The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  “Welcome,” Professor Lin said, standing up. “I’m sorry it isn’t more glamorous. My old office was in a lovely building, but a long walk from the classrooms. And—as my students remind me—I’m not getting any younger.”

  “I think this is nice,” Joan said. She was biased toward people who did not did make a production of their offices; she thought the ability to work anywhere indicated seriousness. “I’m sorry to interrupt you.”

  “Not at all,” Professor Lin said. “I know you’re a novelist—you have to forgive me. I’m not much of a fiction reader.”

  She hated it when people apologized for not having read her books, as if they thought she would expect that they had read them. “This doesn’t have to do with fiction,” Joan said quickly. “I’m writing an article about Yuan Zhao, and I thought you might be able to help.”

  “For which magazine?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Joan said.

  Harry nodded politely. She knew he’d only agreed to see her because Gordon was a colleague.

  “How long have you known Mr. Yuan?” she began, trying to sound like a journalist. The thing she most wanted to ask about—the girlfriend who’d died at Tiananmen Square—was probably not within the bounds of an ordinary interview, and yet she had the feeling that the story was somehow the key to understanding Yuan Zhao.

  “The first time we met was in the winter of ’93, although I was aware of his work before that. I was in Beijing writing a book on the Southern Song—specifically, those noblemen who left the court after the Manchu conquest. I don’t know if you know: there’s a tradition of dissenters retreating to the mountains or the countryside. They often became monks, and in some cases, poets and painters.”

  “Like in his new painting.”

  Harry smiled. “I haven’t seen his new work. It must be quite a departure, though.”

  Joan was struck by the warmth in the professor’s tone. If there was any ill feeling between him and Yuan Zhao, it was clearly one-sided.

  “Maybe his new painting has something to do with coming to Los Angeles?” she suggested. “With responding to the Western fascination with ancient Chinese culture?”

  “That’s an interesting idea,” Harry said. “I also shifted my focus during the year I spent in Beijing.” He indicated a set of bound galley proofs on the desk at his left elbow. It was a large-format art book, with a grainy urban landscape on the cover. In bold letters, above the photograph, was the title Tianming’s East Village.

  “This is about to be published,” he said. “I first proposed it to the photographer seven years ago in Beijing.”

  Harry opened the book to a particular photograph: two young men dressed in satin boxing shorts, crouched on the surface of a legless Ping-Pong table. The picture was obviously meant to be funny; Yuan Zhao scowled theatrically at his opponent across the three-inch net. But there was also something ominous and arresting about the roughly hung flags in the background (Chinese and American) and the shininess of the men’s bodies, as if they’d really been fighting.

  “Do you recognize him?”

  Joan studied the photo: Yuan Zhao was on the left, in front of the Chinese flag, while his opponent was on the right. She could feel the professor watching her closely. “Yes,” she said. “But it’s as if he’s transformed himself. I mean, I guess that’s the art in it. I’ve never been very excited about performance art. Or maybe I don’t understand it.”

  “A lot of it is bullshit,” Harry said. “And a lot of it depends on the context. At that time in Beijing, experimental artists were working in a kind of crucible; their actions inspired reactions from the powers that be. They in turn were inspired by the government’s actions.” He paused: “Of course many of the artists now would disagree with me. The younger ones aren’t even interested in 1989 anymore, much less the ’60s and ’70s. They criticize me for preferring work that deals with the China I know.” The professor shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t help it. I think I’m right. I believe that, in order to be successful, this kind of art must be political—must be socially engaged.”

  “Like these East Village artists.”

  Harry nodded. “Some of them, anyway. Several were arrested during one performance, in June of ’94.” He flipped through the book to show her another photograph. A naked young man, wearing makeup and silver earrings, was cooking fish on an outdoor stove.

  “That’s Baoyu, isn’t it? Am I saying his name right?”

  Harry hesitated. “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “I saw that painting in your book: the man in the bathrobe. And then when I mentioned it to Yuan Zhao, he told me about Baoyu. He’s beautiful, isn’t he?”

