The Dissident Page 7

  “It’s great news, actually—”

  But Cece had covered the phone and was saying something to someone on the other end.

  “Cece?”

  “Sorry, the cats are getting into the slides.”

  One thing that had brought Cece and her brother Gordon together was their love of animals: a suspicious character trait, in Joan’s opinion.

  “I’m finally or ga nizing all our slides,” Cece was explaining. “I’m labeling them with dates, so that if you want to look at Max’s sixth birthday, say, you can just find August 1991 without having to go through the whole—” Cece cupped her hand over the phone, but Joan could still hear her chastising, gently: “Ptolemy! You know that’s naughty.”

  Joan did not like animals, but if you were going to have them, at least they should not be named after historical personages. This was obviously her brother’s doing. Cece was inclined toward the innocuous sort of names that people ordinarily gave their pets, but most of the animals were saddled with her brother’s attempts at cleverness. On more than one occasion, when he and Cece were entertaining, Joan had heard Gordon chastising the animals: “Freud—control yourself!” or, “Retreat, Napoleon—bad cat!”

  “It was so funny to talk to Philip,” Cece continued. “He sounded better than he has in I don’t know how long.”

  Cece was the only person, besides their mother, who had ever called her brother Philip. Joan wondered if she was aware of it.

  “I almost didn’t answer the phone, actually, because I didn’t think it would be either of the children—Livy just called yesterday from Paris, and Max was at the mural—and I was in the middle of brushing Nixon’s teeth.”

  “You brush the cats’ teeth?”

  “Only the ones who have gum disease,” Cece said defensively. “Anyway, I was right—it wasn’t either of them. It was Phil.”

  It was Cece’s vagueness that bothered Joan. She thought that if her sister-in-law could find something to do—an actual job, as opposed to the errands, compulsive childcare, and scattered intellectual enthusiasms that filled her days—she would be able to focus. Cece was far from stupid. She was a serious reader of books that other people didn’t have time for, particularly multivolume works; she was the only person Joan knew who was able to say that her favorite novels were Remembrance of Things Past and A Dance to the Music of Time without sounding pretentious. “I like to get immersed,” she explained.

  “But what did Phil say?”

  Cece lowered her voice to a confidential tone: “He had just come from the studio. He was signing a big contract.”

  “He got a part?” Her brother had auditioned for movies and television for years, securing several commercials and a few bit parts in films, before he left L.A. and moved to New York “to be a playwright.” As if writing was something you could only do in certain places, like surfing or skiing. As if you could suddenly decide to become something that other people had been working at every day, for their entire lives. He still did commercials and institutional videos, and some grantwriting on the side, but Joan suspected that her brother’s Manhattan lifestyle was financed mostly by his girlfriend.

  “No,” Cece said. “It’s a writing contract.”

  People said that your stomach fell when you heard certain kinds of news, but Joan found that hers tended to rise. It seemed to bob up into her throat, like the plastic bath toys Cece’s children had had when they were young.

  “Although, I mean, it seems like it’s for something he’s already written, so I don’t know.” Cece had a very effective way of being mysterious—probably the result of intense mental disorganization. “I’m not sure if he’ll have to actually write something now, or just—”

  “Cece!”

  “What?”

  “What is the contract for?”

  Cece sounded slightly offended. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. They’re paying Philip a million dollars to turn his play into a big summer movie.”

  Joan looked out the window. The Epsteins’ daughter, Sheila, was hitting a tennis ball against the garage door. Sheila wasn’t especially accurate, but she was per sis tent; she sometimes hit for over an hour. Watching from her office window, Joan often wanted to tell the girl to stop. It wasn’t worth it. She was never going to be a natural, and if she was going to work this hard, it ought to be at something more practical, a field not quite so crowded with naturals.

  “He said as soon as he was finished with the movie people, he went straight to Chinatown. Not Chinatown, Chinatown, but the one in Flushing. Did you know Queens had a Chinatown?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did I! It’s supposed to be the most authentic in the world—I mean, not counting in China.”

  “I don’t think you call them Chinatowns in China,” Joan said.

  “He was at the rare animal market.”

  “What was he doing at the rare animal market?”

  “He didn’t say. It was so nice to be talking to him—I don’t know when the last time was.”

  “Looking for a companion, maybe. A nice Bengal tiger.”

  “A while, anyway,” Cece said.

  “Pricing dodos,” Joan suggested.

  “Aren’t those extinct?”

  “You never know.”

  “I think it’s time to become a family again,” Cece said. “I’m sure Phil agrees with me. It’s time to put the past behind us.”

  “I don’t think the past is ever very far behind Phil,” Joan said. “He brings it along with him, like Linus with his blanket.”

  “PTOLEMY!” Cece said. “You get out of there!”

  “Cece?”

  “Sorry—it’s the cats. So we’ll count on you for Friday. Around seven?”

