Oracle Bones (59 page)

But the biggest problem was the passivity of the film’s Chinese villagers.
The document noted that one scene portrayed them giving good food to the Japanese prisoner and the Chinese collaborator:

Objectively it shows that even during the times of war, under such difficult living conditions, the Chinese civilians do not hate the Japanese invaders, on the contrary, they try their best to satisfy the prisoners’ needs…. This violates history severely.

Censorship was a curious issue. In my Beijing neighborhood, I sometimes found bootleg DVDs whose covers advertised, in English, “Banned in China.” Nobody seemed to control the bootleggers for long; even a movie such as
Devils on the Doorstep
eventually appeared on the streets. Filmmakers themselves could be nonchalant about the issue of censorship. One young director told me that the Film Bureau officials reminded him of his grandparents—aging authority figures whom he patronized.

After half a century, many features of Communism had become like that: the Party had power without respect, and it was tolerated rather than feared. The Film Bureau’s oppression was often passive-aggressive; silence was a potent weapon. They avoided official statements, and they never told Jiang Wen how long he was banned from appearing in movies and television programs. In fact, the officials refused to meet with him at all. The goal was simply to make him worry and wait.

After the movie was banned, Jiang Wen repeatedly told foreign reporters that this was a case of life imitating art: the Cannes prize, like the prisoners in the movie, was a possession that only led to trouble. He said that the censorship reminded him of the Cultural Revolution. Such remarks were not appreciated by many of his colleagues in the world of Chinese film. Jiang Wen had always had enemies—his charisma and fame gave him enormous influence, and he had a quick temper and a streak of stubbornness. Now that he had angered the government, other filmmakers worried about a possible tightening of the rules. One producer in Beijing told me, “If he publicly insists that he didn’t do anything wrong, it will hurt the whole industry in China.”

For a while, Jiang Wen gloried in the role of the oppressed artist, but then his attitude seemed to change. One of his friends told me that, as time passed, Jiang admitted privately that he had brought some of the trouble onto himself. Finally, he stopped making inflammatory statements. After a period of silence, he began to explore the boundaries, appearing on a couple of television award shows. Then he acted in a low-budget film with a first-time director. At last, he signed on to the Western. He had never been an action star, and it was obvious
that he didn’t enjoy the work, but it was necessary for political rehabilitation. Xinjiang was his first step back from exile.

ONE EVENING IN
Xinjiang, after another long day of filming, I met with Jiang Wen in his hotel room. I asked how viewers were supposed to interpret the historical perspective of
Devils on the Doorstep
. Carefully, the actor leaned back in his chair—his spine was still aching—and lit a cigarette.

“I never said that this movie was supposed to represent history,” he said. “I believe that a director is supposed to show things inside the heart. Maybe it has something to do with inheritance. I was born near that place in Hebei, and so there is lots of history inside of me. In a way, I think the movie is autobiographical.”

I mentioned that some critics believed the movie was inaccurate because it didn’t portray the Chinese as victims of the war.

“I agree that the Chinese people have been victims,” he said. “But we have our own faults; we need to look hard at a mirror and think about why we became victims. You can’t simply point to others and say that they’re evil—you can’t point at Lin Biao, or Jiang Qing, or the Japanese. That’s too simple.”

He rubbed his scraggly black beard. He wore old sweatpants and Nike sneakers; his eyes looked tired.

“Think of China as a field,” he continued. He gestured with one hand, as if he were planting a neat row of rice in the hotel room carpet. “The Kuomintang, the Communist Party, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing—all of them are seeds in the earth. They grow in different ways; some grow well and others do not. Some become bad. When the Japanese arrived, you could safely say that they were already bad—they were fascists. But why did they get worse after they got here? We Chinese need to talk about this, because so many bad things got worse and worse.

“What most people say is so simple—‘they’re devils, we’re victims.’ But this history is the same as an individual’s life. I’ve had friends say that I should work in the Film Bureau, because then that institution would become more tolerant. I tell them that it would only make me a worse person. If you have a guard at the gate, then the guard becomes oppressive. It doesn’t have anything to do with the person; it’s the system, the environment.”

