The Dissident Read online

  “What?”

  “Harry Lin wants you,” X said impatiently. “He’s seen your work—Drip-Drop, for example.”

  “That was a collaboration, if you remember,” I said. “And does he know what I’ve been doing since?”

  X waved that away. “An artist is an artist, no matter what he’s doing.”

  I didn’t believe that. In fact, I believed the opposite: an artist is someone who’s making art, and I had not done anything more than pencil sketches for the past five years.

  “What about when he comes to see my work?” I asked.

  “He won’t do that before the show,” X said.

  I didn’t see how my cousin could be sure of that. “Won’t he want to introduce himself?”

  “Trust me,” X said. “He’s going to give you ‘space’ to complete your project.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about,” I said. “Completing a project.”

  “And you speak English,” X continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Think of how valuable that will be.”

  “There are translators. Harry could translate for you himself.”

  “Americans don’t have the patience to listen to translators,” my cousin said.

  I couldn’t understand it. Publicly X had always said, “Keep Chinese art in China”—a slogan the foreign journalists particularly liked—but even my cousin knew that in order to become really famous, you had to show abroad. I was sure that was why he’d gotten in touch with Harry Lin in the first place, and inquired about the Dubin Fellowship. Why wasn’t he envious now?

  “You’ll go,” X said, “and then you’ll tell me about it. That way we can”—he switched to English—“have our cake and eat it.”

  “Too,” I corrected.

  “That’s right,” X agreed. “Two cakes, one for each of us. You’ll go, and I’ll get to hear all about it.”

  We were standing at the big worktable in the middle of the studio, and my cousin wasn’t looking at me. He was helping me choose the work I would take on my journey, holding a sheet of slides to the light and frowning. I could see that most of the film on this sheet had been exposed, but X continued looking at the slides, as if there was something hidden there—and all of a sudden I understood that my cousin was afraid. X, who had come from Shanxi with two hundred yuan in his pocket, who had cut, burned, and frozen various parts of his body in the name of art, and now lived in an abandoned factory for the same dubious reason, did not want to leave Beijing. He did not want to fly seventeen hours across the ocean, or live as the guest of strangers. He did not want to shake hands and smile while people discussed his work in a language he couldn’t understand.

  I had admired X’s individuality, his integrity, and his passion for so long that his fear, apparent in the gallery that afternoon, was a revelation. It startled me, although perhaps it shouldn’t have. A lot of people are afraid to travel. There is the discomfort, the strange food, the inevitable failures of plans. There is the fear of flying, and the possibility of getting lost. It helps to have a talent for making oneself agreeable to strangers, something that has always come easily to me. I see what people want, and I give it to them. Maybe that’s a bad quality; in any case, it isn’t one my cousin has ever shared.

  8.

  I HAD COME TO STAY WITH X IN BEIJING AFTER A THREE-YEAR ABSENCE, without knowing what my plans were regarding Meiling. My cousin and I didn’t talk about romantic matters, but the thought of my ex-girlfriend was always in the back of my mind. I didn’t do anything to engineer a meeting, which I both hoped for and feared; rather, I imagined it might simply happen. We were circling one another, and one day we would come together like magnets, naturally and inevitably. I didn’t think of what would happen after that.

  On the last day before I was scheduled to return to Shanghai, I visited a new gallery near the Workers’ Stadium. When I returned, my cousin was still out. I was leafing through a pile of miscellaneous cards on his worktable when I came upon a red postcard. On the front of the postcard was a photo I recognized; I picked it up and examined it, as if I might have made a mistake. But it was certainly her. She was standing next to a model in a white, Western-style wedding dress, but Meiling didn’t suffer by comparison. She wore her hair in two neat plaits, a style that contrasted with her tailored army jacket (not PLA surplus, but a knockoff she’d designed herself) and her knee-high black leather boots. On top of the photo was the company’s logo, a design that incorporated her initials in English and Chinese.

  I was still holding the postcard when my cousin came in the door behind me. He saw the card in my hand.

