Year of the Tiger (2 page)

Seeing how this is Mati Village, most of the customers are artists, though you also get a few farmers and some of the local business-owners, like the couple who run the gas station. But mostly it’s people like ‘Sloppy’ Song. Sloppy is a tall woman who looks like she’s constructed out of wires, with thick black hair that trails down her back in a braid with plaits the size of king snakes. Who knows why she’s called ‘Sloppy’? Sometimes Chinese people pick the weirdest English names for themselves. I met this one guy who went by ‘Motor.’ It said something about his essential nature, he told me.

Sloppy’s here tonight, sitting at a table, slurping the juice out of her dumpling and waving her Zhonghua cigarette at the woman sitting across from her. I don’t know this woman. She looks a little rich for this place – sleek hair and makeup, nice clothes. Must be a collector. Sloppy does assemblage sculpture and collage pieces, and they sell pretty well, even with the economy sucking as much as it does.

‘Yili,
ni hao
,’ Sloppy calls out, seeing me enter. ‘You eating here?’

‘No, just looking for Lao Zhang.’

‘Haven’t seen him. This is Lucy Wu.’

‘
Ni hao
, pleased to meet you,’ I say, trying to be polite.

Lucy Wu regards me coolly. She’s one of these Prada babes – all done up in designer gear, perfectly polished.

‘Likewise,’ she says. ‘You speak Chinese?’

I shrug. ‘A little.’

This is halfway between a lie and the truth. After two years, I’m not exactly fluent, but I get around. ‘You speak Mandarin like some Beijing street kid,’ Lao Zhang told me once, maybe because I’ve got that Beijing accent, where you stick Rs on the end of everything like a pirate.

‘Your Chinese sounds very nice,’ she says with that smug, phony courtesy.

She has a southern accent; her consonants are soft, slightly sibilant. Dainty, almost.

‘You’re too polite.’

‘Lucy speaks good English,’ Sloppy informs me. ‘Not like me.’

‘Now
you’re
too polite,’ says Lucy Wu. ‘My English is very poor.’

I kind of doubt that.

‘Are you an art collector?’ I ask in English.

‘Art dealer.’ She smiles mischievously. ‘Collecting is for wealthier people than I.’

Her English is excellent.

‘She has Shanghai gallery,’ Sloppy adds.

‘Wow, cool,’ I say. ‘Hey, I’d better go. If you see Lao Zhang, can you tell him I’m looking for him? My phone’s dead.’

Lucy Wu sits up a little straighter, then reclines in a perfect, posed angle. ‘Lao Zhang? Is that Zhang Jianli?’

Sloppy nods. ‘Right.’

Lucy smiles at me, revealing tiny white teeth as perfect as a doll’s. ‘Jianli and I are old friends.’

‘Really?’ I say.

‘Yes.’ She looks me up and down, and I can feel myself blushing, because I know how I must look. ‘It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other. I was hoping to catch up with him while I’m here. I’ve heard wonderful things about his recent work. You know, Jianli hasn’t gotten nearly enough recognition as an artist.’

‘Maybe that’s not so important to Lao Zhang,’ Sloppy mutters.

Lucy giggles. ‘Impossible! All Chinese artists want fame. Otherwise, how can they get rich?’

She reaches into her tiny beaded bag, pulls out a lacquer card case, and hands me a card in polite fashion, holding it out with both hands. ‘When you see him, perhaps you could give him this.’

‘Sure.’

What a bitch, I think. Then I tell myself that’s not fair. Just because she’s tiny, pretty, and perfectly put together, it doesn’t mean she’s a bitch.

It just means I hate her on principle.

I order some takeout and head to Lao Zhang’s place.

Lao Zhang’s probably working, I figure, walking down Xingfu Lu, one of the two main streets in Mati Village. When he gets into it, he paints for hours, all day, fueled by countless espressos – he’s got his own machine. He forgets to eat sometimes, and I’m kind of proud of myself for thinking of bringing dinner, for doing something nice for him, like a normal person would do. It’s been hard for me the last few years, remembering to do stuff like that.

Maybe I’m finally getting better.

As I’m thinking this, I stumble on a pothole in the rutted road. Pain shoots up my leg.

‘Fuck!’

I can barely see, it’s so dark.

There aren’t exactly streetlights in Mati Village, only electric lanterns here and there that swing in any good wind and only work about half the time, strung up on storefronts and power poles. Right now they dim and flicker. There’s problems with electricity sometimes. Not so much in central Beijing or Shanghai, but in those ‘little’ cities you’ve never heard of, places with a few million people out in the provinces somewhere. And in villages like this, on the fringes of the grid.

