The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Smell what?”

  “It’s worse outside your classroom,” Catherine said accusatorially. “Emily almost fainted.”

  “Is the classroom open?” I asked them, knowing the answer already.

  “It’s locked. Should we go get Willie?”

  I was not especially eager to alert Willie the security guard, a retired officer of the LAPD.

  “Mr. Jow, Katie thinks there’s a dead animal in the classroom.”

  “What kind of animal?”

  “A skunk?” Katie suggested.

  “Skunks don’t smell like that,” said Kate.

  “It’s probably a raccoon,” Olivia concluded. “Dead from drinking turpentine.”

  “That’s so sad!” the girls chorused.

  “Mr. Jow, if there’s a raccoon, can we have class outside?”

  “Mr. Jow, can we have a funeral for the raccoon?”

  Emily stood up. “Mr. Jow?” she said sweetly. “Where is June Wang?”

  “Yes,” I said, answering the simplest question. “Sit down, and we’ll begin our class here. Courtenay, you may go and find Mr. Willie.”

  The girls, for some reason, collapsed into giggles:

  “Mister Willie…”

  “C’mon Courtenay, find Mister Willie!”

  But I wasn’t listening. It was one of those moments in America when I retreated into my own language, as on a television show when the noise of a crowd is suddenly diminished so that the principal characters can have a conversation amongst themselves. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the English words so much as that I didn’t hear them. An image had come to shut them out: June Wang, trussed in silvery net and hanging from the steam pipe, her painted saddle shoes twisting above the aluminum stool.

  Did I really believe that June was dead? I don’t think so, and yet this improbable scenario got hold of my mind like a night terror and would not let me go. Like a man in a dream I descended the concrete steps; blindly I sat down on the curved stone shell of the tortoise representing the hopes and dreams of the class of ’56.

  “What is art?” I heard myself beginning. “Philosophers and poets have tried to answer this question for centuries. Often it’s hard to come up with a precise definition.” Understandably, my students were not paying attention; a few were taking their homework from their matching colored satchels.

  “Art is something we recognize, from culture to culture, whether or not we have any training. And so perhaps we’ve been thinking the wrong way: perhaps art is not the thing itself, but the perception of art, perhaps it resides in the viewer rather than in the object of his attention.” I paused to look around the circle, and I could see that my students had fulfilled the assignment. There was a paint-by-numbers clown (Holly), a mail-in art test Indian chief in profile on tracing paper (Jenna), and an advertisement for Australian merlot, employing a detail of Da Vinci’s Last Supper (Katie). I had a sudden impulse to tell them I was sorry, that these were not my own words, and that in other circumstances, I wouldn’t choose to bore them with this sort of pomposity.

  “It’s easy to determine what isn’t art, much harder to say what is.” The girls perked up, as if this idea excited them, but it was only Courtenay, whom I could observe from my turtle, coming across the lawn with the security guard. I was unhappy to see that Willie had brought along not only a walkie-talkie and a large ring of keys, but a maintenance man with a mop. For some reason this mop horrified me: I experienced one of those irrational moments that sometimes happen in polite society, when you seriously consider whether it might not be best to run away.

  “Willie!” chorused several girls. “Hi Willie!”

  “Locked out?” Willie asked.

  “Willie, can you smell it?”

  “Thank you,” I told the security guard. “I’m sorry to trouble you. I seem to have left my keys at home.”

  “No trouble,” Willie said. Then he switched on his walkie-talkie and barked something unintelligible into the microphone.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Who is that?”

  “Office,” Willie said casually. “Just letting ’em know.”

  As I followed the security guard up the south stairs (my students following me), I wished passionately for an earthquake, a fire, or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. I wished for an ability I had seen exercised by a teenage alien on television, who could stop time simply by pressing her index fingers together in front of her nose.

