High tech and hot pot, p.12
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 12
“But would South Korea want reunification?”
“If it were to happen now, South Korea would have to spend an incredible amount of money for it. But if the North Korean economy were to improve, then it’s conceivable. We were not separated by our own free will seventy years ago.”
From one of the panoramic windows I observe a man on the far bank gathering water in a wooden bucket. Do you ever see people there having riverside picnics? Couples having a secret cuddle? Teenagers drinking beer and playing guitars? Almost certainly not. These thoughts distract me for a few moments, while Sung continues talking.
“I think Kim Jong-un wouldn’t be against reunification. North Korea has the natural resources, the south the modern technology. Together, the country would have a population of 80 million, and it could be a great economic power, comparable to Japan.”
“And at long last, you would be able to take a boat and row the forty yards from your house to the other side,” I say.
“Yeah, crazy, isn’t it?”
From: Lin Beijing
You can sleep in my studio. There are lots of paintings and sculptures there, I hope it won’t bother you
To: Lin Beijing
No problem, sounds good!
From: Lin Beijing
I’m curious about what you think of China, this modern nazi dictatorship
BEIJING
Population: 21.5 million
PINKLAND
IN PINKLAND, THE trees and flowers are pink; the water, the stones and even the snow are pink, as are the houses, roads, cars, tanks, food, medicine and the walls that separate the country from the rest of the world. In Pinkland, there are no marriages, no class distinctions, no prisons—just love and liberty. If someone causes other people pain or harm, they will be immediately expelled. Citizenship, including a passport, is only granted to women and gay men. Straight men will be issued with visas for a maximum stay of ninety days. Decisions about permanent residency are made during a personal interview at which the applicant must wear pink clothing. The color pink stands for adjectives like sexy, pure, feminine, romantic, soft, relaxed and erotic, among others. Citizens reject bad colors such as black, blue and green; dye their hair pink; and wear pink-tinted contact lenses. Pinkland is a dictatorship, the currency is the pink crown and the emblem is two necking flamingos.
(Source: Pinkland information brochure)
THE CAB RIDE from the southern train station to where Lin lives on the eastern fringes of the city takes more than an hour, even in ideal traffic conditions. Beijing is huge, even by Chinese standards: a megacity with 6 million cars, 391 subway stations and more than seventy universities. Sluggish streams of vehicles edge along the highways, polluting the air; on the sidewalks, pedestrians with breathing masks hasten to their next appointments.
Since I’ve been traveling for a couple of weeks now, I should no longer feel a surge of awe and excitement at the sight of a cluster of high-rise buildings. But during this drive, I see so many newly built districts, and newly being built districts, that I wonder whether this reinforced concrete madness will ever end. Or will China just keep on building until there are no high-rise-free square miles in the whole country? Also striking are the giant propaganda billboards at the roadside; there are considerably more than on my last visit four years ago. In terms of self-promotion, Xi Jinping is as keen as Mao once was.
“Socialism with Chinese Qualities to Gain New Victories,” “Realize the Great Dream” and “Great Struggles for a Great Project”—the slogans are presented in large yellow lettering against a red background. China is not hiding that it’s heading for the top and aims to have a leading global role in the military, technological and economic sectors by 2049. From the Chinese viewpoint, Western dominance is merely a roughly 250-year interlude in history; after all, pre-1800, China had already been a world power for many centuries.
To realize this “great dream,” there has been worldwide investment. The One Belt, One Road initiative—the new Silk Road—attracts trading partners with heavy credit for gigantic infrastructure projects. When Portugal was wallowing in its financial crisis of 2010–14, China was busy buying up companies and took over the port of Piraeus in Greece. And in Africa, China has long been the most important trading partner and is involved in more than one-third of all infrastructure projects. The Chinese assurance of not becoming involved in domestic affairs, unlike Western development aid organizations, has been very successful. And Xi likes to stress the similarity of being badly treated by the West: “We have shared similar experiences in the past. That’s why there is such a close link between China and Africa,” he said at a gathering of African heads of state. Despite some setbacks and much criticism, Xi has already achieved something there that most people thought impossible—most Africans believe that partnership with China does more for their economies than partnership with Western countries (in this context, it wasn’t particularly bright of the current U.S. president to refer to some places in Africa as “shithole countries”; it is unthinkable that Xi would utter such a remark).
Whereas the West mostly considers Africa to be a crisis zone, China sees it as a place where an ever-growing middle class with purchasing power is developing: an excellent sales market for Chinese products, even high-tech toys or cars, so these are sectors that will expand in the coming years. And why shouldn’t a number of countries be interested in the world’s best surveillance systems or social credit software?
In the West, there is still little awareness of the speed with which this global economic power is advancing—or of the extent of its worldwide economic ties. The U.S. government overestimated how damaging a trade war would be for China. For sure it is hurting the economy, but it’s far from being an existential threat. Xi Jinping can rely on the patriotism of his people to make it through some years with smaller economic growth.
• • • • • •
LIN IS WAITING for me on the main street. “It’s a bit untidy at my place. I hope that’s okay with you,” she says.
