Fall 2014 Issue - The Harvard Advocate

                  down the sink : rushed water



funnels after fish entrails, or grease gives



a type of collapse 



              inward, frying in a pan



fennel-seasoned. An equation equates 



oil and flowers, fields and division. Descent



is a disintegration by parts. What is missing?



 



I want to peer down at myself from above



and point out algae. How my grandfather



took me to the pond 



    for the gutting of it—



one blink’s worth too much. Why isn’t there 



more inside? Why isn’t there more to bleed, 



protrude, be stripped? All these still stalks



 



come from somewhere. Fennel was a field,



was a marathon, was a death in a field 



under clouds of phosphate.



  I slice a fish



sideways and grasp at the inside. Now



things go quickly, death is its own mass



and caves in time toward the event, and



 



viewed from without,



each second slows to a whisper



                      never to cross



over. Here. Here seem all horizons 



to end the same, bundled up in one ribbon 



 



tucked between the teeth and tongue.

as if eaten away 



beyond the storm



 



overwhelmingly



searing colors



 



beating back clouds 



fixed by light



 



cleaning wounds 



stroke deeply & clear



 



eddy of dark water 



today with cancer



the shroud lifts 



menacing brush



 



here a guest 



the season ends



 



pulled out of sight 



uncharacteristic



 



in water, silhouettes 



(tears, shriek, hush)



 



uncomposed



it doesn’t affect you



a canvas corner 



strokes against realism



 



appearance of blood 



that swan in the sky



 



a pupil’s bridges 



turning in wind



 



raise their oars 



a thick cocktail



 



scans came back 



you unravel

It is with his mirror he reconstructs 



the passage



of time. 



The warden walks from the north



wall to the south



one time every hour. Cannot



hear his approach—too loud



with the flushing, the



slamming echoes 



of the two—but can



see it in mirrors



if held here like this



yes, only if you are outside 



can you look in, only with 



a mirror can you look out.



The forcing of myopia 



through the frosting of 



glass windows.



 



It is with his mirror he waits, thinks,



“is there such a thing



as normal when I am 



a person, people have teeth,



and I am not entitled to them?”



Just wants teeth to not 



hiss when speaks, so can



be heard, understood.



They say you will



die anyway, what need 



you teeth for—to atone,



to whet a blade for carving?



 



It is with his mirror he shows  



a creation: thirty-two gamepieces,



and a board. Carved of soap,



dyed with pen. 



It is with his mirror he counts backwards,



inducts backwards,



comes to the chill



that comes of it.



It is with his mirror he sees a nick 



and blood. Cut himself



shaving because the present 



 



is closer to him



than he could see



is closer to him



than to anyone



else I know. It absorbs 



him as a blanket 



facing wind. There is 



no wind here 



nor any toy or string to wind, find



wound. But there is a wound where 



the selves in mirror



are closer than they appear.



 

There is an urban legend commonly whispered among schoolchildren in southeast Queens, New York City, that goes like this: A high school girl has been babysitting for some kids in her neighborhood. (In local retellings, it’s usually Bayside, Glen Oaks, or Bellerose.) One day, she’s putting the kids to bed and sees a life-size clown statue in the corner of the room. She inspects it and concludes it’s just a recent, unpleasant addition to the nursery. Satisfied that her charges are safely asleep in their beds, she heads to the den and flips on the TV. A news channel announces: Escaped Mental Patient On The Loose from Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, Believed To Be Dressed As Clown. 



The rest of the story is prone to variation. Tamer versions have the hapless babysitter call the parents and the police, who remove the deranged clown to a padded enclosure where he is never again to be seen. Others recall the clown hacking the unsuspecting babysitter and sleeping kiddies to bits. In these accounts, the clown remains at large to this day. 



