Oracle Bones (57 page)

I had decided not to visit her because it was best to minimize my contact during this period. A foreign journalist in Xinjiang was too conspicuous; handing over the cash was enough of a risk. I asked the man about the political climate.

“Let’s walk around the park,” he said. “It’s better if we don’t sit here too long.”

HE TOLD ME
that Polat’s family hadn’t had any problems, although they had been questioned when he didn’t return to China. The family had friends in the Urumqi police force, which helped. In any case, the authorities now seemed concerned with bigger issues. Polat’s friend had heard about a Uighur being imprisoned in Kashgar because the government believed that the man’s sons had trained with Al Qaeda. I asked if there were many Uighurs who had joined the Taliban.

“Not many,” he said. “But there are some. Anyway, it’s a good excuse for the government.”

We returned to the park entrance. I asked if he had appeared in any movies lately.

“No,” he said, laughing. “It’s bad money anyway. I hope to do some export trade in Dubai next year. What’s the movie you’re writing about?”

I was in Xinjiang to research a story about Jiang Wen, one of China’s most famous actors, who was appearing in a Chinese Western.

“Where are they filming it?”

“In the countryside outside of Shanshan,” I said. “In the desert. It’s supposed to be good scenery.”

I asked the man what he thought of Jiang Wen.

“He’s better than most Chinese actors,” he said. “But I won’t watch any movie they film out here. I’m sure it will be nonsense.”

We shook hands and the man apologized for not being able to invite me to his home. After leaving the park, I switched on my cell phone. The following morning I hired a cab and drove for five hours. We skirted the north rim of the Tarim Basin, watching the scenery grow increasingly desolate until at last we reached the edge of the Flaming Mountains.

DURING MY SECOND
day on the movie set, on the fifth take of the last scene, just as the late-afternoon sun was turning desert orange, an actor rode his horse straight into a wooden beam. The object was part of an entrance gate, and the set designer had made a critical mistake: for a man on horseback, the beam was exactly neck-high. The rider tried to get his hands up at the last moment. He was one of six actors who were riding abreast and moving fast; in the movie they played renegade Tang dynasty soldiers who, in hopes of protecting a Buddhist relic, were attempting to escape an oasis called Big Horse Camp. The Tang had ruled from
A
.
D
. 618
A
.
D
. 907, and that was the period that witnessed the flourishing of Buddhism in China. The Tang also produced some great poetry. The actor hit the ground hard and didn’t move. There was a lot of dust, and the air was growing cool; the sun hung low and sharp above the Gobi Desert. You couldn’t have asked for better light.

The scenery was perfect, too. The Flaming Mountains were treeless, scarred by ridges and gullies, and the dry flanks changed color—brown to red to gray—with the day’s dying light. A trace of snow ran white across the highest peaks. Down below, past the entrance gate, lay the graveled expanse of the Gobi. The desert stretched flat into the horizon, broken every now and then by a pale patch of alkali. The emptiness of this landscape had always been good for films. During the 1950s and ’60s, when the nation was closed to much of the outside world, Chinese filmmakers sometimes went to Xinjiang and other western regions when they wanted to depart from the norm. They made substitutes for foreign movies: domestic exotica.

Now the movie crews had returned to western China, but this time they hoped to export the scenery. A year earlier,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
had been hugely successful in the United States, earning over 120 million dollars at the box office. Some of the most striking scenes had been shot in the desert, and now it seemed like everybody in the industry was back in the west. Miramax had invested in an action movie called
The Touch
, which was currently being filmed in Gansu. The director Zhang Yimou was shooting another foreign-funded martial arts film called
Hero
, which was set partly in Gansu and Inner Mongolia.

Here at the edge of the Flaming Mountains, Columbia Pictures was making
Warriors of Heaven and Earth
, which was billed as a Chinese Western. They had a big budget, by Chinese standards—six million dollars—and the cast was excellent. Zhao Wei, one of China’s most popular actresses, played the female lead. Kiichi Nakai, a Japanese star, had been imported to play a villain. But the big news was that Jiang Wen was working again. A year and a half earlier, he had won the Grand Prix at Cannes for
Devils on the Doorstep
, a war movie
that he had directed. The Chinese government had banned the film, accusing Jiang Wen of disrespecting the nation’s history, and since then he hadn’t been allowed to act or direct in a big-budget production. The Western was an attempt at a political comeback—an action film set in a remote time period that wouldn’t threaten the Communist Party.

