The Dissident
Page 44
“Congratulations,” I said, and this time I meant it. I sat down on a stool at the low beechwood table (a real antique, I suspected) that complemented the ultramodern glass tea set.
“May I?” I asked my cousin, who nodded. I took the baby in my lap. Ruyang was not yet at an age to be fussy about being picked up by strangers. As soon as I lifted him, he began pedaling his feet, as if he were trying to bicycle.
“How are things?” my cousin asked. “How is your work?”
“I do a little, here and there,” I said. “I’m thinking of starting a gallery.” It was not an idea I’d articulated to anyone yet, but my cousin nodded enthusiastically. I told him my impression of the galleries in Shanghai, and described some of the terrific spaces I had seen, in the old ware houses by the river.
“But I didn’t know I was entertaining a curator!” my cousin joked with me. “Let me tell Meiling to bring out the whiskey.”
“You’ll be hearing from me,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
Meiling pushed open the front door with her hip, balancing the heavy tea tray. “Worry about what?” she said.
“Did you hear?” my cousin said. “There’s finally going to be a first-class gallery in Shanghai.”
Meiling looked at me, but before I could explain, the baby stood up in my lap, pushing his fat little feet into my knees. He uttered a string of nonsense syllables in a loud, clear voice—not crying so much as imitating the sound of speech, the same way he was trying to stand.
“He has strong opinions about art,” my cousin said. “Don’t get him started.”
The three of us laughed, and for a second I felt we were back in that other courtyard, outside of Cash’s house. But this time it was spring, and no one could have compared the fine Wulong tea we drank, or the French crepes we had afterward at a chic new café in their neighborhood, to one of our meals back then.
Our old East Village is now buried under massive Chaoyang Park. You can wander through that park for hours (I have done it), trying to identify trees or mounds of dirt, or remember the placement of courtyards, but it’s no use. There is no passageway back. Perhaps that is for the best.
80.
I HAVE FINISHED MY RETELLING OF THE LEGEND LIU CHEN AND RUAN Zhao in the Tiantai Mountains. I’ve changed the title slightly. Look closely among the characters in the top right-hand corner, and you will find the English letters X, Y, and Z. “X and YZ in the Tiantai Mountains,” it reads now. As in algebra, however, the values of X and YZ have changed. Now that X = YZ, there is a new unknown. I’ve written my own name in the bottom left-hand corner, and yet I don’t think there’s any point in copying that name here. I think it has nothing to do with this story, and there would be the further problem of how to present it: as a combination of strokes, dots, and hooks that I would have to cut and paste into this English text, or as an English transliteration: an approximation, a stand-in, a copy.
I am finished being an artist. When I do go into the studio that’s supposed to be for the two of us, it is mostly to admire her work. Now she is making fishing nets with objects caught in them: baseballs and hubcaps, as well as glazed cherries on sticks, bright paper sparklers, and fur earmuffs in the shapes of hearts and stars—things she acquired on a trip we took this past winter, to see the Ice Lantern Festival in Harbin. To be clear: there was nothing improper in this traveling. It has taken me six years to write this story. I am a lazy writer, and only the fact that I am writing the truth—a kind of copying of events, in prose—has made this record possible.
It has been six years since I left Los Angeles, not knowing whether I would ever see her again. Fortunately for me, June was an excellent correspondent. (Not that she always sent words. Sometimes it was a photograph—of her work, not herself—a pair of Japanese electromagnetic socks, a pink plastic fish, or a feather.) Our relationship was an epistolary one for several years, on and off, while June took her high school equivalency, and then got her degree in studio art at the prestigious Wesleyan University in Connecticut. When she finally arrived in Shanghai to meet her cousins, it was on a traveling fellowship similar to the one that brought us together in the first place. (Although June’s fellowship was absolutely earned, and she arrived at Pudong Airport as no one but herself.) I held a sign with her name in English and Chinese. She said:
“You know I can’t read that chickenscratch, Yuan Laoshi.”