The children who pass along this story do so on ragged scraps of paper, in hissed, stolen gossip. Each weekday, they are trundled by tired parents or aged buses along a winding path framed by massive buildings on either side. To reach the two regional middle schools and single district high school in a cul-de-sac at the road’s end, a driver must take its passengers past older structures, decrepit ones with bars on their windows. Barricaded abodes squeeze and shadow the road, until the vehicle finally emerges into a courtyard of tasteful stucco and slate playgrounds. The schools glimmer in the morning sun, as precious offspring are placed safely in the hands of their teachers. A snake of SUVs and hybrid sedans creep away from campus and directly onto the tree-lined Long Island Expressway. The brand-new grounds are a welcome substitute for the older local schools, all in desperate need of funding. It’s a shame they were built behind a cluster of mental hospitals.



 



*



 



Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, established by the Lunacy Commission of New York State, took up residence in Queens in 1912. The name of the outpost, a portmanteau of Creed’s Moor, is a lasting jeer at the previous owners; the large plot of land on which the Center was built was originally billed as a farm, though moors are notoriously useless for producing crops. The state-owned plot, purchased from the Creed family in 1870, was first lent to the National Rifle Association and National Guard as a firing range. Situated in a far-flung corner of the borough, its activity only irritated some livestock and their owners. The first hospital building took in 32 patients and quintupled its population in six years. When it ran out of beds, patients slept in abandoned barracks left on the property. 



An onslaught of development in the mid-20th century sought to catch Queens up to its shinier siblings, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Farmlands like the Creeds’ were destroyed in favor of housing developments and strip malls.  Commuters took up residence from the head to the tail of Long Island, a land mass whittled by the Atlantic to resemble a Florida-bound flounder. Creedmoor continued to establish outposts along the island as if punctuating its shape, defining the vertebrae of the fish’s spine. The number of admitted patients to the Center swelled to over 7,000 by the 1950s, filling over 50 massive, dingy yellow outposts to capacity. 



Along with the purchase of the moor, the state bought one of the few neighboring farms that had been left undeveloped. Working on the farm became a component of treatment for the patients. The labor was thought to be therapeutic, budgets were tight, and the number of mouths to feed kept rising. Felons deemed too insane for prison were sent to the most secluded regions of the vast premises. 



In a dark basement, Dr. Lauretta Bender would place a soothing hand on the head of a trembling child, and turn it to the left or the right. A schizophrenic child, she believed, would yield to her touch; a normal child would turn away. Those deemed psychotic by her diagnostic tests would be administered the fruits of her most recent labors, the newly experimental electroconvulsive shock therapy.



The advent of antipsychotic drugs like thorazine allowed many patients to return to the world beyond the bars of the windows. Some went on to lead normal, happy lives, adding daily pills to their habitual, all-American nine-to-fives. Many went back behind bars, greeted this time by cold prison floors. Others tried the former, served a stint in the latter, and ended up huddling for warmth beneath layers of clothing on the city streets. 



 



*



 



My father grew up in the house we live in now, three blocks and a long, uphill walk from the Creedmoor site. He remembers a different Bellerose, one where he and his friends were forbidden to play around the mental hospital and farm by worried parents. But the pristine rolling lawns of the grounds were too tempting; the neighborhood boys often took to the hills with their wooden toboggans after a particularly enticing snowfall. When we drive past a certain exit on the Long Island Expressway, my father sometimes waves a finger over the passenger seat at some overpasses and trees, saying, “In my day, this was all Creedmoor.” 



The administration of antipsychotic medication, an outpatient treatment that did not require 50 buildings’ worth of beds, caused the patient population at Creedmoor to dwindle from 7,000 to 500.  Today, only a few active buildings remain, relics of an empire for patients who require something more than pharmaceutical care. Purged of its reluctant participants, the farm became a public park in 1975.  With too little money to fill it or even demolish it, one of the Creedmoor outposts—referred to as Building 25—was left abandoned for 40 years. Amateur photographers who delight in grotesque, abandoned locations have published pictures of its interior. Multicolored pigeon droppings form stalactite formations that coat the walls and ceilings; wallpaper and paint peel back to free the asbestos beneath; a collection of rusted cash machines and typewriters, already outdated when they were left behind, rust by a broken window. But you would never know Building 25’s interior decay from the outside. Its façade, better-kept than those of many still-active facilities, bears no mark of the deterioriation within. 



