“He’s a swindler,” the old man said. “He was supposed to pay us a hundred thousand yuan for the use of the land, but he didn’t. Also, they borrowed some tools that they didn’t return.”
I went to the nearby village, where a number of peasants had appeared in the movie. Jiang Wen liked casting both professional actors and average people, because of the way it changed the dynamics on the set. A Hong Kong film consultant had explained to me that this strategy made the movie “less fictionalized, more real,” and this certainly seemed true, at least from the perspective of the villagers. One woman named Zhang Fuhong told me proudly that she had been handpicked by Jiang Wen and his advisors. “They chose me for a big scene because of my long hair,” she said proudly. She was twenty-five years old; when I interviewed her, she was making dumplings in her kitchen. She said she had liked Jiang Wen because he was friendly. In the movie’s pivotal scene, the woman had been killed by the Japanese. “I was the one who tried to run away at the end,” she said.
On a footpath heading back to the reservoir, I met another peasant woman who had also been killed in the movie. “I was a little scared,” she admitted. She told me that she had been impressed by Jiang Wen’s high standards. “There was one scene that they spent days filming, and he still didn’t accept it,” she said.
None of the villagers had seen the finished movie. They had only watched some clips on the monitor, during the filming, and their sense of the plot was incomplete. They didn’t realize that Jiang Wen’s character had also been killed, because those scenes had been filmed elsewhere. Many of the peasants weren’t even aware that Devils on the Doorstep had been banned. One woman said that she didn’t understand why it hadn’t appeared on television yet. The few tourists who stopped by were confused: they knew that a Jiang Wen movie had been made there, and they knew that there had been a problem, but they didn’t understand exactly what had happened.
The only person who seemed to know everything was a twelve-year-old boy named Zhou Baohong. When I traveled in the countryside, I sometimes ran into kids like him: well-spoken, knowledgeable, and obsessed with things beyond the village. If a foreigner appeared, such children latched on immediately. Invariably their conversation included long descriptions of recent examination scores, as well as the odds of getting into a good high school. If I left my phone number, they called me at regular intervals for weeks and sometimes years. Those kids always reminded me of William Jefferson Foster.
Dressed in a filthy blue suit, Zhou Baohong was trying to earn extra money on the weekends by serving as a guide for the movie set. I hired him, and he took me on a tour of all the abandoned houses and objects. He knew how much each prop had cost—he pointed out a fake tree made from cement, which had cost six hundred yuan to make and another two hundred to transport. An extra tower on the Great Wall had cost one hundred thousand yuan. (Jiang Wen hadn’t been satisfied with the real Great Wall.) The boy took me to the empty home of Jiang Wen’s character, and then we paused by a small clearing. “This was the killing field,” the boy said solemnly. “All the villagers died here.”
I asked what had happened to the movie itself.
“Jiang Wen didn’t go through our nation’s Cultural Bureau for approval,” the boy said. “Then he went to France and won a prize. So our nation’s government banned it.” The boy hadn’t seen the finished film, but he said he knew why it had been censored. “The peasants didn’t resist,” he said. “There was no Red Army, no Workers’ Army, no guerillas—none of them showed up. That’s the problem with the movie.”
AFTER JIANG WEN won at Cannes, the Chinese media kept silent—always a bad sign in the People’s Republic. The ban was never officially proclaimed, although two mysterious documents were leaked to Web sites. Supposedly, they had come from the Film Bureau. One was entitled “Propaganda Briefing No. 28,” and it noted that the government was “suspending Jiang Wen for all film and TV-related activities inside China.”
In China, all movies had to be cleared twice: first at the script stage, and then again after filming. The second leaked document—“Comments from the Film Censorship Committee”—identified twenty specific places in which Jiang Wen had changed his script without permission. The sex scene was inappropriate: “The strong imagery and explicit sound stimulates the sensory organs in a vulgar manner.” The committee also complained about the end of the film, which showed the Kuomintang controlling postwar China without resistance from the villagers: “It severely distorts the history. It doesn’t achieve the goal of criticizing and sneering at the KMT.”
