The Dissident Read online

  “I have always wanted to be a screenwriter.” Emily sighed, shifting her oiled body in the chair. Her breasts gleamed. Cece had rarely felt so angry with either of her children. At the same time, she wondered what specifically was making her angry, and whether any of it was even Olivia’s fault. She looked at her daughter and said the first thing that came into her head:

  “You have to eat some breakfast.”

  Olivia made a sound of exasperation.

  “I can’t tell Emily what to do, but Dr. Meyer said you need to gain some weight.”

  “Lucky duck,” said Emily. “I wish I did.”

  “It wouldn’t kill you either,” Cece said. “I’m taking Mr. Yuan to the library. Your uncle is going to keep an eye on Max. I would ask you—” she began. Maddeningly, her voice broke: “Please put on your bathing suits. Mr. Yuan is from a completely different culture, and if he were to walk out here…I imagine he might even decide to leave us.”

  Olivia sat up and scrambled into her racing top: what Cece had interpreted as natural modesty was, of course, simply a desire to hide her underdeveloped chest. She would’ve been mortified when her uncle came out. She needn’t have worried, Cece thought, Phil would not have been looking at her.

  “We’re so sorry,” Emily said, reaching lazily for the bit of black spandex on the deck beneath her chair. “It’s just that we’re so used to it.”

  Olivia glanced at her mother. “In France—” she began weakly.

  “It really is so different from America.” Emily leaned forward to clip the bathing suit behind her back. “Just completely unpuritanical.”

  “Do you think it’s puritanical to respect the traditions of the country you’re in?” Cece asked. “What would you think if Mr. Yuan came into our house and started spitting on the floor? They do that in China, you know.” (In fact she wasn’t sure whether educated people like Mr. Yuan actually did any spitting, but it was one of the things they warned you about in Culture Shock! China.) “Would you think he was doing the right thing, even though in his country it’s OK?”

  The girls were quiet.

  “Would you?”

  “No,” said Olivia tensely.

  “We really are sorry. We apologize.”

  For the first time, Emily looked almost contrite, and Cece wondered if she’d been too harsh. There were certainly many worse things a teenager could do than take off the top of her bathing suit in front of a house guest, even a Chinese one.

  “You don’t think he saw us?” Emily said.

  “No,” Cece said. “I’m sure not.” She noticed a tag Emily had forgotten to remove, still hanging off the side of her suit. “Here,” Cece said, moving to help her.

  Emily flinched.

  “You have a tag.”

  Emily reached back and felt the tag. She looked past Cece at the house, as if she were appraising it: “Thanks,” she said coolly. “I’ll take it off with scissors later.”

  “I think I have some in my purse,” Cece said. She fished around in the large side compartment where she had always carried Tylenol, Band-Aids, Kleenex, and at one time crayons, in case some child—her own or another—was bored.

  “That’s OK,” Emily said.

  “Here,” Cece said. “Just hold still a second.” She knelt down next to Emily, but what she’d taken for a price tag was actually a small plastic anti-theft device, impossible to remove.

  “I guess they forgot to take it off at the store.” Emily was staring defiantly into the distance, but it was a childish kind of defiance—a put-on. Children were like decks of cards, one face showing at a time. In every seventeen-year-old, there was a fourteen-year-old, and even a twelve-year-old, who, depending on the circumstances, could be shuffled to the top.

  “They do that all the time,” Cece heard herself saying. “Deactivate them, and then forget to take them off.”

  Emily looked at Cece with her sharp, slightly slanted green eyes. She had a splash of freckles, very faint, across the bridge of her nose.

  “And then it’s so inconvenient, having to take it back.”

  “We could take it back today,” Olivia said. “If we can use the Pathfinder—can we?”

  “I’m taking Mr. Yuan to the library,” Cece said.

  “After?” Olivia asked. “When you get back?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Emily said. “Knowing me, I probably won’t.”

  “Sorry?” Cece said.

  “Take it back.”

  Both Olivia and Cece looked at her.

  “I mean, I’ll barely use that part of it”—Emily giggled—“unless I’m here again.”

  “But you will be here,” Olivia pleaded. “Mom?”

  “I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” Cece said.

  26.

  WHAT IS MORE COMFORTING THAN A LOBSTER? ONE LONG LINE SEGMENT, the length of the brush, fanning slightly at the bottom. Three or four hook strokes, on the diagonal (three for a small lobster, four for a big one). With a wet brush, three dashes, nearly but not quite joined at the base, like an inverted bouquet. A dot of pure ink for the eye. Then, with a clean brush—rinsed, dried, and separated, so that a few long bristles stand apart from the rest—four firm lobster legs. Then the magic.

  I remember the first time I watched my teacher, Wang Laoshi, pull a hair from his own head, dip it in tincture (three parts ink, one part water) and draw it lightly across the page. At once there was a lobster and the ground the lobster stood upon; suddenly the lobster seemed to cast a shadow, although there was nothing to indicate rock or seabed beneath him. I cannot explain, except to say that a lobster without antennae is a specimen, dependent on his dead, stalked eyes; with the antennae, he is a creature in motion. (It is possible to paint the antennae with the very tip of the brush, but not, I think, with the same freedom.) Occasionally, when I have something important to do—such as tell the story of my first days at St. Anselm’s School for Girls, and about one student in particular—I will procrastinate, and paint a lobster.

