Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  The girls’ dormitory was the first place I felt I wasn’t alone, especially after one night in particular, when I told them about the sexual abuse I had suffered as a young girl.

  ‘I can’t exactly remember what happened to me. All I remember is the fear, the enormous fear and terror when his hands touched my body and fingered me,’ I murmured, lying in my bunk in the dark, my eyes wide open.

  ‘Same here.’ I heard Mengmeng sitting up on her bunk. ‘I know exactly what you mean. I hated the man who abused me and I still hate him, intensely. He lived next door. He was always coming into our house when my parents were away and groping me. He threatened to cut out my tongue if I told my parents. I wanted to kill him.’ Her tone was furious, disgusted, as if it had happened only yesterday.

  ‘You did better than me! At least you dared to hate the man, and not just feel scared,’ another girl on the bed next to mine spoke up.

  ‘Not really. I was too scared to tell my parents. It continued for a year or two until my father moved us away for business reasons. I don’t know what would have become of me if we had remained in that house. I probably would have got pregnant or else become a murderer. Every day I prayed that man would die the worst kind of death. I imagined him falling naked on a razor-wire fence and his penis being sliced through in the most painful way.’

  As the dormitory building grew quieter after midnight, we lay in the dark and waited for sleep to come. But it didn’t. With an unspoken, but almost collective feeling, we girls were dreading these memories would return to us in our dreams. They were monstrous shadows over our unconscious minds. Mengmeng told me she experienced nightmares often. She described the images to me: an obscure space, a male hand, a vulgar gesture, an icy intrusion, breathing, all devoid of faces or narrative. Then she would wake up in a cold sweat, still trembling, her limbs paralysed. How familiar all this was! I couldn’t have described it better! It seemed that all of us had experienced similar ordeals. Stories that remained untold except in the darkness of the girls’ dormitory.

  When I think back on those days now, it seems obvious that many Chinese girls then suffered such abuse, and so regard love as the opposite of sex: sex only represents the abusive and violent relationships between men and women, whereas love goes far beyond sex, and should really be asexual.

  Mengmeng was always stylish and had good taste in fashion. Elegant, pale-skinned with long black hair, you would think that she came from a wealthy, urban family. But she was in fact a peasant’s daughter from Shanxi, the home of coal and brown yams. Her family had ploughed fields for years and held no great hopes for their daughter’s future. But Mengmeng had always been fascinated with cinema. Her parents must have loved her, since she seemed very attached to them. I noticed how they posted her food packages and clothes parcels, which only increased the disappointment I felt towards my own family. My parents barely ever sent me anything from Wenling.

  Mengmeng’s father visited once, bringing kilos of dried pork sausage which fed our room of four for a month. He seemed to be one of the smartest peasants in the country. Instead of tending to vegetables under the scorching sun and freezing rain, he began buying and selling. At the end of 1990s, President Jiang Zemin created the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation and allocated big sums of money to the African development fund. Mengmeng’s father bravely left China for Zambia because ‘the land is very cheap in Africa’. It didn’t matter much to him where he went – Zambia, Nigeria or any other African country were all the same to him, as he had no interest in the history or culture of the continent.

  ‘My father went to Africa alone, leaving us behind. He worked very hard, even harder than he had in China,’ Mengmeng told me. ‘But within a year, he had managed to buy a huge piece of land in Zambia. It was an abandoned colonial farm. He hired locals to plant sugar cane, tea and tobacco. Imagine that!’

  I was intrigued: how does a Chinese man who can’t speak any foreign languages create such a large business in Africa? No one I knew then had ever been to Africa, it was simply beyond most people’s imaginations. My only reference was the film Out of Africa by Sydney Pollack starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. It didn’t look like the white people had a happy time there. And I couldn’t imagine that us yellow people would fare any better, we were so clueless about the place.

  ‘Isn’t your father lonely, all the way over there without your mother?’ I asked Mengmeng.

