On our wanderings around Beijing, Victoria and I would play a game to see who could find the sign with the most amusing English translation of the Chinese characters. Our game soon developed into a serious competition. We named it the Translation Olympics, and there were multiple different events. There was the VENDOR & RESTAURANT category, the winner of which was a laundry shop with CLEENING SERVICE FOR CLOVES written in English below the Chinese sign. The silver medal in that category went to the restaurant whose motto was SMART NOSHERY MAKES YOU SLOBBER, and promised that their food was “guaranteed not to cause pregnancy.” The small jiaozi (dumpling) store around the corner from the language school that advertised FRAGRANT AND HOT MARXISM lost out because of its lack of subtlety. Then there was the PROHIBITED ACTION category in which NO STRIDING narrowly lost out to DO DRUNKEN DRIVING. Honorable mentions in that category went to NO LOUDING, THE GRASS IS SMILING AT YOU—PLEASE DETOUR, and KEEP OFF THE LAKE.
My favorite was the HEALTH & SAFETY category. BE CAREFUL OF CAUTION took the gold over PLEASE SLIP CAREFULLY, and a sign that clearly meant to say CLEANING IN PROCESS but instead read EXECUTION IN PROCESS. In the INDIVIDUAL FREESTYLE—a category for translations that didn’t fit into the other categories—a fire extinguisher labeled HAND GRENADE stormed away with the gold medal. It strikes me now that many of the Chinese I encountered that year were just like these translations. They forged ahead and didn’t let their lack of understanding or grammar worry them. They didn’t wait for conditions to be perfect. They just kept pushing forward.
One of the first places in Beijing that Victoria took me was to her husband’s art studio. One Saturday morning, a couple weeks after I first arrived in Beijing, Victoria picked me up at the Zhangs’ and told me that she was taking me to a place called 798. As Driver Wu sped away from the Zhangs’, Victoria told me a little bit about where we were headed. She explained that about ten years ago a group of artists had taken over a number of abandoned military factories on the outskirts of the city and turned the spaces into studios. The area was now called Art Zone 798 or just Qi Jiu Ba (798) for short. The name came from Factory No. 798, one of the largest factory buildings in the complex.
Art Zone 798 turned out to be a collection of cinder-block buildings organized along a grid. We pulled in and parked, and Victoria called to a man smoking a cigarette in front of one of the buildings. I assumed he must be her husband. He was quite small and looked to be in his early forties. He wore paint-spattered gray work pants and a hooded sweatshirt. He waved to Victoria and threw his cigarette on the ground and walked toward us.
The man exchanged a few words with Victoria and then the two of them stopped talking and looked at me. Victoria laughed and slapped the man on the shoulder. She switched to English. “Well . . . say hello to Chase!” He spoke to me in Chinese, but I didn’t catch a word of what he said. “Ah!” Victoria said with mock severity. “Yong Yingwen! Use English! His Chinese is not that good yet.” She smiled at me. “But he is practicing—right, Chase?”
“Hello. My name is Z,” he said. “Very pleased to meet you.”
I extended my hand and shook his. “Z? Is that your real name?” I asked.
He laughed. “It is not the name my mother gave me, no. But it is the name I used for art.” He shrugged. “So yes, you can call me Z.”
“Your English is very good,” I said. “I’m impressed.”
“I spent ten years studying and living in New York.” He lit another cigarette. “Want to see my studio?”
As we followed Z, Victoria pointed to the cinder-block buildings. “This all used to be factories. To make guns.”
“When?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Victoria said. “Long time ago. Maybe more than forty years. Now it’s all artist studios here. And restaurants. All of them but they used to be factories for guns. That’s why it’s called Factory 798. All factories that make weapons for the army are given number seven.”
“Why number seven?”
Victoria looked at me quizzically and laughed. “I don’t know! That’s just the number they choose.”