  “That didn’t help his case with the police,” Harry said. “After he was arrested, along with some others, all of the artists had to move out of that area.”

  “How sad.”

  “But you have to remember, the East Village was their invention. They named it—you could say that it only existed in their imaginations anyway. Now I hear that the whole area is going to be turned into a park.”

  “You’re kidding,” Joan said. “That’s a tragedy.”

  Harry shrugged. “Not really. It’s gone already; if it still existed, bulldozing it wouldn’t be enough to destroy it. The community was already falling apart that spring, in ’94.”

  Joan became aware that she was jiggling her knee, an anxious habit she had retained from adolescence.

  “The first thing was attribution,” Harry continued. “It became very complicated, but basically, it’s difficult to determine the authorship of some of these works.” He indicated the open book on the table. “That one, for example. Is it a photograph by Zhang Tianming? Or a performance by Yuan Zhao?”

  Joan looked back at the boxers. She noticed Yuan Zhao’s well-developed physique—something he’d apparently let go in the intervening years. His skin was darker, sleek with sweat; he looked tougher than he did today.

  “Well, it seems like an academic distinction,” she said. “I mean, it’s both—isn’t it?”

  Harry smiled. “And therein lies the trouble. Of course, once it becomes worth something, the question is somewhat more immediate. This particular photograph is part of a series that recently sold in Berlin for fifty thousand U.S.”

  “Gosh,” said Joan.

  “You can imagine, our friend was not pleased.”

  Joan nodded, but she had a hard time imagining Yuan Zhao fighting over money. He seemed like the kind of person who would give way—and then maybe stew about it later.

  “It’s much harder to collaborate once you have to determine the percentages. Those of us who work in a solitary way probably can’t imagine,” Harry said. “I complain about it—this little underground bunker—and pretend to be grateful for the teaching. But in fact I think solitary work suits me.”

  “I know what you mean,” Joan said. “I think he’s the same way—I mean, he seems to enjoy working alone.” She decided to take a chance. “And in his personal life…I guess he’s been single for a long time?”

  “Did he say that?” Harry asked casually. He opened a drawer in his desk, as if he were looking for something.

  Joan didn’t want to seem as if she were desperate to hear the story. She thought Harry would tell her more if he didn’t think she was planning to write about it.

  “He told me about his fiancée,” she said.

  Harry looked up from his desk. “I wasn’t aware that they were engaged.”

  “He said they were,” Joan said. “He said they had just gotten engaged when she died.”

  “Died!” The professor started. For the first time, she felt as if she had his full attention.

  “In the detention center?” Joan said.

  “Which detention center?”

  “I don’t know the name of it. But Mr. Yuan said it was very dangerous—it was summer, and there was a lot of sickness.”

  Harry smiled, and for a moment even seemed to be trying to
keep from laughing. She couldn’t imagine what she’d said that could be funny.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “But the woman I’m thinking of is very much alive. I believe she’s having a child.”

  “Perhaps I misunderstood,” Joan said, although there were few conversations she remembered as clearly as the one that first night with the dissident. She looked back at the photograph of the boxers: Yuan Zhao was in a defensive posture, as if he were waiting for the other guy to throw a punch. His opponent was in motion, warming up: that was why you couldn’t see his face.

  “Who’s that?” she asked, pointing to the other artist. She obviously wasn’t going to find out anything more about Yuan Zhao’s fiancée from the professor.

  “I did meet him,” Harry said. “The name escapes me—but I remember that we had a very interesting conversation about the twelfth-century monk painter, Fanlong.”

  “Yuan Zhao mentioned that painter the first time I met him.”

  Harry raised his eyebrows in a kind of mock surprise. “Did he? That’s interesting, because Yuan Zhao isn’t much interested in these old painters. Actually, not many of the young artists are. That other young man was the exception.” Harry glanced at his watch. “I’m sorry to say that I have to teach. A ‘research methods’ class.” He smiled. “Never imagine that tenure frees you from this kind of thing.”

