The Dissident Read online

  Because of his humble origins, when he came to the capital my cousin did not know about the West. He soon began to claim strong preferences (for German photography, Italian fashion, French cheese) and biases (against Hollywood and American food) but these attitudes were culled from his friends, many of whom came from more exalted circumstances. My cousin didn’t know where “Hollywood” was, or that ordinary people actually lived there. Like many Chinese, he was allergic to dairy products, so he was hardly an authority on Brie or Camembert. And although he tried to cover it up, my cousin spoke almost no English. He pretended not to be interested in the language, and even when I caught him studying, I was careful to save face for him in this matter.

  “Won’t they be surprised by your English?” he giggled, delighted, a few months before I left for Los Angeles. We were lying on our backs smoking in his beautiful studio in the Factory, with its arched Bauhaus ceiling, whitewashed brick, and fashionable big character slogan painted in red on the south wall: “Seek Truth from Facts.” In fact that slogan, from the post-Mao period, was not one of the authentic ones famously preserved in other parts of the Factory (“Chairman Mao Is the Red Sun in Our Hearts,” for example) but was chosen by my cousin to illustrate his aesthetic philosophy. He painted the characters in the same neat, blunted style as the originals and cleverly distressed the red paint so that you couldn’t tell the difference.

  This was in March of 2000. The weather was still cold, but X’s studio was comfortable, warmed by the electric heaters he had once used in his famous performance piece Something That Is Not Art. In the distance we could hear the chugging and clinking of the radio transmitter workshop next door. I told my cousin that I didn’t think my English would be very impressive to a native speaker.

  “Sure it will,” X said. He was in high spirits that day, as if he were the one going off to America in a couple of months. “Yuan Zhao, genius painter and speaker of English!” he exclaimed.

  “Hardly,” I said.

  He thought I was being modest, but in fact the Traverses were not at all surprised by my excellent English. If anything, they were disappointed by the force of my accent, which they assured me I was losing almost from the day I arrived. To them, English wasn’t really a language. It was a genetic gift, present in everyone but unfortunately latent in some people, like biceps. It only had to be strengthened and drawn out.

  I apologize in advance for the long-windedness of this account. It’s a particular trait of exiles that they are constantly having long conversations in their heads with imaginary friends. When they finally meet someone sympathetic, they tend to exhaust that person with weeks of stored-up dialogue—that is to say, they talk your ear off. In order to explain what happened to me in Los Angeles, and absolve myself of guilt in the events of the year 2000–2001 at the St. Anselm’s School for Girls, I have to tell another story at the same time, set in China in the late twentieth century. I assure you that although on the surface, this might seem to be a story about politics and art and even death, it will touch on those topics in only the most superficial ways. As I’ve said, I am an expert in just one thing; and so this will be a story about counterfeiting, and also about the one thing you cannot counterfeit.

  2.

  CECE SHOULD NOT HAVE BOUGHT THE BEAR CLAWS. SHE WAS ALREADY regretting the purchase when she rang Joan’s doorbell; her effortlessly slender sister-in-law probably wouldn’t want one. It had been a spur-of-the-moment inspiration in front of the bakery case: Cece had felt like celebrating. She wasn’t sure she could explain why she was so excited about the famous dissident, nor could she articulate, even to herself, the salutary effect she hoped Yuan Zhao might have upon her scattered family.

  Cece was about to turn around and take the white pastry box back to the car, when she saw Joan coming toward the door. Through the frosted glass panel, Cece could make out just the shape of her sister-in-law, stopping for a moment to examine something on the hall table. It was uncharacteristic of Joan to interrupt her day for a coffee date; Cece couldn’t remember the last time the two of them had socialized alone.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  Cece stepped into the house, which was dark and smelled of books. Or maybe she just imagined that it smelled like books: her sister-in-law was a novelist, who also taught graduate creative writing by correspondence. She lived in a perfectly nice two-bedroom Spanish bungalow across from the Rancho Park golf course, which Cece thought might be immeasurably improved with a simple renovation. She’d even made some suggestions: about ways the furniture might be rearranged to encourage circulation, and the type of blinds that would maximize the light. Her sister-in-law wasn’t especially interested in interior decoration, however, and the house always felt haphazard to Cece. There was also something about being there that made her hungry.