But the biggest problem was the passivity of the film’s Chinese villagers. The document noted that one scene portrayed them giving good food to the Japanese prisoner and the Chinese collaborator:
Objectively it shows that even during the times of war, under such difficult living conditions, the Chinese civilians do not hate the Japanese invaders, on the contrary, they try their best to satisfy the prisoners’ needs…. This violates history severely.
Censorship was a curious issue. In my Beijing neighborhood, I sometimes found bootleg DVDs whose covers advertised, in English, “Banned in China.” Nobody seemed to control the bootleggers for long; even a movie such as Devils on the Doorstep eventually appeared on the streets. Filmmakers themselves could be nonchalant about the issue of censorship. One young director told me that the Film Bureau officials reminded him of his grandparents—aging authority figures whom he patronized.
After half a century, many features of Communism had become like that: the Party had power without respect, and it was tolerated rather than feared. The Film Bureau’s oppression was often passive-aggressive; silence was a potent weapon. They avoided official statements, and they never told Jiang Wen how long he was banned from appearing in movies and television programs. In fact, the officials refused to meet with him at all. The goal was simply to make him worry and wait.
After the movie was banned, Jiang Wen repeatedly told foreign reporters that this was a case of life imitating art: the Cannes prize, like the prisoners in the movie, was a possession that only led to trouble. He said that the censorship reminded him of the Cultural Revolution. Such remarks were not appreciated by many of his colleagues in the world of Chinese film. Jiang Wen had always had enemies—his charisma and fame gave him enormous influence, and he had a quick temper and a streak of stubbornness. Now that he had angered the government, other filmmakers worried about a possible tightening of the rules. One producer in Beijing told me, “If he publicly insists that he didn’t do anything wrong, it will hurt the whole industry in China.”
For a while, Jiang Wen gloried in the role of the oppressed artist, but then his attitude seemed to change. One of his friends told me that, as time passed, Jiang admitted privately that he had brought some of the trouble onto himself. Finally, he stopped making inflammatory statements. After a period of silence, he began to explore the boundaries, appearing on a couple of television award shows. Then he acted in a low-budget film with a first-time director. At last, he signed on to the Western. He had never been an action star, and it was obvious that he didn’t enjoy the work, but it was necessary for political rehabilitation. Xinjiang was his first step back from exile.
ONE EVENING IN Xinjiang, after another long day of filming, I met with Jiang Wen in his hotel room. I asked how viewers were supposed to interpret the historical perspective of Devils on the Doorstep. Carefully, the actor leaned back in his chair—his spine was still aching—and lit a cigarette.
“I never said that this movie was supposed to represent history,” he said. “I believe that a director is supposed to show things inside the heart. Maybe it has something to do with inheritance. I was born near that place in Hebei, and so there is lots of history inside of me. In a way, I think the movie is autobiographical.”
I mentioned that some critics believed the movie was inaccurate because it didn’t portray the Chinese as victims of the war.
“I agree that the Chinese people have been
victims,” he said. “But we have our own faults; we need to look hard at a mirror and think about why we became victims. You can’t simply point to others and say that they’re evil—you can’t point at Lin Biao, or Jiang Qing, or the Japanese. That’s too simple.”
He rubbed his scraggly black beard. He wore old sweatpants and Nike sneakers; his eyes looked tired.
“Think of China as a field,” he continued. He gestured with one hand, as if he were planting a neat row of rice in the hotel room carpet. “The Kuomintang, the Communist Party, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing—all of them are seeds in the earth. They grow in different ways; some grow well and others do not. Some become bad. When the Japanese arrived, you could safely say that they were already bad—they were fascists. But why did they get worse after they got here? We Chinese need to talk about this, because so many bad things got worse and worse.