  ‘My mother would rather die than go to Africa. I feel the same way …’ Mengmeng paused, and didn’t want to go on. Then she continued, her voice unsteady: ‘My father probably has a mistress there. Last time my mother called him, a woman answered the phone. She sounded very young, with a Sichuan accent …’

  I imagined this middle-aged Chinese man on his farm in Africa. A global peasant! How did the whole thing work? I was intrigued by how being a peasant could be combined with being a global business man.

  ‘Anyway, now my father wants my brother to join him, to help run the business.’

  ‘Does he want to go?’

  ‘Are you kidding? He doesn’t even know where Africa is! Africa is a step down for him, it’s not America. But to be honest, he couldn’t care less. He’s bored with his current job and just wants to have some fun. But you can’t have much fun in China. Too many rules!’

  Yes, that was true, in China we didn’t have much fun. Rigid rules trapped everyone. I always had thought Mengmeng a wise person, she was always coming out with wise statements like this. But in my case, being able to leave my stifling home town and study film in the capital was already freedom enough. I would also have liked to have more fun if only I knew how!

  East Village

  The performance on the Great Wall was only the beginning of my fascination with the underground art scene. I wanted desperately to be part of it, despite the fact that I was only a yokel from the countryside. At that time, all non-official art activities were banned by the state, everything from abstract painting to rock music. Typically the young rebels had long hair, wore hippyish clothes and lived in Beijing without a Beijing residence permit. The police raided residential areas and arrested people living in the city illegally. As a result, the artists went underground and hid themselves in small hamlets on the outskirts of Beijing.

  I don’t really know where the name East Village came from. It might have been inspired by New York’s East Village. But Beijing’s version was originally called Dashanzhuan, literally ‘Big Hill Hamlet’. It was located in the eastern part of the city, between the third and fourth ring roads. In the 1990s, artists just casually referred to it as East Village, distinguishing it from the other artists’ colony, West Village, near the Summer Palace.

  The underground was what attracted me – I certainly wasn’t going to become one of those state artists like my father. This was my generational statement. So, when in my second year at film school we were asked to produce a short film, I decided to make a documentary about the East Village artists. That way, I could make friends with them.

  One May weekend, I carried a heavy video camera (one of those early Beta cameras from the lab in the film school) on various buses out east. I got off at the end of the bus route and looked around. The area was scruffy and downtrodden, the road like hundreds of thousands in other Chinese villages, with stray dogs running about. Buffalo shit replaced paving stones, and the poplar trees looked wilder and older than the ones in the city centre. Date trees were common in Beijing in those days, and here too they absorbed the spring sunlight to mature their still-raw fruits. Yellowing sorghum and wheat fields edged both sides of the bumpy road, along which came the occasional horse cart driven by a local peasant. This was 1994, when the outskirts of Beijing still looked very rural and felt poor. As I approached the village proper, shabby clay houses were dotted randomly in the landscape, their windows broken and papered over with old newspaper and cardboard to block the wind and sandstorms. There were no shops, let alone proper streets. Only broken beer bottles and scraps o
f metal. It was basically a slum, even by the standards of a village girl like me.

  Yet the people were intimidating. I was only twenty-one years old. The camera was a shield, but I barely knew how to operate it. I passed a peasant carrying a hot pan on his bike, off to sell baked sweet potatoes in the market. I stopped and bought one, so that I could ask him whether he knew of any artists living in the area.

  ‘Artists?’ The sweet-potato seller raised his eyebrows, staring at me as if I were an alien: ‘What artists?’

  ‘You know, those people who paint and play very loud music.’ I bit into the soft, piping-hot potato which had been wrapped in an ancient copy of People’s Daily. It was crusty and very sweet.

  ‘You mean those fucking mad young people who never cut their hair and walk around naked? They are like insane grasshoppers in the winter looking for rotten shit. They’re always making a noise, drinking, and up to no good. They came knocking on our door in the middle of the night once, asking to borrow a big wok.’

