The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  “I nominate my cousin, Longxia Shanren,” X said. “He can be my assistant editor.”

  I forgot my cold and hunger. I must’ve let my mouth drop open, because some guys I didn’t know nudged each other and laughed. I had heard what my cousin said, but I didn’t want to make a mistake: how embarrassing, if somehow I’d misunderstood.

  I looked at X, who was smiling at me.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “It seems like a lot of responsibility.”

  “Oh, you think we’re giving you a big position?” my cousin teased me.

  “No!” I said. “No, I—”

  “Worried you can’t handle it?”

  “I can handle it!”

  X smiled. I looked around the table and saw that everyone was nodding their agreement. Even Lulu didn’t raise an objection.

  “We already discussed it,” said Cash. “You can translate the text into English for the foreign reporters.”

  “Will there be foreign reporters?”

  “There are always reporters when he’s around,” Cash said, indicating my cousin. “He draws them like a toilet draws flies.”

  People laughed, and I looked at Meiling, whose cheeks were almost as bright as her scarf. She looked a little like one of those Tibetan children whose faces are permanently reddened from sun and wind and altitude.

  “Are you cold?” I asked her.

  “I’m all right.”

  I had been worried about bringing Meiling to my cousin’s, but now I was glad: she could see me being honored by actual artists. I thought of how she would describe the afternoon to her provincial roommates, how impressed they would no doubt be by my connections in Beijing.

  “What’s going to go into this magazine?” Meiling said suddenly, not only to me but so that the entire table could hear.

  I looked at her with amazement. I had been trying to think of something to say in response to my nomination, but I’d been too shy even to thank my cousin. Meiling, on the other hand, was boldly offering what seemed to be a criticism.

  “Ah,” said X. “See? All of you jabbering about nominations and photocopies and distribution, and this young lady tells you what’s what.”

  I was glad that X was defending Meiling. At the same time I wanted to remind him that he’d been “jabbering about nominations” as well. He’d been nominating me!

  “We don’t even know which works will go into our first issue,” my cousin said.

  “Yours, presumably.”

  We all looked up to see who had spoken, and I recognized the photographer who had given me directions to Something That Is Not Art.

  “Old Hua is right,” Tianming said, looking around the courtyard. “You artists are crazy. It must be below freezing out here.”

  X got up, smiling, and pulled another chair to the table. “Finally,” he said. “What took you so long?”

  Everyone started standing up, hugging themselves and stamping their feet. Lulu’s friend carried the bowls outside and dumped them; a couple of dogs immediately appeared to eat up the leftovers. The party seemed to be breaking up.

  “Let’s go,” Meiling said. “I’m cold.”

  “Let’s wait a little longer,” I said. I wanted to thank my cousin privately, but he was talking to Tianming.

  “I can’t,” Meiling said. “I told my roommates I’d help them straighten up.”

  “Hey, cousin,” X called. “Come over here and meet a great photographer.”

  Meiling sighed. “Just one more minute,” I promised her.

  I went over and shook Tianming’s hand.

  “We met already,” I told my cousin proudly. “He gave me directions to your place for the performance the other day.”

  “What did you think of it?” Tianming asked.

  I looked at my cousin. “It must have been really uncomfortable. I was worried about you afterward.”

  “Don’t worry,” X said cheerfully. “I’m used to it.”

  “But I mean, did you think it was an art project?” Tianming was looking at me seriously, as if my opinion mattered. I wondered if this was some kind of test. If I said it wasn’t art, I might be insulting my cousin; but if I said it was, then the project wouldn’t have succeeded. What was the right answer?

  “Did my cousin tell you about the project?” X asked Meiling, who was standing beside me but looking out at the road, where the dogs were whining for more handouts. Her breath came in little clouds of warm vapor.

  “He described it,” Meiling said, and stopped.

