Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Amused by my curiosity about their leading nationalist, the Russians suggested I join them the following evening to meet Zhirinovsky’s New York friends and advisers. At ten at night at the kitschy Russian Samovar restaurant on West Fifty-Second Street, I was introduced to several bearish-looking men with broad features and beards, who wore turtlenecks with their dark blue suits. My attempts to discuss Zhirinovsky’s anti-Semitism were curtailed by the Unforgettable Eugenia, a seventy-two-year-old woman in a long sequined dress, who wore enormous plastic glasses and sang Russian Jewish folk tunes. “I spent last month with him,” one member of our group reported between songs, producing snapshots to prove it. “It’s a shame, you know—he’s really getting very arrogant, not nearly as funny as he used to be. Famous people always have this problem with their sense of humor.”

I wondered how funny he used to be and said that he seemed strikingly unfunny these days. “You’ve been reading the New York papers too much,” one man said. “Vladimir just likes power and attention. Everyone hated him at school; he was the class clown, and provincial! So he says whatever will make him popular now, but he doesn’t believe any of his own rhetoric. He’s not like Rutskoi or Hitler or Stalin. It’s all a joke, the biggest joke around.” I thought this was pushing cynicism pretty far, but I didn’t get to say so because the Unforgettable Eugenia began her grand medley from Fiddler on the Roof.

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk,” said Zhirinovsky’s friends, and they led me to a basement at the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Eleventh Avenue, where I found what appeared to be a reproduction of the lobby bar at the Intourist Hotel, circa 1986. A band in navy-blue jackets with yellow piping was singing Beatles songs in Russian. A mirrored ball revolved overhead, and every table had plates of those revoltingly grainy tomatoes and cucumbers I had thought you could grow only in the depleted soil of the steppes.

I asked whether Zhirinovsky were gay, a rumor I’d heard from friends in Moscow. “He’s never very interested in women,” someone remarked. “And he’s always got those good-looking young guards around him.” Someone else knew a male poet who claimed to have had a long-term liaison with Zhirinovsky. The vodka had been going around, so everyone was keen to be helpful at this point. “If you want to sleep with him, we could probably arrange that for you,” one volunteered. Another shrugged and said, “It might be fun to write about afterward,” then added sotto voce, “but I know, believe me. I’d think twice about it if I were you.”

I was somewhat distracted by the women who had come to join us, all wearing enormous quantities of turquoise eye shadow, one sporting a floor-length black satin dress and black satin gloves up to her shoulders with jet buttons. Feeling out of my depth in the political conversation, I got up and danced under the mirrored ball to “All You Need Is Love” and “Let It Be,” making good use of the slow-dance two-step that I had last utilized in high school. When I sat down, I pointed out that even if Zhirinovsky was really an actor and didn’t believe his own rhetoric, he might get trapped by it. “Don’t worry,” someone said. “He won’t get enough power to be trapped. He’ll just get influence. Russians are too cynical to elect such a cynic.” I expressed relief. “A cynic like that,” said one of the company, “could much more easily be elected mayor of New York, even president of the United States.” He slapped his hand on the edge of the table. “That’s why we live here,” he said, and burst out laughing.

TAIWAN

“Don’t Mess with Our Cultural Patrimony!”

New York Times Magazine, March 17, 1996

In 1995, the Metropolitan Museum was planning a sensational exhibition of work from the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and they were courting press coverage. They anticipated safe, flattering articles about how loans of the first order were being brought over for a spectacular installation. My first draft of this story consisted mainly of a semi-scholarly discussion of Song dynasty Chinese painting, which I had studied in college. When plans for the show began to unravel, my essay had to be rewritten entirely. It ran as a cover story with an image of a landscape painting by the Song master Fan Kuan behind a rope and the caption “The Chinese Masterpiece You Won’t See at the Met.” Although the curator was distressed by that cover, the exhibition was among the most visited in the museum’s history. As I’d learned in Moscow and Beijing, controversy can be a great ally of art. If this exhibition was important enough to provoke national protest in Taiwan, it must be worth seeing.