I attended one of the intermediate schools constructed behind Creedmoor. My mother says she never truly got used to the dismal morning drive to deposit me behind a mental institution for eight hours a day. My father worked as a clinical psychologist, performing evaluations of at-risk students in public schools and overseeing outpatient treatment at a clinic in Staten Island. He had a long commute from our home in Bellerose to the clinic each morning that required him to leave while I was still eating breakfast in my pajamas. One day in eighth grade, I came downstairs to eat and noticed that he, too, was in his pajamas. He was going, he informed me, to a conference at a new clinic for children that Creedmoor had built in a lot right next to my school’s campus—today, we could walk to our respective day jobs together. I passed that lot every day on my way home from school, but I had never noticed that the perpetual construction had come to an end. I was stunned to learn that there was something new being created for an institution that had seemed so static and quiet beside three schools of screaming children. He came home that day to report that the new facilities were beautiful and modern, worthy of comparison to the brand new schools that now mark the campus. 



 After the creation of the new center, I always wondered why my father didn’t transfer jobs to work closer to home, but deeper down I knew that his work in outreach was more important to him than it was to cultivate a new career to avoid a commute. Some evenings, when he and my mother locked the office door, I knew he was telling her horror stories from work: parents abusing their children and children abusing their parents. And these were the patients deemed well enough for outpatient treatment, leaving my mother to wonder about the condition of those who remained in the facilities next door to the school. 



Only once in my three years on campus did I ever see someone emerge from the remaining Creedmoor buildings. We had just been released for recess. In the distance, I noticed a slow row of people emerge from a Creedmoor side entrance. They milled around the enclosed playground, some stalking the perimeter, others half-heartedly tossing a basketball. I thought of all the times kids in my middle school would ask each other if they were “in the wrong building,” a joke I now understood as a cruel jab at the actual sick people who were our neighbors. I stood paralyzed by this realization. A few minutes later, a guard rounded the Creedmoor patients back into a line. Our lunch aide blew the whistle, signaling the daily headcount and the dreaded return to math class. The inmates returned to their respective institutions. 



 



*



 



On January 28, 2014, Raymond Morillo escaped from Creedmoor during a psychological evaluation. Though he had recently maxed out his 1998 sentences for slashing and manslaughter, authorities deemed the 33-year-old too dangerous for the city streets and sought to place him behind a new set of bars. Around 11:30 a.m., Morillo quietly exchanged clothes with an insider friend and strolled off of the premises. The hospital did its best to hush up the breach, and my mother only found out a week later in a community newsletter: Garage Sale, Church Fair, Escaped Convict. By this point, Morillo had been caught boarding a Greyhound bus outside Memphis, Tennessee, one step away from anonymous freedom out West. I have not been back to my middle school for several years, but I can already hear the phony, prepubescent chatter: Those in the know can guarantee that Morillo evaded capture by donning a clown suit.  

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything.



–Maria Montessori



 



All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.



 –Antonin Artaud



 



Adults fundamentally misunderstand children. Few talk about it, which is odd, because the evidence is everywhere. Tune into any form of media, and you’ll learn that education is in crisis, that toys are too gendered, or that the internet has become too dangerous, while playgrounds are now too safe. Even the most essential facts about children—the level of their need for supervision, for strictness, and for stimulation—appear to be completely mysterious to the people tasked with raising them. Confronting this widespread mystification, it becomes difficult to believe that all adults were once themselves children—let alone how recently this was the case. 