  “Here’s just a little something left over from brunch. They’re good if you warm them up.”

  Joan looked inside the box. “How many people did you have at brunch?”

  “Oh, well, I thought Maxwell and his friend would be hungry.”

  She trailed after Joan into the kitchen, which was full of bright blue tile. It reminded Cece of a trip they had taken once, to Istanbul, where Gordon had given a talk. This was just after he had published his important work Manias and Obsessions: A Symbiosis. The book had propelled her husband to academic stardom, for a time, and made him the youngest psychiatrist ever to be tenured by UCLA.

  This, of course, was many years ago, and Gordon’s subsequent books, on bulimia, trichotillomania, and the family of maladies that fall under the rubric “OCD,” did not cause quite so much of a stir.

  Joan had asked about Max’s friend.

  “She’s very pretty,” Cece said. “Almost a bit much—for Maxwell, I mean. Well, girls develop more quickly of course. I was trying to think what it was about her, because she’s very sweet, very polite…but it may just be that she wears these colored contact lenses, and they change depending on the day. None of the colors match her skin, so it’s a bit disconcerting—”

  “What color is her skin?”

  “Oh well, Joan. It’s brown.”

  “Dark brown?”

  “You think I’m racist,” Cece said.

  “I’m teasing,” Joan said. “Is she black or Hispanic?”

  “Hispanic. The mother is from El Salvador. But Max says her stepfather is black. And she has two very cute little black brothers. I saw them once, when her mother picked her up.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Jasmine. That’s pretty, isn’t it? They’re both involved in community ser vice. That’s how they met—although it seems that Jasmine was involved in it before Max was. Or at least, that’s what I gather.” It was amazing that her tendency to babble got worse around Joan, one of the people she wanted to babble in front of least. Around her brother-in-law Phil, who was at least as smart as Joan, she had always felt perfectly articulate.

  “He met her doing his community ser vice?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “So what did she do?”

  “What do you mean?” But she knew what Joan meant. She meant: What did Jasmine do in order to get herself assigned to the graffitieradication project? It was something Cece had wondered herself more times than she would’ve liked to admit.

  “I mean, did she commit a crime?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. She’s very quiet.”

  “But then how—?”

  Sometimes Cece had the uncomfortable feeling that her sister-in-law was asking questions in order to gather material, or simply stockpiling facts in case she found a use for them in her writing. At those times Joan became unnaturally conciliatory and empathic. She nodded sympathetically and made her voice even softer than usual, as if she would like you to forget she was there.

  “I don’t know,” Cece told Joan firmly. “Maybe she’s just community-oriented.”

  “I would love to go out and see the proje
ct,” Joan said. “Do you think Maxwell would mind?”

  “You can see it driving west on the ten,” Cece told her. “Just look for the painters’ scaffolds.”

  Joan looked disappointed. Good, Cece thought: it was important that her sister-in-law get her priorities straight.

  “The important thing is just that Max has such a nice girlfriend,” she continued, fabricating a little, in the ser vice of Joan’s priorities. “Jasmine is his first.” It wasn’t that Jasmine wasn’t nice, only that Cece couldn’t tell what she was. She was closed off, sealed up. Joan would say it was a cliché, but as far as Cece was concerned, eyes were the windows to the soul, and Jasmine’s windows were covered over with incongruous, bright blue Venetian blinds.

  “I’m surprised that you and Gordon let her sleep over.”

  “We don’t. She just came over early this morning—although, you know, if they’re going to, they will.”

  “That’s very enlightened, Cece. I’m impressed.”