  I had returned from the East Village that evening and gone straight to Meiling’s dormitory. I had to talk to someone about what I’d seen. I had tried to emphasize the aspects of the performance I thought would impress her—in particular the number of foreign journalists present—but Meiling had been skeptical. I assumed she would conceal her doubts now that we were talking to the artist himself; although I think I loved Meiling already that afternoon in the courtyard, I obviously didn’t know her very well.

  “How did it strike you?” X asked.

  Meiling shrugged. “I like art you can use.”

  I looked quickly at my cousin, and then down at my shoes. I was embarrassed for Meiling, and perhaps also a little bit impressed. How could she talk back to people like my cousin and Tianming—these bohemian, experienced artists—as if she were chatting with her classmates?

  “Art isn’t useful,” X said. “That’s the whole point. That’s why there hasn’t been any of it for so long.”

  “There hasn’t been any because it wasn’t allowed,” Tianming said. “It still isn’t.”

  “Is that true?” I forgot my nervous ness for a minute. “What about at CAFA?”

  X shook his head. “I’m talking about experimental art—real art. When I got out of detention, I was careful. I went to see my parents, and I didn’t make anything. I thought I would never make anything again.”

  This was the first time I’d ever heard my cousin mention his time in jail, although of course my parents had talked about it when it happened. My mother told me then that prisons had improved a great deal since the 1960s and ’70s, and that my cousin would be all right. I remember this as one of the earliest instances in which I knew my mother was lying to me.

  “Then one day I saw something,” X continued. “I was sitting at the table, and my mother was cooking at the stove. She was talking to me about who knows what, and I was just sitting there, thinking about how many times I had wondered whether I would ever be released and get to go home—to see my mother again, and taste those chive and tofu dumplings.”

  Even Meiling was listening now; she had stepped closer to my cousin and me, and her left hand in its red glove brushed against mine.

  “I was watching the pan, and the smell reminded me so much of being a kid—I really thought I might have traveled back in time. I was afraid to look down: I thought I’d see two dirty little boy’s hands on the table in front of me! Then a huge bubble rose up in the pan”—my cousin spread his hands to show the size—“and it stayed for what seemed like forever. I thought it was a message to me.” X looked around our little circle, from Tianming to Lulu to Meiling and me. “The pan, the bubble, the steam. There is a whole invisible world, just waiting for people to see it. All of a sudden I thought painting wouldn’t work anymore—I would have to find another way.”

  “That’s a great story,” said Fang, who had edged into our group. “You should interview him about his inspiration,” he said to me. “We could use it for the magazine.” Fang glanced at my cousin for approval, but X wasn’t paying attention.

  “I’d like to see those prints,” my cousin told Tianming.

  “Which prints?” the photographer asked.

  “The ones you took of Something That Is Not Art.”

  “I’d like to see them too,” I said. Most of the artists had gone, and I could sense Meiling’s impatience. But I was reluctant to leave what seemed to be the inner circle.

  Tianming looked surprised. “I w
ish I’d known.”

  “What do you mean?” X said.

  Tianming shrugged. “I thought you didn’t want those photographs. So I destroyed them.”

  I thought my cousin looked startled, but he recovered quickly. “Good,” he said. “Thank you.” He turned to me. “Can you be here at the same time next week? That’s when we’ll have our first official meeting. I promise it’ll be inside next time.”

  That was how I started going to the East Village every Wednesday afternoon at one o’clock. We would alternate between different apartments, depending on whose was most livable at the moment (and who had managed to pay their rent). That winter, my first away from home, was particularly cold, but it wasn’t bitter. To me those afternoons in the East Village had all the glamor of an exotic holiday; I was sorry to return to school at night. As I biked west into the city, the Great Wall, Kunlun, and Lufthansa hotels stood out like garish planets in the night. Sometimes I would stop, balancing on my bike with my toes on the ground, and look back the way I’d come: it gave me a pleasant shock of fear to see the nothingness out there. It was like peering over the edge of the earth.