You could argue that film and television made for children is an exception to this principle of misunderstanding. Think of the unshakeable pink joy on a child’s face as she bounds for the couch in time for Spongebob, or belts out Frozen’s theme song for the hundredth time. Yet this enthusiasm hardly proves that producers of children’s film and television have any real understanding of the minds of children. Adults buy the movie tickets, after all. And as anyone who’s ever seen a child go glow-eyed in front of the TV will know, they’re as entranced by adverts for cereal and vacuum cleaners as they are by cartoons. It is the screen itself that hypnotizes, not the content.  



This isn’t to say that all film and television made for children is primarily shaped by the tastes of adults. Universal Studios’ Despicable Me, released in 2010, is a useful illustration of where children’s movies go right. Simultaneously schmaltzy and bizarre, the film’s premise—a supervillain adopts three orphans as part of a plot to steal the moon before growing to adore them and embracing the role of fatherhood—mangles tropes in a delightfully self-aware fashion, spooling out a narrative that feels both expansive and familiar. The film grossed over 500 million dollars and spawned an Oscar-nominated sequel, plus plans for a third (to be released in 2017), as well as a 2015 spinoff devoted entirely to the invention at the crux of the films’ success: a sea of small, banana-colored, absurdist creatures called minions.   



A relatively minor feature of the original Despicable Me, minions have since become a cultural phenomenon. They are ubiquitous online and endlessly purchasable, not only as toys and costumes, but also as images plastered on the surface of every object a child could conceivably desire, not to speak of products that could only be of use to older people, like phone cases and adult-size shoes. (There is even, floating somewhere out there in this world, a minion blimp.) It can be difficult, once this alarmingly rapid evolution from character to brand has taken place, to recall exactly what was appealing about a given figure in the first place—think Mickey Mouse. Yet a clue to the popularity of the minions can be found, I think, in a children’s show that, at first glance, bears little similarity to Despicable Me at all. 



Pingu ran from 1986–2000, and chronicled the escapades of a young penguin and his igloo-dwelling family in claymation. A joint British-Swiss production, the show consisted of 156 five-minute episodes. Unlike Despicable Me, which, like most CGI blockbusters, delivers layers of meaning on multiple levels in order to appeal to viewers of all ages, Pingu’s intended audience was primarily very young children. Its episodes were designed for the shortest of attention spans. They contain not so much actual narratives as quick strings of events that blur into each other, thanks to a strikingly ‘90s overuse of the dissolve technique of scene transition. 



Between the vast, complex, flashy cosmos of Despicable Me and the retro, minimalist landscape of Pingu, we encounter a surprising connection: invented language. A key source of the minions’ comedic appeal is their distinctive mode of communication, which consists of a mishmash of mispronounced and seemingly random phrases of English, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, etc. (“gelato,” “what,” “para tu”), mixed with a gibberish that echoes the intonations of real language. The characters in Pingu express themselves in a nonsensical yet melodious series of babbles, honks, squawks, mutterings, sighs, and squeaks. 



The minions’ language is only a small aspect of Despicable Me, one zany element in a narrative otherwise dominated by American English. Pingu, on the other hand, features no real words of any kind. Only once in the entire length of the show’s 14-year run can a coherent English phrase be heard. At the end of the Christmas Special episode, first aired on December 25, 1992, Pingu turns to the camera and honks the words “Happy Christmas!” while his plasticine beak pokes out roundly. (The result sounds a little more like “Happy Christ-moose!,” implying that, like a real mother tongue, Pingu-ese leaves an indelible imprint on its native speakers.)



Despicable Me and Pingu are hardly alone in their representation of nonsensical communication. Though markedly absent from American children’s television and from movies in general, several other British kids’ TV shows also feature creatures who do not speak anything close to comprehensible English. The vaguely nightmarish Teletubbies coo and burble like toddlers making their very first grasps at language, while the more obscure, rodent-like aliens that populate the creepy and claustrophobic world of The Clangers (1969–74) communicate exclusively in haunting whistles. Teletubbies was heavily criticized for its use of babble-talk. Angsty child psychologists and parents chastised its creators for supposedly exacerbating the delay in language fluency that has been proven to result when young children are exposed to too much television. This criticism has since been refuted, though the fact remains that the Teletubbies’ sing-song gibberish might be, if not developmentally damaging, so insufferable as to cause real psychological harm. 



