The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  Phil’s voice called out to someone, calmly, and then, like a miracle, she heard the dissident. His voice was heavily accented and unmistakable. She didn’t know what Mr. Yuan was doing in the backyard in the middle of the night, and she didn’t care: the only thing that mattered was that Max was upstairs, asleep in bed, oblivious. Thank you, she told God, who had already retreated back above the roofs and the purple smog, dissolving into empty space.

  She heard the pool-house door opening again, and then Yuan Zhao, politely wishing Phil a good night. Had the dissident seen them embracing? Had he recognized her? And what right did he have to judge them, especially given what was going on at the school? Cece caught herself thinking as if Mr. Yuan were guilty, when she’d already decided she didn’t believe Emily’s accusation—not even a small part of it. She felt ridiculous hiding in the rose garden, and only the threat of further embarrassment on both sides kept her from going out to the lawn. They were all adults, after all, even if they came from disparate places. How different could it really be? People made mistakes in China; they fell out of love and had to make other arrangements. Maybe the compromises were different, but culture shock could last only so long. At some point, you had to stop being shocked and start absorbing it; otherwise, you would all stay strangers forever.

  After what seemed like ten minutes, and was probably less than two, Phil returned. When she saw his face, she knew what she would have to give up, of course: the one thing she’d forgotten to offer.

  “False alarm,” he said. “Thank God.” He collapsed onto one of the stone benches and put his head in his hands. Something about the theatricality of the gesture disturbed Cece. It occurred to her that she would never see Gordon in that sort of pose.

  “It was only the Chinaman.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”

  “I thought you’d be glad.”

  “But did he see us?”

  Phil shrugged. “I told him I had a date.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “Is it beyond the realm of possibility that I might have a date?”

  “No.” Cece’s stomach churned ominously. “But what was he doing in the yard?”

  “He saw my light on, and thought I was still up. He came to get one of his books.”

  “What book?”

  Phil shook his head impatiently. “Some art book. What ever it was, he seemed very excited about it.”

  “At three in the morning?”

  “How do I know? He’s a genius—he gets inspired in the middle of the night.” What ever had been between them a moment ago was gone. God had slunk craftily away with it. It was starting to rain for real.

  “I should go inside,” Cece said, meaning it. Phil didn’t argue, which somehow hurt her feelings.

  “Good night, Ceece.”

  “Good night, Phil,” she said, but she was the one who stood there and watched him go. Her dress was getting ruined for nothing. Nothing had happened, so why did it feel as if everything had changed? The one thing she wanted to preserve, the possibility, was gone. How was she going to manage without it?

  45.

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS NONE OF MY BUSINESS, I HAD NOT IMAGINED MRS. Travers as the kind of woman to have relations outside her marriage, not to mention relations with the brother of her husband. At the same time, what drew me into the backyard that night, after I heard the double tone of the alarm system switching off, was a kind of fascinated curiosity, a sense that things in this house were not quite as they seemed. I recognized a pair of high-heeled shoes discarded by the back door, and once I had discovered the truth, I could not get the sight of the couple embracing in the garden out of my mind. On subsequent nights, as I was drifting off to sleep, I found myself imagining, in scrupulous detail, what might have happened if I hadn’t discovered them. I had experienced this type of prurient interest once before, at the end of my relationship with Meiling—as if, by some betrayal of my brain, the images most calculated to hurt me had somehow also become my fantasies.

  I wondered if Dr. Travers or his children knew the truth. I thought his sister, the lady novelist, must’ve guessed it. I watched Joan Travers coming across the lawn for our third interview, smoothing her blouse and touching her hair. I had also prepared myself, arranging my ink, brushes and water pan, and changing into the old collarless purple silk shirt, which I now used primarily as a kind of smock, to protect my clothing while I painted.

  It was October, and I had finally begun my project. After school and on weekends, slowly and then with more confidence, I was copying one episode at a time from Cangyun Shanren’s famous handscroll Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the Tiantai Mountains. It’s true that this endeavor didn’t exactly correspond to the Dubin Fellowship’s description of an original project, but I had been in Los Angeles almost three months, and I was getting desperate. My teacher had always encouraged me to copy as a way of coming to my own ideas. What is original does not come out of air, he told me, and it occurred to me that I might begin by painting an appreciation of one of those masterpieces. Who knew where it might lead?

  It seems to me now that there were several reasons why Zhao Cangyun’s scroll in particular was appropriate to my months in Los Angeles, but at the time, the choice seemed arbitrary. I was with Cece one afternoon at Century City, where I often accompanied her on shopping trips after school. While she bought groceries at Gelson’s Market, I wandered into the bookstore underneath the multiplex. I was browsing in the Decorative Arts section, looking for a gift for my mother (who has a special passion for Fabergé eggs) when I was distracted by another volume: Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the Oscar Tang Family Collection. I flipped through the index: Dong Yuan, Wang Meng, Bada Shanren, and Zhao Cangyun were all there, a bunch of friendly gods. I stood in the brightly lit store with soothing classical music piped invisibly through the ceiling and cheerful American voices all around me, and began turning the pages, revisiting the great works I had first seen in my teacher’s shabby room. When I came upon Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the Tiantai Mountains, I knew that I had found my project.