We followed Victoria’s husband to the studio that he shared with three other artists. He walked over to where some futon mattresses surrounded a low table. He unplugged a kettle from the wall, refilled it, and plugged it back into the wall. While the water was getting hot, he walked around his studio with me. It was much larger than I had expected and had high ceilings with large skylights that filled the studio with sunlight. Z stopped in front of a large canvas with eight Wizard of Oz–sized munchkins dressed in military outfits standing in a row. Behind them was a large airplane parked on a runway. He stood waiting for my reaction. “Cool,” I said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
After our tour, we walked to the corner of the studio and sat on the mattresses and drank green tea. Victoria asked me what I thought of her husband’s paintings. Did I think Americans would like them? I could tell that Victoria was hoping I would buy one. I told her that I liked them, and the next time my father was in Beijing we should show them to him because he knew a lot more about art than I did. Victoria seemed satisfied with my response. She asked Z to show me other artists’ studios.
We walked to a second studio in a nearby building. The walls were covered with large canvases bearing images and slogans taken from old Communist propaganda but painted in a style that was more reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s. I assumed the artist was mocking the embrace of the Communist Party in China, but when I asked Z and Victoria if the artist really believed the slogans, they nodded and both said yes. Victoria said they would take me to the studio of the most successful artist in China, Zhang Xiao. She explained that one of his paintings had just sold for over $500,000 in an auction in Hong Kong. Zhang Xiao’s studio was at the end of a long row. As we were coming to the door, I suddenly heard the surreal sound of American accents echoing inside the gallery. I was hit by that sense of surprise you feel when you run into a close friend in a place you’re not expecting them to be and you have to double-check it’s them. It had been four or five days since I had seen another American and a week since I last spoke to my father and had heard American-accented English. Just as we walked in, I saw an American couple, accompanied by a scruffy-looking woman with peroxided blond hair, heading for the exit. The blond woman was an art guide of some sort. She spoke in loud nasal tones and punctuated her speech with wild arm movements. When she saw me, she stopped talking abruptly and all three of them gave me puzzled looks. I realized they were obviously very confused by what an American boy was doing wandering around the outskirts of Beijing with a Chinese couple. It struck me as a funny situation and I decided to mess with them. I nodded at them and with a straight face said, “Nimen hao,” in my best Beijing accent. They looked about as bewildered as I’ve ever seen anybody in my life and it took every ounce of effort to contain my laughter until they had made it through the door.
Zhang Xiao’s studio was twice as large as Z’s. On every wall were these massive portraits of ordinary Chinese people all painted in shades of pale grays and greens. The way they had been painted made them look almost like cartoon characters. Their heads bulged at the top and then narrowed to a point at the chin. They had huge, balloon eyes with enormous dark pupils and tiny mouths with thin, pursed lips. The faces were stoic, their lips closed and silent. But underneath that stoicism I could sense a terrible sadness that came through in their eyes. It made me feel as if all these people held stories that had never been told to anyone. Stories that were begging to be told, but would always remain suppressed. Many of the paintings were of incomplete families. A mother and a daughter, a solitary man, a father and a baby. I felt as if their sad, haunted gazes followed us around the darkened studio.
Z suggested that we all have lunch at the restaurant he had just opened. Victoria explained that Z and two other artists from his home province, Guizhou, had started it together. She explained that opening restaurants had become a popular thing for artists to do in China
. The restaurant provided them with food to eat, money to pay some bills, and a gallery space to exhibit their work.
The restaurant, which had the less-than-creative name The Three Guizhou Men, was about a two-minute walk from Z’s studio. The entrance was marked by a bright red sculpture that Z had made especially for the opening. It resembled a sort of totem pole composed of three comically squat men stacked vertically, their arms raised overhead, supporting the figure of a man above. A hostess wearing an elaborate headdress and costume that I suspected was traditional Guizhou formal dress greeted us outside and brought us to a table in the back. Almost immediately after we had been seated, dishes of steaming vegetables, rice, and meats started appearing. Z did what I had noticed a number of Chinese do: he took his napkin and tucked a corner of it under his plate and then used the end of it to wipe his mouth or his hands.
