philip tinari

The fatman came to our seminar. Since the two things he professes to hate the most (besides the thing he hates the most) are Shanghai and the academy, I didn’t think he’d make it, and that was even before what happened last week in Chengdu. I didn’t believe he’d come until I got the call to come to his suite late one night, where he sat in his bathrobe on a couch next to an old writer-friend, the poolside Mao incarnate. The next morning after a state-owned-hotel breakfast of gruel, broccoli, and a soy-sauce friend egg, he sat before the assembled audience of academics in a pink t-shirt, his blue linen worker pantlegs tucked into his socks. “Designing China could mean anything,” he opened. “Like Fucking China.”

Shanghai is a city of servants, began the diatribe, who traded the foreign occupiers for the fiction of the people’s democracy. From there he moved through the litany of cases that to him mark the increasing inhumanity of an irredeemably flawed system. The sterilized cop-killer executed. The earnest lawyer detained. The earthquake investigator on treason trial. No slides of dropping vases, dipping vases, grinding vases into powder. No gray brick buildings, no riffs on Ming chairs or Qing temples. No ceramic flower panels. No hundred-hour-long videos.

Someone asked: “Whither Chimerica?” He replied that the die were cast the day Pat Nixon got taken to see the pandas in the Beijing Zoo while the two boys struck a “deal among mobsters.” Two illicit lovers, unable to hop out of bed and into the shower. NBC was the only news outlet not to interview him last August, although they sent an invitation for him to come into the studio to demonstrate calligraphy. “Don’t think Western valuations of human life are absolute,” he chided, “particularly across cultures,” one eye to Abu Ghraib.

Someone asked: “Can’t we separate China as nation-state and China as civilization?” He replied that you can’t tell by looking at a girl whether she’s deep-down good; you can only say her skirt fits well or her shade of lipstick flatters.

Someone, a misguided old Shanghainese friend from the New York days, asked: “How do you keep up the opposition even as you design buildings for the government?” That he had so little idea about how things get built–that the fatman was on retainer to the Swiss boys, who were in turn at the hire of the state–is interesting, even if the answer, the old line about how the government would never pick him in a million years, was not.

Someone asked: “What can we do here as foreigners?” all stuck on the problems of presence as complicity to the bigbad state. “Foreigners in China are only ever here out of interest,” using in Chinese the two words that mark the two main valences of “interest,” “So you’re best off walking around, finding a nice restaurant, taking some pictures, and going home to tell your friends what a great time you had.”

After the talk, that’s just what he did. While the scholars kept behind closed doors–the Californians wondering if he was all for show, the Shanghainese taking offense on behalf of their city and country–the fatman was out taking pictures for his copkiller documentary, chauffered by an abstractionist-cum-art deco dealer in a five-series and a Patek Phillipe.

I met them for lunch in a little Huaiyang place around the corner from Xintiandi. We had a good, tight room on the second floor, just four of us. The walls were hung with line drawings of bygone local scenes–a barber drying a head with a coal-heated blower, picky ladies inspecting meat. Having eaten his lunchtime pills, he carefully filled the tiny Ziploc into which someone had sorted them with spoon after spoon of tea. He sealed the bag and set it at the center of the table, which at this point only held a few cold appetizers. He let three seconds go by, just long enough for the three of us to start wondering exactly what the teabag was doing on the table. And then suddenly, a fist fell from above, bursting the bag and soaking the abstractionist in tea. “You sure move quick!” came the gleeful punchline, as the abstractionist produced a napkin and began to wipe down his face. “Funny, no?” he asked. “I learned that one from Uli Sigg.”