Age of Ambition (28 page)

One part of his life where Michael was not making progress was with girls. Since college, he had had two serious relationships, but they had foundered in part because of his infatuation with studying. “They usually decide that a person who wakes up in the middle of the night to listen to English recordings is kind of ridiculous,” he wrote. He was, at heart, a romantic—“If your wife really loves you, she won't care about anything but your soul,” he told me—and he was out of step with his generation's attention to finances. He showed me a set of scenes he wrote for his students to practice, and his perspective came through in his classroom exercises:

A:
You look good today.

B:
Thanks.

A:
Do you love me?

B:
No, I only love money.

Now and then, Michael asked me to take a look at his Chinese writing, or to polish the grammar of the English passages he wrote for his students. I was often struck by how comfortable he was putting himself at the center of the story. Earlier generations in China were less comfortable doing this. I asked his father to talk about the three decades he spent working in a coal mine. He said, “All mines are dangerous. It was very hard at that time. We earned about sixty yuan per month.” And that was all he had to say on the subject. Michael, by contrast, saw his own life as an epic fable of frustration and triumph. He wrote, “I was extremely lonely and confused from 2002 to 2007. I wanted to be someone great. I didn't want a commonplace life … Was I really destined to be a failure? What should I do? Maybe I was doomed to be an ordinary person.” The prospect of conformity offended him. He wrote, “Why should I be like everyone else, just because I was born to a poor family?”

He framed the study of English as a matter of moral entitlement. He told his students, “You are the master of your destiny. You deserve to be happy. You deserve to be different in this world.”

 

TWELVE

THE ART OF RESISTANCE

 

The harder the Party struggled against the unruly culture of the Chinese Internet, the more unruly that culture became. When, in 2009, authorities declared their intention to rid the Web of “online vulgarity,” people responded by inventing a smiling cartoon symbol—a mythical creature that resembled an alpaca—named the Grass Mud Horse, which, in Mandarin, was a homonym for “Fuck Your Mother.” Overnight, the Grass Mud Horse was galloping and grazing all over the Internet, singing in music videos and appearing in animated shorts—often cavorting with another cartoon creature, the River Crab, a play on the Party's beloved concept of “harmony,” which Lin Yifu had touted to his audience. Each new satire and double entendre was, in effect, a middle finger in the face of the state. The censors issued urgent instructions:

Any content related to the “Grass Mud Horse” must not be promoted or exaggerated (this goes for any mythical creatures or river crabs as well).

It did no good. Soon, the Grass Mud Horse was on T-shirts and in the form of kid-friendly stuffed animals. Nobody embraced the symbolism as rapturously as the artist Ai Weiwei, who posted a photo of himself nude, leaping into the air, clutching a stuffed Grass Mud Horse over his genitals. He titled the photo “Grass Mud Horse Covering the Middle”—a near-perfect homonym for “Fuck Your Mother, Party Central Committee.”

In the years since Ai Weiwei created chandeliers to spoof China's new opulence, and explored the relationship with the West by sending people to Germany, he'd attracted growing recognition as an artist and an architect. His work on public projects put him in contact with politics in a way he had rarely experienced, and he began to see “how it functions, how it works,” he said at the time, adding, “Then you have a lot of criticism about how it works.” As his criticism grew, Ai Weiwei became China's most determined innovator of provocation. By the time he was hired to serve as artistic consultant to Herzog and De Meuron, the Swiss firm that was designing China's National Stadium for the Olympics in Beijing, his views had begun to take a sharp turn. Before the stadium was completed, he disowned the games as a “fake smile” concealing China's problems.

Ai Weiwei was a Falstaffian figure: capacious belly; meaty, expressive face; and a black-and-white beard that stretched to his chest. The full picture was imposing, until he revealed a whimsical view of the world. “His beard is his makeup,” his brother, Ai Dan, told me. The artist lived and worked on the northeast edge of Beijing, in a studio complex that he had designed for himself, a hive of eccentric creativity that one friend called “a cross between a monastery and a crime family.” Behind a metal gate painted turquoise, a courtyard planted with grass and bamboo was surrounded by airy buildings in brick and concrete. He and his wife, Lu Qing, also an artist, inhabited one side of the yard, and several dozen assistants occupied the other. Visitors roamed unhindered, as did a geriatric cocker spaniel named Danni and a tribe of semiferal cats that occasionally destroyed Ai's architectural models.

He and his wife had no children. He had an infant son from an extramarital relationship with a woman who worked on one of his films. They lived nearby, and he spent part of every day with them. He had never intended to be a father. “She said, ‘Yes, I want to have the baby,'” he told me. “I said, ‘I don't normally think I should have a baby, but if you insist, of course, it's your right, and I will bear the full responsibility as a father.'” He was enjoying being wrong about fatherhood. “So-called human intelligence—we shouldn't overestimate it,” he told me. “When an accident happens, that can be nice.”

Ai spent much of his time on the road; he owned an apartment in Manhattan, in Chelsea. But when he was in China his orbit revolved tightly around his studio, which acquired a role in the cultural life of Beijing akin to that of Andy Warhol's Factory. He wandered among the buildings day and night, which made it difficult to discern when he was working and when he was not, a distinction that had eroded further in recent years as the line between his art and his life became increasingly indistinguishable. Since discovering Twitter, he had become one of China's most active users, often spending eight hours a day on it. I asked him if it was taking away from his art. “I think my stance and my way of life
is
my most important art,” he said. “Those other works might be collectible, something you can hang on the wall, but that's just a conventional perspective. We shouldn't do things a certain way just because Rembrandt did it that way. If Shakespeare were alive today, he might be writing on Twitter.” He enjoyed the spontaneity, but he also saw a deeper significance in it for Chinese people; it was, he concluded, their “first chance in a thousand years to exercise their personal freedom of expression” without the state standing between their words and the public.

