The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  My students giggled. I had made a joke in English! Perhaps it was this small success that caused me to reach up theatrically and yank a few hairs from the crown of my head, in the manner of my teacher, Wang Laoshi. The pain was sharp, and my eyes watered. I noticed that my students had stepped back. They were whispering.

  “This is AP art,” I heard Emily say suddenly, and I was afraid that she had somehow seen what was wrong with my work—that she was calling me a fake.

  “I think you can learn from this,” I said. But I did not sound confident. Even the stupidest student can hear weakness in a teacher’s voice.

  “What are you doing here?” Emily demanded. The hairs on my arms stood on end. I stared at my lobster—but how could he help me? He didn’t even have his antennae yet. As I was turning to face my students, having lost my face, I heard a voice:

  “I’m transferring.”

  Standing in the front of our classroom was a Chinese girl. Or rather, a Chinese girl with an American voice, what is called a Chinese-American. She had short hair and a wide face—a country face, but beautiful, like old pictures of my paternal grandmother on her wedding day in Taiyuan. She was wearing the same uniform as the other girls, and also she was not. She was wearing the lavender dress, hemmed just as short as Emily’s and Olivia’s, but underneath it she had put on a pair of wine-colored corduroy pants, which were spattered with paint, an addition that had the effect of making the dress ridiculous; or rather, since the dress was already ridiculous, making a comment about its ridiculousness. She was wearing a beaded choker around her neck, and a tiny ruby stud in her left nostril, like a Hindu. The stud exactly matched the color of her trousers, which were wide and frayed at the bottom, so that they nearly covered her shoes. There was something strange about her shoes as well: it took me a moment to see that she had painted the stamped leather band on each shoe white, and the rest of the upper black. The inversion was jarring, if you were used to the ordinary model.

  My AP artists pinched each other’s arms and stepped on each other’s feet. There was soft, untraceable giggling.

  “I think the class is full,” said Emily. “Isn’t it, Mr. Jow?”

  “I am Yuan Zhao—Yuan Laoshi,” I told the new student.

  “I’m June,” the student said. “I’d like to take your class.”

  “We have been working together for almost one month,” I said. “I’m afraid you might have trouble catching up.”

  “I could show you my portfolio,” June said. “Some of it’s old work, but there’s some stuff that’s OK.”

  My students exchanged shocked glances. I had only been at St. Anselm’s for three weeks, but even I had noticed that my girls shared a particularly Chinese superstition: they didn’t admit that anything they’d done was good. A student would come out of a test swearing she’d failed it; another would put on an impressive dance performance after promising her friends that she was going to “fall on her ass.”

  “Do we even have any extra easels?” Olivia said.

  “That’s OK,” said June. “I’ve been working on flat surfaces lately.”

  “Flat surfaces,” Catherine repeated, looking pointedly at our new student’s petite bosom.

  Ordinarily I liked Catherine, our class’s defender of love, but that day I wasn’t proud of her.

  “I would be happy to look at your work,” I told June. “You will have to choose a theme, of course.” I indicated the whiteboard, where our themes were still written next to our names. Some of the themes, written in whiteboard marker, were becoming faint or indistinct.

  June squinted at the board. “Who’s Frank?”

  “France,” Katie said, annoyed. “My theme is France.”

  “Too bad,” said June. “Frank was my favorite.”

  “You may come to my office hours,” I told June. “I’ll look at your work then.” It seemed like a good idea to separate June from my other students, at least for the moment.

  “I have it now, actually,” June said, glancing at Emily.