  The peasant was keen to get to market to sell his potatoes.

  ‘Why did they want to borrow a wok?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think, girl? They shot a fucking wild goat and skinned it in the middle of the night. They wanted to make a stew with our wok. They’re always hungry, their eyes are like bulging frog-eyes! Just like a pack of wolves who haven’t eaten for days! Crazy fuckers! But I have to say, they don’t bother us too much. As long as they don’t steal our animals, we don’t have anything to do with them. It doesn’t bother me if they sleep with each other’s women!’

  In those days, peasants were very much under the influence of the government’s propaganda about moral conduct. Hard work and chastity were the ideal, being lazy or committing adultery the definition of depravity itself. If not wanton, the artists must have appeared mad in the eyes of the surrounding peasants. As our conversation came to an end, the sweet-potato seller pointed towards a few houses further down the road, and off he went.

  It was already noon, but still too early for the artists to have started their day. I stood outside one of the little houses and knocked timidly on its door. No one answered. I moved on to another house, where I watched two sparrows jump around and suck drops of liquid from beer bottles scattered around the yard. Poor sparrows, I bet even they were starving!

  Suddenly the door behind me burst open and a young man wearing only a pair of shorts came out. His hair was tied up in a ponytail and a straggly beard dressed his face – almost a trademark look for avant-garde artists back then. He glanced at me for less than two seconds then, swinging his arms and kicking his hairy legs, he strode briskly past me towards a little house in the near distance.

  ‘Are you a painter?’ I followed him closely, clutching my camera to my chest. ‘They told me you are a painter.’

  But he was not in the mood to talk. He seemed to be in a hurry. Intuition told me he would make the perfect subject for my documentary. So I followed him all the way to a little makeshift shed, around which several ragged, unkempt men were chatting. When we drew closer, I realised that he was heading for a public toilet – perhaps the only toilet in the village. At that time, these simple dwellings typical of suburban Beijing had neither heating nor proper plumbing. I stood and waited as the ponytailed man disappeared inside. I felt slightly embarrassed, but in no time my attention turned to the conversation between the two men beside me.

  ‘We’d drunk a whole fucking bottle of Erguotou by dawn, but the Swiss dealer wouldn’t give up. He began bringing out bottles of wine from his car and we finished them too with the leftover pig’s trotters.’

  ‘So the Swiss dude bought some paintings from you after all?’

  ‘I did a bulk sale! I even palmed off the ones I did in art school! He gave me a thousand yuan for eight pieces: four big, four small. I was selling paintings like those peasants sell cabbages in the market. I said: “Just take the whole bag! Don’t worry about the change!” He was delighted and opened another bottle!’

  A thousand yuan at that time was a reasonable sum, given the rent for those small houses was only around eighty yuan per month, so that kind of money meant you were covered for a whole year’s rent in the village. It was a good deal – if you didn’t expect that ten or fifteen years later those very same paintings would be auctioned at New York’s Whitney Gallery or London’s Sotheby’s for four to six million dollars a piece.

  As I was standing around with my ears pricked for any gossip from the village, I realised I too needed the toilet. So I went to the women’s side, hoping I would catch the ponytailed man when I came out. But as soon as I entered, I saw that it was fully occupied. Six women were squatting above six holes, chatting to each other in between their bowel movements. The toilet stank and flies were buzzing like a live electrical wire. All kinds of bodily fluid decorated the concrete floor and I couldn’t find a clean spot for my feet to stand on. Even our communal toilet in the compound back in Wenling never got this bad. I wondered if the Swiss art collector had relieved himself here after consuming so many beers and shots of liquor. As I was waiting my turn, I tried not to puke from the stench.

  When I finally escaped I saw the ponytailed painter light a cigarette as he stood talking with two other artists in front of the toilet block. A few more men arrived. They looked bedraggled and beat, their jeans splattered with paint. Their chatter was spiced with frequent swear words, as if they had known each other for years. I gathered that this was the place – the public toilet – this was the real social hub of East Village, and I should use it as my base.