He told me that many Chinese needed psychological help. “People should spend more time looking inside themselves,” he said. “A person and history are the same—by that, I mean that a personal history is enormous. An individual can be even more complicated than a society. But there isn’t any time for the Chinese to examine themselves like that. Everybody is too busy; there’s not
enough quiet for reflection. In the distant past, the country was peaceful and stable, but now it changes so fast. Certainly that’s been the case since Reform and Opening, but to some degree the past two hundred years have been like that. We don’t know where we are. We haven’t found our road. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Chinese tried; some of them tried to find it in our own traditions, while others looked outside the country. This debate is still going on.”

He continued: “Chairman Mao is a perfect example. He often said that he didn’t like Chinese history, and the Communists initially succeeded because they were untraditional. But Mao used traditional Chinese language to oppose the old things, and he became a traditional emperor. It’s not as if he decided to do this; he just didn’t know any other alternatives. He’s a tragic figure—the most tragic in Chinese history. He’s like a seed that grows big, but in a twisted way, because the seed can’t overcome the soil.”

I asked the actor what could be done about that.

“You have to change the soil,” Jiang Wen said.

The room was silent; he paused to light another cigarette. “I want to make a movie about Mao,” he continued. “Mao was more tragic than Hamlet. Mao was an artistic person, not a political person. He should have been a poet and a philosopher; he should have been creating things instead of dealing with politics.”

Jiang Wen laughed and acknowledged that such a film wasn’t going to be made in the near future. He had no idea when he would direct again; he was still feeling out the political climate, step by step. But the character of Mao Zedong fascinated him nonetheless. “I think Mao has something to do with every Chinese person,” Jiang Wen said. “He represents many Chinese dreams and many Chinese tragedies.”

THE FILM SET
swallowed the outside world. Some scenes included turbaned bands of Turkic warriors; off-camera, the actors referred to these extras as “Taliban.” Apart from jokes like that, it was hard to remember that there was a war happening on the other side of Xinjiang. My meeting with Polat’s friend seemed just as far away: the only reminder was the stack of hundred-dollar bills.

During the filming, we rarely saw Uighurs. Han Chinese ran the oil company, and the movie’s horseback extras—the Taliban—were actually Kazaks. The Big Horse Camp scenes were filmed near a small oasis that was home to one Uighur family, but they kept out of the way, tending to their flock of two hundred sheep. One afternoon, I visited their home and talked to a young
Uighur in his twenties, who told me sleepily that he liked Jiang Wen. But he preferred American movies—
Twister
,
Terminator
, anything with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He said he had liked the part in
Titanic
when the boat snaps in half.

When I asked He Ping, the director, about the difference between an American Western and a Chinese Western, he had a well-polished answer. “American Westerns are about taking culture to the west,” he said. “It’s about one culture going to another place; they’re taking law and order to the west. A Chinese Western is totally different. It’s about exchange between different cultures.” He also told me that in order to make the film more “postmodern,” he had cast an actress with a shaved head as a Buddhist monk.

They used a body double for Harrison Liu. The doctor told him to stay off horses for a while; he needed to recover in order to film a subsequent scene in which his character would be killed by a Taliban-Turkic-Kazak band. He was fated to die with one arrow through his chest and another through his knee. Many months later, when I saw the death on a movie screen, I thought immediately of the Huron of
Black Robe
.

AT THE END
of my last day on the set, I rode away with Jiang Wen in his private van. He had spent part of the afternoon leading a camel train across the Gobi. Harrison’s body double had taken up the back of the procession, so nobody would notice him.

The van bounced across the blackened desert. No trees, no grass—nothing but a flat dead horizon. I asked the actor about his favorite movies, and he told me that as a young man, over a period of ten years, he had repeatedly watched
Raging Bull
.

“When I saw that movie,” he said, “it wasn’t as if it was an American movie, or a movie about a boxer. I felt like it was about my home.”

I asked if his copy had had Chinese subtitles, and he shook his head. “I only understood ten per cent of it,” he said. “But really it’s just a matter of seeing it and understanding the mood. I liked the shades, the blacks and whites, and I liked the atmosphere. And I liked Robert De Niro, because in that movie he reminds me of my mother. His attitude reminds me of her.”