  “Thank you so much for your help,” Joan said.

  Harry Lin stood up and removed a neatly pressed sports coat from a hanger behind the door. “I don’t think it would be a bad idea to write something about our friend,” he offered. “An article or even a piece of fiction. You might start by asking about this performance.”

  Joan could feel herself blushing. It seemed that Harry had known what she was up to all along.

  “Feel free to stay and look at the books if you’d like. The door will lock behind you.”

  Joan waited until she heard him climbing the stairs. The interview wasn’t what she’d expected, for several reasons. She began flipping through Tianming’s East Village, hoping to find a picture of Yuan Zhao’s girlfriend, the fashion designer (now, only questionably dead). There was one group snapshot, of maybe twenty artists around a long table, but there was no way for Joan to guess which young woman she might’ve been.

  There were no captions on the photographs, and the titles were given at the beginning of each section: Drip-Drop, Something That Is Not Art, Modern Dance. Although the names of the other artists appeared in the text, the book was clearly one photographer’s vision of a specific place and time, rather than a documentary of the performances that took place there. Joan didn’t see anything wrong with that, although it was sometimes hard for her (an uninitiated viewer) to tell the performers apart. Maybe that wasn’t important? Even Harry Lin, who had actually attended some of the performances, couldn’t remember the name of the second boxer. Did it matter if that name was nowhere in the book?

  It was the kind of issue that made you glad to work alone. Even if you were inspired by other people, no one could claim that the thing you’d written somehow belonged to them. People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them, like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it. She made something of their leavings, and afterward they could not say: “Wait, that was my love affair,” or “Hey, give me back my childhood memory,” any more than they could demand the return of their soda cans from the man who gathered them from the neighborhood trash.

  60.

  THE BEIJING EAST VILLAGE “ENDED” ON JUNE 12, 1994. OR THAT’S THE date that Harry Lin has put down in his book. It’s been my experience that anniversaries are not fixed; they wobble, depending on who is telling the story. I suspect that if you were to ask each artist when they knew it was finished, you would get a succession of different dates. Some might argue that the name “East Village” didn’t refer to a community, but only to a random collection of people brought together by cheap rents in a changing city. Others might even say that there was never an East Village in Beijing, except in the imagination of one photographer, and that those pictures are the only place it existed at all.

  For me, the end came almost two months before the official date, April 21, 1994: as it turned out, my nineteenth birthday. We had just finished our performance of Drip-Drop, which was attended by the Chinese-American scholar Harry Lin, in Beijing that year on a Fulbright. After the performance, there was going to be a party at Lulu’s beautiful apartment, up by the Asian Games Village.

  Drip-Drop was my first artistic collaboration with my cousin, apart from the magazine, and the only time I performed as an artist in the East Village. Like Something That Is Not Art, it took place in X’s apartment and was crowded with journalists and other spectators. My cousin and I stood on the surface of a legless Ping-Pong table, one of us on each side of the ragged net. Yuchen had got us a discarded table from the staff room of the Concord Hospital. We were wearing knock-off Thai boxing shorts, an idea of my cousin’s that I enthusiastically supported, since I had been afraid we would be performing naked. Behind us were two flags—Chinese and U.S.—and in front of the flags X had placed the same heaters he’d used before, only this time there were no fans. My cousin set the timer for twenty minutes, and the two of us crouched down, facing off like sumo wrestlers. Soon, we began to sweat.

  In the dramatic photographs of this performance, my cousin’s body and my own are slick and dripping. The flags and the Ping-Pong table comprise the background; nothing else is visible, and X and I are giants tramping on a puppet stage. What was most extraordinary about this performance (I will brag a little, since I was only an actor in my cousin’s show) was not captured in the photographs. It was the sound of our sweat hitting the table in that silent room, faster, slower, and faster again, like the sound of the ball in an actual match. My cousin had originally wanted to use blood for this purpose; it was only with great difficulty that Yuchen and I persuaded him of a more practical alternative.

