World Beater

Author Nell Freudenberger. (Bruno Vincent/Getty Images)

Most fiction authors start out writing about a very circumscribed world — one that begins and ends in their area code. From the get-go, Nell Freudenberger’s work has been broad and wide reaching. Her first book, the story collection Lucky Girls (2003), included a tale about a westerner in Bombay who falls into an adulterous relationship with an older Indian man; a story about a privileged American woman working with AIDS babies in Bangkok; and an Indian woman’s bittersweet musings on her mother’s ill-fated journey through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan.

One reason for the global span of the 31-year-old American’s fiction is that she’s had the good fortune to travel extensively — she’s lived in both Bangkok and Bombay. But the way I see it, choosing to write about such far-flung locales demonstrates the author’s innate need to grasp how the other half lives.

Her new novel, The Dissident, continues Freudenberger’s quest for cross-cultural understanding. This time, though, the action takes place on native soil — not New York, where she lives, but California, where she grew up. The subversive of the title is Yuan Zhao, a Chinese performance artist who lucks into a one-year residency in Los Angeles, where he will teach art at St. Anselm’s School for Girls while preparing for a massive gallery exhibition of his work.

The idea for the book hearkens back to Freudenberger’s teen years. “When I was in high school, a visiting artist came to our school from China for three weeks, and he taught us to paint with ink. He didn’t speak English, so our classes were silent,” Freudenberger says during a lull at the recent International Festival of Authors in Toronto. Nursing a pot of tea in a hotel restaurant, Freudenberger is genial if a little diffident; she’s clearly more confident on the page than in person.

The Chinese envoy didn’t turn Freudenberger into an artiste, but his stint made an indelible impression. Freudenberger eventually took up Mandarin and became interested in a cadre of Beijing artists who rose to prominence in the early ’90s. Huddled in Dong Cun — the city’s “East Village” — rogue artists like Rong Rong and Zhang Huan strove to assert their humanity amid China’s relentless industrialization. The result was some gutsy art. One of Zhang Huan’s most arresting photographs depicts him sitting naked on a public latrine, slathered with fish sauce and coated with flies. As research for the book, Freudenberger travelled to China, and earlier this year, she contributed a story on Beijing’s East Village to Travel and Leisure magazine. She tweaked the East Village’s mythology slightly for The Dissident.

“People sometimes talk about a writer’s themes, and that never made sense to me,” says Freudenberger. “But a person once said to me, ‘Your themes are just your obsessions, and they would be your obsessions even if you weren’t writing about them.’”

(Random House of Canada)

Freudenberger’s most prominent theme/obsession is the friction that can arise when different cultures collide — and stereotypes break down. Yuan Chao’s host family are affluent Californians with a litany of issues. Gordon Travers is a psychiatrist with a passion for genealogy but scant feelings for his immediate kin. His son Max is an inscrutable youth with a new-found affinity for firearms and his daughter Olivia is coping with peer pressure at St. Anselm’s. Cece, the matriarch, is a kind, if delusional, soul who hopes that housing a Chinese dissident will somehow unite her fraying family.

Informed by hoary clichés about Eastern spirituality and only a cursory knowledge of Chinese culture, Cece Travers views her serene houseguest as a man of deep political convictions and inner peace. The enigmatic Yuan, on the other hand, views the Traverses — indeed, Americans in general — with amusement, assuming them to be hopelessly obsessed with wealth and status. Without revealing too much, let’s just say that Yuan isn’t quite as dignified as he seems, nor is Cece quite as dizzy as she seems.

While it carries a provocative title, The Dissident is not a political book. “I’m definitely not qualified to write about geopolitics,” Freudenberger concedes. Indeed, one of the most significant details to come from her interviews with Rong Rong and his anti-establishment cronies was their frustration at “the political context that got put onto their work, especially by Western curators,” she says. North American and European interpreters often talk about the influence of the Cultural Revolution on the artists’ work. It’s a misguided analysis, Freudenberger says, given that many of them were born in the ’70s.

Like the East Villagers, Freudenberger is less interested in ideology than the struggle of individuals. “The stories that I’m trying to tell are at a much more personal level,” she says. With The Dissident, “I was interested in the American family, and the perceptions that they had of this man before he arrived.”

Conversely, she wanted Yuan’s hosts to be an idealized version of American domesticity: “I wanted a family that you might imagine if your only contact with America was in movies.” Yes, the Traverses are dysfunctional, but Freudenberger avoids the savage depictions of West Coast excess that you find in novels by Michael Tolkin or Bruce Wagner. While highly attuned to social discord, Freudenberger is a sympathetic chronicler, imbuing even her shiftiest characters with humanity.

That’s likely because her own travels have taught her a lot about social interaction. While teaching English in a government school in Bangkok in the late ’90s, she had to contend with Thai etiquette on a daily basis. It’s not unusual in Thailand for a friend or colleague to tell a woman, “You look fat today.” What seems like a cruel salutation is actually a phrase of endearment; the North American equivalent might be, “You look cute today.” Body language was another touchy issue.

“In Thailand, where you put your feet is very important,” Freudenberger says. “I must have been hiding my feet under my skirt for the first six months, because you are just afraid that you might put your foot in the direction of the king. Americans are kind of humourlessly worried about that. To be intensely culturally sensitive, but also be ignorant of the place that you’re travelling — it may be a stereotype of Americans, but you do run into that a lot. I guess the humour in that was something that inspired my writing.”

The Dissident is published by HarperCollins and is in stores.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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