The movie’s subject was safe, but the horses were another issue. Earlier on the day of the escape scene, the Japanese actor had been injured while riding. A couple of weeks before that, a Chinese actor named Li Bukong had dislocated his shoulder after being thrown by a horse. Wang Xueqi, another actor, had taken a bad spill and cracked some ribs. Wang played a Turkic bandit leader—he wore hair extensions and blue contact lenses. One stuntman was still in a hospital near the Kazakhstan border. A crew member in charge of food services had broken his ankle. Even the production coordinator had been thrown by a horse. Jiang Wen, who was thirty-eight years old, had injured his knees and back during sword fighting scenes, but thus far he was one of the few actors who hadn’t fallen off his horse.

His wife, Chenivesse Sandrine, had recently arrived on the set, along with their young daughter. Chenivesse was a tall, strikingly beautiful French woman who held a doctorate in religious anthropology from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. I was standing next to her when they filmed the escape scene. We communicated in Chinese: I spoke no French; she didn’t feel comfortable using English. Between takes, I asked about the French reaction to Jiang’s Grand Prix, and she smiled with the memory. “After Cannes, we went on vacation to the south of France,” she said. “Everywhere we went, people recognized us. They’d say, oh, we saw you on television. Congratulations! If we went to a Paris café, people stopped drinking coffee and asked for autographs.”

That was the scene: the brilliant light, the endless Gobi, the blonde woman speaking Chinese with a French accent. The director called for the fifth take; everybody became silent. A soft breeze blew. The nearest town was an hour’s drive across the desert. There wasn’t a doctor on the set. The actor rode straight at the beam.

CREW MEMBERS SPRINTED
over to where the man lay in the dust. Somebody shouted that it was Harrison Liu, who played a soldier in Jiang Wen’s renegade band. The fallen actor tried to stand but then fell back in the dust. He was holding his neck.

Jiang Wen swung his horse around hard and skidded to a stop, dismounting quickly. His face was black with anger—all day, the frustration had been building, because of all the accidents and delays. The son of a People’s Libera
tion Army officer, Jiang was a large, barrel-chested man with a scraggly beard. The Chinese often said that he looked like a
liumang
, a “thug”: short-cropped hair, bulging eyes, hard chin. His shoulders were broad. He smoked constantly. He had a deep and resonant voice—every word sounded like it started low in the gut and then rose through years of old cigarette smoke. But despite the
liumang
façade, he was well educated in film: a graduate of Beijing’s Central Drama Academy. In addition to his acting, he had directed two critically acclaimed movies.

Jiang Wen helped Harrison to his feet—at first, the man didn’t seem to be badly hurt. The two of them joined the other actors, who had gathered around He Ping, the director. They watched the playback monitor, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It was growing cold; there wasn’t much daylight left. In front of the monitor, a horse sidled over and pissed triumphantly. A crew member in a PLA greatcoat began sawing off the treacherous wooden beam. Harrison was still rubbing his neck.

“We’ll have to shoot that scene over again,” He Ping said.

“My neck hurts,” Harrison said.

“You were riding too fast,” one of the other actors said.

“
You
were riding too fast,” Harrison shot back.

Jiang Wen stalked away from the monitor. He wore a helmet, gauntlets, and knee-high riding boots. His leather shoulder guards were studded with strips of armor. He clutched a whip in one hand. His face looked like he was about to explode. He turned to his personal assistant and barked, “Give me a cigarette!”

The man pulled out a package. The brand name was Snow Lotus and on the front there was a picture of a pretty white flower. “
Wo cao,
” Jiang said. “Fuck me. What kind of cigarette is that?”

“It’s the local brand.”

Jiang Wen stared at the cigarettes and finally grabbed one. He spun on his heel and walked off, muttering to himself. He lit the Snow Lotus and jammed it into his mouth. He sucked in hard.