Z explained with great care that these dishes were the dishes his mother used to make. When our waitress brought us a plate of sliced peppers and beef, Z got very excited. He stabbed his chopsticks at the bowl. “This is my favorite. Try, try.”
Victoria laughed. “It’s not easy to find authentic Guizhou food here in Beijing.”
Z pointed to the ceiling where there were sets of characters painted in red on the arches. Victoria explained that the writings were old Maoist slogans and asked me if I could read them. Of the three, I could only translate one, 女人擎半天, as “Women hold up half the sky.” The other two Victoria translated as “We shall heal our wounds and we shall continue fighting until the end,” and “Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible.”
“I like those,” I said. “They’re nice. What are they from?”
“Mao Zedong,” Victoria said.
“Chairman Mao?”
“From his Red Book,” Victoria said.
“Oh,” I said, somewhat surprised. “Isn’t that weird to have his quotes on the wall? I would think that they’re not really that relevant anymore.”
“They’re Mao’s statements.”
“I know, but does everyone believe in them still?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Even now?”
“Yes,” Z cut in. “He make mistakes, but he is great man. Before him China had many problems. The Nationalist government was very corrupt. Many people were poor. Mao changed that and he rescued China from the Japanese dogs.”
He swore in Chinese and spat on the ground after he said “Japanese dogs.” It confused me to see such vehemence toward the Japanese paired with such positive feelings toward a man that had always been put in the same category as Hitler and Stalin in my history books. “But what about the Cultural Revolution?” I asked. “The Great Leap Forward? Didn’t a lot of people die?”
“It’s complicated.” Victoria nodded at her husband. “He was there, you know? For the Cultural Revolution. I am too young, but he is older. He was sent to the work camps.”
I wouldn’t have brought it up if I had known. Perhaps sensing my awkwardness, Victoria added, “It’s okay. You can ask him about it, he doesn’t mind.” I hesitated, but Victoria said, “If you want to know, you should ask him. He doesn’t mind talking about it. Most people do though.”
“What was it like?” I asked.
Z took a long breath. “My father was a teacher. That meant that things were very bad for us. He was the first one to commit suicide in our village. After that they sent me to the Dadu River State Farm. I was eleven. Seventeen when I can go home. It was hard, hard work.” Z’s face darkened and I saw that under his easygoing exterior a harder side existed. “The comrade in charge, Controller Qiu, he was a bastard.” Z reached over his shoulder and rubbed his back. “I still have scars.” He paused. “But I can’t remember his face. I only remember always being hungry. We ate anything we can find. Insects—zenme shuo—ah yes, worms, and when we can’t find those we ate the dirt, we ate the bark off trees, anything.” He paused. “This why I am so small. My head is too big for my body. I should have been much taller. Never enough food.”
Z paused and encouraged us to sample more dishes that had been placed on the table. It was all really good but there was so much of it that I was already full. Not wanting to be rude I took another spoonful of the peppers and spicy beef dish. Z picked up a small bowl of rice and ate hastily. He explained that he rose to become the farm’s youth deputy party secretary. “When I applied to be the youth party secretary, at the end of the application, I was required to write, ‘I will stay on the Dadu River State Farm for the rest of my life.’”
He bowed his head for a moment before looking up. “I could never bring myself to write that sentence. It seems crazy now—but back then, not knowing what the future would be, to write that would break all the hope I hid in my heart. I was not given the head position. I knew I should have said it. I was hungry, and I would have gotten more food as the head. But I just couldn’t.”
He reached across the table, picked up a dish, and offered it to me. “Please,” he said. “Delicious. Very spicy,” he added. “You like spicy?”
All the tables in the small restaurant were now filled. The conversations from other tables seemed to bounce hard against the cement walls and floor. I had to raise my voice to be heard.
“What happened?” I asked. I leaned forward to hear his answer.
“You mean how did I get back home?”
“Yes.”