  From that day on, I went back to the village regularly and carried on filming. One of the painters I met was Yue Minjun. Years later, he became very famous for his series of Laughing Man portraits. He was painting them when I met him, those crazy-looking figures with the laughing faces – grimacing open mouths, gaping like pits, fringed with immaculate white teeth. In my eyes, Yue’s work was the result of compulsion. He painted those pink male faces over and over again. Their wide mouths and tightly shut eyes, with a strain of a frozen hilarity, reminded me of Chinese peasants crying over their doomed futures as the government continued to seize their land for industrial projects. Yes, that laughter was a bitter cry.

  For Western consumers of art, the Chinese avant-garde of this period is ‘magic realist’ or ‘hyperrealist’. They are absurdist works that rejected reality in favour of some other stratosphere of the imagination. But in fact, the artists of the East Village were social realists. Their material was the village itself and the people in it. The best work of the period was an utterly realist piece. The putrid, crowded public toilet became a major performance project for Zhuang Huan, who later went to New York and became one of the most celebrated international Chinese artists of our generation. I was lucky enough to witness his performance in that very toilet, a piece entitled 12 Square Metres. Zhuang Huan covered his body in a visceral liquid of fish and honey to attract the flies. He then squatted down, letting the flies attack his flesh for hours. That day, the toilet was even more crowded than usual with hordes of spectators circulating outside, commenting and taking photos, including journalists from Reuters and the New York Times. I was one of the photographers, squeezed in by the entrance to the toilet. But after ten minutes of being crawled on by those awful local flies – who were probably dirtier than any other I had ever encountered – I had to escape from this atrocity, this battle between man and insect.

  Away from the crowd and the stench, I put down my camera and took a break. As I sat on the dirt, I thought: yes, these artists are fascinating, but I’m not sure if I could become one of them, or use this mode to express myself. Somehow, I always found their artistic language to be very male. It was too macho and too blunt, to put it simply. What these artists did was give their middle finger to the official talk of the People’s Daily. But we young people didn’t give a damn about the People’s Daily or any other official media outlets. Not even the middle-class Chinese wasted their time pa
ying attention to the party’s propaganda these days. Only the officials did. Times had changed. This was no longer the 1970s or 80s. So what were these artists trying to prove really? As an aspiring young artist myself, I composed a vision of my future – instead of representing the things no one believed in, I would concentrate on the things we did. At least, I would try with my future films and books.

  But my filming in East Village was abruptly stopped a month after I started. One sunny day in June, the police stormed the village and arrested some of the artists while one of them, Ma Liuming, was in the middle of a performance in the yard of Fen – Ma Liuming’s Lunch. Ma Liuming had an androgynous male/female persona, and sat completely naked, sucking a plastic tube attached to his penis. But I was an inexperienced film-maker then. I had used up all my tapes before he had even started the actual sucking, so I didn’t capture any of the real action. Some villagers reported the obscene scene to the police, or maybe the police were already monitoring the village’s activities that day. In any case, suddenly the police surrounded us. They demanded that all the spectators show their ID cards and Beijing residence permits. Those who failed to show their papers were arrested. My papers were good, so I was allowed to leave without incident, but Ma Liuming was put in jail for two months for his infamous penis-sucking lunch. The other remaining artists fled the village and relocated to other parts of Beijing. Soon after that, a newly built Fourth Ring Road cut through the area and the village was wiped from the map of Beijing. I kept all the footage I filmed during my Beijing years, but during the course of my Western nomadic wanderings, I lost the material from the East Village, just as I lost contact with those artist comrades and our time of expressive exuberance. What makes this all the more poignant is that the time of underground artists is now well and truly over in China. These days, artists are either state-sanctioned, in prison, or exiled in the West. We have lost our collective energy, lost our once strong underground identity.