The major difference between Pingu or Despicable Me and shows like Teletubbies or The Clangers is that the penguins and minions in the former speak not gibberish but actual invented languages, however rudimentary they may be. After watching a series of Pingu episodes, you will begin to notice patterns, rhythms—even something like structural rules. “Penguinese has a complex intonation pattern,” writes Tony Thorne, Director of the Language Centre at King’s College, London. “It seems to mimic not just the language of human beings, but the sounds that animals—and birds, of course—make, too.” 



Key elements of the minions’ language have been explained and interpreted by enthusiastic amateurs on fan pages across the web. Universal went so far as to develop an app that humorously “translates” the minion’s speech—just one part of its menacingly extensive marketing campaign. 



It is this complexity that accounts for the extent of the Despicable Me trilogy’s critical success and saturation of pop culture. Yet—like the sprawling Pingu Wikia that cannot possibly have been constructed by the show’s primary viewing audience of infants—this interest in the linguistic construction of minion-speak explains the films’ appeal for adults, not children. Kids, while they might be unconsciously aware of the similarities between minion- and penguin-talk to human language, are hardly going to be delighted by analysis of these constructions’ surprising linguistic sophistication. Could this be another case of mistaking adult enthusiasm for real engagement with the minds of tiny viewers? Or is it possible that, while adults are drawn to the obsessive pleasure of picking apart the machinery of these constructed languages, they hold a different—and even more significant—magnetism for the minds of children?    



Compare, for a moment, the delightfully weird babble of the minions and Pingu family with the way English is spoken in the rest of children’s TV and cinema. Recall the deliberate slowness, patronizingly exaggerated emotion, and intense, syrupy feminization of the voice in shows such as Barney and Friends and Dora the Explorer, not to mention the limited vocabulary and extreme oversimplification of what’s actually being said. If anyone spoke like this in real life, it would be nightmarish—perhaps this is why the eerie, sing-song intonation reminiscent of children’s TV has become something of a trope in horror movies. Yet we subject children to it by the mouthful. 



The simplified language of children’s films and television shows reflects the tamed, narrowed, decluttered version of the real world they construct. It is as true on the visual level as it is on the linguistic. Visually, Pingu has a distinctly German minimalism: a sparse white landscape set against a block-blue sky; a homogenous cast of near-identical clay penguins; a set of simple, symbol-like objects (ball, fish, skis). Despicable Me, though infinitely more expansive and varied, remains anchored in the visual archetypes of children’s narratives (orphanage, suburban street, villain’s lair) which tether it to recognizable terrain like a tent to soil.  



The made-up languages of Despicable Me and Pingu open these landscapes up—tearing their horizons like seams, collapsing the boundaries of their conventional narrative arcs. Once they have tapped into the immeasurable imaginative capacity of their young audiences, the possibilities of meaning and sensation within each story become limitless. The central problem—even tragedy—of children’s TV and film is that productions fail to utilize their most potent asset: the outlandish, surreal, and inconceivably vivid minds of their viewers. What makes Despicable Me and Pingu so successful is that—with the melodies of their warped and gabbled chatter—they manage to do exactly this.    



 



After we emerge into the grayscale latter stages of our lives, it becomes easy to forget how frustrating life was when we were children. A child spends her days being spoken down to, misunderstood, and ignored—being told she must follow rules “just because,” that her deepest concerns are humorous or nonsensical, and that she won’t possibly be able to understand until she’s grown. Imagine the relief of that child—legs tucked up against the black plush of the movie theatre seat or the familiar folds of her sofa—as she listens to a language that belongs not to adults but to her and to her alone. A language that is honest as music and rich as a full young heart, without boundaries or barriers keeping her out. A language that, to a child, probably sounds most like the truth.  

