’s telephone did not ring in the morning, ordinarily. Everyone…

  11

  For a long time, Joan had imagined writing a novel…

  12

  I cleared U.S. customs easily, through the double doors marked…

  13

  Fionnula was chittering again. Phil had been forced to sedate…

  14

  The studio had not exactly asked him to come. They…

  15

  Phil had decided to take the red-eye to compensate for…

  16

  While I was with the Traverses, I had a habit…

  17

  What did one wear to meet a dissident? Joan had…

  18

  Yuan Zhao was a young man of slight build, with…

  19

  Joan didn’t get a chance to talk with the dissident…

  20

  That night, despite my exhaustion, I lay awake for hours.

  21

  I woke up when Max got home. In my dreamy…

  22

  Max had gone out. Cece heard the alarm being turned…

  23

  Cece had thought of separation. She had even spoken the…

  24

  They spent the week before school started at home. On…

  25

  The rose garden encompassed the northeast corner of the backyard.

  26

  What is more comforting than a lobster? One long line…

  27

  The week after I met Meiling in the library, we…

  28

  The apartment we visited that afternoon was in a new…

  29

  A week after Harry Lin failed to show up for…

  30

  Phil had organized his schedule in Los Angeles in order…

  31

  He had notified the studio of his whereabouts, and they…

  32

  Almost immediately upon arrival, he had managed to make her…

  33

  “Do you want some juice?” his brother held up an…

  34

  I had an appointment to meet the principal at two…

  35

  Of course, I did not start out expecting to teach…

  36

  Joan resolved to apologize to the dissident. Yuan Zhao might…

  37

  I came into the classroom one afternoon to find my students…

  38

  I slept well the night I’d given June the key.

  39

  November 7, 1993, was a bleak, lamplit afternoon in Beijing,…

  40

  When I finally found the house (identifiable even without its…

  41

  I didn’t expect June to show up at the end…

  42

  The bush baby was gone. They had combed the hutch,…

  43

  St. Anselm’s was not designed for rain. The girls darted up…

  44

  It was terrible to be the only one awake. The…

  45

  Although it was none of my business, I had not…

  46

  In January of 1994, my cousin X and I put…

  47

  When our school holidays began, to my parents’ disappointment I…

  48

  That winter Meiling bought a secondhand bicycle. She hadn’t grown…

  49

  The day before I was to visit June Wang’s grandmother…

  50

  When June beckoned me outside, and her grandmother urged me…

  51

  Two months and three days after he arrived in Los…

  52

  When he arrived at the orange bungalow, the house was…

  53

  The weeks leading up to my show passed quickly, each…

  54

  Cece had informed the principal about my show, and Ms. McCoy…

  55

  I waited until there were only a few weeks before…

  56

  When I arrived at the gallery on the morning of…

  57

  When I arrived, the gallery was already full of people.

  58

  In the fall of 1987 a train traveled north from…

  59

  Joan had spent most of the art show watching Yuan…

  60

  The Beijing East Village “ended” on June 12, 1994. Or…

  61

  At the moment police from the Chaoyang Branch arrived in…

  62

  Cece did not believe in God per se, but she…

  63

  They pushed dinner back to six-thirty, to give Phil and…

  64

  Phil stayed at the Beverly Wilshire on Friday and Saturday…

  65

  Phil called on Monday night, right after dinner. It was…

  66

  Cece was sitting in the internship office one afternoon, addressing…

  67

  The day before St. Anselm’s annual dance directions concert, Cece gave…

  68

  Malmstead hall was dimly lit as parents, siblings, and teachers…

  69

  Bright lights flooded the courtyard, and there were no more…

  70

  Phil and Aubrey stayed in the immaculate guest bedroom of…

  71

  Phil arrived at the studio early. Both Barnetts had been…

  72

  Joan was not intending to break into her brother’s house.

  73

  They headed east, Yuan Zhao directing her. There was no…

  74

  The message from the principal’s office came on Monday morning.

  75

  Cece dropped her bag on the floor in the front…

  76

  When Gordon got home, he insisted she call Harry Lin.

  77

  She found Gordon in the study alone. His students were…

  78

  I returned home just before Christmas of the year 2000.

  79

  It was three years before I sought them out. I…

  80

  I have finished my retelling of the legend Liu Chen…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Nell Freudenberger

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1.

