Like father, like son: Artist Ai Weiwei's memoir

In the middle of the night, after a particularly tough day of interrogations in a Beijing security facility, the artist and dissident Ai Weiwei decided to write his book, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrow: A Memoir. His tough implacable interrogator had informed him there is a price to pay for every word he utters.

“During the Cultural Revolution, you could have been shot a hundred times over.”

That night he realises he had never asked his father, the celebrated but persecuted poet Ai Qing what he had gone through during the Cultural Revolution; it was now too late. That night he decides to write, so his son will never have the same regret.

In that moment, the themes of the book were set. It is hardly an autobiography of the artist, or much of a discussion of the artist’s works. This is a book of fathers and sons, and the political price to be paid for words uttered under a controlled Chinese Communist Party state. The tale is there in the sub-title, The story of two lives, one nation, and a century of art under tyranny.

The story begins with Ai Qing, along with the ten-year-old Ai Weiwei, being bundled into a Liberation truck in 1967 and driven to “Little Siberia”, a camp at the farthest reaches of North-West China, for being a “big rightist”. He is denounced, beaten and made to do the very worst tasks. One grueling scene has the poet in sub-zero winter having to drill into frozen stalagmites of faeces to clear the long-drops.  

Ai Weiwei weaves together the story of Ai Qing’s past with the horrors of their time in “Little Siberia”. This first half of the book is Ai Weiwei at his best; deft, lyrical and direct. His father had grown up the son of a cold but careful landlord, raised largely by a wet nurse and then excelled as a painter. Like many Chinese students (and future Community Party leaders) in the 1920s he had gone to Paris to experience the West. Back in China, Ai Qing became a poet, joined the Party hoping for a better future for China and was jailed for subversion in the Shanghai Concession. When Japan invaded in 1937 he fled to the countryside and then joined Mao’s forces in their headquarters in Yan’an. It is here that Ai Qing takes part in the fabled discussions of art with Mao, who seems at first to have befriended him.

Mao instituted the turgidly named Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art to “rectify” the thinking of intellectuals; they argued for freedom of expression to tell the truth; Mao argued they were there to serve the revolution. There could only be one winner in any argument with Mao. Ai Qing and other intellectuals were on the long slide towards being “rightists”, decadent and denounced during the Cultural Revolution.

Ai Qing’s poetry is sprinkled through 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, indeed the title comes from one of his works, Yarkhoto. Alongside his memoir, Ai Weiwei has published a volume of Selected Poems by Ai Qing, who was eventually rehabilitated but only after Mao’s death.

Both books show Ai Qing as a close observer of the countryside and peasant life; his poems especially of the 1930s and 1940s are filled with the landscapes, seasons, farmers and even war refugees he sees, like the painter he had once been. The scenes awaken in him thoughts of his hopes for a better China, even revolution.  In A Conversation with Coal, he imagines the fuel as being ancient and alive, just waiting for a spark.  

His personal poems echo Ai Weiwei’s themes of family. In an elegy to his wet nurse, Dayanhe, a child bride so unremarked that she was just given the name of her village, he writes “I am the landlord’s son..” but because of her love he grew to be her son. It was written while in prison and dedicated to China’s women toiling in obscurity. But perhaps most remarkable is his long poem, My Father which begins by describing his father, a village landlord, as liberal, wanting to modernise China. But it becomes slowly apparent he would never risk anything to achieve change and eventually father and son are estranged.

He was a common man -
Fainthearted, content with his lot……..

 In the second half of 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrow, Ai Weiwei’s life seems to riff with his father’s in so many ways. Like Ai Qing, he leaves China to experience new ways of making art. In New York, he survives the life of a starving artist, meets Allan Ginsberg and his imagination is sparked by Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual art. While his father tried to make poetry accessible by using a vernacular style, Ai Weiwei experiments with artistic forms to drive his messages; first installations, and later the internet. At one point, he says he never asked his father’s advice but “like a star in the sky or a tree in a field” he had always been a compass point. 

Returning to China, he encounters a country in the midst of erasing the memory of Tiananmen Square. Provoked, he takes a photo of himself giving the finger to the Square. Next comes his Black Cover Book of provocative underground Chinese art - like this father’s first volume, self-published. While Ai Weiwei became famous for helping create the Bird’s Nest design national stadium for the Beijing Olympics, his exhibition of avant-garde artists called  in Chinese “Unco-operative Attitude”, though something more direct in English) was promptly shut down by the Shanghai authorities.

Ai Weiwei is especially forthright on his belief in the potential of the Internet. After the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 left more than 5000 students dead when schools collapsed, he organised an army of online helpers to scour records and provide both a memorial to the children and any evidence of poor building standards. His blog posts became hugely popular; “I was like a jellyfish, and the internet had become my ocean,” he writes. He was a born contrarian, he says. 

But contrarians are not welcomed by China’s internet censors. Eventually, the State would and did react. On April 3, 2011, he was detained. It was for tax evasion, he was told. For the next three months he disappeared from public view. He was held and questioned in a tiny cell, watched over constantly by guards, including two who stood over his bed as he slept. His two interlocutors, investigators Li and Xu, are deftly drawn from just a few details and come across as tempters; admit something and he could be free, why bring China into disrepute and, perhaps most directly, why endanger your son and family.

Ai Weiwei records at length the back-and-forth of the questioning, and, like some of his art, there is a dark absurdity that runs through his detention. He describes how soldiers must watch him sleep, despite the closed circuit TV. Standing at attention, the soldiers, often young peasants, whisper questions to each other about sex. Ai Weiwei starts to helpfully whisper back answers. Eventually they accord him the title, “Dear Sex Uncle”. (Naturally he would later make a public art work of his prison cell.)

It is in these scenes that Ai Weiwei is at his best; concrete, descriptive and humane. But occasionally, he pauses to explain the philosophy of his opposition and the memoir bogs down. However, this is a book which sticks closely to the artist’s aim; to remember the past truthfully because that subverts the sanitised official version; to speak out in the present against all constraints on freedom and free speech. 

In the end, Ai Weiwei is released after 81 days and eventually decides he must leave China, largely for his son’s sake. But now, he concludes sadly, the dissident has become something else. He is an exile.

“My father, my son and I have all ended up on the same path, leaving the land where we were born. A sense of belonging is central to one’s identity, for only with it can one find a spiritual refuge….Without a sense of belonging, my language lost, I feel on edge and unsure about things, facing an equally anxious world.”

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir (The story of two lives, one nation and a century of art under tyranny)
Ai Weiwei

Selected Poems
Ai Qing