I no longer paint very often, and I’ve also stopped working for my father. Mostly now I spend my time at the gallery, which I have sentimentally named “Mountain,” in honor of Cangyun Shanren, as well as a certain street in Beverly Hills, California. I had thought of naming it for my old teacher, but there is another Wang in my life now, one who refuses to be honored except in the wall text next to her work. In the middle of the day, I often come home to cook: shrimp and chive dumplings, red braised pork, sesame rice, and cold cucumbers dressed with sauce. These things are ready for us when June comes home from her studio, hungry and excited. After eating our big meal of the day we nap, and after that June sometimes wakes me in the best way imaginable.
Our apartment is charming, but hardly large: there are dozens of galleries in Shanghai, and hundreds of curators, all struggling to survive. June says I have better taste than the others, and I tell her that soon her work will be keeping us both in luxury. Who knows? Maybe it will happen: maybe we’ll make some money, and go back to visit America in style. It would be nothing like before. For one thing, Cece has written to me that they plan to sell their big house. I would like to walk through the rose garden one more time before that happens, and present her with the finished scroll: she should at least have the original copy. I would like to show June the bush baby, still alive, I suspect, safe in her landscaped hutch. It would be nice to go back to California as myself.
It is exhausting pretending to be someone you’re not; June says that’s part of the reason it’s taken me so long to finish this account. (There aren’t even any pictures, she mocks.) It is a relief, in any case, to write these final words. June sometimes teases me, calling me “Old Man.” Maybe not in years—we are, in fact, only six years apart—but in spirit. She says I am a conservative or even a reactionary (using the word in the American way, of course, as someone who isn’t culturally up-to-speed), and it’s true that I have trouble letting go of the past. I was certainly never meant to be a dissident. I was never meant to be an artist, or at least not the same kind of artist as my cousin X—the groundbreaking performer Yuan Zhao. I am someone who paints rocks and birds and lobsters, again and again the same way, because the repetition of these forms gives me solace. They make me feel that I am home.
And yet occasionally there’s something more than that. Sometimes there’s a tree or an arrangement of clouds that makes me think I’m doing something—not new, perhaps, but something of my own. June has said that she recognized that I wasn’t who I said I was right away, that first day in the studio at St. Anselm’s.
“How?” I asked her. “How did you know?”
“Because I was expecting to find Yuan Zhao, and you weren’t him.”
“How did you know I wasn’t him?” I said. “There were people who’d seen us both who still didn’t know for sure.”
“I recognized you.”
“Because you’re an artist,” I said.
June shook her head in a particular, frustrated way that is so dear to me—when I think of how I almost allowed that gesture of hers to slip away forever, my skin puckers and I am, for just a moment, cold.
“Because you were for me, Old Man. How could you be anybody else?”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Whiting Foundation, the Pen/Malamud committee, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters for their generous support. I’m also indebted to the U.S. State Department for sponsoring my first trip to China, especially to Michael Bandler and Paul Thomas. I’m enormously grateful to Rong Rong and inri for taking the time to talk with me in Beijing, and welcoming me into
their home, and to Karen Patterson for translating our conversation. And I stayed too long with Sommer and Alex in Beijing: thank you.
Wu Hung’s lucid writing about contemporary Chinese art was invaluable to me, especially Rong Rong’s East Village. I was very lucky to have editors like Daniel Halpern and Lee Boudreaux, who read this book many times. Amanda Urban is simply the best agent a writer could imagine. Finally I’m grateful to Paul for agreeing to spend his vacation in Harbin (in January), and for his faith that it would be worth it.
About the Author
Nell Freudenberger’s collection of stories, Lucky Girls, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2005 Freudenberger was the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award. She lives in New York City.
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ALSO BY NELL FREUDENBERGER
Lucky Girls
Credits
Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Jacket photographer © Alan Thomas/Getty Images
Copyright
THE DISSIDENT. Copyright © 2006 by Nell Freudenberger. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2006 ISBN: 9780061850127
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Freudenberger, Nell.
The dissident / Nell Freudenberger.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-075871-4
ISBN-10: 0-06-075871-6
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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