  My mother had a grudging respect for Wang’s talent, although her opinion of him as a man was less favorable. She objected in particular to a collection of postcard-sized images, pasted to the wall next to my bamboo and lobsters, almost all of which had been cut with a small, pearl-handled knife from an English guidebook to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. I was particularly taken with an eighteenth-century Spanish flintlock gun, made of steel and tortoiseshell, and I often flipped past the Picture Gallery (full of holes, as if it had been burgled) to the Arms and Armor section of the guide.

  “Look at the paintings,” Wang would instruct me, smacking the side of my head very lightly for emphasis. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  “Ow!” I would yell, although my teacher barely touched me.

  Wang softened toward me when he realized that I could translate the captions of his favorite pictures. The translations were difficult, full of foreign names and places, and in order to maintain my interest, Wang allowed me to choose the paintings we would discuss. My mother talked about Old Wang’s dirty mind, but in fact it was my fault that almost all of the pictures hanging on the wall above his table were of beautiful young women in various stages of undress. There is one I remember best, maybe because it relates to the story I’m telling now. Like most people, I think, the works of art that have stayed with me have always been the ones that accidentally corresponded to people and events in my own life.

  Titian’s Violante, a typical Venetian bella-portrait, was painted sometime between 1515 and 1518. It captures the Venetian courtesan Violante, a young lady who came back to me with particular force once I started teaching at the St. Anselm’s School for Girls. Violante is dressed in rose and blue silk; her impossibly white shoulders are set against black velvet; her hair is so brilliantly gold that it seems laced through with metal wire. If there is a flaw in this picture, it’s in the saturation of the colors: so rich and strong that they leach glory from the girl beneath them. Perhaps that’s why she alwa
ys looked (to me anyway) so angry.

  If you had compared Wang’s small gray room with Violante’s marble palace in the Kunsthistorisches, if you had seen the two of us sitting at the scarred wooden table, gazing up at this portrait—an infirm, politically disgraced old man and a fat, pimply boy—you might have understood her irritation. “How dare you look at me,” she seemed to say, lightly, but with an edge of fury: “Take care, take care—because I am not for you.”

  Before the war, Wang Laoshi had been one of the most famous artists in China. In his beautiful house in Shanghai’s French Concession (not far from the residence of Sun Yat-sen) there were reproductions of works by Italian masters: Leonardo, Caravaggio, Titian, and Parmigianino. As a young man he had even traveled to Florence on a government exchange, visiting the Uffizi and studying with a restorer of Renaissance altarpieces. He returned to China with the intention of devising a parallel methodology for the restoration and preservation of the landscape scrolls that were his passion. It was my teacher who first introduced me to the work of the Southern Song loyalists—including the hermit painter Zhao Cangyun—who fled Hangzhou in 1275, abandoning their court to the barbaric Mongol horse men.

  “Those were real painters,” my teacher would say. “Where are the real painters now?”

  When I began studying with Wang Laoshi, my teacher was living like a young student, in a room with a table, a hotplate, and a bed that was rolled away in the morning and propped against the wall. Our brushes were ancient (they were losing their hair), and we used only newspaper, so that sometimes I would be painting rocks and clouds and pine trees over the faces of Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, and even old photos of the chairman himself.

  “It can’t be helped,” my teacher would say sadly, passing me another page from the People’s Daily. “Perhaps the shame of defacing our dear leaders will inspire you to do better.”

  “Wang Laoshi is crazy,” I would tell my mother when I got home.

  “Wang Laoshi is a great artist,” my father would say. “That’s what great artists are like.”

  I studied with Wang Laoshi until 1991, when I was sixteen and preparing frantically for my college entry exam. Because of my respectable grades and my excellent scores in English, my parents hoped that I would be admitted to a university in Beijing. When I told them I wanted to go to CAFA, the Central Academy of Fine Arts, they did not say, as others did: “How can you be sure of your future as an artist?” or “Why not study engineering right here in Harbin, so that you can get a good job with your father?” Instead they encouraged me, praising my landscapes, lobsters, and birds.

  “So exact,” my father said. “Like a scientist.”

  “As if they’re about to fly off the page,” my mother concurred.

  At that time I particularly liked drawing birds—not the swallows that nested in the roof of our apartment building, or the crows you could see in the People’s Park, but exotic species from a book my mother had given me: The Pocket Guide to North American Birds. I drew thrushes, thrashers (brown, sage, and California), hummingbirds (rufous and ruby-throated), the American redstart, and even the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker. I learned that the possibility of spotting one continues to lure birders deep into the old-growth forests of Louisiana, where they are almost always disappointed; the problem, of course, is that the ivorybill’s existence depends on the accounts of the very people who want to see him most. They’re able to dismiss a crimson crest in the female, or the absence of a characteristic note in the call—according to ornithologists, like a child’s tin horn—not because they’re lying, but because the passion that inspired their quests in the first place has ultimately clouded their judgment.

