“You see that old man? He’s from my father’s village. I met him years ago, when I was young. I only met him twice. He just told me he was concerned about me, so he came all the way to Beijing to check if I was all right and do you know what he said?”
Weiwei is grinning.
“He said, ‘How long were you in for, Ai Weiwei?'”
“I said, ‘Eighty-one days.’
“He laughed at me and said, ‘Ah, that’s OK, that’s nothing. Don’t make a fuss. I was in for years. In the old days everybody was. Forget about it.”’
–Barnaby Martin, Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