  Afterward, like marathoners, we were allowed to stand outside in the cool night, wrapped in blankets, while the journalists asked us (asked X, mostly) questions about the significance of the piece. Meiling had brought us both thermoses full of cold green tea, which I drank greedily, and my cousin left politely untouched until he was finished with the reporters. The three of us took a taxi and arrived early at Lulu’s place, where she and her grandmother were setting out a spectacular buffet.

  I had been nervous about Lulu’s reception of Meiling, but my cousin’s girlfriend was more than polite. In fact, they seemed to be trying to outdo each other with friendliness. Meiling had brought a bottle of expensive whiskey for the party, as well as a flowering plant for Lulu’s grandmother; Lulu complimented Meiling extravagantly on the silk tunic she was wearing over her jeans, which she’d designed herself. I could see that they hadn’t resolved their quarrel, only transferred it to another arena, as women so often seem to do. Under other circumstances this behavior might have made me nervous, but that night I was just glad for the appearance of peace.

  The guests arrived in twos and threes until the apartment was hot and crowded. In Lulu’s living room, with its brightly painted traditional furniture and its photographs of X’s performances on the walls, we sat on the floor and had dinner. Sometime around midnight, when we were all pretty drunk, my cousin gave me a happy-birthday toast:

  “Way back when we were kids—when we used to call him Xiao Pangzi—I never imagined my cousin and I would be making art together. Now I can’t imagine the East Village without him. Welcome to Beijing,” my cousin said: “Happy nineteenth!” Everyone cheered and raised their glasses, and Meiling gave me a public kiss on the cheek. Lulu had even gotten me an American-style cream-filled cake, decorated with candles.

  “Make a wish,” she told me, at the same moment that Meiling took my hand. I must have sat there for half a minute, trying to think of something else to wish for. In the
end I just blew gratefully, extinguishing every flame on the first try.

  After the cake, we rolled back the rug and started dancing. Cash brought out his electric guitar and amplifier, and I danced with Meiling, and then with Ai Dan, Lulu, and even Baoyu. A beautiful exchange student from the French island of Réunion had brought purple and silver glitter; we made a game of dousing our friends. I noticed that Lulu was getting angry about the mess and the commotion, and I saw her shouting at my cousin, who seemed unconcerned. When he and Fang lit a joint on the couch, however, I saw Lulu grab her bag and go out. I raised my eyebrows at X, but he was busy getting high, and I don’t think he noticed.

  I didn’t plan on falling asleep, but it was four-thirty when I woke up on the couch. My mouth was dry, and my head predictably throbbed. When I sat up, it seemed that most of the guests had left: Cash sat on the floor, not playing but simply cradling his guitar as if it were a baby. A couple made out in the doorway; behind them in the kitchen, Yuchen was cleaning up. I got up and squeezed by the couple, blinking in the fluorescent light.

  “Can I help?” I washed and then filled a glass from a jug on the counter.

  Yuchen shook his head: “I just wanted to get the bottles picked up. I’m going home.”

  “Have you seen Meiling?”

  He nodded: “A while ago. I don’t know if she’s still here, though.”

  “She would’ve woken me up if she were leaving,” I said. “She’s probably asleep somewhere.” I noticed a pot of Lulu’s grandmother’s fried rice on the stove, and was suddenly ravenous. I decided I would take a plate into the living room and eat; then I would find Meiling and take her home.

  The main room was so smoky, however, that I ended up carrying my plate of rice down the corridor, looking for another place to eat. I passed Lulu’s bedroom, where the party was continuing: I peeked around the door, in case Meiling was there, but it was only some guys, drinking and gambling with cards. I continued to the end of the hallway, a part of the apartment I had never seen, where there was a closed door. I assumed that the room belonged to Lulu’s grandmother, who had gone to spend the night with some relatives.