We pass a barrier to her residential area, which consists of eight-story apartment blocks. She has hair almost to her hips and melancholic dark eyes. In her light blue rubber sandals, red leggings and brightly colored dress beneath a far-too-large woolen sweater, she looks like a fairy queen from a second-hand store. Sometimes when she’s walking ahead of me, she sticks her arms out with her hands at right angles to her forearms, as if she were about to start flying.
Lin opens the door to the apartment and turns on the light, and all of a sudden we are surrounded by strange characters. Ahead of me, a sullen, grim-looking Kim Jong-un sits in a single-seater plane, releasing atomic rockets by pressing a button. Next to him, Xi Jinping and his wife wave from a group of cheerful teenagers. A child in a kimono rides a white swan, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck pose on the Great Wall dressed in workers uniforms and a blonde girl with a pink octopus in her hair cleans her nails with a bread knife. On the floor lies a decapitated Venus de Milo painted pink, among countless tubes of paint, palettes and brushes.
Lin’s pictures sit on easels or lean against the wall, one propped next to the other. There is not even close to enough space in the three-room apartment for an adequate gallery; there are even pictures leaning against the kitchen cupboards. Black-and-white plastic sheeting makes the floor look like an oversized chessboard. Being an artist in China is similar to playing a game of chess but less fun: tactical maneuvering and thinking ahead are important, because you often have to adapt to new situations and always live in fear of being checkmated.
“I had a huge studio on a five-thousand-square-mile piece of land in Songzhuang, half an hour from here. The state mafia destroyed it,” she says, while waiting for the water to boil for tea. “They said something about an order to destroy seventy illegal buildings. I had rented the land for twenty years. When I began building there, they said it wasn’t a problem. Two years later, they suddenly changed the law. That happens often with this nazi regime.”
“Did they give you any warning?”
“They gave me a week to leave the house, but they came with two large bulldozers after three days. They destroyed thirty or forty artworks and one year of work getting things set up.”
In Beijing, such incidences are common. Tens of thousands of residents were driven out of their homes in recent years, often under the pretext of dilapidated buildings having to be demolished for safety reasons. The people affected are mostly the poor—the new arrivals and migrant workers employed on construction sites and in restaurants in the city. Beijing intends to destroy a total of ten thousand acres of “illegal” buildings and reduce the inner-city population by 2 million.
Very often it is artists who are victims of these measures. Many galleries have been destroyed, not only in Songzhuang but also in the Caochangdi art district, made famous by Ai Weiwei.
Lin is not sure whether her studio was targeted because she transformed it into an art project—Pinkland: a utopian dream world where everything revolves around the color pink, subtly criticizing a state where everything revolves around the color red.
“Artists are not welcome here. The government hates us,” she says. Lin documented the demolition with photos and videos; she went to court a number of times, but her case was always rejected. She will certainly not be getting any compensation.
I ask her about her painting of Xi, the president and his wife waving happily, surrounded by smiling children—something about it seems off.
“Well spotted. I posted it on Weibo and got lots of likes because it seems so positive and patriotic.” The story behind it, however, is different. “It is an exact re-creation of a propaganda photo of the Romanian dictator Ceauşescu. I just gave the children a more Chinese look and inserted our president. But, of course, the viewer doesn’t know that.”
Then she takes me to Pinkland, or what is left of it. One room in the apartment is full of relics: two Christmas trees, a radio set, a Venetian carnival mask, a wig, a sculpture of a female torso, baby dolls, a rubber chicken, towels and articles of clothing—everything in pink, even the walls.
Lin shows me deceptively real-looking Pinkland passports with flamingo motifs, pink crown banknotes and an information brochure with rules for citizens and visa applicants.
“I can even put a Pinkland stamp in your passport,” she offers cheerfully.
At the moment, Lin is working on a film script about a fantasy world whose dictator forces people to feel free and happy. A dreamland enclosed behind a wall, where it is illegal to like any colors other than pink, where free love is practiced and where pink happiness pills are prescribed to cure sadness. A utopia somewhere between Barbie’s Dreamtopia and Orwell’s 1984, but lesbian. If I owned a film production company, I would immediately invest a heap of money in her project.
The studio apartment belongs to me for the night. Lin says good-bye and will sleep at her mother’s home two hundred yards away. Her parents are divorced, but her father gave them three pieces of real estate.
The bedroom could have come straight out of a naughtier version of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. The pink headboard, which has two handbags dangling from it, is decorated with two golden branches and between them in large letters is written “Lick Me, Baby.” The decorations on the wall include a picture of Jesus with lambs and what looks like a medieval oil painting of an aristocratic lady with a painted-on mustache. The door, with “Queen Lin’s Bedroom” written on it next to a painted crown, is guarded by a stuffed deer. Only the humming electronic air filter doesn’t really fit in with this surreal collection.
When I go to brush my teeth in a dark green bathroom full of indoor plants, a grinning skull observes me from the windowsill. On the ground, there is a bust of Ludwig van Beethoven and a rubber mask with the face of Hillary Clinton. This host certainly wins the award for the most original interior decoration of all the apartments that I have ever visited.
To: Nora Zhangjiajie
Hi Nora, has our interview been broadcast yet?