  By now I was familiar with Emily’s unassailable social position among my students. I knew she lived in the Greek Revival mansion on the corner of Rimpau and Third, drove her brother’s “old” black BMW convertible to school, and that the diamond-studded silver heart she wore around her neck was a gift from Jake, her long-distance boyfriend, a senior at a boarding school in Connecticut. Emily was not by any stretch my least talented student, and the mechanics of drawing—proportion, shading, the tricks of perspective—came to her with an ease my other students worshipfully admired. Like June, she had entered the class with some work already completed: four small abstractions, derivative of Mondrian but nevertheless well executed, which she intended to use in the Color and Design section of her portfolio. I had put them up on the shelf above the whiteboard as an example for the other girls, but Emily had suddenly become shy, and asked me if she could put the paintings away.

  It was hard to see how anyone could threaten a young woman with all of these advantages—and yet Emily was staring at our new student with such iciness that I was uneasy, as if that look had been directed at me.

  “Mr. Jow is doing a demonstration,” she said.

  June looked at my lobster. She did not say anything disrespectful, or indicate her opinion in any way. Nevertheless, my neck and ears got warm, as if someone other than a student—X or my old teacher Wang Laoshi—were looking at my work.

  “Everyone will work on their Color and Design pieces today,” I said as firmly as I could. “If you haven’t thought about Color and Design yet, today is the time to start.”

  My students scurried back to their easels, complaining to each other about their terrible senses of Color and Design.

  June had already taken her black portfolio from where it was leaning against the wall (it was the same portfolio the other girls used, except that it hadn’t been bought new for the class) and was removing some drawings, laying them on my until-now-empty teacher’s desk.

  The first thing I noticed was that June’s drawings were very good. The first were a pen-and-ink series of beds: rumpled and made, pristine and improvised, from a bare mattress with just the suggestion of a cold floor beneath it, to a pristine king that looked as if it had never been slept on (except for an empty water glass on the night table), to a child’s bunkbed, full of toys and books and clothing, as if its occupant (absent, as in all of the other drawings) were preparing for a siege.

  “These are interesting,” I said.

  “They’re old,” June said quickly. “Look at these.”

  I was surprised to see that my opinion mattered to her. I thought she must have known how good she was, especially in comparison with her fellow students. As the semester progressed, occasionally I would see another student ask her for help, especially when there was no one else around. (June was often in the studio in the mornings before school or after the last bell, when my other students were changing into their St. Anselm Andalusian outfits, getting ready to compete in volleyball and soccer.) Ordinarily when one girl looked at another’s work, it was with gasps of awe, followed immediately by a frown, as she professed that her friend’s project was “way way better” than her own.

  June never commented on the quality of her classmates’ work; instead she gave specific suggestions. “Maybe the background should be more purple,” she would say. Or: “What about if you did it on a smaller paper?” I noticed that the other students followed her instructions, although they didn’t acknowledge her help or include her in any social way.

  “These are chairs,” June said, showing me four more drawings, this time in oil pastel. She was able to manipulate that difficult material with what looked like ease; any roughness was deliberate.

  “These are doorknobs.” She removed and replaced the drawings too quickly. I wanted to tell her to wait, except that I was always eager to see the next set.

  “Balloons.”

  “Coat hooks.”

  “Soap.”

 
Some were graphic, like cartoons; others were more realistic, but none was the same as any other.

  “I’m very impressed,” I told June. “I think you’ve already completed a lot of the material you would need for a portfolio.”

  I could tell June was trying to keep herself from smiling. “I haven’t shown you my fruits.”

  “Are your parents from China?” I asked her.

  “Taiwan,” June said. “But they died when I was a baby. My grandmother brought me to L.A. when I was two.”

  I wondered how her parents had died, but I thought it might be insensitive to ask. “Is your grandmother an artist?”

  June seemed to find this amusing. “No,” she said, but she didn’t volunteer any more information.

  “So you’ve mostly studied here at this school?” I tried to speak calmly, controlling my excitement. I wished for someone to confirm what I was seeing; I assumed the other art teachers at St. Anselm’s had already discovered June, the kind of student you meet once in a career, if at all.

  “I haven’t taken art electives here before. I usually like to work on my own.”