“We were out in the fields and this boy, he was two years younger than me but was senior in the camp because his family were peasants, he said that we were going home. Just like that. No warning, no explanation. He said they didn’t tell him why or how, but this old flatbed truck arrived, and we climbed on it, and it stopped on the outskirts of Guiyang, and I walked home. After we left those fields, we never came back. I had been away from home for over four years. I remember I went to my house, and only my mother was there. She had been beaten in prison and could never work again. My sister had been sent out to the country a few months after I had left. She was two years younger than me.” He laid his chopsticks down on the table. “Ruo never came back. My mother never got over that. Even to this day she still likes to think that Ruo will come back. That she is alive and will return. I have to believe that she got sick and died. There was so little food and no medicine.”
Our waitress came with a platter bearing barbecued meat piled high in a mound with diced chilies and peppers. Victoria pointed a chopstick at it. “This one is too spicy for him,” she said to Z.
Z waved his hand in front of him. “Let him try, it’s fine.”
“Thank you. I’m okay though,” I said. “I’m quite full.”
“Chi bao le,” Victoria said. “That’s how you say I’m full. Chi bao le.”
I mouthed the words silently, thinking about all that Z had told me. A question struck me. “So when did you learn to paint?”
“After I got home. First I just started to draw. I drew the things I couldn’t forget. Controller Qiu beating that old woman. Peng’er falling down in the fields that day, and never getting up. The Red Guard leading my father through the streets with a rope around his neck. Mocking him. Throwing things at him.” He paused for a moment to pull his emotions back around him, and I saw his eyes were misted. “The drawing helped me find happiness again. It was a way to tell the story of things I never thought I could talk about. I think it helped other people, too. So I kept drawing and got better and better, and then I taught myself how to paint. Art felt safe.”
“So what do people think of Mao now?”
Victoria answered for her husband. “We see good and bad. Some bad things happened, but they see that Chairman Mao loved China, he wanted to free China from foreigners. He wanted to help the people.”
“But it seems like nobody wants to talk about the bad things he did. Only the good things,” I said.
“It is not so simple,” Victoria said. “He was a great leader, and he did what was best for China.”
“I just don’t get why
you defend him like that. Surely your parents must have suffered, too.”
Victoria pursed her lips and said nothing.
“Why won’t you talk about it?”
“Chase, you are not so smart.”
“What do you mean?”
“No talking tells you how hard it was. Maybe for some people it is too hard, too difficult to talk about.”
“How so?”
“It’s like a scar that is left dry and solid,” Victoria said. “Don’t touch. If you touch it, it bleeds. Better to leave it alone so slowly, slowly, slowly the scar heals around the edges and gets smaller and smaller. Takes a lifetime to heal, maybe even three lifetimes.”
I looked at her to see if she believed what she was saying. There was no joy in her eyes. I saw the same sadness I had seen in my father’s eyes after Tom had died, and I realized that what she had said was true. My father and I had never talked about what happened to Tom. The three of us sat there in silence for a few moments.
After that afternoon, I learned not to ask direct questions. I learned to let the answers reveal themselves. In the United States, most people are only too pleased to talk about themselves. But not in China. I did not know whether it was an innate or learned reaction, a national characteristic, or a form of survival. The Chinese that I came across were happy to listen, but most of them did not want to talk.
十三
The year I was in China was the year that the world seemed to wake up to its importance. There were plenty of Westerners running around looking for opportunities that were, almost without exception, vague and ill-defined. They even showed up at the training grounds of the national Beijing teams. Every two or three weeks, a coach from a tennis academy in Spain or Germany or Australia or the United States would appear. The head of the academy would train with us for an afternoon and show us new drills and hand out T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of his academy. And then he would disappear. Once at the beginning of practice when we were sitting together waiting for Madame Jiang to finish speaking with the visiting professional, Random said to me, “Watch, everyone is going to practice very hard. They hope for a scholarship to his academy. But we are too old. They are looking for younger kids.”
Beautiful Country Page 8