*   *   *

Ten months after the earthquake in Sichuan, and nine months after Hu Shuli's investigation of the collapsing schools, Ai Weiwei found himself fixated on one detail in particular: the government had declined to count or name the students who had died. Despite repeated requests, it had produced no list, no tally of the casualties, no report on what went wrong. When some parents demanded information too insistently, they were detained. This galvanized and infuriated Ai in a way that more abstract political issues rarely had. “We started to ask very simple questions: Who's dead? What are their names?” he told me. In a blog post that was unusually harsh even for him, Ai wrote of the officials in charge of the disaster area, “They hide the facts in the name of maintaining stability. They intimidate, they jail, they persecute parents who demand the truth, and they brazenly stomp on the constitution and the basic rights of man.”

That December he launched what he called a citizens' investigation of the quake, an attempt to document how and why so many schools collapsed—and to collect as many names as possible. He signed up volunteers and sent them to Sichuan to investigate. They collected 5,212 names and cross-checked them with parents, insurance companies, and other sources. The results filled eighty pieces of paper plastered on a wall of his office—a spreadsheet containing thousands of names and birth dates. Each day, Ai's office posted to Twitter a list of the students who were born on that day who had died in the earthquake. “Today, there are seventeen,” Ai told me one winter morning at the studio. “The most of any day yet.”

We were sitting in his office, and he was, as usual, at the keyboard tweeting. As we talked, he checked the clock and announced that it was time to go to the courthouse. Over the past year, his office had sent more than 150 letters to government agencies seeking information about earthquake victims and construction problems, under the Freedom of Government Information Law. He had yet to receive a substantive response. Today he planned to file suit against the Ministry of Civil Affairs for not responding to his requests.

He slid into the passenger seat of a small black sedan, with a driver and a woman named Liu Yanping, who was overseeing the letter-writing campaign. “According to the policy, they have to respond within fifteen working days,” she said, clutching a sheaf of papers on her lap. I asked Liu if she was a lawyer, and she laughed. “For a long time, I was at home raising my child,” she said. “On his blog, Ai Weiwei asked for volunteers, so I wrote him an e-mail. The work looked interesting, and I was curious.” It led to a full-time job and other new experiences: not long after Liu joined Ai's staff, she was arrested in Sichuan, where she was publicizing the trial of an earthquake activist; she spent two days in police custody for “disturbing the social order.”

We reached the Second Intermediate People's Court of Beijing, a tall modern tower with a grand arched entry and a modest office at the back for processing new cases. We passed through a metal detector, where two young men in guards' uniforms were engrossed in a comic book. There was a line of bank teller–style windows, and at the one closest to us, a tiny old woman in a pink padded jacket was bellowing into a rectangular opening in the glass. “How could the other side win without any evidence?” she shouted. “Did they bribe the head of the court?” On the opposite side of the glass, two women in uniform were listening with resigned expressions suggesting that the old woman had been at it for a while.

Ai and Liu lined up in front of window No. 1 and, when it was their turn, slid the papers through the opening to a middle-aged man in a tan blazer. He looked glassy-eyed and exhausted. He read the papers carefully and identified a problem: “You say that you need the Ministry of Civil Affairs to make this information public, but why are you taking an interest in this?”

Ai leaned over to speak into the opening in the window. “Actually, according to the policy,” he said, “everyone has a right to ask for this information—not that you have to agree.” After some back-and-forth, Ai and Liu consented to write out a description of their goals, and they found seats in a waiting area full of people holding similar sheaves of paper. “They don't want to accept this,” Ai said, “because once it is in the legal pipeline, they have to make some kind of judgment.” By the time Ai and Liu reached the window again, an hour had passed. Now they learned that they were using the wrong color ink. Written materials had to be in black, and they had used blue. They sat down again to rewrite them. They got in line again.

“Kafka's castle,” Ai murmured. Two hours stretched into three, and I asked him why he was bothering with this if he did not expect a response. “I want to prove that the system is not working,” he said. “You can't simply say that the system is not working. You have to work through it.” Twenty minutes before closing time, the man behind the glass finally accepted the filing, and Ai and Liu, satisfied, turned to leave. The old woman was still yelling.

*   *   *

Ai Weiwei always sensed that he was born into the wrong family—or, at least, an inauspicious one. His father, Ai Qing, was among China's foremost literary figures. He had joined the Communist Party as a young man and earned a reputation for accessible verse imbued with the spirit of the revolution. He was especially impressed with Chairman Mao, for whom he wrote a poem of praise that began, “Wherever Mao Zedong appears / thunderous applause erupts.”

In 1957, when Ai Qing was forty-seven, he and his wife, Gao Ying, a young staff member at the writers' association, had a son. At the time, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, one of Mao's purges of intellectuals, was gathering force, and Ai Qing's devotion to the Party was called into question. He had written a fable, “The Gardener's Dream,” that highlighted the need to permit a broader range of creative opinions. In it, a gardener who cultivates only Chinese roses realizes that he is “causing discontent among all the other types of flowers.” A fellow poet, Feng Zhi, attacked Ai Qing, saying that he had fallen “into the quagmire of reactionary formalism.”

Ai Qing was stripped of his titles and ejected from the writers' association. At night he would bang his head against the wall and demand, “Do you think I am against the Party?” In those wretched weeks, the couple had to name their infant son. The father simply opened the dictionary and dropped his finger onto a character:
, pronounced
wei
, which means “power.” The irony was too great, given the circumstances, so he altered the tone slightly to make it into a different
wei
,
, which means “not yet.” Their son thus became “Not yet, not yet.”