  When I got back to the university, I used to bicycle past Meiling’s dormitory, count four stories up and three windows over, just for the plea sure of identifying her dim light. If the window was dark, I would go to the library. I would stand outside in the freezing wind, happy to know she was safe and warm inside. The next day, I couldn’t help it: I would tell her what I’d done.

  My mind returns obsessively to that winter. I can’t say whether this is hindsight—knowing what would happen to our East Village the following June—or simply the most perfect season of my youth, when I was falling in love and becoming an artist at the same time. I think of it at night, and try to remember whether I knew I was happy. Did I enjoy those months in the East Village; did I know how fragile it was? Or was the fact that I did not know somehow a condition for my happiness?

  47.

  WHEN OUR SCHOOL HOLIDAYS BEGAN, TO MY PARENTS’ DISAPPOINTMENT I did not go home, and for the first time I could remember, I missed the New Year in my hometown. (The Rooster became the Dog that year, and now incredibly, as I write this, the Rooster has come round again.) When the dormitories shut down, I went to stay with my cousin and finished the first issue of Lu Kou.

  The first and only issue is now a collector’s item. We made thirty-five copies, which was all that we could afford. It included some of Tianming’s East Village portraits, a piece by Baoyu called “Instructions for Making a Piece of Per for mance Art,” as well as photographs documenting a project that looked nothing like those instructions. We also published my interview with X, about the transformation in his work after 1989. Had I been born in the year of the Dragon, like my cousin, as opposed to the humble Rabbit, I might have experienced a similar transformation. But in the spring of 1989, I was about to turn fourteen. In those days I would hurry home after school, where I would drink warm tea and study English with my mother.

  I knew I was lucky to have been safe at home that spring. And I didn’t wish to have been a university student at that time. I wanted to be part of another, newer movement, artistic rather than political. I flattered myself that X and Tianming needed my youth the way that I needed their experience; together we would let the whole world know about the Beijing East Village.

  That winter we were having a running argument. It took many forms but always returned to the same issue: who did our work belong to? For example, there was Walking Up Coal Hill with Candles. Wearing a conservative business suit provided by Lulu (as well as tasteful makeup and a pink ribbon in his long, silken hair), Baoyu attempted to climb the hill behind the Forbidden City holding two lit candles. But on that cold and windy day, the candles immediately went out. Even with Lulu and Ai Dan on either side of him, there was no way to climb and shield the flames at the same time. The picture Fang finally took is of failure: Baoyu stands at the edge of the small shrine on top of the hill, looking out over the Forbidden City. We see him from the back, his hair blowing in the wind, holding in his right hand the pair of extinguished candles, like two spent sticks of dynamite.

  Fang argued that this picture was his, and should therefore be captioned, “Zhu Fang, Baoyu on Coal Hill, February 1994.” Baoyu countered that this photograph was simply a documentary recording, if a skillful one, of his own project: “Chen Baoyu, Walking Up Coal Hill with Candles, February 1994.” Fang looked to his mentor, Tianming, to resolve the dispute.

  “Where is this piece going to be shown?” Tianming asked innocently, and the two artists had to concede that until someone was interested in exhibiting Coal Hill, it was unlikely to need a caption at all.

  Unlike Cash and my cousin, Tianming did not invite the group of us to his apartment, and I was curious to see where the photographer lived. One morning that February, I finally got my chance. It was Saturday, and I was waiting for my cousin in his apartment. (He had given me a key, which I was so afraid of losing that I wore it around my neck, with my citizen ID.) I had arrived early that morning in the East Village, as usual, and my cousin hadn’t returned from Lulu’s yet.

  My cousin’s apartment was dirty and cold. One of the windows was open, but there was still a strong smell of cigarettes and mildew. The bed was unmade, and some rusty chains were lying on the floor, which X had obviously been salvaging for a project. A whole collection of empty beer cans and liquor bottles were sitting by the door; since my cousin rarely drank, this was evidence of how many people showed up to hang out with him on a regular basis.