“What most people say is so simple—‘they’re devils, we’re victims.’ But this history is the same as an individual’s life. I’ve had friends say that I should work in the Film Bureau, because then that institution would become more tolerant. I tell them that it would only make me a worse person. If you have a guard at the gate, then the guard becomes oppressive. It doesn’t have anything to do with the person; it’s the system, the environment.”
He told me that many Chinese needed psychological help. “People should spend more time looking inside themselves,” he said. “A person and history are the same—by that, I mean that a personal history is enormous. An individual can be even more complicated than a society. But there isn’t any time for the Chinese to examine themselves like that. Everybody is too busy; there’s not enough quiet for reflection. In the distant past, the country was peaceful and stable, but now it changes so fast. Certainly that’s been the case since Reform and Opening, but to some degree the past two hundred years have been like that. We don’t know where we are. We haven’t found our road. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Chinese tried; some of them tried to find it in our own traditions, while others looked outside the country. This debate is still going on.”
He continued: “Chairman Mao is a perfect example. He often said that he didn’t like Chinese history, and the Communists initially succeeded because they were untraditional. But Mao used traditional Chinese language to oppose the old things, and he became a traditional emperor. It’s not as if he decided to do this; he just didn’t know any other alternatives. He’s a tragic figure—the most tragic in Chinese history. He’s like a seed that grows big, but in a twisted way, because the seed can’t overcome the soil.”
I asked the actor what could be done about that.
“You have to change the soil,” Jiang Wen said.
The room was silent; he paused to light another cigarette. “I want to make a movie about Mao,” he continued. “Mao was more tragic than Hamlet. Mao was an artistic person, not a political person. He should have been a poet and a philosopher; he should have been creating things instead of dealing with politics.”
Jiang Wen laughed and acknowledged that such a film wasn’t going to be made in the near future. He had no idea when he would direct again; he was still feeling out the political climate, step by step. But the character of Mao Zedong fascinated him nonetheless. “I think Mao has something to do with every Chinese person,” Jiang Wen said. “He represents many Chinese dreams and many Chinese tragedies.”
THE FILM SET swallowed the outside world. Some scenes included turbaned bands of Turkic warriors; off-camera, the actors referred to these extras as “Taliban.” Apart from jokes like that, it was hard to remember that there was a war happening on the other side of Xinjiang. My meeting with Polat’s friend seemed just as far away: the only reminder was the stack of hundred-dollar bills.
During the filming, we rarely saw Uighurs. Han Chinese ran the oil company, and the movie’s horseback extras—the Taliban—were actually Kazaks. The Big Horse Camp scenes were filmed near a small oasis that was home to one Uighur family, but they kept out of the way, tending to their flock of two hundred sheep. One afternoon, I visited their home and talked to a young Uighur in his twenties, who told me sleepily that he liked Jiang Wen. But he preferred American movies—Twister, Terminator, anything with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said he had liked the part in Titanic when the boat snaps in half.
When I asked He Ping, the director, about the difference between an American Western and a Chinese Western, he had a well-polished answer. “American Westerns are about taking culture to the west,” he said. “It’s about one culture going to another place; they’re taking law and order to the west. A Chinese Western is totally different. It’s about exchange between different cultures.” He also told me that in order to make the film more “postmodern,” he had cast an actress with a shaved head as a Buddhist monk.
They used a body double for Harrison Liu. The doctor told him to stay off horses for a while; he needed to recover in order to film a subsequent scene in which his character would be killed by a Taliban-Turkic-Kazak band. He was fated to die with one arrow through his chest and another through his knee. Many months later, when I saw the death on a movie screen, I thought immediately of the Huron of Black Robe.
AT THE END of my last day on the set, I rode away with Jiang Wen in his private van. He had spent part of the afternoon leading a camel train across the Gobi. Harrison’s body double had taken up the back of the procession, so nobody would notice him.
The van bounced across the blackened desert. No trees, no grass—nothing but a flat dead horizon. I asked the actor about his favorite movies, and he told me that as a young man, over a period of ten years, he had repeatedly watched Raging Bull.
