The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

  “They showed she’d been looking at Mondrian,” June said. “She copied.”

  “They weren’t exact copies,” I said. “And anyway, copying is one way to learn. Just like with languages.”

  June made a skeptical noise, but she returned to the desk and sat down next to me. She leaned on her arms, allowing her elbow just slightly to touch mine. I was better prepared than I’d been the other night for the feeling her skin gave me; if June noticed, she pretended not to, staring dutifully down at chapter 3. Flipping forward, I had noticed with apprehension that the subject of chapter 17 was “Dating.” Luckily, we were moving extremely slowly.

  “Listen and repeat,” I said, moving my arm away from hers. “Jintian shi Xiao Lin de shengri.”

  “Jin-tian-shi—”

  “Xiao Lin,” I prompted.

  “Show leen.”

  “Xiao Lin de sheng ri.”

  “Show leen de sheng ri.” June looked up: “But I bet Emily didn’t destroy those paintings.”

  “Focus on the lesson,” I said.

  June gave me an innocent smile. “How do you say ‘fish’ in Chinese?”

  54.

  CECE HAD INFORMED THE PRINCIPAL ABOUT MY SHOW, AND MS. MCCOY had obtained her own stack of printed announcements from UCLA. She had posted these on bulletin boards throughout the school, so that by Monday everyone knew where and when my work would be displayed.

  “We’re all coming to your show on Friday, Mr. Jow,” Holly said that afternoon. “We can’t wait to see your paintings!”

  “You should only come if you’ve finished your homework,” I said. “Please don’t make your parents go out of their way.”

  Emily raised her hand, but didn’t wait for me to call on her. “We have a show too, Mr. Yuan. Our dance concert is December 11. Will you come?”

  “Of course,” I said. “That’s the same day your Sesqui—” I stopped; for what ever reason, I never succeeded in saying this English word. “—your projects for Mrs. Diller are due.”

  “Sesquicenterpieces,” June supplied. I was surprised to hear her take an interest in the sesquicentennial contest, which I would’ve expected her to scorn. I was sure that the other girls had ignored it, and in this case I couldn’t say that I blamed them.

  Still, I felt an obligation to produce some entries. “That’s right,” I said. “Vice Principal Diller asked me to remind you.”

  June returned her attention to her net, which seemed to be going through a repetitive cycle. One day it would be small, covering her lap like an old lady’s crocheting. A few days later it would be a skirt, and after a week it would be hanging all around her stool, gossamer puddles on the dirty linoleum. I thought she was doing the same project again and again, until one day after school I saw her knotting two pieces together: in fact it was a very large net she was making, one small section at a time.

  I had seen artists who became involved in this kind of mind-numbing mechanical labor as a way of postponing their real work. If June really needed an enormous net, she might have bought one in any hardware store. Emily seemed to agree with me, because she suddenly turned and addressed June directly:

  “Is that what that is?”

  “What?”

  “Your Sesquicenterpiece. Are you making a big net for Mrs. Diller?” There was giggling at this admittedly appealing thought.

  “No,” June said.

  “I’m sure you’ll win, if you are.” The girls covered their mouths, emphasizing rather than hiding their amusement. I had the urge to intercede, but something stopped me. Ever since I’d seen the shadow of Violante in Catherine’s portrait, I couldn’t help seeing it on Emily’s face as well. The analogy wasn’t comforting.

  “I’m not.”

  “Well then, what is that?”

  “It’s a net.”

  “Uh-huh,” Emily said. “But what’s it for?”

  I was accustomed to thinking of June as something special, a kind of genius, and I couldn’t believe that these girls had the power to disturb her. I was therefore surprised to see her edging off the stool, one toe on the floor, allowing her net to fall from her lap and a whole row of knots to slip loose, a half hour’s labor. She blushed in cartoonish spots, like a Roy Lichtenstein; if she could have escaped from the studio at that moment, I believe she gladly would’ve abandoned all of her work behind her.

  What I did next, I did to help her—which illustrates how little I had learned from my fellowship in Los Angeles.

  “It’s for the birds,” I said. I did not mean to speak idiomatically, but the moment the words were out, my English ear heard them that way. I didn’t really think that June was making the net for her aviary: I believed she was doing it because she had to, even if she wasn’t sure what she would eventually use it for. I didn’t think that “for” was particularly important to June.

  “For her aviary,” I corrected myself. “June keeps birds.”

  This time I didn’t understand the giggling. Ornithology seemed a perfectly innocuous hobby, even an admirable one. It had occurred to me that I would never have had the patience for the daily monitoring, feeding, and sweeping of shit that the aviary required; I’d always preferred photographs and Audubon’s renderings to the messy, frenetic creatures themselves.

  “Her aviary,” someone said. “Can June do birdcalls?”

  And, “June, can we come over and see your zoo?”

  If Mrs. Diller had entered the art studio at that moment, she would’ve found unacceptable chaos. Of all the girls, only Emily remained calm, raising her hand and looking seriously in my direction.

  “Emily?” I called, hoping the class would quiet down out of respect. And sure enough, Emily waited until she had their attention:

  “How do you know?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “About the aviary. Have you seen it?”