  When Wang Laoshi looked at the portfolio I meant to send to CAFA, which included both Chinese-style ink paintings and reproductions of the Europe an masters, he said I was a brilliant copyist. But he was also the one who reassured me a year later, when I failed to be accepted. It was almost as if he were a little bit relieved.

  “Better to copy sounds than shapes and colors,” he said. “Make your English perfect; then you can do anything you like.”

  What he was telling me, in the kindest way possible, was that my talent was for mimicry, nothing else; and as long as that was the case, I should use it for something more profitable than painting. I took his advice. I majored in English at Beijing Normal, where I worked hard for perhaps the first time in my life. I might have abandoned art altogether, never making another painting, and been perfectly happy. And then I discovered my cousin X.

  27.

  THE WEEK AFTER I MET MEILING IN THE LIBRARY, WE HAD OUR FIRST real date. It was her idea. We were going to the Central Academy of Fine Arts to see if we could find my cousin.

  We stopped in the open reception area outside the Main Office. There was no one at the desk, but in the center of the space a student was doing a strange performance. He was standing on a chair, balancing on one foot with the other hovering in the air, raising his arms above his head. Every few seconds, he would clap dramatically once or twice, all the time muttering to himself. Other students passed by without paying any attention. Apart from this peculiar behavior, I was surprised to see no indication that the art students were different from our friends at Beijing Normal. The young men and women hurrying through the reception area were dressed in ordinary shirts and slacks; unlike the crowd I’d seen hanging out at the Kongmiao teahouse, few of them even wore their hair long. It occurred to me that I might step into the passing stream of students, attend a lecture—perhaps even spend a day as a CAFA student—without anyone suspecting a thing.

  While I was daydreaming about this possibility, Meiling had approached the young man standing on the chair.

  “Excuse me?” she said tentatively.

  “Greedy little sluts!” he exclaimed.

  “Hey!” I said.

  The student put his other foot down on the chair, and turned toward us; when he saw Meiling, he blushed:

  “Sorry. These mosquitoes have been snacking on me since this morning.”

  Meiling giggled. The student grinned. I could see that if Meiling were to become my girlfriend (a prospect still too overwhelming to picture clearly), there would be many such irritating instances with other men: she had a kind of personal magnetism that drew people in immediately.

  “We’re looking for a student,” I said sternly. “Maybe you can help us.”

  “No problem.” The young man smiled, mostly at Meiling. “I have a directory right here.” He went behind the desk and pulled out a thick, spiral-bound book. But when I told the student X’s name, his expression changed. He closed his directory and began busying himself with the cap of a leaky thermos on his desk.

  “He’s in the department of painting,” I said.

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  “He’s my cousin.”

  It didn’t surprise me that this student knew my cousin, but I couldn’t understand why he was being so unfriendly. He looked as if he didn’t believe I was telling the truth.

  “If you don’t believe me, you can ask him yourself.”

  The student smiled. “Doubt it,” he said. “Because he’s not a student here anymore.”

  Just then a young woman came out of the office, carrying an armload of green file folders. “Hey you,” the student said rudely. “Is Fang in there?”

  “Where else would he be?”

  “There’s a guy here who wants to see him.”

  “The person I’m looking for is named X,” I told the girl, who laughed. Then she put down her folders and opened the door to the office, calling someone inside. She looked me and Meiling over, and waited in the doorway; clearly she wanted to see what would happen.

  It’s hard to remember meeting the important people in your life for the first time. Everything you learn about the person later conspires to supplant your earliest impression; it’s very difficult for me to think of Li Fang as the rat-faced, messy-haired, camera-toting whirlwind who emerged grinn
ing from the office that day—as opposed to the serious assistant photo editor of our magazine Lu Kou, or the morose, suspicious Fang who would not return my phone calls after the crisis. But even if there had been no crisis, and the authorities had allowed us to go on publishing unmolested, we might have fallen out. Although X and Tianming got most of the credit for Lu Kou, it was Fang who made the deal with a printer; Fang who did the photocopying; and Fang who managed to distribute our little magazine to a few people who mattered. What began as a collaboration, before any of us were sure it had value, turned into something else once people started offering us money and taking our picture. All of a sudden everyone wanted to own what he himself had made; paradoxically, it was our very success that doomed us.

  But that afternoon at CAFA, it was as if Fang had found his own long-lost cousin. Before I could even introduce myself, he said:

  “I know who you are. From Harbin, right? Studying at Beijing Normal?”

  Despite Fang’s strange appearance—his greasy hair was pulled back in a headband, and he was wearing a dirty flannel shirt over a T-shirt that said “Happy Day”—I was proud that a CAFA student was identifying me in front of Meiling. This was the kind of student I’d seen hanging out at the teahouse, and the fact that he’d recognized me made me imagine for a moment that I was an artist myself.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I meant to look him up earlier, but—”

  “He told me about you. He wrote to your parents to ask where you were, but he hadn’t heard back yet. You’re lucky—I’m going to see him right now.”

  “What’s new?” the girl with the folders said.

  “It’s true.” Fang grinned: “If I’m not here, I’m at your cousin’s place; if I’m not there, I’m at Cash’s.”