  When she’d gotten off the phone with Cece, Joan went downstairs to the kitchen and replaced the phone in the charger. The worst thing she could do today would be not to write. That would be letting her brother get away with something. Still, she could not quite go back to her office. She stepped out the screen door into the backyard: an empty rectangle of grass that she had slowly transformed into a garden. Now there were ferns, impatiens, and a few birds-of-paradise, along with her big purchase—a Meyer lemon tree. She had been proud of the garden, startled that her efforts had yielded something tangible. Now, suddenly, the yard had become a negative quantity, a colorful representation of the work she had failed to do.

  It was not that Joan was envious, or not only that. After all, she’d never wanted to write a play, a form that forced you to give up control to a terrifying extent. It was more the fact that her brother’s achievements seemed to go against the natural order, in which years and years of labor finally produced something acceptable to its creator, usually ignored by the larger world. Instead, after years of ostensible “writer’s block,” there was suddenly a play, which was now going to be made into a “big summer movie.” Standing in the garden, Joan realized that she hadn’t asked about the subject of Phil’s play. She was pretty sure she already knew.

  11.

  FOR A LONG TIME, JOAN HAD IMAGINED WRITING A NOVEL ABOUT CECE and Phil. Her ex-husband Frank had suggested it a long time ago, when they were still married and had socialized with Gordon, Phil, and Cece on a regular basis. According to Frank, you could no longer write a novel about adultery, both because the nineteenth-century precedents had exhausted the genre and because the social taboo that had once made it a great subject was gone. Incest was still available, but it was sensational and hardly sympathetic. The situation with Gordon, Phil, and Cece, on the other hand, was perfect: even in late-twentieth-century Los Angeles, people ordinarily refrained from sleeping with their spouses’ siblings.

  Joan suspected that Frank had found Cece attractive, and reveled in the contradiction between her perfect house wifely persona and the very clear evidence (although it was never discussed) that she and Phil had been engaged in a long-standing sexual relationship. Joan had agreed that the idea had potential, but of course she
could never use it. Now that their parents were gone, and Phil was essentially out of touch, Gordon and his children were the only family she had left. Even a new novel wasn’t worth losing them, she told herself. And anyway, who knew whether it would work?

  There was the question of Gordon, for example. In a novel, you would have to specify whether or not Cece’s husband knew about the affair. His condescension toward Phil, which had culminated in essentially dismissing their younger brother from the family, suggested that Gordon was well aware of what had been going on for all those years. On the other hand, when Joan was getting divorced, Gordon had called her up one day to tell her very seriously that no marriage was perfect. He and Cece had had their difficulties too, he said, as if that fact wouldn’t be completely obvious to Joan. If she had been forced to articulate it, Joan would’ve said that her brother both knew and didn’t know. But you couldn’t do that in a novel: that was why real life was both more complicated and less satisfying than fiction.

  She had worried that Frank would take on the project himself, but luckily her ex-husband hadn’t been interested in “domestic themes.” “That’s your department,” he’d been fond of saying, as if by granting Joan family life, he was entitled to stake his claim on everything else. When they’d divorced, Frank had been at work on a very long, heavily researched novel set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, a magnum opus under which Joan imagined he was still laboring.

  She hadn’t listened to Frank, and now she strongly suspected that her brother had gone ahead and written it. Of course, someone might argue that the story belonged to Phil, whereas it wasn’t Joan’s to write. But Phil was not a writer! He was someone who dabbled in literature, the way he dabbled in theater, in women, and in life in general.

  On her way up to her office, Joan came across the article about the dissident, on the kitchen counter underneath the toaster oven, where she must’ve left it yesterday. She picked it up and toed the foot pedal of the trash can, preparing to toss it out. It was just a photocopy of a printed article—a copy of a copy of a copy—from the Taipei Times. The quality was poor, a pixilated newsprint version of a photo that had probably been dark and grainy in the original, and the dissident’s expression was hard to make out. Joan had to squint to read the accompanying text.

  Yuan Zhao was one of the leaders of the democracy movement. He was arrested in June of 1989, and spent six months in Beijing’s notorious Qincheng prison. He was reported, upon his release, to have commented that the food in jail was better than in his university canteen. In the late winter of 1990, he had moved to an artists’ community near the Beijing Summer Palace, where he had lived in close proximity to some of China’s most famous contemporary artists, of the internationally recognized “cynical realist” school. Two years later he moved again, this time to the far east side of the city, an area that would soon be dubbed Beijing’s East Village by the shabby collection of painters, photographers, and performers who began to take up residence there.

  The East Villagers lived where the rents were cheapest, among filth and industrial waste just outside the Third Ring Road, where they began publishing an underground journal of their work called Lu Kou, or Intersections. During this time, Yuan Zhao stopped painting and began staging increasingly daring performances, often in collaboration with his friends. These performances attracted the attention of foreign media, as well as of the government. In June of 1994, exactly five years after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Yuan Zhao returned to prison briefly, this time at a detention center in Changping.

  Joan went into her office, and was clearing off the space around her computer—a pile of receipts marked “taxes,” a copy of Family Happiness and Other Stories overdue from the Beverly Hills Public Library, an ancient glass of water with a dusty skin on top. She realized she was still holding the article, and pinned it absently to her bulletin board. You never knew what might be useful. Sometimes it scared her, how unpredictable these things were: you were annoyed about being disturbed, and then that very interruption dropped something precious in your lap.

