The Dissident Read online

  I arrived at the consulate with my passport, the receipt of my CITIC application fee, and my forms (DS-2019 and DS-156-158) neatly completed in English and Chinese. I had a letter from my father, president and CEO of Ditian Petroleum, and one from my painting professor at Beijing Normal, who spoke of my mastery of traditional technique. Just to be safe, I also had brought along my old portfolio—a body of work that had not been updated for some time. More important was the letter Professor Harry Lin had sent from Los Angeles, verifying my invitation from the St. Anselm’s School for Girls, and offering the stipend I would receive from UCLA as proof that I possessed sufficient funds to complete my stay in Los Angeles. I had wanted to see those letters, to be sure that all of the information was correct, but my cousin told me to relax; he had checked the paperwork himself before forwarding it on to the consulate.

  In addition to my qualifications, there was the evidence of my parents’ apartment, our car, and the fact that I was an only son with a profitable career ahead of me. I had no relatives in the United States, and would be staying with strangers. There had been some question of applying for the “O” visa: Nonimmigrant Temporary Worker of Distinguished Merit, but my cousin and I had judged that needlessly complicated. I was a natural as a J-1 Exchange Visitor, and so we would aim for that.

  After nearly four hours, I was admitted to the courtyard, where I joined the “pre-screening” line. These days the U.S. visa section is located in the five-star Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel complex, but at that time they were still operating out of the old consulate, a beautiful walled house that had belonged to the last Qing finance minister. Ginkgo trees cast lazy shadows; outside the canteen, a small stone bridge spanned an artificial pool, stocked with frogs and lotuses. It was almost lunchtime, and the American employees strolled casually in that direction, as if they had nothing particular to do. Those of us in the visa line watched their progress. Someone had told me that the visa windows were actually in the Qing minister’s former stables; I thought of a joke about the officers “stalling for time,” but I did not think my compatriots in line would understand it.

  Finally I reached the pre-screening window, where a young Chinese consular employee—hiding a bad case of acne behind a curtain of hair—looked over my documents, stamped my forms, and sent me to the second window, where I had to wait again. Outside I noticed people had been chatting and joking with each other, but in here everyone was silent, as if we were students in an examination where only a certain number of passing marks would be awarded. One man had what looked like a photo album under his arm, to demonstrate “strong ties” to his family, and the girl standing behind me in line was carrying a violin case, as if she might at any moment take out her instrument and begin to serenade the officer.

  For his part, the visa officer looked uncomfortable behind his plastic partition. As I got closer, I could see him more clearly. He had sparse, fair hair, more colorless than yellow, and the kind of skin that suggested he didn’t spend very much time outside. His manner was very serious, but there was something funny about it too: his expression made me wonder how long he had been in Shanghai and whether his more experienced colleagues liked to tease him. I had the feeling he was younger than he looked, especially when he motioned for me to step forward to the window and pass my documents through the partition.

  “Hello,” he said, glancing at me sharply, as if he knew what I’d been thinking. “Would you start by telling me who will sponsor your stay in Los Angeles?”

  “I will be co-sponsored, by the St. Anselm’s School for Girls, and Professor Harry Lin of UCLA.”

  “Will you be staying with the professor?”

  “No. I’ll stay with a family called Travers, whose child attends the school where I’ll be teaching.”

  The visa officer seemed to relax slightly. “You speak English very well,” he said. “Where did you learn it?”

  “My mother was an English teacher.”

  The officer looked at his screen. I wondered how much information he had about my background, my mother’s exotic history and my grandfather’s death in detention. What ever he knew, he didn’t seem to want to discuss it with me, and I didn’t blame him. I myself had never liked to hear about how my mother’s father, who suffered from a congenital weakness in his lungs, had perished laboring in the frozen fields north of Harbin—where the air is so cold it hurts to breathe—or about my father’s family, boiling grass to make soup during the famine of ’58. As a child I had rebelled instinctively against those stories, which seemed to me a way of letting ghosts into our house.

  “You’re currently working for your father—is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “At his office here in Shanghai.”

  “It’s in the Shartex Plaza.”

  The visa officer sifted through my documents and extracted one, I couldn’t tell which. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, getting up from his desk. He disappeared through a door the same color as the wall behind him, and I was left listening to the murmur of the officers and applicants on either side of me, who kept their voices hushed, as if they were conducting secret transactions. A wall clock ticked loud seconds. I wondered if there was something in my past that neither my cousin nor Professor Harry Lin had anticipated, which would prevent me from making this journey after all.

  I don’t remember when I first learned that my mother had been detained; it was something that seemed obvious in retrospect, one of those things you both know and don’t know at the same time. My mother never had to remind me not to talk about it outside the house; I was conscious as a child of the fact that we were being watched, by our neighbors, the leaders of my mother’s work unit, my teachers at school. It wasn’t the malevolent kind of watching so much as the stern “for your own good” kind. People thought they could understand our family just by looking at it: my father was a rising star in the Party, who could never have hoped to win a woman like my mother without his newfound connections, and my mother was an elite intellectual, who had sacrificed her dignity so that her child would never suffer the way she had.