  I had been cherishing a hope that my students were exaggerating: that June Wang had simply left a sandwich in my room after school, which was rotting in the overheated classroom. The moment we got into the gallery, however, I had to abandon that idea. Although it was usually a popular place for students to study, that morning the gallery was empty—or almost empty: standing in front of my classroom was Vice Principal Diller, wearing a midnight blue suit, a red and blue scarf, and a large pair of clip-on earrings, two spiky gold anemones adrift in the stiff waves of her hair. They seemed especially appropriate in light of the current situation, since there was now no mistaking the smell.

  “Fish!” my students cried. “It smells like dead fish!” They covered their mouths and noses and made sounds of disgust. I couldn’t help noticing that these gestures were overdone a bit, and aimed in the direction of the vice principal. But Laurel Diller ignored them: she was one of those disciplinarians you find in schools all over the world, who seem to relish their own unpopularity.

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on, Professor Yuan?” she asked. Both she and Principal McCoy insisted on that honorific, although I had assured them on several occasions that it had not been earned.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I seem to have left my key at home.”

  She nodded, as if this was to be expected. “Line up,” she barked at the girls. “You should have been in line for Professor Yuan at 8:14—as you know.”

  The girls took their hands away from their faces and lined up.

  “Teaching is often not the most difficult part of the job,” Laurel Diller confided softly, unlocking my classroom door. “If you fail to impress the importance of the rules on the students—and in particular these students, Professor Yuan, I know you know what I mean—you may never have a chance to begin your important work.” Then she stepped back, allowing Willie and the maintenance man to precede her into the classroom.

  The classroom was boiling: the thermostat by the door had been pushed past ninety. In the center of the room, sitting on the aluminum stool, was June Wang, reading a National Geographic magazine. This was the first time I had seen her in her own clothes, rather than the school uniform: she was wearing a lime green smock with a border of white daisies, over a pair of bright white trousers. Perhaps inspired by the African ladies in her National Geographic, June had looped many strands of bright-colored glass beads around her neck; she was also barefoot, her feet hooked around the bottom of the stool. Although her forehead was shiny with sweat, happily there seemed to be nothing else wrong with her.

  I have heard that in moments of great relief people become angry, but my immediate response was embarrassment. I looked at my shoes, which was how I noticed a murky liquid seeping out from underneath my desk.

  “Why didn’t you open the door?” Vice Principal Diller was demanding of June. “Didn’t you hear Professor Yuan knocking?”

  “Did you knock?” June asked. “I heard people rattling the door.”

  I walked around my desk, my heart pounding, as if I were the one being chastised. I was not surprised by what I saw. My key was sitting in the center of the desk, as June had promised; beneath my chair was a large plastic shopping bag, leaking a pungent gray substance onto the floor. I didn’t have to look inside to know what was in there, packed (as they say) like sardines. A few ants investigated the perimeter.

  This was the second time an important moment in my life had been marked by a piece of performance art involving fish. (How many people can write that sentence truthfully?) Since no r
ecord of Baoyu’s Lunch—performed in the Beijing East Village on June 12, 1994—had yet been published in America, June’s use of the material was a coincidence. But that is the thing about art, and performance art in particular. It acts on different people in different ways, depending upon their unique histories. If you look carefully at Zhang Tianming’s photographs of June 12, the last hours of our East Village, you will understand why June’s “assignment” affected me so powerfully.

  “Why didn’t you open the door for the students?” Vice Principal Diller demanded.

  “I was wearing headphones.”

  “Headphones aren’t allowed in class, Miss Wang—as you know.”

  “But class hadn’t started.”

  “I think you had better come see me in the Lower School Office,” Laurel Diller said.

  Whether the fact that I chose this moment to pick up the bag of fish and place it on my desk indicates that I didn’t want June to leave my classroom, I’m not sure. I did, however, succeed in diverting attention from my student: the maintenance man, who had been standing in the doorway with a blank expression, leapt into action, retrieving a garbage bag from beneath the sink and holding it open, so that I could dump the shopping bag inside. He was not able to prevent collective disgust at the sight of the bulging gray bag: several girls screamed, while the more resourceful among them began opening the windows. And there was something disturbing about the bag, something obscene about its softness, its bulging gray wetness, and its smell—of dead things crowded together in a sack.