  I WAS NOT MEANT TO BE A DISSIDENT. I WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO LIVE outside of China. I never intended to be a guest, for an entire year, in the home of strangers, dependent on their charity and kindness. Who would have imagined, watching me grow up in Harbin—sitting quietly with my father in our old apartment behind the Russian church, or clutching my mother’s hand as she haggled good-naturedly with Old Yang over the price of scallions—that I would wind up in Los Angeles, living in the gu
est room of people who could not find the province of Heilongjiang on a simple English map?

  I am tempted to say it was an accident. Certainly I would not have gotten involved in politics, or in the artistic community of the Beijing East Village, had it not been for my cousin, also an artist—I will call him X. (Because of his continuing activity in China, I am forced to conceal his identity here.) But it also began with my mother, who always hoped I would become a famous artist and go abroad, and with my father, who sent me to have drawing lessons with his old friend, the painter Wang Laoshi. Quite possibly it began with Wang Laoshi, who saw my early efforts, and encouraged me to pursue absolutely any other profession.

  But I hesitate to put responsibility on others. In the end it’s my fault that I am so easily persuaded. I have always been impressionable, skilled at mimicry. I am, as my teacher admitted, a brilliant copyist. On paper, I could reproduce Audubon’s and Bada Shanren’s birds; I could make my mother laugh by imitating the gestures and mannerisms of people we knew (for example, my father’s postprandial expression of despair); even the pronunciation of foreign words was not difficult for me. In school, English was my best subject, not only because of this talent for imitation but because of my mother, who had been born in Seattle, Washington, and much later became a teacher of Business English at the Harbin University of Science and Technology.

  My mother went to China for the first time in 1953, three days after her twelfth birthday, when her parents decided to return to their motherland and do their part for the glorious new People’s Republic. My grandfather, an electrical engineer with the Boeing company, had been deeply honored by a personal invitation from Zhou Enlai. As it turned out, however, my grandfather’s timing wasn’t good. A little more than a decade later, my grandmother and my mother were sent to separate “cadres’ schools” to be reeducated, while my grandfather eventually went to a much harsher place—a work camp in the Great Northern Wilderness—where he died, six years before I was born.

  When I told this story—as if it had happened to distant relatives rather than to my immediate family—my American hosts were horrified. I think they were also a little thrilled by the tragic irony: it was as if, Cece Travers said, my relatives had been American Jews, returning unknowingly to Germany in 1939. I couldn’t explain to the Traverses that a Chinese person did not think of the 1960s and ’70s in this way: that those years represented a perversion of our own ideals, some of which we still cherished, rather than an atrocity visited on us from outside. The fact that my relatives had been in a work camp was enough for Cece. “Perhaps they aren’t telling you everything,” she said, in a way that made it clear she thought I was being callous about the sufferings I described.

  In fact the opposite was true. I had my reasons for concealing my background from the Traverses, but I have never been comfortable telling the story of things that happened before I was born. I always feel that I’m making things up. In Los Angeles, I found out how much easier it was to tell my own history as if it belonged to someone else: at the end of my account, I was surprised (and a little proud) to find tears in the eyes of my American audience.

  After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 (and incidentally my birth, in 1975) my mother became an English teacher, if a reluctant one. Her former passion for literature, in particular the Romantic poets, was not relevant to the business English courses she was assigned, and she never returned to the original poems and translations she’d begun as a university student in the early 1960s. Her talents as a teacher were thus primarily focused on me, so that by the time I was in high school, I already spoke English more fluently than my classmates and even my teachers. My mother and I used to laugh at the book I used in school, Idiomatic English, which purported to teach us how to speak like real Americans. The book was full of dialogues between John, Mary, and (inexplicably) someone named “Batty,” of which the following is an approximate but unexaggerated example:

  John: I am thinking to get a gift for our friend Batty. Monday is her birthday. A necklace or a bracelet would truly fit the bill.

  Mary: No one knocks on the gift horse’s mouth. But you had better not have a chat with Batty before the big day. That is to say, you are a chatterbox. You will certainly let the cat out of the bag.

  John: Mary, you are a strict taskmaster! Why do you say that I am a bean-spiller? I am as silent as the mouse, and also the grave.