*Cryogenic*







There is a building somewhere in the bowels of Beijing, beneath the gimlet sky and jungle streets. It is probably not too far from Tiananmen Square, where thousands of tourists scurry under the eyes of pimpled plainclothes policemen. On even the smoggiest of Beijing days, the air inside remains cool and dry. There are probably no windows and no indication of this building’s meaning or purpose.



This building holds national treasures of the People’s Republic of China, of no monetary value, yet zealously guarded: over 50 years’ worth of 15 by 20 foot canvases, all painted over in white. Each one-and-a-half-ton canvas was carted here in the dead of night, a monumental secret. To destroy one is a criminal act. If you were to scrape away the paint, a damaged but recognizable image would emerge: the face of Chairman Mao Zedong.



Like a game of spot-the-difference, each portrait would seem identical—receding hair, plump cheeks, mole on the chin—save for some slight detail. In some, Mao’s face would look stern and fatherly, as if disciplining an errant child. Recent portraits would present a flushed, benevolent Mao with a Mona Lisa smile. The earliest portraits would have him donning an octagonal cap and coarse woolen jacket.



All the portraits share one certainty. Starting from the first in 1950, each has hung for one year, more or less, over the gate to Tiananmen Square in Beijing. A small handful have been assaulted by rotten fruit, black paint, and even fire. During the Tiananmen Square protests of 1984, one was pelted with three ink-filled chicken eggs. Whether it survives its year-long tenure or not, each canvas comes to the same end. It is taken down, painted over in white, and placed in storage for an imagined future, when the country might need it again.



 



*Lifework*







If the storage building is a graveyard—a cryogenic vault—then another building tucked away in a corner of the Forbidden City is a birthplace. It is called “the metal shack” by those in the know. Built in the early 1970s, the shack is fireproof and would be air-proof if not for the vents near the door. Despite its utilitarian appearance, the metal shack is an art studio.



Here, Ge Xiaoguang has worked since 1976. According to rumor, the government pays Ge a salary of 250 dollars every month to lead a team of artists who paint China’s political leaders, from past heroes to modern luminaries. His main and most important job is duplicating the Tiananmen portrait of Chairman Mao, so that it may be replaced every September. Ge boasts that his nearly 40 years of practice allow him to complete the portrait in only 50 days.



“It is still hard to get him right, because it is more than just another piece of art,” he says. “Every year I try to make the painting better. This has been and will always be my most important creation.”



The official No. 4 Standard Photograph of Mao Zedong, owned by the state-operated New China News Agency, is Ge’s blueprint. He makes a few modifications. The official photograph is monochrome, so Ge remakes Mao in ruddy technicolor, aglow with a hearty red blush. 



Ge analyzes the portrait’s pose meticulously. If Chairman Mao were to face straight forward, the portrait would lack dynamism and depth. So Ge turns Mao’s face slightly to the side. Not too far, however, for both ears must always remain visible. One of Ge’s predecessors was banished to a rural district to work as a carpenter, his punishment for painting only one visible ear. Authorities thought the arrangement might imply that the Chairman was but halfhearted in his attention to the voice of the people. 



Nor were their fears entirely unfounded. Reports circulated of a visiting schoolboy, who pointed at the Tiananmen portrait and shouted, “Look! Chairman Mao has no ear!”



Some days, Ge ventures forth from the metal shack and into Tiananmen Square. He stands on a scaffold and works directly on the currently displayed portrait. Its giant size makes it impossible to take in at a close quarters, constantly compelling him to descend from the scaffold to view it from a hundred feet away. While he perches on the scaffold, Ge sweeps the painting with a fan brush to produce an airbrushed quality. Mao’s face glows jovially through the canvas.