  “Girls!” Vice Principal Diller shouted. She looked from me, cowering behind my desk, to June in her bare feet and beads, to the uniformed girls moaning by the window, barely concealing their thrill at the novelty of the offense. The vice principal did not look defeated. She looked like a race horse pawing the gate, eager to demonstrate the qualities for which she’d been bred.

  “Professor Yuan?” she asked, and there was silence.

  “I’m afraid one of our projects has gone awry.”

  “Was this a class project?”

  “Yes,” I said, defending June without hesitation. I looked to see whether she appreciated this noble gesture, but my prize pupil was busy sketching a design in red marker on the whiteboard. The design was like an umbrella, or a child’s drawing of a bird—a bird with a worm in its mouth.

  “Where are your shoes?” Vice Principal Diller demanded.

  “In my locker.”

  “Go put them on, along with the rest of your uniform. If you are not in my office in less than ten minutes, Miss Wang, you’ll find that we’ll be talking about something much more serious than a few demerits. Incidents like these are particularly unfortunate for someone in your shoes.”

  June looked thoughtfully at her bare feet.

  “For someone on academic probation.”

  This was the first I’d heard of any academic problems; naively I had assumed that June was an equally stellar student in her other subjects. There were a few titters from my class. I gave them a warning look, but they ignored me; it was only when Laurel Diller turned to them that they began to quiet down.

  “I hope all of you are working hard on your Sesquicenterpieces,” Vice Principal Diller said. She glanced at the bulletin board, where the announcement Mrs. Travers had pinned up our first week was now sun-bleached and curled in one corner. “I anticipate several strong entries from this class.”

  June had slipped on a pair of purple plastic clogs, and retrieved her net from the shelf underneath the window. Slowly she made her way out of the classroom, followed by Laurel Diller. Of course she wouldn’t have wasted her precious net on “Something That Is Not Art”; it frustrated me to think she might not be planning to use it in my class at all.

  “June Wang!” I called suddenly. June and Vice Principal Diller both stopped, although only Laurel Diller turned around. “Please report to me after school. I need to check your homework.” I had spoken without thinking: immediately my cheeks flushed. The word “report” was particularly absurd.

  June didn’t give any indication that she’d heard me, but the sharpness in my voice had an effect on the other students, who finally began to settle into their seats. Even more surprising, Laurel Diller favored me with an approving nod, as if the two of us were engaged in some sort of common enterprise.

  39.

  NOVEMBER 7, 1993, WAS A BLEAK, LAMPLIT AFTERNOON IN BEIJING, THE beginning of winter, when the air told you the season had changed for good. I followed the directions on the announcement card my cousin had given Meiling, but once I crossed the Third Ring Road and entered the winding lanes and alleyways of the East Village, I was immediately lost. Perhaps it was the cold, or the sudden absence of cars, or the transition underfoot from pavement to dirt, but I felt as if I’d crossed a boundary. As I got farther from the highway, it seemed as if a door had shut behind me: if I turned back, I would no longer find the gates of the Workers’ Stadium, thronged with bicycles, or the high walls of the embassies. The city would be cloaked in fog, and there would only be the world before me: silent, old, in black and white.

  I was early, and so I walked my bicycle through the narrow lanes, past the dark, falling-down farm houses, the puddles of brown-green sludge, and a scared-looking yellow bitch, her teats nearly brushing the ground. For a few minutes I followed a peasant who was pulling a cart full of garbage behind his bicycle: occasionally he would glance back, as if to make sure it was still there, but if what he’d collected was salvage, I suspected it was too pitiful even for him to care much about it.

  “Grandpa,” I called out. “Can you help me?”

  The man stopped and looked back warily. I was riding my new black Forever bicycle; my hair was growing out; and I had looped the silk cravat underneath my army jacket, in preparation for meeting my cousin’s friends.

  “I’m looking for lane number seven.”

  The old man stared at my bike.

  “Do you understand me?”

  He shook his head.

  “Speak putonghua?” I asked him.

  He smiled; of course he had no teeth.