  “Have you seen that yet?” he asked casually.

  I shook my head.

  He laughed. “Professional, right? She was always a businesswoman.”

  “Are you in touch with her?”

  “Some,” my cousin said. “Not much.”

  “She lives with someone?”

  X shook his head. “Alone. Near the Bell Tower.” He hesitated for a moment: “Will you go and see her?”

  “No.”

  “She’ll be sorry,” he said. “I know she wanted you to come.”

  He turned away as he said it, giving me my privacy. He must’ve known it was the very thing I’d come to Beijing hoping to hear. Still, the thought of Meiling and my cousin discussing me together—wondering whether I would have the courage to visit her—was painful and humiliating, and I didn’t want X to know I was already considering the possibility.

  “I know she’ll be around tomorrow morning,” my cousin said. “The address is on that card.”

  “I won’t have time before my flight,” I told my cousin—a pretense that deceived neither of us. My flight wasn’t until the afternoon, and there was nothing special I was returning to in Shanghai anyway.

  “Take that just in case,” my cousin said, indicating the postcard. “I have too many of them.”

  This was in March, and Beijing was cold and windy, as if winter and spring had combined in their worst aspects. Nevertheless, the following morning I found myself biking east from the Factory, toward Houhai. I had thought that the ride would be invigorating, and prepare me for a difficult meeting, but as I rode east I got colder and colder, so I was almost tempted to turn back. By the time I reached Meiling’s lane, I was shivering, and my stomach was uneasy. These physical ailments were at least a distraction from what was ahead of me: my thoughts felt frozen, locked up and inaccessible, as if I were one of the ice sculptures at the famous festival held every winter in my hometown.

  I let my feet take me down the lane, following a jog in the path, past a tiny hutong shop selling ice cream and telephone cards, to her building. I could see what had attracted her to this house right away: the entrance was made in the traditional way, with two overlapping walls forming an S shape, so that a visitor was unable to see inside from the street. I could hear my own pulse as I stepped around the second wall, but the courtyard was empty. There were some loose, cracked concrete paving stones, a plastic laundry line, and some plants along the wall, huddled in their red clay pots. The staircase was dark, but some lights were coming from the apartments on the second floor. I could hear a pair of female voices, although I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  I climbed the stairs in the same numb way I had turned in to the lane; I felt insubstantial, as if someone coming down the stairs in the other direction wouldn’t see me, would pass right through me like a ghost. On the landing I stopped and listened: the voices had also stopped, replaced by a CCTV news anchor: “Scientists are planning to investigate a lake in the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region, where local farmers have reported sightings of an aquatic monster. Could China challenge Scotland with its own homegrown ‘Nessy’?” This information was coming from apartment two, and Meiling was in number three. I knocked tentatively; a woman’s voice (not hers) called out:

  “Come in, come in!”

  At first I didn’t see anyone in the room; then I heard, quite literally, a pin drop.
I looked up: the most glamorous young woman I had ever seen was staring down from the landing of a steep flight of wooden stairs, an “international-type” beauty, tall and imperious, with large eyes and long, gangly limbs. She was wearing a white jacket with epaulets, and slim, midnight blue pants. Kneeling at her feet was a figure all in black, her hair in a knot on top of her head, her mouth full of straight pins. I stared at that tall, beautiful girl the way you might stare at anything—a newspaper, a map, or your watch—to avoid making eye contact with a stranger.

  Meiling, on the other hand, looked right at me, until I had to look back. She couldn’t smile (her mouth was full of pins), but she nodded briskly. She put another pin in the hem of the model’s slacks and then removed the rest of them from her mouth.

  “Take a rest,” she told the girl, who jogged down the steps and brushed past me with the smile of the very beautiful, who imagine their every glance to be a kind of largesse. I had no eyes for her. But neither could I look at Meiling, who was coming down the steps slowly, supporting herself on the railing. At that time it had been almost three years since I’d seen her, and the shock of being in her presence was such that I didn’t notice the most important change in my old lover until she was standing right in front of me.