  She tried not to feel that Joan was being condescending. It was only that she had an acerbic manner, which was maybe more pronounced because of all those years of being independent. Joan had been married and divorced in her thirties. Although she had dated a reasonably desirable succession of men since then, she had always chosen to live alone. As far as Cece knew, her sister-in-law had never expressed any interest in having children; now it was too late. Cece tried to imagine her life without Olivia and Max, and failed completely.

  “As long as I know where they are,” she said quickly. “I have to drive Max everywhere now anyway.”

  Joan shook her head. “What a hassle.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind.” The idea of once again giving Max the mobility and freedom that came with a learner’s permit was too terrifying to contemplate. “It’s not as if I have anything else to do.”

  “You do things.” Joan paused for several moments. “You do career counseling.”

  “That’s not definite,” Cece said. In fact she was reconsidering her offer to volunteer as the internship coordinator at St. Anselm’s School. There seemed to be so much to do at home. “It would just be coordination,” Cece said. “Putting girls in touch with St. Anselm’s parents who work in particular fields.”

  “That would use your people skills,” Joan said. “God knows, I could never do it.” Cece could not help feeling that what Joan was saying was that she would never want to be the internship coordinator of St. Anselm’s School. Nor did she necessarily blame her.

  Joan made a face: “I can’t believe I just said ‘people skills’—what an idiotic expression.” She arranged three of the bear claws on a plate that Max had made for her years ago, and put them in the microwave. Cece remembered when she would take her children to the store where they could decorate paper circles, to be turned into plastic plates. Other children had focused on stars and moons, or dinosaurs, or simply filling the entire white space with color; Max had drawn a bright green stick figure in the center of the circle, and then almost obscured it with punishing black dots, like rain or snow or (now it was impossible not to imagine) bullets, and then printed his name in large red letters, larger than the drawing, marching around the edge of the plate: “Maxwell T., age 7.” She had almost told him he couldn’t give the plate to his aunt—but of course you couldn’t tell them that.

  “I can’t believe you still have this,” Cece said.

  “I love this plate. It always reminds me of Thirty-three Short Films about Glen Gould. You know at the end? When Glen Gould is just a speck in all of that snow?”

  “I don’t think I saw that,” Cece said. Joan thought Max’s problems were evidence of some kind of depth, or even artistic talent; she thought that they signified something. But Max’s depression wasn’t “creative”; it was a sickness. It meant nothing. It sucked all of his energy away—that was how she thought of it, the good particles fighting the bad particles, like on antihistamine commercials—so that he was listless and tired, and even his eyes looked fluey.

  “How does he seem?” Joan asked. “Apart from Jasmine?”

  “I don’t know, to be honest,” Cece said. “I’ve been trying to stay around the house, in case he needs anything. But he never does, really.”

  Joan didn’t say anything, but Cece knew what she was thinking: her sister-in-law thought that she was too involved with her children. Cece was willing to cede ground to Joan in many areas, but not in this one. Joan had never had children; she could not know what it was like to have a teacher begin a conversation, “We aren’t sure what to do with him anymore.” She didn’t know how it felt to find out about the birthday parties he hadn’t been invited to, and then to see him spending hours on weekend afternoons in the den with the shades drawn, sitting four inches from the television, hunched over a control pad, with which he was shooting aliens, or mafiosi, or cops, his body jerking to the rhythm of the robotic digital soundtrack.

  The accident with the gun had happened nearly five months ago. They called it “the accident” because it had happened in a car, although it was not a traffic accident in the strict sense of the word. The officer had pulled Max over for driving in two lanes at once (a beginner’s mistake) and found that he had a learner’s permit, which did not allow him to drive without a licensed adult over twenty-five. Then the officer had asked Max to open the glove compartment—to check for the registration—and that was how he had discovered the gun.

  “Should we have our coffee in the garden?” Joan asked.