  I felt purified by this decision, and when I paid for my purchase I was even pleased by its heavy price—the expense seemed to reinforce its value, as if I were buying some rare medicine or tonic. Looking back, however, there are two things I should note: first, that my humble “appreciation” may perhaps have had a core of secret vanity, since Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the Tiantai Mountains was the longest, most intricate painting in the book. And secondly, there is the fact that I did not announce my project to my hosts. When I met Cece in the Green 7 section of Parking Level Three, carrying my bag from the bookstore, I was for some reason inclined to lie—to say that it was only a gift for my mother: a picture book of Fabergé eggs.

  The Traverses had supplied me with an ample store of ink and brushes, but it took me some time to find the right paper: 20 by 564 centimeters, ocher rather than white, thick enough to hold the ink. Once I finally got started, however, everyone was happy with my choice of traditional materials. I knew that Cece had heard something about our East Village from Harry Lin, and I think she’d been afraid that I would end up doing that sort of project: cooking fish in the nude, chaining myself to the ceiling, or emerging newborn from a womblike rubber bubble.

  I was far away from such extravagance. I was painting the third episode of Zhao Cangyun’s masterpiece, in which two Confucian gentlemen climb up into the Tiantai Mountains in search of medicinal herbs. On their way home they become lost, and bathe their faces in a stream. They look back and see that:

  The air above the mountain is dense,

  The green peaks lofty and contorted.

  Gazing at them you are transported

  To another world.

  What Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao don’t know is that this moment represents their last chance to turn around, and that this view is a foreshadow of their destiny.

  The novelist rapped timidly on my open door. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she s
aid. “You’re working.”

  “I was expecting you,” I said. “Come in—sit down, please.”

  “May I move this?” she asked. I helped her move a chair near my easel; she was circumspect about my work, waiting to be invited to examine it.

  “This is nothing,” I said modestly. I was in fact pleased with what I had produced, the calligraphy in particular. It had been a long time since I had written characters with a brush.

  “It’s lovely.” The novelist glanced at the reproduction. “You’re—working in the classical style?”

  “That’s the first step,” I improvised.

  “Oh yes, I see,” the novelist said. She took a piece of paper from her purse and unfolded it: a poor-quality photocopy from a newspaper, with a picture and some text. The novelist looked from the Xerox to my face, and then back to the copy again.

  “You—excuse me—you look—”

  “I look older,” I said. “I look in the mirror, and I hardly recognize myself.”

  I remembered the day that photo was taken: it was spring, and I had bicycled straight from school to the East Village, where I found two foreign photographers (a Norwegian man and a British woman) in Cash’s courtyard, taking pictures for their newspapers.

  The novelist shook her head. “I was going to say the opposite: this picture’s six years old, but you’re exactly the same.”

  I stared at that photograph, and I’m embarrassed to say that I was moved: only six years had passed, but it seemed like such a long time ago.

  “I feel older,” I said, which was absolutely true.

  The novelist pretended to scan the article. When she spoke, her voice had an artificial casualness: “You were in jail twice, first in ’89, after the democracy protests, and then again in ’94, is that right?”

  For a moment I was not sure how to answer this question. And then I thought of something the photographer Zhang Tianming had told me, the first time I visited his apartment in the East Village. “An artist can lie and tell the truth at once,” he said, and when I saw his photographs, I understood what he meant. Take his portraits of us East Villagers: the photograph of Cash, for example. It shows the musician in his familiar black bomber jacket, black jeans tucked into black leather boots, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Tianming placed his subject in front of a window; although it must be evening—Cash never got up early—I like to imagine that the sun is rising behind him. The contrast between his fierce costume (not a lie exactly, but a kind of pose) and the bright light on his glasses was the truth about Cash, who believed he would become a rock star in the new Beijing. That lying to tell the truth was at the root of Tianming’s genius.

  Thinking of the photographer, I may have told the lady novelist more than I intended.

  “I was not in jail in ’94,” I said. “You won’t believe it, but I missed our village’s last performance.”

  The novelist was scribbling excitedly in her notebook. “The article got it wrong,” she said, as if this were very unusual, and of great significance. Something I had noticed about my American hosts was that they tended to believe something was true if they read it in a newspaper.

  “So I can’t tell you much more about it,” I said. I glanced at my scroll, as if I were yearning to return to it.

  The novelist looked up. “If you don’t mind,” she said. “Maybe we could talk a little about your parents?”

  “Is this important for the article?”

  The lady novelist looked startled and then blushed, making me wonder if I was not the only one telling fibs. “Oh—yes. Although to be honest, I’m not sure I’ll use everything. You’re welcome to see it before it goes to print.”

  Here, you see, I tell a real lie. I say this not to excuse myself, but to explain: I was very nervous, and I hadn’t expected to be quoted in print.

  “We could start with your father?”

  “He worked on a cargo boat,” I said. “Do you know where Shanxi Province is?”