  “You’re—” But there was no need to state the obvious.

  Meiling laughed. “People told me you were in town. I didn’t think you would come, but when I heard someone in the corridor, I knew it was you. Will you have some beer? Someone brought it, but I won’t drink it. Or some tea?”

  She was wearing a loose black dress and a man’s white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, but even this modest clothing couldn’t conceal the fact that Meiling was going to have a baby. Why hadn’t my cousin told me?

  “Or lychees?” Meiling suggested. “I’d like some lychees myself.”

  “All right,” I said. “Anything is fine.”

  Meiling laughed gently. “Sit down, have a rest. Get ready for your big journey.”

  “I’m not leaving until August,” I told her, but I sat down obediently. While Meiling got the fruit, I looked around the room: there was a pair of pink plastic slippers outside the bathroom door, lined up perfectly along with sneakers and several pairs of the traditional cloth shoes she liked to use on her models. An intricate Tibetan rug, turquoise, red, and green, decorated the floor, which was the same polished wood as the table. On the wall above the table was a small photograph of Meiling’s grandparents, in a gold frame hanging from a red plush ribbon.

  Of course I wondered about the baby’s father. But my cousin had said that Meiling was living on her own, and there was nothing in the apartment to indicate otherwise. In fact the extreme neatness of the room was characteristic of her; although the outside of the building was decrepit, and the common spaces ill cared for, Meiling seemed to take plea sure in reversing that entropy here. The one thing that surprised me was a pack of Red River cigarettes on the table next to my left elbow; although everyone had smoked in the East Village, Meiling had always said the habit was disgusting. I credited her with the fact that I’d never taken it up.

  “I can’t believe you smoke now,” I said to Meiling’s rear end, which was facing me as she rummaged in the cabinet for a plate.

  “They’re the model’s,” Meiling said, straightening up and looking at the girl, whom I could see standing on the roof, staring out toward Yonghegong, her arms crossed over her chest. “Isn’t she lovely?”

  I made a face: you could see that my response pleased Meiling. There’s a funny kind of camaraderie between women and the men they’ve dropped. Perhaps because I wasn’t threatening, she allowed herself to talk intimately with me—not only as if we had been speaking every day, but almost as if we were still together. It was flirtatious, and at the same time the very purpose of the flirtation seemed to be a warning, that what ever had been alive between us was now quite dead.

  Meiling came and sat in the chair opposite mine: “Are you nervous?”

  I was fantastically nervous, but not about my trip. I felt as if I were onstage or in a difficult exam; my mind seemed to have flown out my ear like a sparrow, and escaped through one of the kitchen casements. In its place was a small hole and an empty, buzzing sound.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What you’re doing makes everything possible. People here are still making their projects—blowing bubbles and howling.” Her scornful tone pleased me, and I didn’t remind her that not so long ago in the East Village, she had applauded those same projects: the fish-frying, the bubble-blowing, and the collective primal screams. Some of these performances we called art; others were just pranks; but we noticed that the critics often couldn’t tell the difference, and sometimes I wondered whether we knew ourselves.

  “People have seen these things already,” Meiling said. “And who cares about a performance nobody sees? What you’re doing, on the other hand…” She gave me a smile so radiant that I hardly noticed how her voice trailed off. Like my cousin, Meiling was vague on what I would actually be doing in America.

  I looked at the poster above her head, from the late 1960s, when my grandfather was breaking rocks in Heilongjiang. It was now a fashionable collector’s item. The poster showed a boy and a girl in red neckerchiefs holding hands: the boy is launching a toy rocket, while the girl waters a hole in the dirt next to a tiny potted sapling. Perhaps it was the factory smokestacks in the background, or the lavender color the artist had chosen for the sky, but there was something unnatural and sinister about the image (undoubtedly why Meiling liked it). Underneath the children, a caption read: “Revolution Improves Productivity.”