  In spite of all that, I know my parents’ marriage was not one of convenience. I can tell because of how disappointed the two of them are now. My mother must have thought that her sacrifice would be rewarded by the kind of love you read about in English poems; my father, when he saw that he couldn’t make my mother happy—no matter what promotions he received, or what material comforts he could provide—sank into a kind of chronic, low-level depression. In some unhappy marriages I’ve heard the child is ignored, but in my case, it was the reverse. Both of my parents watched me with the intensity of a pair of gamblers, waiting with clenched hands to see whether I might find the satisfactions that had eluded them.

  For much of my childhood, my father lived in the workers’ compound at Daqing, while my mother and I stayed in Harbin. During that time, I refused to admit I hardly knew my father. I often lied to my classmates, making up stories whose purpose was not to cover up the truth so much as to get away from it for a little while. For example: my father had been sent on a secret mission to Moscow, where he was getting technology secrets from Chairman Andropov, unknown in the West, which would allow China to triple its oil production within five years. My father was working with a team of scientists to refine a specialized jet fuel for use in the first Chinese spaceship to the moon. I once told a new student that my father had died in an oil well, where he was drilling deeper into the earth than anyone had previously ventured. I remember promising myself that I would tell this boy the truth, once I was sure he believed me. I left him by the Ping-Pong tables, with the image of my father’s hand disappearing slowly under the bubbling black liquid. I then forgot about the story, until the new boy told the others, and someone who knew my situation reported me to the teacher.

  “How could you not be proud of your father, when the whole of China looks to Daqing?” my teacher demanded. “What kind of person makes up lies, when the truth is so glorious?�
�

  I was sent to think about these questions while I cleaned the lavatories; worse than the punishment was something else my teacher told me, quietly, when the other students had dispersed: “Don’t you know that lies like that can come true, if somebody says them out loud?”

  That night I thought of things I might carelessly have said, and forgotten. My father, on one of our visits to the compound at Daqing, had given me two plastic soldiers, one red and one white; sometimes, before they set upon each other with brutal ferocity, I allowed them to engage in a bit of pre-combat dialogue. Had the things I said while I held these soldiers—a PLA infantryman and a Japanese officer, who threatened each other with methods of torture I had learned about in school—become true without my knowing it? Would someone somewhere have his fingers crushed, his skin branded, or his eyes cut out, because I snarled these horrors in the voices of my soldiers? Would my father decide to take a nighttime walk, trip, slide, and be sucked down between the giant iron birds, kowtowing to one another in the freezing field?

  The visa officer came back through the unmarked door and sat down in front of me. He picked up the letter from Professor Sui at Beijing Normal and frowned at it.

  “It says here that painting was only your minor in college. Why do you think this American school invited you?”

  This was a question I hadn’t prepared for, and my hesitation must’ve shown on my face. The officer’s momentary friendliness slipped away; he seemed to be taking plea sure in my nervous ness.

  “Someone must have recommended me?” It sounded as if I were begging. I thought of my cousin and how he would’ve handled this situation, with only his few phrases of English. Of course, my cousin had not put himself in a position to find out.

  “I have friends who—” But I didn’t want to mention X or any of our friends in Beijing. I had the feeling that I was in a dream, in which a child in adult clothing had suddenly assumed complete power over me.

  The visa officer waited.

  “I think they must’ve thought of me because of my experience with traditional technique,” I said. “I studied with a well-known painter as a child, specializing in landscapes. If you’d like to see some of my work, I have…”

  But the officer was shaking his head, as if he’d already gotten what he wanted. “You can go to window number seven, now,” he told me. “They’ll stamp your passport with the visa.”

  Clearly he expected me to thank him, but somehow those words stuck in my throat. He watched me struggle for a moment, and then looked past me impatiently to the next applicant, the girl with the violin. As I turned toward the final window, this very young girl glanced at me; I was surprised to see a shadow of envy and distaste in her clear black eyes, as if I had somehow obtained this piece of good fortune unfairly, through no particular gift of my own.

  As a child, I had a fantasy about disappointing my parents, who had always done everything for me. One day, I thought, I would stop doing my homework, or purposely fail my college entrance exam. Even once I was a student at Beijing Normal, I would sometimes cut my classes, walk out to the plaza with the fountain (which they filled in winter, to make a skating rink). I would sit on the edge of the fountain and imagine going farther, getting on a train to Ürümqi, Kashgar, Lhasa—I didn’t care where. I would stare at the faces in the crowd going past outside the gate. Their quick movements seemed guided by some inner purpose, in contrast to my own inertia. Those on foot or bicycle would glance in at the elite campus as they went past, thinking, perhaps, of their own sons and daughters, and yet none made eye contact with me. Our mutual envy was misinformed, and willfully so: we didn’t want to know the truth about each others’ situations. We wanted to imagine that paradise existed just outside the gates of our own lives.