From: Nora Zhangjiajie
No, it’s still being checked.
From: Nora Zhangjiajie
Maybe they will never broadcast it
Lin’s WeChat profile photo shows Adolf Hitler in a pink uniform, and she is regularly posting things on Weibo that are deleted within minutes, or seconds, by diligent censors. When she wrote, “Long live the Dalai Lama,” the police were at her front door within two hours. Her accounts have been blocked numerous times—ten thousand followers suddenly gone from one second to the next. But she doesn’t give up, getting her information from banned foreign news portals and publishing her views on what is happening in the world. She is not afraid of serious consequences.
“They are looking for the big fish, not the little shrimp,” she says.
IN NUMEROUS ARTICLES about artists and dissidents, you can read about what happens when people say things in China that don’t toe the party line. Or you can spend half an hour in Lin’s mother’s living room.
The setting is unconventional. Between the sofa and the open-plan kitchen are the following decorations: a life-sized human skeleton for anatomy classes with a green hat on its skull; a picture on the wall of a child wearing a bloody eye patch and holding a fork, his own eye on a plate in front of him; a garden gnome; a display cabinet full of dolls; a porcelain flamingo; and much more.
In these surroundings, I witness an argument with her mother that Lin assures me is no exception but rather part of a long-running series of clashes; they fight on an almost daily basis. Lin talks in quiet, soft tones, unlike her mother, whose voice is loud and cutting, and who proceeds to clean up the kitchen with more noise than necessary. She appears wiry and fit enough to be ten rather than twenty years older than her daughter. As a yoga teacher and a vegetarian, she, too, is a nonconformist who lives her life differently from the generation before hers. Now and again, Lin translates and comments on her opponent’s words, instead of answering immediately, which just makes the situation even more absurd.
Annotated Rantings of a Patriotic Chinese Mother:
“Don’t say anything bad about our country to him. Foreigners think our system isn’t good, though every year things are improving. If you say too many negative things, then you should feel guilty about being Chinese because you hate this country.”
I don’t hate this country. She is acting as if party and country are the same, as if criticism of one is automatically criticism of the other. But they are two different things. I’ve tried so often to explain that to her.
• • • • • •
“You have no respect. You have to honor the party as you should honor your own parents and accept that they are always right. People who speak badly about their mothers are bad people.”
I believe the government should be a service organization, not just like parents.
• • • • • •
“You’re always complaining. Life is beautiful—you have enough to eat, enough fruit, you can live a healthy life. What more do you need? Why are you never satisfied?”
I don’t know how to answer to this. But I simply feel that this government shouldn’t turn the screws too tight. I told her I’m not complaining, it’s just my opinion, I’m just saying what I think. If things are not going well, you should be able to criticize the government. Living a healthy life, for instance, is not so easy because nature is so polluted.
• • • • • •
“We can’t do anything about the destruction of the environment. You don’t have to drink water from rivers; you can get perfectly clean drinking water from stores. You don’t think our country will die, do you?”
I just know that quite a lot is heading in the wrong direction. My mother doesn’t feel this. I often think of leaving them. Mother and country. The decision is difficult for me. If I go, she will say I’m a bad person for leaving her behind.
• • • • • •
“You just make that rubbish and are wasting your life. Why can’t you work as a teacher again, get married and have children? You are thirty-two. But stubborn as you are, I’m not surprised you can’t find anyone.”
The Chinese like subservient women. Sometimes I think that I’m strange or crazy and it’s not surprising that nobody likes me. But when I was in Europe, people often spoke to me and men wanted my WhatsApp contact details. When I told my mother that, she refused to believe me.
• • • • • •
“And you forgot to do the washing up.”
Oh, I think she’s right.
They quarrel passionately, unforgivingly, neither budging from her position in this doll’s-house-cum-ghost-train room that Lin designed. Interestingly, Lin’s mother let her daughter decorate the living room even though she describes her art as “rubbish.” In China, sometimes you have to look for evidence of parental love in deeds, not words.
Lin suggests that we take a look at Beijing’s art scene. She orders a cab with her pink cell phone.
“I’m not really that strong. Actually, I’m small and weak,” says Lin, still battered by the fight. “I only want to be myself, but that seems to be not allowed.” During the cab ride towards the city center via the Beijing–Harbin Expressway, she tells me of her lifelong struggle.
Lin started taking painting classes at ten, but even then, at school, just copying from other works bored her. She hated learning by obeying—independent thinking was not encouraged. Once, her art teacher shouted at her and wanted to throw her picture out the window because the colors she used were too bright—too much pink, even then. Schoolkids were drilled to think of individuality and freedom as unimportant. Instead, they were taught to serve their country, follow the party lines and be prepared to make sacrifices.
In music classes they sang patriotic songs. Lin remembers the lyrics of one of them: “Our motherland is like a garden, the flowers in the garden full of color. Our heads are like sunflowers, and there’s always a smile on our faces.” Lin felt that she was the only one in the classroom who was immune to the numbing magic of the sickly sweet melodies and lyrics. There was something wrong. Where were they, these gardens and flowers, and why didn’t she feel like smiling all the time?