But the little market on the corner of Lao Zhang’s alley is decorated with tiny Christmas lights.

I buy a couple cold bottles of Yanjing beer (my favorite) and Wahaha water (the label features this year’s perky winner of the Mongolian Cow Yogurt Happy Girl contest) and turn down the alley.

Lao Zhang lives in one of the old commune buildings, red brick, covered in some places with red wash, surrounded by a red wall. The entrance to Lao Zhang’s compound has two sculptures on either side, so there’s no mistaking it. One is a giant fish painted in Day-Glo colors. The other is a big empty Mao jacket. No Mao, just the jacket.

Inside the compound are four houses in a row. Sculptures and art supplies litter the narrow courtyards in between. Lao Zhang shares this place with the sculptor, a novelist who also paints, and a musician/Web designer who’s mixing something now, a trance track from the sound of it, all beats and
erhu
. Not too loud. That’s good. Some loud noises really get to me.

The front door is locked. Maybe Lao Zhang isn’t home. Maybe he’s already over at the Warehouse for the show. I use my key and go inside. I’ll have a few
jiaozi
, I figure, leave the rest here, and try the Warehouse.

The house is basically a rectangle. You go in the entrance, turn, and there’s the main room, with whitewashed walls and added skylights, remodeled to give Lao Zhang better light for painting.

The lights are off in the studio, but the computer’s on, booted up to the login screen of this online game Lao Zhang likes to play,
The Sword of Ill Repute
. A snatch of music plays, repeats.

‘Lao Zhang,
ni zai ma
?’ I call out. Are you there? No answer.

To the right is the bedroom, which is mostly taken up by a
kang
, the traditional brick bed you can heat from underneath. Lao Zhang has a futon on top of his. On the left side of the house there’s a tiny kitchen, a toilet, and a little utility room with a spare futon where Lao Zhang’s friends frequently crash.

Which is where the Uighur is.

‘Shit!’ I almost drop the takeout on the kitchen floor.

Here’s this guy stumbling out of the spare room, blinking uncertainly, rubbing his eyes, which suddenly go wide with fear.

‘
Ni hao
,’ I say uncertainly.

He stands there, one leg twitching, like he could bolt at any moment. He’s in his forties, not Chinese, not Han Chinese anyway; his hair is brown, his eyes a light hazel, his face dark and broad with high cheeks – I’m guessing Uighur.

‘
Ni hao
,’ he finally says.

‘I’m Yili,’ I stutter, ‘a friend of Lao Zhang’s. Is he … ?’

His eyes dart around the room. ‘Oh, yes, I am also friend of Lao Zhang’s. Hashim.’

‘Happy to meet you,’ I reply automatically.

I put the food and beer down on the little table by the sink, slowly because I get the feeling this guy startles easily. I can’t decide whether I should make small talk or run.

Since I suck at both of these activities, it’s a real relief to hear the front door bang and Lao Zhang yell from the living room: ‘It’s me. I’m back.’

‘We’re in the kitchen,’ I call out.

Lao Zhang is frowning when he comes in. He’s a northerner, part Manchu, big for a Chinese guy, and right now his thick shoulders are tense like he’s expecting a fight. ‘I thought you were going to phone,’ he says to me.

‘I was – I tried – My phone ran out of minutes, so I just …’ I point at the table. ‘I brought dinner.’

‘Thanks.’ He gives me a quick one-armed hug, and then everything’s normal again.

Almost.

‘You met Hashim?’

I nod and turn to the Uighur. ‘Maybe you’d like some dinner? I brought plenty.’

‘Anything without pork?’ Lao Zhang asks, grabbing chipped bowls from the metal locker he salvaged from the old commune factory.

‘I got mutton, beef, and vegetable.’

‘Thank you,’ Hashim says, bobbing his head. He’s got a lot of gray hair. He starts to reach into his pocket for money.

I wave him off. ‘Please don’t be so polite.’

Lao Zhang dishes out food, and we all sit around the tiny kitchen table. Lao Zhang shovels
jiaozi
into his mouth in silence. The Uighur stares at his bowl. I try to make small talk.

‘So, Hashim. Do you live in Beijing?’

‘No, not in Beijing,’ he mumbles. ‘Just for a visit.’

‘Oh. Is this your first time here?’

‘Maybe … third time?’ He smiles weakly and falls silent.

I don’t know what to say after that.

