The Dissident

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

I was not meant to be a dissident. I was not supposed to live outside of China. I never intended to be a guest, for an entire year, in the home of strangers, dependent on their charity and kindness. Who would have imagined, watching me grow up in Harbin--sitting quietly with my father in our old apartment behind the Russian church, or clutching my mother's hand as she haggled good-naturedly with Old Yang over the price of scallions--that I would wind up in Los Angeles, living in the guest room of people who could not find the province of Heilongjiang on a simple English map?

I am tempted to say it was an accident. Certainly I would not have gotten involved in politics, or in the artistic community of the Beijing East Village, had it not been for my cousin, also an artist--I will call him X. (Because of his continuing activity in China, I am forced to conceal his identity here.) But it also began with my mother, who always hoped I would become a famous artist and go abroad, and with my father, who sent me to have drawing lessons with his old friend, the painter Wang Laoshi. Quite possibly it began with Wang Laoshi, who saw my early efforts, and encouraged me to pursue absolutely any other profession.

But I hesitate to putresponsibility on others. In the end it's my fault that I am so easily persuaded. I have always been impressionable, skilled at mimicry. I am, as my teacher admitted, a brilliant copyist. On paper, I could reproduce Audubon's and Bada Shanren's birds; I could make my mother laugh by imitating the gestures and mannerisms of people we knew (for example, my father's postprandial expression of despair); even the pronunciation of foreign words was not difficult for me. In school, English was my best subject, not only because of this talent for imitation but because of my mother, who had been born in Seattle, Washington, and much later became a teacher of Business English at the Harbin University of Science and Technology.

My mother went to China for the first time in 1953, three days after her twelfth birthday, when her parents decided to return to their motherland and do their part for the glorious new People's Republic. My grandfather, an electrical engineer with the Boeing company, had been deeply honored by a personal invitation from Zhou Enlai. As it turned out, however, my grandfather's timing wasn't good. A little more than a decade later, my grandmother and my mother were sent to separate "cadres' schools" to be reeducated, while my grandfather eventually went to a much harsher place--a work camp in the Great Northern Wilderness--where he died, six years before I was born.

When I told this story--as if it had happened to distant relatives rather than to my immediate family--my American hosts were horrified. I think they were also a little thrilled by the tragic irony: it was as if, Cece Travers said, my relatives had been American Jews, returning unknowingly to Germany in 1939. I couldn't explain to the Traverses that a Chinese person did not think of the 1960s and '70s in this way: that those years represented a perversion of our own ideals, some of which we still cherished, rather than an atrocity visited on us from outside. The fact that my relatives had been in a work camp was enough for Cece. "Perhaps they aren't telling you everything," she said, in a way that made it clear she thought I was being callous about the sufferings I described.

In fact the opposite was true. I had my reasons for concealing my background from the Traverses, but I have never been comfortable telling the story of things that happened before I was born. I always feel that I'm making things up. In Los Angeles, I found out how much easier it was to tell my own history as if it belonged to someone else: at the end of my account, I was surprised (and a little proud) to find tears in the eyes of my American audience.

After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 (and incidentally my birth, in 1975) my mother became an English teacher, if a reluctant one. Her former passion for literature, in particular the Romantic poets, was not relevant to the business English courses she was assigned, and she never returned to the original poems and translations she'd begun as a university student in the early 1960s. Her talents as a teacher were thus primarily focused on me, so that by the time I was in high school, I already spoke English more fluently than my classmates and even my teachers. My mother and I used to laugh at the book I used in school, Idiomatic English, which purported to teach us how to speak like real Americans. The book was full of dialogues between John, Mary, and (inexplicably) someone named "Batty," of which the following is an approximate but unexaggerated example:

John: I am thinking to get a gift for our friend Batty. Monday is her birthday. A necklace or a bracelet would truly fit the bill.

Mary: No one knocks on the gift horse's mouth. But you had better not have a chat with Batty before the big day. That is to say, you are a chatterbox. You will certainly let the cat out of the bag.

John: Mary, you are a strict taskmaster! Why do you say that I am a bean-spiller? I am as silent as the mouse, and also the grave.

Mary: Because right now, John, you are talking my ears off!

When I finally met my cousin X in Beijing, I found him studying from this same textbook, practicing John, Mary, and Batty's lines quite seriously. This was midway through my first year at Beijing Normal, when my cousin still imagined he might go abroad and study. He had come to . . .

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger Copyright © 2006 by Nell Freudenberger. Excerpted by permission.
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