  Mary: Because right now, John, you are talking my ears off!

  When I finally met my cousin X in Beijing, I found him studying from this same textbook, practicing John, Mary, and Batty’s lines quite seriously. This was midway through my first year at Beijing Normal, when my cousin still imagined he might go abroad and study. He had come to Beijing after being dismissed from the well-regarded Hubei Academy of Fine Arts for taking part in a controversial performance piece, Buried Alive No. 1. In that project, a group of students had interred themselves in a kind of mass grave, breathing through lengths of hospital tubing. The audience was led to the site (a fallow pasture lent by a local farmer), where they found only a crop of suspiciously rubbery hollow vegetables poking out of the disturbed ground. I didn’t see this piece myself, but I’ve heard that people gasped and covered their eyes, when the first students began to claw their way out.

  Buried Alive No. 1 took place in the spring of 1987, two years before the student protests; after Tiananmen, the authorities would recall it as a dangerous precedent. By that time my cousin was a member of Beijing’s artistic avant-garde: living illegally outside the work unit system, moving frequently among the tenuous communities on the city’s edges. From the original artists’ village near the Summer Palace at Yuanmingyuan (where he was associated with the internationally recognized “cynical realists”), X went to Songzhuang and, after a hiatus in the maximum-security facility at Qincheng, to the industrial dump between the Third and Fourth Ring Roads, which became known in the 1990s as Beijing’s East Village. Although we’d met as children, the East Village is where I really got to know him.

  Between the fall of 1993 and the spring of ’94, we produced two issues of a new artistic journal, Lu Kou, or Intersections, which was later referred to by the overseas Chinese scholar Harry Lin as “the best new journal of Chinese experimental art.” (It was, at least, the newest.) After the East Village was broken up, I did not communicate with my cousin for several years. By the time we finally reconnected, he was living and working in Dashanzi, the fashionable new art district in northeastern Beijing. My cousin was one of the first to set up a studio in Dashanzi’s abandoned Joint Factory 718—once the largest military electronics complex in Asia—when the rents were cheap, before the gallery owners, foreigners, and fashion designers discovered it.

  Throughout my life, I have been either in very close touch with my cousin or completely estranged from him. But in the spring of 2000, when he contacted me about the fellowship in Los Angeles, our relations entered an awkward, lukewarm phase. Even though we professed our friendship and loyalty to one another, there were still certain subjects we couldn’t talk about, and that added a strained and uncomfortable element to our discussions of, say, the continuing relevance of painting, or the architectural transformation of Beijing, or the possibility of artistic collaboration in twenty-first-century China. In the past there have been times when I called him “older brother,” and also when I declared him my enemy; those abrupt reversals make the relationship we maintain today feel both precious and false.

  I met my cousin as a child only once, when I was seven and he was thirteen. I showed him the paintings of bamboo, birds, and lobsters that I had made with my teacher Wang Laoshi, and X taught me to fly my new kite in Stalin Park, beside the river. Although he was kind to me, the distance between us seemed hopeless and exhausting; when we met again, ten years later in Beijing, this gap hardly seemed to have narrowed. My cousin had talent, political conviction, style, and (naturally) success with women I couldn’t hope to imitate. Nevertheless I think even he was sometim
es lonely and frightened in Beijing, which is one of those cities that can make you feel like a local or a stranger, but very rarely anything in between.

  From that first reunion, we were both hoping for some kind of genetic connection, and in spite of the differences in our personal styles, his black Mao suits and avant-garde hairstyles compared with my eagerness to fit in, people said they could see the family resemblance. I treasured those compliments, and once I had lost some weight courtesy of Beijing Normal’s abysmal canteen, I could see that there was something to them. On the inside, however, my cousin and I were completely opposite: he was a leader in everything, and I was the perfect follower. At least for a while, I felt privileged to take his directions.

  There is only one area in which I have historically felt superior to my cousin, and this has to do with our family backgrounds. My cousin’s father, my uncle, was a boatman on the Yellow River, whereas my father, because of the accidents of politics, rose from a traveling oil driller to become one of the elite cadres at our nation’s largest oil field. And while my mother would certainly have completed her translation of Keats’s lyrics had her education not been interrupted, X’s mother sold fried snacks in a village outside Taiyuan.