  That evening, my mother cooked a celebratory dinner, and my father got out an atlas with a map of the United States, to pinpoint the exact location of Los Angeles, California. I found his questions and my mother’s enthusiasm oppressive, and after dinner I told them I was going out. I wandered for almost half an hour, not sure of where I was going, and eventually found an anonymous, smoked-filled public call shop, populated by teenagers hunched over antiquated computers. Because X believed our phone lines were never entirely secure, we spoke in an amateurish kind of code—certainly something the authorities could have figured out, if they were in fact listening. But this type of theatrical secrecy was typical of my cousin.

  “How is the new painting?” he asked me.

  “It’s coming along.”

  “I mean, today in particular. No snags?”

  “I’m starting to think the whole project is too ambitious,” I told him. “Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea in the first place.”

  “Oh, it’s good,” X said. “Trust me. You can’t see it yourself, because you’re standing too close to the canvas.”

  My departure date was set for the fifteenth of August. In the intervening months, during which I obsessively visited my favorite spots in Shanghai—the museum, the Jing’An Si, and the bar at the J. W. Marriott hotel—I never quite believed that I was going. Even once I was at the airport, I was waiting to be stopped by a customs official, or one of the doctors who can quarantine a passenger at the last minute and keep him back for examination. On the plane, my anxiety did not abate: I thought I would be apprehended as soon as I disembarked in Los Angeles, by a conscientious team of ground crew, customs officials, and police, who would put me on a plane right back to Shanghai.

  If it still seems unbelievable that all of these people would support me, given the name I had established for myself, and that I would be allowed to leave the country on any premise, given my political history, I would ask you to suspend your disbelief a little longer, so that I might tell my story in order, not chronologically, but as it falls out of my memory, through my fingers, and into this laptop computer. The computer—manufactured by the American company Dell but made in China—was a gift from Cece Travers, who noticed how much of the time I was supposed to be painting I actually spent filling up yellow legal pads. I used my own language at first, in case anyone found my diary; but once I had the computer, I thought I might try writing in English.

  “Does this have to do with your project?” Cece asked me kindly, when she found me poking at the American keyboard, one-fingered, my horse hair brushes languishing soft and unused in the spectacular studio she had prepared for me.

  I explained to Cece that I was planning a special project, something different from all of my previous work, which would include text as well as images. Of course that was another fabrication. In order to keep lying convincingly, and hold on to your sanity, it helps to have a private place where you are simultaneously either speaking or writing down the truth.

  10.

  JOAN’S TELEPHONE DID NOT RING IN THE MORNING, ORDINARILY. EVERYONE who knew her was aware that she didn’t like to be disturbed before noon. It was her habit to sit down to work from seven-thirty until eleven. Then she would go for a jog, fix a light lunch, and read the newspaper while she ate. In the afternoons she would return to her desk, either going back over what she had done that morning or taking care of other tasks: university paperwork, her students’ stories, or the occasional book review. These days her schedule hummed along as usual; a book of her short stories came out in paperback; but she couldn’t ignore the fact that it had been two years since her mornings had produced anything really new.

  When the phone rang on Wednesday morning, she thought she might as well answer it.

  “Joan,” Cece said. “I don’t like to call in the morning—”

  “That’s OK,” Joan said.

  “I just wanted to invite you to dinner with Mr. Yuan. It’ll be simple, maybe a tomato salad—the Santa Monica market has heirlooms now—and a pappardelle I’ve been making with Peekytoe crab. I don’t know if you have plans on Friday, but I’d love it if you could come.”

  “I don’t know,” Joan said. “I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

/>   “Harry Lin is going to be there, too,” Cece said casually. “Did I mention him before? He’s the one who organized everything with Mr. Yuan. He’s the chair of the art department at UCLA, published very extensively, Gordon says. Divorced, I think—or widowed? And he’s unusually tall, at least for a Chinese—”

  “Cece?”

  “What?”

  “Are you trying to—”

  “No! Joan, I swear. I’m not even positive he’s single. It’s just that he’s an interesting man, and I’m always a little intimidated around him. I thought you would add so much to the conversation.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Joan said. Cece’s flattery was blatant, but it was also hard to resist.

  “Think about it,” Cece encouraged her, and then expertly changed the subject: “Did I tell you who called the other day?”

  “Who?”

  “Phil. From Chinatown, of all places.”

  Joan was seized by a sudden apprehension. “You mean, Chinatown in New York, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Cece said.

  Joan relaxed. She’d been relieved when her younger brother had left Los Angeles ten years ago for New York. They had never gotten along particularly well. Phil was manipulative, depressive, and needy, qualities the whole family indulged to an extent she had never been able to understand. There was also a sort of competition between them, perhaps because of their closeness in age. Gordon, who was five years older than Joan, had always been untouchable, but against Phil she felt she had to prove herself again and again. Maybe this was her own fault: she did tend to mea sure herself against others. But who didn’t? She had always worked harder than her younger brother, but no matter how irresponsibly he behaved, things seemed to work out for him. Part of that was his looks, his chiseled features and childlike blue eyes; he could be very charming, especially with strangers. It was difficult to explain to other people what aggravated her about Phil.