 



*Workshop*







Ge was once a protégé. Now he’s the only one of his kind. Once, dozens of Beijing art students studied the art of Mao portraiture. His image was in constant demand. It hung in schools, workplaces, and factories. It was pasted onto banners, buttons, and badges.



From the years 1964–1976, Wang Guodong—a recluse who gave no interviews, and of whom no public photographs exist—was the only official painter of Chairman Mao. In his youth, Wang had been the errant painter who gave Mao only one ear. Banished by the Red Guard to a remote framing factory, he was forced to construct picture frames. But after two years in exile, Wang reclaimed his official title and kept it for two more decades. 



In 1975 government authorities, perhaps anticipating Wang’s approaching old age, demanded that he take on apprentices. Wang selected ten Beijing art students—including a 21-year-old Ge Xiaoguang—more for their political reliability than their artistic talent. From the moment of their selection onward, they studied only political portraiture: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and most of all, Mao. Even with such bounds on their creativity, disparities in talent emerged. Some, like Ge, excelled. Others, it seemed, would never be able to capture Mao’s spirit. Their color palette was too yellow and sickly or their brushstrokes too crude.



Despite the apprentices’ varying levels of aptitude, orders poured in from all over the country. Factory-style, the apprentices painted non-stop. Their sentiment was not creative. They viewed themselves as art workers, rather than artists. Like interchangeable parts, not a single portrait from Wang’s factory was ever signed with a name.



By the 1980s, as China entered its great economic revolution, the demand for Mao’s image had waned. Bicycles gave way to cars, caps gave way to blue jeans, little red books were cast aside for chat rooms. Mao’s face fell out of fashion as brand name logos became de rigueur.



Excepting Ge Xiaoguang, Wang’s apprentices turned elsewhere. The hand-drawn boldness of their propaganda style translated well to the world of advertising. Instead of replicating Mao, they drew movie posters, cosmetics labels, commercials, magazines.



By the time Mao portraits had become passé, Wang Guodong had already retired. He relinquished his brush in 1976, the year of Mao Zedong’s death, for the first time (even through his years at the framing factory, Wang had gone on painting). In 1976, for the first and only time in history, a black-and-white photograph replaced the technicolored portrait over Tiananmen, in an expression of mourning.



 



*Chopping Block*







In June 2006, online chat rooms across China exploded over the alleged mistreatment of a faded, gray, gilt-framed 1950 portrait of Mao. The painting, an early model for the larger one in Tiananmen, had long been kept under wraps by its owner, an anonymous Chinese-American collector. In June, the state-controlled Huachen Auction Company announced the painting would go up at a Beijing auction for an estimated 120,000 dollars.



“How dare they do such a thing,” wrote one user online. “If they sold Mao’s portrait today, they will auction off Tiananmen Square tomorrow!” Huachen Auction Company refused to comment, but quietly withdrew the portrait.



At a 2014 Sotheby’s auction, a 1977 portrait of Mao by Andy Warhol sold for about 12 million dollars—18 times the price it fetched when it was last up for auction in June 2000. The painting shows Mao with a yellow sun-halo over his face, casting his eyes and left side in a deep, inky shadow. His jacket is glossed in crimson.



Warhol often painted Mao: in green and blue and red, with clown makeup, or Marilyn Monroe-style. For some reason, all of Warhol’s portraits show Mao from an angle that reveals only one ear. It is unknown whether Warhol chose to imitate Wang Guodong’s failed portrait, or if Warhol fabricated his own portrait of Mao from existing images. Knowingly or not, he had depicted the Chairman as a bloody one-eared Van Gogh.



 



*Novelty*



Warhol’s repetitions of Mao are far outstripped by those of Ge Xiaoguang’s former peers. In an age of computer-manufactured graphics, these political art workers’ hand-drawn skills are out of fashion yet again. So they’ve returned to their roots, creating novelty items and nostalgic propaganda. Iterations of Mao now appear on bookmarks, posters, pins, playing cards, and liquor bottles.