‘We’re going to have to eat fast,’ Lao Zhang says. ‘I want to get to the Warehouse early. Okay with you?’

‘Sure,’ I say. I have a few
jiaozi
and some spicy tofu, and then it’s time to go.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Lao Zhang tells Hashim. ‘Anything you need, call me. TV’s in there if you want to watch.’

‘Oh. Thank you, but …’ Hashim gestures helplessly toward the utility room. ‘I think I’m still very tired.’

He looks tired. His hazel eyes are bloodshot, and the flesh around them is sagging and so dark it looks bruised.

‘Thank you,’ he says to me, bowing his head and backing toward the utility room. ‘Very nice to meet you.’

Chinese is a second language to him. Just like it is to me.

‘So, who’s the Uighur?’ I finally ask Lao Zhang, as we approach the Warehouse.

‘Friend of a friend.’

‘He’s an artist?’

‘Writer or something. Needed a place to stay.’

He’s not telling me everything, I’m pretty sure. His face is tense; we’re walking next to each other, but he feels so separate that we might as well be on different blocks.

A lot of Chinese people don’t trust Uighurs, even though they’re Chinese citizens. As for the Uighurs, a lot of them aren’t crazy about the Chinese.

You’re supposed to say ‘Han,’ not ‘Chinese,’ when you’re talking about the ninety percent of the population that’s, well, Chinese; but hardly anyone does.

The Uighur homeland used to be called East Turkestan. China took it over a couple hundred years ago, and now it’s ‘Xinjiang.’ For the last thirty years or so, the Chinese government’s been encouraging Han people to ‘go west’ and settle there.

The government takes a hard line if the Uighurs try to do anything about it.

Since the riots in Urumqi last year, things have only gotten worse. Gangs of Uighurs burned down shops and buses and went after Han Chinese with hammers and pickaxes. So much for the ‘Harmonious Society.’

This guy Hashim, though, I can’t picture him setting things on fire. He looks like a professor on a bender. A writer or something, like Lao Zhang said. Maybe he’s an activist, some intellectual who got in trouble. It doesn’t take much for a Uighur to get into trouble in China.

‘You should be careful,’ I say.

Lao Zhang grins and squeezes my arm. ‘I know – those Uighurs, they’re all terrorists.’

‘Ha ha.’

The other thing that’s screwed the Uighurs is that they’re Muslims, and you know how that goes in a lot of people’s heads.

The Warehouse is at the east end of Mati Village, close to the
jiaozi
place. It’s called that because it used to be a warehouse. The building is partitioned into several galleries and one big space, with a café in the corner. The main room has paintings, some sculpture, and, tonight, a band put together by Lao Zhang’s courtyard neighbor. The highlight of the evening is the end of a performance piece where this guy has been sealed up in what looks like a concrete block for forty-eight hours. Tonight’s the night he’s scheduled to break out, and a couple hundred people have gathered to watch.

‘I don’t get it.’

‘Well, you could say it’s about self-imprisonment and breaking free from that,’ Lao Zhang explains. ‘Or breaking free from irrational authority of any kind.’

‘I guess.’

‘Hey, Lao Zhang,
ni
zenmeyang
?’ someone asks.

‘
Hao, hao
. Painting a lot. You?’

Everyone here seems to know Lao Zhang, which isn’t surprising. He’s been in the Beijing art scene since it started, when he was a teenager and hung out at the Old Summer Palace, the first artists’ village in Communist China. After a couple of years, the cops came in and arrested a lot of the artists, and the village got razed. That happened to a lot of the places where Lao Zhang used to hang out. ‘Government doesn’t like it when too many people get together,’ he told me once.

Finally, Lao Zhang gave up on Beijing proper. ‘
Tai dade mafan
,’ he’d say. Too much hassle. Too expensive. So he led an exodus to Mati Village, a collective farm that had been practically abandoned after the communes broke up. A place where artists who hadn’t made it big could live for cheap.

‘You think they’ll bust you here?’ I asked once.

Lao Zhang shrugged. ‘Who knows? It lasts as long as it lasts.’

I have to wonder. Because even though Mati Village is pretty far away from Beijing proper, far from the villas and townhouses on Beijing’s outer fringes, people still find their way here. Foreigners, art-lovers, journalists.

Me.

And that Prada chick from the
jiaozi
place tonight. Lucy Wu.

‘Jianli, it’s been a long time.’ Lucy Wu smiles and extends her hand coyly in Lao Zhang’s general direction, having spotted us hanging out by the café, behind the PA speakers where it’s not quite so loud.