  I must’ve hesitated too long. I watched this error register on Emily’s sharp features, and a second later, on the cluster of faces around her. The idea that one of their classmates had been socializing with a teacher after school, particularly a male teacher, was too suggestive to ignore. Even if my visit with June had been completely innocent, the other students wouldn’t have seen it that way.

  “June’s grandmother is an old friend of mine, from China,” I said quickly. “I saw June’s aviary once while I was visiting her.” But the bell was ringing, and no one was listening. I hoped that the girls would forget the little scene, the way they seemed to forget what they had been doing at the end of every class period, as if each bell erased the previous hour and allowed them to begin again from scratch.

  Of course that had never been true of June, who hurried out of the classroom, for the first time leaving her net in a heap on the floor. I had to restrain myself, waiting for the chattering pack of girls to leave the room, before bending down to smooth and fold it up.

  55.

  I WAITED UNTIL THERE WERE ONLY A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE ART SHOW to begin worrying in earnest. (That is typical of me.) I hadn’t heard from Harry Lin since his letter in early September, and all that time I’d been hoping that something would happen to get in the way of the show. Maybe the professor would decide that ten-year-old work was too stale for an American audience after all, or perhaps he had discovered an exciting new painter in the months since my arrival, who would preempt me. Even when I saw the fancy announcements, I still didn’t believe I was going to be honored. Perhaps the professor could simply exhibit DNA-ture without me? He would apologize to the audience, and explain that the artist had been forced to return to China (leaving them free to imagine some vague and ominous political persecution), or he might describe the decision as my own choice, a personal passion to “Keep Chinese Art in China.”

  As November 22 approached, and Harry didn’t call, however, I became more and more anxious. I will not bore you by recounting my dreams during this period, except to say that many of them took place in cavernous white galleries, where a tall, thin Chinese man perform
ed introduction after introduction: May I introduce the world-famous artist, Little Fatty! I give you, ladies and gentlemen, the Lobster Hermit! The night before my show, waking up from a particularly unsettling version of this dream—in which Harry Lin, disguised as a PLA soldier, turned from the podium to embrace June Wang—I could not fall back to sleep. After lying there for more than an hour, I turned on the light and dialed the familiar number.

  “I can’t do it,” I said, when he answered.

  “Do what?” X asked.

  It was three in the morning, L.A. time, three in the afternoon in Beijing. Fourteen hours later, Yuan Zhao: DNA-ture would open at the Fowler Museum of Art. I would be the guest of honor, and my cousin would be asleep.

  “I can’t do the show.”

  “The what? You’re breaking up.”

  “The show.”

  “What time is it there?” X said. “You sound tired.”

  “I’m wide awake,” I told him. “There are going to be dozens of people there—maybe a hundred.”

  “I hope at least a hundred,” X joked. “Otherwise, what’ve you been doing over there?”

  “My hosts will be there,” I said. “Also my students.” There was one student I thought of in particular, but after the incident in class the other day, I wasn’t expecting her. I wished that were more of a consolation.

  “It will be inspiring for them,” X said gravely.

  “It will be humiliating,” I said. “They’re expecting someone else—an artist.”

  “You have no confidence,” X said. “How can you be an artist without confidence?”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  “You’ve been painting, haven’t you?”

  “Not anything Harry Lin would be interested in,” I said. A part of me wanted to tell X about Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao in the Tiantai Mountains: how I could lose myself in the roots of a tree, or an outcropping of mossy rock. But I restrained myself. My cousin would want to know why I cared to spend months copying when I could be making something new. It was the same question June Wang had asked, and I’d had only the most pedagogical of answers. Perhaps the truth was that copying was what the talentless did. It was up to the real artists to make new things.

  “I’m not sure how much longer I can do this,” I told my cousin.

  “I’m having trouble hearing you,” X said.

  “I’m thinking of disappearing into the mountains,” I told him. Longxia Shanren, I thought, the Lobster Hermit—going back into his shell.

  “Don’t go anywhere before tomorrow night,” X warned. “Everyone’s expecting you.”

  I hung up the phone. I could feel rather than hear a beat coming from Max’s headphones in the next room. I was listening to that sound, the house’s pulse, when something occurred to me. It wasn’t a new or particularly original idea; in fact it was a version of the same thought I’d been having since I sat on the fountain outside Beijing Normal so many years ago, and watched people streaming past the gates. The difference was that now I was prepared to act. People’s expectations didn’t matter. First thing tomorrow morning I would go to UCLA and find the professor. If Harry Lin wasn’t going to call off the show, I would do it myself.

  Why did I suddenly feel confident enough to betray my hosts, not to mention my illustrious academic sponsor, Harry Lin? I wasn’t sure, but as my mind finally decelerated into sleep, I seemed to see a kind of billboard, hovering over the intersection between wakefulness and dreams. Although I couldn’t remember the words of its message the next morning, I retained an image: my two travelers, Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao, ascending a mountain, accompanied by a young female companion who bore a striking resemblance to my student, June Wang.

  56.