A restaurant on the outskirts of Beijing called The East is Red goes a step further, repackaging the Cultural Revolution as a dinner theater. Giant black-and-red socialist-realist murals and stenciled portraits of Mao cover the restaurant’s walls. Waiters dressed in Red Guard costumes scamper between tables, while entertainers toting plastic rifles serenade customers with revolutionary songs like “March of the Revolutionary Youth” and “I Love Tiananmen.”



Wedding parties, birthdays, and reunions crowd the massive concrete atrium. Old ladies stand and wave miniature red flags, tears in their eyes. Banquet tables groan under the weight of dishes with translated English titles like “a peasant family is happy” (root vegetables and steamed bread), “recalls past suffering the food” (grain with sand or hard millet), and a speciality from Mao’s home province, “Hunan earth, Hunan passion” (corn cakes stuffed with wild nettle greens).



Younger customers, a generation removed from the Revolution, view the restaurant as an entertainment, akin to a Tudor-themed bar in England. “People in my generation barely ever hear or read anything about the Cultural Revolution, so restaurants like this are really fun for us,” says a young patron. “Today’s China feels so cold and detached compared to the land my grandparents lived in.” 



For older customers, verdicts are mixed. “The first time I came here,” one says, “I was frightened. Sometimes, when everyone was singing, I felt like maybe the bad times were coming back. Maybe this could happen again. But then some songs made me so happy, too.” The performers onstage belt out rousing verses, “One after another following the party, smashing the evil of the old world! The East is red, the sun is rising, China has birthed a Mao Zedong.”



As restaurants dish out Mao-era specialities, Mao’s original portraitists and newcomers continue to churn out images for companies with nostalgic names like Red Years (a playing card manufacturer) and Red Star (a hard liquor brand). On city streets, Mao impersonators of varying levels of believability (some are women) pose for photos with tourists, like the costumed superheroes of Times Square.



 



*Posterity*



It is unknown whether Ge Xiaoguang will retire, whether he has selected an apprentice to succeed him, or whether he is even the real painter behind the Tiananmen Square portraits. Ge may simply be a photogenic face authorities have chosen to represent the artist, when the “real painter” is really an assemblage of dozens of interchangeable art workers.



But Ge does look right when placed next to Mao’s portrait. If he is the artist, then his years of work have transformed him into a convincing double of his subject, save for the lack of a trademark mole on the chin. Ge’s receding hairline follows the same pattern, his round cheeks glow with the same jovial flush, his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth possess something of the portrait’s keen benevolence.



Of previous official portraitists, little is left but a handful of faceless names: Zhou Lingzhao, Zhang Zhenshi, Wang Guodong. Unlike them, Ge Xiaoguang has become something of a minor Beijing celebrity. Walking the streets near Tiananmen, he is often recognized by passersby. The painter and the portrait have converged.



A picture exists of the painter that shows him standing on his scaffold, facing the Mao portrait with his back turned to the photographer. It’s a closeup shot, and all we can see of Mao are his eyes. At close quarters, they look bittersweet. Between them stands the artist—half turned, head tilted, lifting his brush to add one more stroke.

He’s got utilization behavior problems, see, and so it’s no surprise to me that Garney is gonna fondle some sweet girl eventually. He’s done it before, even, so it’s not unexpected and far as I know there’s no resolving a mental situation like his, so sometimes he’s gonna automatically fix a spoke with tools no stopping and sometimes he’s gonna fondle a set of breasts and the fallout of the latter situation is where I come in with the mediation business. The former just ends up with useful hands, a fixed spoke and no need for mediation, so seems clear which of them I’d prefer. As they vow.

The day the package arrived, the boys ran into the common room, pushing and shoving like animals at a watering hole. The House Mother had to fend them off as she cut through the thick cardboard box to expose the glittering gifts inside. The instant she was finished, they began to swarm the box, eager to select the nicest gift from the bunch. Each boy was allowed to take a single gift, and each was determined to make it a good one.