  I didn’t mind the mess or the cold; it was a luxury to have the place to myself. After I had finished examining the room, I sat in an old upholstered chair and watched the people going by outside the window: laborers on their bicycles, and the occasional old man with a cart of dried jujubes and nuts. I imagined that this was my apartment, and that I had woken up early on a Saturday to jot down an idea for a project—as brilliant and ephemeral as the bubble in a frying pan.

  I was so wrapped up in this fantasy of myself as an independent East Village artist that when I heard a knock on the door, I called out casually:

  “Come in!”

  It was Tianming. “Have I got something to show you,” he said, shutting the door behind him. He turned around, and stopped.

  “It’s you,” he said, as if I’d startled him. “For a second I thought you were your cousin.”

  I blushed: could the photographer guess what I’d been imagining before he walked into the room?

  “I’m just waiting for him,” I said. “He’s at Lulu’s, but he should be back any second.”

  “I had something I wanted to show him, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t be home.” Tianming looked around the room: “It’s freezing in here—you should come wait at my place.”

  “I’m all right here,” I said, but I was glad when he insisted.

  The photographer led me around the corner and down a long alley to a run-down farm house. His landlady was cooking in the kitchen with the door open; steam came from a door across the courtyard, in the center of which was a large jujube tree. A well-fed gray cat was asleep under an old metal folding chair. Even the drone of construction on the Third Ring Road sounded fainter here.

  “This is great,” I said. “How did you find this place?”

  “Are you looking?” Tianming asked. In contrast to some of the other artists, who treated me in an affectionate but condescending way—as if I would always be X’s cousin, Little Fatty—Tianming took me seriously.

  “I might be,” I bluffed, although I hadn’t thought of it until now. “Living in the dorms is really a pain.”

  “But it’s nearly free, isn’t it?” Tianming said. “You’re so lucky, not having to pay rent in Beijing.”

  I nodded, embarrassed. I hadn’t thought about the fact that the photographer might be struggling to pay for his room, even in this kind of neighborhood.

  “I think it’s good to live in a dormitory,” Tianm
ing said gently. “Otherwise how will you meet people?”

  I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t interested in meeting other students—that the people I wanted to meet were all right here in this village.

  Tianming unlocked his front door. “We can always help you find a place, after you graduate.”

  I was surprised by the size of the photographer’s room, although I tried not to show it. It was even smaller than my room at school: a narrow concrete box with a desk, two beds, and an exposed water pipe running the length of one wall. Tianming’s double-lens Seagull camera sat on the desk beside a large black binder; three or four test sheets were taped to the wall next to the mirror. The only other decoration was a dark oil painting of a girl’s face, looking over her shoulder.

  “My sister’s self-portrait,” Tianming said. “She painted it the week before she went back home.” He touched the edge of the painting, although it was perfectly straight. Then he turned to me abruptly: “So, you want to see some pictures?”

  I helped him clear off a space on the bed, and Tianming began laying out the prints one by one. For a moment I didn’t understand what I was looking at. When I’d attended my cousin’s performance, the electrical equipment—fans on one side, heaters on the other—had seemed to be the most important part of the project; but in Tianming’s photos, all of that had been cropped out. My cousin’s naked body seemed to be suspended in air, his four limbs extended like spokes of a wheel. Behind him was the banner with the title Something That Is Not Art: you could only make out the last two characters, yishu.

  “That’s incredible,” I said.

  “What about this one?” the photographer asked, holding up a print. “Of these two, which do you like better?” Tianming was kneeling on the concrete floor. He was wearing his typical faded black jeans and worn cotton sweater, and his hair was cut a little too short. He was skinnier than my cousin, with milder, less distinctive features; if I’d seen him on the street, I wouldn’t have thought he was an artist, or even a college student. He looked like someone you might find selling trinkets on a blanket outside Beijing Zhan.