  Meiling sighed: “Sometimes this place is like a pigeon coop.” I couldn’t tell if she was talking about her apartment, or Beijing, or all of China. “You’re lucky to be going away.”

  “Come with me.”

  She laughed, and glanced down at her belly.

  “I’m serious. How are you going to do it alone?”

  “My mother will help.” Meiling sounded casual, but I thought I heard a false note, a crack in her confidence.

  “For how long?”

  She shrugged. “It’ll be all right.”

  “I could take care of you,” I said.

  Meiling half-smiled and shook her head. “Why are you so nice to me?”

  The answer to that question was fairly obvious.

  Meiling blushed, and tried to turn it into a joke: “A pregnant woman traveling with you…that’ll help with your visa application for sure.”

  She picked up the cigarettes and turned them around in her hands, frowning at the label. Was she considering my suggestion? Suddenly I thought everything might change; the present seemed to crack open, revealing a potential future I had barely allowed myself to imagine. It’s funny that in this moment I didn’t think of the baby’s father—who certainly did exist somewhere, even if he was no longer part of her life.

  “He could be an American citizen,” I said.

  “How do you know it’s a boy?”

  Then, without thinking, I did something that surprised us both. I reached out my hand and put it on Meiling’s round, black stomach. The skin there felt tight, the flesh of an unripe fruit.

  Meiling sat still for a moment, tolerating me, but her expression changed. She stood up from the table.

  “I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t. I was glad to see that playful ease drop away, even for a second.

  The model stuck her head in the door. “Miss Xu?”

  “Come in, come in. What are you waiting for?”

  Meiling turned to me, composed again. “The fact that you would do this for us…”

  For us. The collective pronoun startled me, and I looked up, as if there were someone else in the room I had missed until now.

  “For everyone, I mean. Not just East Village artists, but all young Chinese artists. You’ll be part of a whole international movement.”

  There was a new glibness in Meiling’s voice; this kind
of rhetoric was uncharacteristic of her. She’d always been suspicious of groups, even of our East Village, and I knew she didn’t believe in the idea of artistic “movements.”

  “This is the Chinese century,” Meiling said. “Everybody says so.”

  If it was really the Chinese century, I wondered why I had to go abroad. But I didn’t say that to Meiling. If she was encouraging me to go to America, then I had my answer. My ex-girlfriend might remember me sometimes with nostalgia, but her feelings were no more than that. How could I have imagined otherwise?

  “Thank you,” I said, and Meiling smiled. She thought I was responding to her flattery: that I really believed in myself as an ambassador of Chinese art.

  “This could be the beginning of something big for you,” she told me.

  “Yes,” I said. At least I knew it was the end of something else.

  9.

  A RECURRING TROPE IN THE LANDSCAPES OF THE OLD MASTERS IS THE passageway between this world and the other. In the Zhao Cangyun scroll Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the Tiantai Mountains, the border is a stream the two pilgrims wade across to meet the immortal ladies on the other side. In paintings like Zhang Feng’s Stone Bridge, it’s a rocky arch the pilgrim comes to suddenly on a mountain path. Sometimes, like Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao, you pass through easily, but cannot return. Other times, like Zhang Feng’s solitary pilgrim, you stay on the bridge, locked in place, unable to go either forward or back.

  I thought of this arch as I stood by the gate of the American consulate on Wulumuqi Nan Lu, in a long line of applicants. Everyone had warned me to get to the consulate early, and I’d had only a glass of tea before leaving the apartment. By the time I reached the striped sentry platforms, with their two stone-faced guards, my stomach was growling. It was not only hunger I felt, but a kind of anxiety, similar to stage fright. My cousin had promised that there would be no problems. I would simply explain that I had been working in the Shanghai office of Ditian Petroleum for nearly three years, and that I wanted to perfect my English, my greatest contribution to the company. In exchange, I was happy to share with the American students some of the glories of the Chinese landscape tradition, which I had studied with a master painter as a child.