  As she talked, she was laying out several small acrylics: a banana that looked somehow regal, two friendly persimmons, a plum in the first stages of rotting, its skin shriveling into interesting purple rivulets, and a large, resplendent peach, haloed with fuzz. In the bottom, right-hand corner of each painting was a small red mark, like an umbrella with a curved handle, or a child’s drawing of a bird.

  “What is that?” I asked her. “Your signature?”

  June looked embarrassed. “Sort of a signature. Here’s the J.” She traced it with her finger. “And the W is upside-down.”

  “What is your family name?” I asked her.

  “Wang,” she said, drawing out the A in an adorable American way.

  Now, there are millions of Wangs in China, and the fact that this young woman had the same surname as my old teacher was of no significance. But I could not help remembering how Wang Laoshi used to wear trousers like June’s, spattered with paint and coming apart at the cuffs.

  “I might be able to accept you,” I told her, extending the interview a little longer than necessary. I already knew I was going to let June Wang into my class. “Do you have an idea about a theme?”

  “House hold appliances,” June said.

  “House hold appliances?”

  “Probably the smaller ones: coffeemakers, dustbusters.” June smiled. “Maybe a vacuum, if I get ambitious.”

  I didn’t know about house hold appliances, but knew I wanted those persimmons in my class. It was the same kind of thrill I got the first time I saw X’s paintings on the walls of his room in the East Village.

  “All right,” I said. “You can bring your things and start tomorrow. There’s space over there in the corner, next to Katie.” I tried to position her as far from Emily as I could, but the other girls were unshakably loyal.

  “Um, Mr. Jow?” Katie called from across the room. “The slide projector’s here. There isn’t really any space.”

  I hadn’t realized my students were listening. “We will move the slide projector,” I told them. “Welcome to our class, June.”

  “Thanks, Yuan Laoshi.”

  She didn’t know how to speak Chinese. Her pronunciation of my name was almost as bad as the other girls’. Still, I was surprised by how happy it made me feel, just to know that she remembered it.

  36.

  JOAN RESOLVED TO APOLOGIZE TO THE DISSIDENT. YUAN ZHAO MIGHT have forgotten about her error a few weeks ago, but Joan hadn’t; in fact, she hadn’t stopped thinking about him since the dinner party. At first she planned to stop by Gordon and Cece’s, just to say she was sorry, but the thought of Phil observing that visit made her change her mind. She wasn’t writing a novel about Yuan Zhao (at least not yet), but she had checked out Professor Harry Lin’s book Experimental Chinese Art: the Tiananmen Generation from the library, and she’d bought a map of Beijing, to see if she could figure out where the East Village had been.

  She decided she would visit him at the high school. She was afraid she might need some sort of pass, but the security guard must’ve assumed she was a parent; he simply nodded her through the gate. She asked directions from a student and hurried upstairs. If she was lucky, she would avoid running into Cece or her niece.

  When she knocked on the door of the art classroom, Yuan Zhao seemed to be alone. He was concentrating on the screen of his laptop computer. The area around him was a pleasant mess: a sink with a coffee can of still-wet brushes, a bookshelf full of heavy art catalogues and magazines (the golden spines of many years of National Geographic), and a typewriter precariously balanced on an old metal folding table. The room smelled richly of turpentine and glue.

  “Hello?” Joan said. The dissident looked up; his long hair was tied back in a ponytail, and he was wearing Western clothing: a gray sweater that was slightly too big for him, and a pair of pleated trousers.

  Yuan Zhao stood up politely and glanced toward the back of the room: a student was working at a large steel table underneath the window.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting,” Joan said.

  “My classes are finished for the day.” It was hard to tell whether he was angry, or simply awkward out of shyness. He indicated an empty chair in front of the old typewriter, and Joan sat down.

  “I came to apologize about the other night,” she said. “I’m so sorry I asked all those questions. I was interested in your life—but I shouldn’t have pried. I feel terrible about it.”