  12.

  I CLEARED U.S. CUSTOMS EASILY, THROUGH THE DOUBLE DOORS MARKED “Nothing to Declare.” The officer, an older, heavyset black man with a mustache, barely glanced at my passport. He asked me the purpose of my visit (cultural exchange), my occupation (teacher), and whether I was transporting any weapons or farm products. When I showed him the small pocketknife with the mother-of-pearl handle I always carried, he waved me through, all the time continuing a conversation with another officer.

  I proceeded through the passageway, out into a light so bright that initially I was blind, and saw only an indeterminate mass of people crowding the barrier between us and the main terminal. The terminal was all glass and blue steel; outside you could see the cars gliding peacefully by, like silvery fish. I looked around, and saw the characters “Yuan Zhao” on a sign, above which was a halo of yellow hair, some large gold earrings, and a smooth, eager face.

  “Hello,” said Cece Travers. “I’m so relieved that you made it. I could barely sleep last night—although I’m sure it was much worse for you. Was it very uncomfortable?”

  “Hello,” I said. “No, thank you.”

  “Do you remember which baggage claim you are? I never do—oh, wait, here, we’ll just ask. Sir?”

  “Baggage claim two,” I said, but Cece was already getting the answer from a member of the ground crew.

  “I meant to bring my son to help with the bags, but he was busy today. That’s Max; his sister Olivia will be home on Thursday. And I didn’t even introduce myself properly. I’m Cece Travers.”

  “Yuan Zhao.”

  “Well, I know who you are. I copied your name from the museum catalogue. I know how if you just get one line wrong, it means something totally different.”

  This idea about the mutability of Chinese characters was one I heard over and over again in America. There was also some confusion about the Chinese having multiple words for snow, which I eventually determined was a corruption of a similar misconception about Eskimos—one of those interesting ideas that achieve their currency through repetition, and take hold in people’s minds in spite of clear evidence to the contrary.

  “I know that your first name—I mean the name that comes first—is your family name,” Cece was saying. “Do you prefer to be called Mr. Yuan?”

  On the plane I had been planning to give Mrs. Travers my childhood nickname. My mother had called me Xiao Pangzi because I was an enthusiastic eater, and it was a name I still felt comfortable answering to, particularly among people who didn’t understand its silly connotations. However, the whole point of this trip, at least according to my cousin, was to enhance the reputation of modern Chinese painting in America. Meiling was even more optimistic: we were at the outset of a whole new movement in international art, and Americans should associate that movement with the name “Yuan Zhao.”

  “Mr. Yuan is fine,” I told Cece. We proceeded toward the baggage claim, where Cece set the sign down casually on the ground. That was something a Chinese person would not have done, although it was a relief to me to have the large, embarrassing characters out of sight. The crowd around baggage claim number two was almost entirely Shanghai people; I was nervous that at any moment someone I knew might appear and ask what I was doing in Los Angeles.

  Cece saw me looking at the sign and misinterpreted my reaction.

  “Please forgive the calligraphy. I did make a mistake, didn’t I?”

  “It’s perfect,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Thank you—for being patient with me. I love Chinese painting, and you were coming, and I thought I might learn some characters. But of course, it’s very difficult. I was consoling myself with how different the languages are—and now here you are. I have to admit, I didn’t expect you would speak such beautiful English.”

  “You’re too polite,” I said automatically, but Cece took me literally.

  “No,” she said, touchi
ng my arm. “I’m really not being polite at all.”

  I almost said that my mother had been born in America, and then caught myself. One of the things I had been doing in the months leading up to my trip was practicing how I might answer certain questions, so that nothing I said would contradict the things my hosts might already believe about me. I was surprised to have almost slipped so soon.

  “Chinese schools must be excellent,” Cece remarked.

  My bags arrived all together, and the process was just as simple with the paintings: a clerk at the office for oversized baggage assured us that they had arrived safely, and confirmed our authorization of the graduate students from UCLA who would pick them up.

  “I don’t want to embarrass you, but I have to say—I’m a huge fan of your work,” Cece said. “Harry Lin gave us the catalogue from the Taiwan museum.”

  “Thank you,” I said, but the reference to Professor Lin startled me. All of my communication with him had been through my cousin, and X had promised me that I wouldn’t have to meet the professor for months, until I had established myself in Los Angeles (and hopefully made a start on my “project”). I was disturbed to hear Cece mentioning him so casually, as if he were a friend of the family.

  “They just took my breath away, even as reproductions. I’m so impatient to see the originals.”

  “That work is very old,” I said.

  “Oh, I know that,” Cece said, just as we passed through the last set of automatic doors into the street. For a moment, the air caught me off guard. It wasn’t the heat—I’d expected that—but a certain softness, which I would later learn to associate with the desert cities of the “Southland”: Santa Barbara, San Diego, Palm Springs. In between the traffic sounds, you could hear small birds. Looking up, I saw a slim tower, topped with a futuristic, circular glass room, a miniature version of the new Oriental Pearl TV headquarters in Pudong.