LIKE ANY GREAT
actor, Jiang Wen had a knack for occupying roles that captured the mood of a nation. During the first blossoming of Reform and Opening cinema, filmmakers celebrated the countryside of the loess plateau—the traditional heart of Chinese culture, the home to cities such as Anyang and the scarred landscapes of the Yellow River. In 1988, Jiang Wen starred in
Red Sorghum
, which was directed by Zhang Yimou and also starred Gong Li, who would eventually become China’s most internationally famous actress. In the
film, the woman’s character rejects the advances of a peasant played by Jiang Wen. Stubbornly, the man returns to the woman’s liquor distillery, where she and her employees stand in awkward silence. Jiang Wen stares at them defiantly, with a sense of violence in his posture. Finally, he turns and pisses into the bottles of fermenting alcohol, one by one. Then he picks up Gong Li, hoists her onto his hip, and marches off to the bedroom. Throughout the scene he hardly says a word. The alcohol turns out to be the best the distillery has ever produced. Gong Li’s character bears a son.
Red Sorghum
became immensely popular with Chinese audiences, as well as a great success at international film festivals.

Within five years, the fascination with the loess plateau had faded. In the early 1990s, in the wake of the crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations, a wave of anti-foreign nationalism settled onto the Chinese intellectual climate. In 1993, a television series called
Beijingers in New York
tracked a group of immigrants whose stereotypically Chinese character—cultured, moral, upright—was challenged by the stereotypically empty materialism of the United States. Jiang Wen played a transplanted artist who struggles to adapt to his new world. At one point, he hires a white prostitute, throws dollar bills at the woman, and orders her to say, in English, over and over: “I love you, I love you, I love you!”
Beijingers in New York
became immensely popular with Chinese viewers.

Those were only two of Jiang Wen’s best-known characters, and neither of them trapped the actor. That often happened in Reform and Opening—China changed so quickly that many artists had their moment and then slipped out of touch. But Jiang Wen remained popular, and he played roles from the full range of Chinese history. Over the years, he played Qin Shihuang, the ruler who first unified the Chinese empire, and he played Puyi, the impotent last emperor who watched the Qing dynasty fall apart. Jiang Wen played an imperial eunuch; he played peasants and policemen; he played petty crooks and small-time businessmen. He captured something fundamental about the psyche of the modern Chinese male: his aspirations and fears, his dreams and insecurities.

In 1994, Jiang Wen directed his first feature film,
In the Heat of the Sun
. Based on a short story by the well-known writer Wang Shuo, the film was set in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. Often, historical movies are strongly narrative—characters’ lives intertwined with important events—but
In the Heat of the Sun
is driven by imagery. The movie’s first “script” consisted of pictures that Jiang Wen had sketched into a notebook: a teenaged boy peering at a group of dancing girls. In the film, the boy is often observing—he gazes through a telescope; he stares out from under a girl’s bed; he snoops through
his parents’ belongings. The sweeping political campaigns disappear, and the standard Cultural Revolution mood—suffering, sadness—is replaced by adolescent yearning and sexual awakening. The boy, along with his friends, is basically unsupervised; their parents are distracted by political events. The film became an enormous success, especially among young people who had come of age during the 1980s.

Like many movies, it contained allusions to other films, but they all belonged to the Communist world. The teenaged characters reenact scenes from Soviet propaganda films such as
Lenin in
1918. Hollywood seems far away, as it did to Jiang Wen when he was growing up. In the 1970s, he lived in remote Guizhou province, where his father was stationed with the PLA. Theirs was a railroad town: trains from Beijing passed through on their way to the southwest. Movies provided the only glimpse of the outside world.

“We lived in a big building that was like an old barn,” Jiang Wen told me once. “Right out in front was the town square, where they showed movies at night, twice a week. They showed them outdoors. I could see them from my bed, looking out the window. They fascinated me, because they came from so far away—places like Albania, Romania. I still remember
The White-Haired Girl
—that was a beautiful movie. Before that movie, I’d never seen ballet before. And the first time I ever saw Latin letters was in a movie. They were the letters
U S
on the helmets of American soldiers.