  “Never mind, never mind,” the dissident said, blushing.

  Joan wondered if there was a Chinese protocol for apologies. Was she embarrassing him? She hurried to change the subject: “I have to admit, I was hoping you might tell me a little more about the artists’ villages you mentioned.”

  “That isn’t interesting,” the dissident said.

  “Oh, it is,” Joan said. “To me it is.” The studio was quiet except for a faint beat from the headphones of the student sitting at the table.

  “We moved to the Yuanmingyuan because it was cheap, and we knew some artists lived there,” the dissident said. “That’s near the old Summer Palace—where you can see the Empress Cixi’s marble boat. Actually a copy of the boat.”

  Joan was not interested in tourism. She tried to be patient. “When you say ‘we’…?”

  “Myself, Baoyu, my friend Tianming. Baoyu liked to dress up in women’s clothes, and Tianming started to photograph him that way.”

  Joan had seen reproductions of some of Yuan Zhao’s early paintings in Harry Lin’s book. One showed police in green uniforms surrounding a young man in a bathrobe, a cornucopia of fruits and flowers growing where his genitals should be.

  “One day he was arrested, and—”

  “The man in the bathrobe!” Joan exclaimed. “Is that right?”

  The dissident looked startled.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve been reading Professor Lin’s book. You were saying he was arrested?”

  “We were often moving from place to place,” he said slowly. “We were not supposed to be making that kind of work. Per for mance art was illegal, you see.”

  “Why performances but not paintings?”

  “A censor can’t review a performance beforehand. And so much of our work at that time was done privately, or only for an audience of friends.”

  “But someone must’ve taken pictures?”

  Yuan Zhao nodded. “An artist named Zhang Tianming photographed most of the projects. Of course, that makes attribution difficult. In the moment, the project belongs to the performer. But if a skilled photographer, an artist in his own right, takes a picture, who does that picture belong to? And who is the author of the performance five years from now?”

  “That’s fascinating,” Joan said. “The idea that the authorship of a work of art could change over time.”

  Yuan Zhao smiled. “Fascinating, and also a big problem for artists.”r />
  “I would love to see those photos,” Joan said.

  “They haven’t been published, unfortunately,” Yuan Zhao said. “Only some of them were in a small magazine we started.”

  Joan had opened one of the thin graph-paper notebooks she always carried, and was jotting things down. “Do you mind?” she asked him.

  “I don’t mind, but—”

  “Just for my own education,” Joan said. “Maybe when your show opens, I could do some sort of profile. For the L.A. Times Magazine, or even Art in America.” It wasn’t something she’d planned to say (she certainly wasn’t qualified to write for Art in America) but now it occurred to her that a profile was the perfect excuse. They would have to have several more interviews if she was really going to write an article. “An article would be good publicity for DNA-ture,” she added.

  The dissident looked unhappy. He was the real thing—an artist who didn’t care about the press, who just wanted to be left alone to make his work. She was about to apologize again, when Yuan Zhao looked up:

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Joan couldn’t believe her luck. “Thank you,” she said. “But I interrupted. You were talking about your magazine?”

  “We used to have meetings—‘art lunches,’ we called them.” His voice became more authoritative, as if he’d come to the part of his story he liked to tell. “We talked about Chinese art, the problem of copying.”

  “Sorry,” Joan said. “The problem of copying?” She could hear students approaching the classroom, and wished they would stay outside for at least another few minutes.

  “Of copying Western art,” Yuan Zhao explained. “Even now it has only been fifteen years since we were first allowed to see these things. Can you imagine, trying to swallow the whole of Western art in fifteen years?”

  “I’ve never thought about that,” Joan said. “Did you find that many artists attached themselves to a particular period, before finding their own style?”

  The dissident hesitated. He looked at his student, who was bent over some kind of intricate work in her lap. Sunlight glowed orange behind the dirty windows.