I asked, somewhat carefully, “What’s your mother like?”

“Too complicated to explain,” he said. “That’s another movie I’ll make someday.”

The van bumped forward. The sun hung low and then disappeared; oil well burnoffs flamed a dull orange in the distance. Jiang Wen’s cigarette glowed the same color. He talked about foreign directors who had encouraged him—he
had met Martin Scorsese twice, and Volker Schlöndorff, the director of
Tin Drum
, had helped Jiang Wen get funding for his first movie. Jiang Wen struggled to explain how much he loved making films, and at last he pointed to the cigarette.

“It’s like smoking,” he said. “I need to make movies like I need to smoke.”

At first, I wasn’t sure what he meant—whether filmmaking was an addiction, or a necessity that had been denied, or a profession that, one way or another, through fame or censorship or horses, seemed destined to finish him off. But then I noticed his smile—the sweetest look I’d ever seen on his hard face. He liked it all.

19

Election

December 1, Ninetieth Year of the Republic

ONLY ONE OF THE ORIGINAL ANYANG ARCHAEOLOGISTS WAS STILL
alive. In the summer of 1936, Shih Chang-ju had overseen the excavation of the largest cache of oracle bones ever found. The following year, when the Japanese occupied Nanjing, and the Kuomintang fled west. In 1949, they were driven to Taiwan by the Communists. That was the story of Shih Chang-ju’s life—a nomadic archaeologist, displaced repeatedly by war. There was something poignant about his published description of the excavations of June 1936, when the season’s last dig uncovered the oracle bones:

But, indeed, facts are stranger than fiction. The actual pleasure of discovery far exceeded our anticipation!

After archaeologists in Anyang told me about Shih, I telephoned the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. An assistant answered the phone. “He won’t be in today until about three o’clock,” she said. “He’s busy with meetings this week.”

I explained that I wanted to schedule a visit to Taiwan. Such trips required time; direct flights weren’t allowed between the island and the mainland, so a traveler had to change planes in Hong Kong. I asked if Professor Shih might be available next month for an interview.

“Oh, I’m sure he can do it anytime,” she said. “He’s here every day.”

I asked, “Is this the same Professor Shih who excavated in Anyang in the 1930s?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“He still goes to meetings?”

“Only if there are visitors in town. This week we have some people in from the mainland.”

“How old is he?”

“He just celebrated his hundredth birthday this year.”

“How is his health?”

“Very good!” she said. “He has a problem with his eye, and his hearing isn’t great, but otherwise he’s fine. He comes to work every day, like the rest of us. You can say he’s the oldest worker in the office!”

BY A WESTERN
calculation, Professor Shih was ninety-nine—the Chinese considered a person to be one year old at birth. He was a native of Henan province, where he had first made his name as an archaeologist, but after 1949 he hadn’t returned to the mainland. Since arriving in Taiwan, Professor Shih had focused primarily on organizing, analyzing, and publishing all of his old research notes. It was virtual archaeology: if you could no longer excavate in Anyang, then at least you could excavate your notes from Anyang. In 2001, at the age of ninety-nine, Professor Shih published his eighteenth book:
Hou Chia Chuang (The Yin-Shang Cemetery Site at Anyang, Honan), Volume X
. When I visited his office, he proudly gave me a copy, inscribed and dated in a shaky hand. The material had been researched more than sixty years ago.

His desk looked like one of those still-life memorials to a famous writer who has passed away. An old leather-bound field notebook lay open, its yellowed pages showing an ink sketch of a tomb: two prone skeletons, a rounded vessel. The notebook was dated 1936. It sat beside an article that the archaeologist had published in the 1970s: “A Study of the Chariot of the Shang Dynasty.” (In Anyang, Shih had excavated and analyzed the “ghosts” of some of the earliest-known chariots in China.) Well-worn tools sat on the desktop—magnifying glass, ruler, T square. Everything seemed old, except for a couple of computer printouts that showed various models of digital cameras. The assistant told me that the professor was trying to decide which one would be most useful for his future research.