According to the officer, Ai’s high profile has made him an expedient tool for Westerners to attack China, but “pawns sooner or later all get sacrificed.” Of course, it’s obvious that Ai also regards the officer as a pawn, one who, in serving an oppressive regime, has sacrificed his freedom to speak for himself.
In his first memoir, “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows,” Ai recounts this and other showdowns with the state — confrontations that, alongside his iconoclastic art, have both forged his status as an international icon and forced him to work in political exile.
While his father was cleaning latrines, scraping feces that had frozen “into icy pillars,” 10-year-old Ai built the stove, fetched water from the well and endured a life that resembled “an open-ended course in wilderness survival training, if we were lucky enough to survive.” During countless “denunciation meetings” of which Ai Qing was a primary target, the author bore intimate witness to his father’s ritualized humiliation.
Interspersed throughout this narrative are flashbacks to the senior Ai’s birth, his childhood as the eldest son of prosperous landowners who often abandoned him to the care of his nursemaid, a loving peasant woman named Big-Leaf Lotus.
Similarly, a Western metropolis — New York — would become for Ai Weiwei what Paris was for his father: a kaleidoscopic swirl of influences that catalyzes new ways of seeing.
If Ai Qing was tentatively searching for a new vernacular to democratize the subject and scope of poetry, Ai Weiwei found in the technology of communication a way to democratize his audience.
Ai writes evocatively of the nights spent in his detention cell when “all I could do was use memories to fill the time, looking back at people and events, like gazing at a kite on a long string flying farther and farther, until it cannot be seen at all.” Most poignant are his midnight conversations with the young, rural-born men employed to guard his door, their cracking joints reminding Ai of “a crisp snapping sound like a turnip being broken into two pieces.” The guards “gradually became fully, noisily human to me,” Ai writes.
In the final pages of the book, Ai writes that “advocacy of freedom is inseparable from an effort to attain it, for freedom is not a goal but a direction, and it comes into being through the very act of resistance.” Remembering, too, is a form of resistance.