  The novelist nodded. “I looked at a map,” she said, but she had stopped taking notes. Clearly I was repeating the information she’d read in her article. Encouraged, I continued:

  “My mother sold snacks in a river town, Yichang. That’s how they met.”

  “So your background was considered—”

  “Middle peasant,” I said without hesitation, as I had on numerous occasions in the East Village. Only X and Meiling knew the truth about my family, about my mother’s girlhood in America, her subsequent imprisonment, and my father’s rise through the ranks at Daqing. There were other children of wealthy parents in the East Village (X’s girlfriend Lulu, and the “doctor” Yuchen), but they did not enjoy the same regard as people like X and Tianming, who had come penniless from the provinces to make their names. I could see this distinction right away, which was why, whenever someone asked, I explained that my situation was similar to that of my cousin.

  The novelist asked me a few more questions, including whether or not I had been fairly treated when I was imprisoned in 1989. I suggested that the Taiwanese journalist who wrote that article might have made the story more dramatic, for political reasons. The novelist nodded, but did not look convinced.

  “I’m sorry to bring up a painful time—”

  “Detention is painful,” I said sharply, surprising myself. “What is painful is the water dungeon, the tiger bench, or ‘flying an airplane.’ Sitting here talking to you…”

  “Oh I understand,” the novelist said, scribbling eagerly. “I so appreciate the time you’ve taken. If I have other questions—details to fill in—maybe I could come back another time?”

  I regretted mentioning the torture. To be honest, I had chosen those particular punishments because of a Falun Dafa demonstration I had observed on Santa Monica Boulevard, when I’d gone to the fish market with Cece. A soft American voice recounted horrors from a tape player, while practitioners meditated on the ground; one young man, apparently of Tibetan origin, was wearing a sandwich board that read, “China Stole My Freedom,” on top of a Nike tracksuit.

  I have to emphasize that my pretensions here and in the East Village had nothing to do with the dissembling of my parents and grandparents, during the political campaigns of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. I was eighteen years old, trying on a new identity as a kind of fashion, whereas they had been trying to save their lives. X once remarked on this irony; in general, however, he didn’t mind my borrowing his proletarian background if it suited me. My cousin’s extreme generosity toward me in the East Village made it difficult for me to refuse later, when I was called upon to be generous with him.

  46.

  IN JANUARY OF 1994, MY COUSIN X AND I PUT OUT THE DEBUT ISSUE OF Lu Kou. It began during my first lunch in the courtyard of Cash’s place: a very bad lunch of instant noodles, gray bits of chicken, and a lot of bright red chili oil. I noticed that Meiling avoided the meat, although my cousin enthusiastically hunted for it, spitting gristle and bones onto the table.

  “The main thing, of course, is distribution,” said Cash. “How many people see it.” He was huddled in a black coat: it wasn’t windy in the courtyard, but it was cold; I wondered why we were sitting outside.

  “The photocopying is going to be very expensive,” said Fang. “We’re not going to be able to make many copies.”

  “I can help with that.” Lulu looked elegant in a gray coat with a white fox fur collar. Aside from X’s girlfriend, Fang, and Cash, I recognized the “Doctor,” Yuchen, and the beautiful, aloof Baoyu. There were several other people I didn’t know, including a plump student type sitting next to Lulu, who introduced herself as Ai Dan. I was sorry not to see the photographer I’d met the other afternoon; I wanted to thank him for directing me toward Something That Is Not Art.

  “Depending on when her allowance arrives,” Baoyu said, stretching his arms languidly above his head. He had pushed aside his unfinished soup, which had immediately been set upon by ants.

  “At least I do contribute,” Lulu said. M
y cousin observed this rivalry with amusement, as if the two of them were his children. I was grateful to X for letting Meiling and me listen in on this important conversation. Even the courtyard seemed romantic to me, with its dying tree, single table, and extra, mismatched chairs. It faced the back of a small apartment house, the door of which had been painted bright red. Leaning against the door was a large brown-and-white oil portrait of a young woman’s face in broad strokes, looking warily to the left, as if she were expecting someone. I didn’t admire the painting so much as its casual placement in the courtyard; when you were with X’s friends, you felt that art was the stuff of daily life, present all around you, as necessarily as a pair of chopsticks or a bicycle.

  “I think we should start by figuring out the masthead,” Cash said. “Who’s doing what?”

  “I nominate X as editor-in-chief,” Fang said immediately.

  “I would be honored,” said my cousin. It was clear that he’d expected this position and that his nomination was only a formality.

  “And you for photo editor,” the doctor said to Fang.

  “Assistant photo editor,” said Fang quickly. “Helping Tianming.”

  “That’s what I meant,” said Yuchen.

  My stomach was rumbling; I hadn’t eaten more than a few spoonfuls of my soup, which had long since turned cold and gelatinous. As much as I was thrilled to be included with X’s friends, I couldn’t help thinking of the tiny, warm dumpling shop behind the university, with its steamy plate glass and scalding jasmine tea.

  “I’d like to make a nomination,” X said. Immediately everyone became quiet. I could hear the sound of hammers from the construction site at the edge of the village, and the static barks from the foreman’s megaphone.