  “There are some artists around here,” I tried again. “Do you know where they live?”

  Perhaps he did understand then, because he responded energetically, in incomprehensible dialect, gesturing vaguely before pedaling off, his wheels squeaking under the weight of the fetid cart. I turned and saw a young man standing against the side of a house, apparently watching our exchange. He was wearing a camera around his neck.

  “Hello?” I said. “I’m looking for my cousin’s house.”

  “Who is your cousin?” His face was distinctive, if not particularly handsome, with a high forehead and a bulbous, upturned nose. He spoke quietly, but his expression was noticeably friendly; when I told him X’s name, he smiled.

  “Do you know him?”

  “Everyone knows him, even Old Hua. He was saying you didn’t want to find bad people like that.”

  “I couldn’t understand him.”

  “It’s Fujianese. At first he liked talking with me—I’m from Fuzhou—but now that he’s seen some of our goings on…” The photographer paused: “Hey, are you here to see Something That Is Not Art?”

  “That’s right! My cousin gave me a card for it.” I rummaged in my pocket: I was perhaps a little too eager to show off my connection.

  “You’re not far. Just turn left there, and then right at the public toilet—you can’t miss it, although it’s much worse in summer. Keep going straight to the second intersection, you’ll see a house with a sign on your right. At least I think there’s a sign. Better hurry: he’ll stop when the photographers leave.”

  “Are you one of the photographers?”

  The question seemed to amuse him. “You could say, well—I am a photographer. But not the same kind. They were taking news pictures. But my kind of pictures? Your cousin didn’t want them.” The photographer smiled and looked down. “Not that I blame him. I’m a problem for him this tim
e. He’s making something that isn’t art—you see?”

  I nodded, although I didn’t, quite.

  “If I photograph him, then it is art, no matter who’s making it. Problem is—without him I’m nothing; without me, his work disappears. That’s the big question, see? Whose art is it?”

  I must’ve looked baffled, because the photographer laughed. “Go on,” he said. “You can still catch some of it.” Then he continued the way I’d come, out of the village toward the Third Ring Road.

  At the time, I had no idea that I’d just met the man who’d invented the Beijing East Village, and whose photographs are the only place where it still exists today. Even when the buildings were still standing, before the garbage was covered over and the inhabitants driven away, Tianming’s East Village pictures turned this wasteland, with its toilets and junk heaps and falling-down houses, into a place with a name. They were like a map, showing us not only where but who we were. It is ironic, if not particularly surprising, that the pictures that brought our village to life were the same ones that would eventually destroy it.

  40.

  WHEN I FINALLY FOUND THE HOUSE (IDENTIFIABLE EVEN WITHOUT ITS sign, by the flashes coming from the windows), pushed past the photographers, and joined the crowd of mostly young people standing along the walls of the small room, I thought immediately of my mother. I remembered how many times she had reminded me to contact X; how sure she was that this family connection would eventually secure me entrance at CAFA; and how CAFA would direct me toward the artistic career that had been cut short for her by the accidents of history. She would’ve imagined an official show at the National Gallery: me and X, a red ribbon, and on the walls, scenes of Yellow Mountain’s lofty peaks softened and blurred by mist. Imagining these things, I felt glad that my mother was in Shanghai, more than one thousand kilometers from the Beijing East Village.

  I found my cousin suspended between two stepladders, completely naked, his wrists and ankles lashed to the steps with twine. On each rung of the ladder that didn’t hold a hand or foot, my cousin had placed either a fan or a small heating unit; electrical cords extended from these appliances to a power strip against the wall. Obviously the circuits in the place were overloading, because the wall socket was sparking dangerously. The way the fans and heaters were arranged (fans on the right, heaters on the left), my cousin was suffering intensely. One side of his body had started to burn; the skin was red and swelling slightly. The other half was in shadow, but I was sure the flesh there was pale and goose-pimpled. Half of his head was wet (at intervals he was being doused with water), and every few seconds, he would shiver violently. The appliances, which had been fixed to the ladders with more twine, nevertheless wobbled in an ominous way.