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE GALLERY ON THE MORNING OF MY SHOW, SOME students were busy painting the walls. One of them was standing on a ladder, stenciling large letters in a deep vermilion: “Yuan Zhao: DNA-ture.” For a moment, I stood in the hushed interior, watching him work, savoring the experience of walking into the preparations for my own show. The feeling was so intense that it took me a moment to notice another person, a man sitting with his back to me in a glass-enclosed office at the back of the gallery.

  The student on the ladder paused and looked down: “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Professor Lin,” I told him.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No,” I said, glancing toward the office. This was it: the professor had heard us talking and was getting up. “I don’t have an appointment. I’m—”

  But at that moment the glass door opened, and I saw I had made a mistake. The one thing I remembered from my brief conversation with Professor Lin years ago in Beijing was his height; by contrast, the man coming toward me was short, handsome, and solidly muscled. He was much younger than the professor, and was wearing a blazer over a T-shirt and jeans, with a university ID on a cord around his neck.

  “Mr. Yuan? I thought that might be you!” He continued formally, in Chinese: “I am Martin Lu. I’m pleased and honored to meet you. I will serve as your interpreter to night.”

  “My interpreter?”

  “I am extremely sorry that Professor Lin is not here now. He is sick in his—” Martin struggled, and resorted to an English word: “Sciatic. I’m sure he will be sorry to have missed you, but he wants to be very healthy for your opening.”

  “Never mind,” I said. The two students working on the stencils were watching me while pretending to keep busy—as if I were some kind of celebrity. I felt defeated. I’d been steeling myself for the meeting, which would be difficult, but would at least remove the primary difficulty of DNA-ture. Now I was back where I started: how could I cancel the show if the professor wasn’t even here?

  “I apologize for my putonghua,” Martin continued. “I understand better than I speak.”

  “You speak very well,” I said. “Although I suspect you might find better uses for your time. I would be perfectly comfortable speaking English at the reception.” That is, I thought, if the reception were going to take place at all.

  Martin stared at me. “That’s incredible,” he said, switching to English. “Don’t tell me you’ve picked that up in the last couple months?”

  “You know what they say: you have to immerse yourself.”

  “Wait until I tell Harry. I’m sorry he’s not here, but selfishly I’m glad to get a minute with you before the show. I have to tell you—I love your work.” Martin suddenly looked shy. “Actually my dissertation is about the East Village, your performances in particular.”

  “My performances?”

  “My favorites are Something That Is Not Art and Drip-Drop. I wanted to ask about the Ping-Pong table, whether that was part of the project from its initial conception, or something you came up with later…?”

  “It came from the hospital where a friend of ours was working,” I said. “We got it at the last minute.”

  “From a hospital,” Martin repeated, as if I’d just confided the identity of the Mona Lisa. “That’s terrific. Harry absolutely forbade me from getting in touch with you before the show, but I’ve been dying to talk with you. Maybe next week sometime, if you could spare a half hour?”

  “Next week would be fine.”

  “Great!” Martin was staring at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable, as if he knew more about me than I knew myself. I imagine that’s something celebrities have to contend with all the time: their fans have an unshakable impression of them before they’ve even met them. Even if the reality doesn’t conform to those expectations, a true devotee won’t be disappointed by the discrepancies. He simply won’t see them.

  “I love DNA-ture,” Martin continued. “But I have to admit, I wish we were showing the performance work instead.”

  I should have been concentrating on how to find Harry Lin, but I enjoyed talking with Martin Lu, who reminded me of myself as a university student. I don’t mean in his dress or mannerisms, which were completely American, but in the
way he sounded when he asked about Drip-Drop. It seemed to mean something personal and concrete to him. I was curious to know more about what Martin thought of the East Village artists, especially of my cousin X.

  “How could we have shown my performance work?” I asked him.

  “We could’ve shown the photos?” His tentativeness suggested that he was aware of the controversy surrounding Tianming’s photos of the East Village.

  “Where did you see those photographs?” I asked him.

  “Oh—I’ve practically been living with them for the last year. I’m Harry’s research assistant for Tianming’s East Village.”

  “Tianming’s East Village?”

  “For the book. We’ve gone through so many arrangements with the plates, but finally we decided that a chronological—” Martin saw my expression and stopped.

  “Harry is working with Zhang Tianming on a book about the East Village?”

  Martin blanched. “Oh—I…”

  “Is it called Tianming’s East Village?”

  Martin sounded desperate. “Mr. Yuan—I’m so sorry. I had no idea you didn’t know about Harry’s book, or I wouldn’t’ve said anything. I know he meant to tell you himself, but maybe he was waiting until after the show, so that you…” Martin’s voice trailed off, and he looked as if he were becoming increasingly frightened of what he had done.

  I thought of the first time I had met the photographer, that cold November afternoon on my way to Something That Is Not Art. Tianming had seemed to appear out of nowhere, from the cold fog of the village, to send me on the right path. There had been no stream to cross, no peach tree, and no stone arch, but when I followed the photographer’s directions I had indeed found myself in another world.

  “The book is just one perspective,” Martin continued anxiously. “Your performances are another. And even these paintings—”