  Cece followed her out the back door, latching the screen a little more vigorously than necessary. She would have liked to explain to Joan what it was like being Max’s parent: to surprise her with some of the things she didn’t know—but it wasn’t worth it. Joan would be fascinated; she would want to talk about articles she had read on gun shows and the NRA in the New York Review of Books. Joan liked it when you could attach real people to big themes; what she didn’t understand was that it was never the same when it was your child. You could not consider your child in the light of the New York Review of Books.

  “So when does your dissident arrive? It’s any day now, isn’t it?”

  “On Monday,” Cece said. “Just before Livy.” Her daughter Olivia had been in Paris and the Dordogne for ten weeks, studying French. It had seemed like longer. “I shouldn’t even be sitting here—there’s so much to do.”

  “What do you need to do?”

  “Well, we wanted to leave some art supplies in the pool house. Some watercolors, and one of those wooden manikins, you know, for figure drawing. It was supposed to be for Max, but all he draws are cartoons. And we put in a skylight,” Cece continued. “The guys finished yesterday, but they’ve left a mess of course.”

  “A skylight!”

  “For painting, since it’s going to be his studio for a whole year.”

  “Well that’s generous,” Joan said.

  Her sister-in-law implied that it was too generous, over-the-top, but Cece thought it was the least they could do. She had always had a problem saying no to foundlings. Now they were down to Salty, Spock, the four cats, the blind guinea pig Ferdinand, and Freud (the single surviving bunny), which was progress. When Cece thought of the dissident, alone and in America for the first time, she felt a kind of anxiety that could only be alleviated by doing something. It wasn’t generosity so much as a kind of habit.

  “We want him to be comfortable,” Cece said. “Did you know that he’s never been outside China? It’s like a miracle that the government is letting him come.”

  “Is he that big a deal?”

  “There’s an article about him.” Cece had forgotten about the article, which Max had printed off the Internet for her, and she had put in her purse. But had she switched purses? She could feel her sister-in-law watching as she sifted through her bag, where she’d dropped the article in a hurry, folded into squares.

  “Here!” she said, finally uncovering it. “It’s fascinating—from the Taipei Times, so it’s less biased.�
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  She had not expected Joan to be interested; she was pleased to see her sister-in-law skimming the article and examining the badly reproduced picture. Cece had looked closely at that picture, trying to get a better sense of the person who would be living in their house for the next nine months, but the image was frustrating. It gave you a certain impression: a defiant young man standing in Tiananmen Square, his hands in his pockets and a line of flags snapping in the wind overhead, but you couldn’t make out much of an individual expression.

  Joan looked up from the article. “Can I keep this?”

  “Of course,” Cece said. “And you’ll have to come and meet him.”

  “All right,” Joan said, surprising Cece again. “When?”

  “Sometime next week.” She decided not to mention the dinner party yet. She had invited Professor Harry Lin from UCLA, a colleague of Gordon’s and the one who had arranged the dissident’s visit. Her sister-in-law did not like to be introduced to eligible men, or at least not the eligible men Cece suggested; she’d made that clear on a number of occasions. And yet in this case, Cece couldn’t help being a little sneaky. Harry Lin was a leader in the field of Asian art history, obviously extremely intelligent, and in their (admittedly brief) interactions, Cece had found him modest and kind as well. His wife had passed away several years ago, and as far as Cece knew, he was still single.

  “I’ll give you a call. Max and Livy will be glad to see you,” Cece added, although both her children tended to make unkind jokes about Joan, occasionally referring to her as “Auntarctica.” Joan did have a tendency to be a little chilly, especially around family: something that would happen, Cece imagined, if you spent most of each day alone.

  Joan was getting up from the table, clearing the remains of the bear claws and the cups. “This will be the last year they’re both at home, won’t it?”

  It was like Joan to focus on the negative. But Cece wouldn’t let it ruin her mood. On Monday she would pick up the dissident, and Thursday was Olivia’s homecoming. By next weekend, the house would be lively and busy again.