“When I saw that movie,” he said, “it wasn’t as if it was an American movie, or a movie about a boxer. I felt like it was about my home.”
I asked if his copy had had Chinese subtitles, and he shook his head. “I only understood ten per cent of it,” he said. “But really it’s just a matter of seeing it and understanding the mood. I liked the shades, the blacks and whites, and I liked the atmosphere. And I liked Robert De Niro, because in that movie he reminds me of my mother. His attitude reminds me of her.”
I asked, somewhat carefully, “What’s your mother like?”
“Too complicated to explain,” he said. “That’s another movie I’ll make someday.”
The van bumped forward. The sun hung low and then disappeared; oil well burnoffs flamed a dull orange in the distance. Jiang Wen’s cigarette glowed the same color. He talked about foreign directors who had encouraged him—he had met Martin Scorsese twice, and Volker Schlöndorff, the director of Tin Drum, had helped Jiang Wen get funding for his first movie. Jiang Wen struggled to explain how much he loved making films, and at last he pointed to the cigarette.
“It’s like smoking,” he said. “I need to make movies like I need to smoke.”
At first, I wasn’t sure what he meant—whether filmmaking was an addiction, or a necessity that had been denied, or a profession that, one way or another, through fame or censorship or horses, seemed destined to finish him off. But then I noticed his smile—the sweetest look I’d ever seen on his hard face. He liked it all.
19
Election
December 1, Ninetieth Year of the Republic
ONLY ONE OF THE ORIGINAL ANYANG ARCHAEOLOGISTS WAS STILL alive. In the summer of 1936, Shih Chang-ju had overseen the excavation of the largest cache of oracle bones ever found. The following year, when the Japanese occupied Nanjing, and the Kuomintang fled west. In 1949, they were driven to Taiwan by the Communists. That was the story of Shih Chang-ju’s life—a nomadic archaeologist, displaced repeatedly by war. There was something poignant about his published description of the excavations of June 1936, when the season’s last dig uncovered the oracle bones:
But, indeed, facts are stranger than fiction. The actual pleasure of discovery far exceeded our anticipation!
After archaeologists in Anyang told me about Shih, I telephoned the Aca
demia Sinica in Taiwan. An assistant answered the phone. “He won’t be in today until about three o’clock,” she said. “He’s busy with meetings this week.”
I explained that I wanted to schedule a visit to Taiwan. Such trips required time; direct flights weren’t allowed between the island and the mainland, so a traveler had to change planes in Hong Kong. I asked if Professor Shih might be available next month for an interview.
“Oh, I’m sure he can do it anytime,” she said. “He’s here every day.”
I asked, “Is this the same Professor Shih who excavated in Anyang in the 1930s?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“He still goes to meetings?”
“Only if there are visitors in town. This week we have some people in from the mainland.”
“How old is he?”
“He just celebrated his hundredth birthday this year.”
“How is his health?”
“Very good!” she said. “He has a problem with his eye, and his hearing isn’t great, but otherwise he’s fine. He comes to work every day, like the rest of us. You can say he’s the oldest worker in the office!”
BY A WESTERN calculation, Professor Shih was ninety-nine—the Chinese considered a person to be one year old at birth. He was a native of Henan province, where he had first made his name as an archaeologist, but after 1949 he hadn’t returned to the mainland. Since arriving in Taiwan, Professor Shih had focused primarily on organizing, analyzing, and publishing all of his old research notes. It was virtual archaeology: if you could no longer excavate in Anyang, then at least you could excavate your notes from Anyang. In 2001, at the age of ninety-nine, Professor Shih published his eighteenth book: Hou Chia Chuang (The Yin-Shang Cemetery Site at Anyang, Honan), Volume X. When I visited his office, he proudly gave me a copy, inscribed and dated in a shaky hand. The material had been researched more than sixty years ago.
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