



The enormous brick fortress in West Harlem was built in the mid-1970s as a visionary housing project, a new model for an affordable, self-contained urban community. Today, on a balmy September afternoon, it is a low-income housing compound lined with security cameras, guards, and triple-locked doors. A few drunks shouting at nobody in particular linger outside. Pound for pound, though, the most dangerous person living here may just be a diminutive 85-year-old Chinese grandmother dressed in a stylish purple sweater set with black leopard spots sent by her daughter in Canada.



This is not a slum. Neither is it where you would expect to find an internationally known human-rights warrior living out her golden years. In her one-bedroom apartment, Dr. Gao Yaojie — known to many as "the AIDS Granny" — moves with great difficulty through her tidy clutter and stacks of belongings. In the small kitchen, she stirs a pot of rice and bean porridge, one of the few things she can digest. She lost most of her stomach in surgery after a suicide attempt four decades ago and suffered multiple beatings during the Cultural Revolution.

A large bed where Gao's live-in caretaker sleeps overwhelms the living room. In Gao's bedroom, two twin beds are piled with stacks of books, photos and quilts. Her desk is heaped with papers, medications, and yet more books. Gao's computer is always on, often clutched to her chest as she lies working in bed.

"I left China with one thing in each hand," Gao says to me in Chinese. "A blood-pressure cuff to monitor my high blood pressure and a USB stick with more than a thousand pictures of AIDS victims."

Before she agreed to meet me at all, she set rules via email: There would be no discussion of China's politics, the Communist Party's future, or the myriad issues that concern other dissidents. These are inexorably tied to her own life, but Gao does not want to be known as a multipurpose Chinese dissident. A lifetime of looking over her shoulder for danger has left her wary. She never learned English.

"I seldom see anyone," she says. "Many people from China are very complicated. I don't know what kind of intentions they have. I see them as cheating to get food, drinks, and money. They don't really do any meaningful work."

Gao believes she is watched here, just as she was in China for so many years. Given China's well-documented pattern of stifling critical voices abroad, it's impossible to rule out that someone is monitoring or harassing her, even in Harlem.

Money is tight. She had a fellowship through Columbia University for her first year in the U.S. Now she gets by on private donations that cover roughly $35,000 a year in expenses, the largest of those being her rent at Riverside. She has a few teeth left and can't afford dental work.

She spends her days in bed, sleeping, writing, researching online, and obsessively analyzing what she witnessed in China in a lifetime that bridged tremendous tumult. For hours, she clicks away on her keyboard, emailing contacts back home for information and putting final touches on her newest book. She learned to use a computer at age 69.

This will be Gao's 27th book and the ninth to chronicle China's AIDS epidemic, a public health catastrophe that decimated entire villages and put her on the government's enemy list. "You wouldn't understand the earlier books, they were too technical," she says, flashing a near-toothless grin.

"Although I am by myself, appearing to be lonely, I am actually very busy," she says. "I am turning 86 soon and will be gone, but I will leave these things to the future generations."

Her unplanned journey from Henan province to Harlem began 17 years ago, six months after she retired as a gynecologist and professor at the Henan Chinese Medicine University hospital in Zhengzhou. She went from being a retired grandmother to China's first and most famous AIDS activist, and became such a thorn in the side of the regime that she eventually fled to New York for safety, away from her family and everyone she knows.

She turns to her computer and pulls up a photo of a gravely ill woman with an incision up her abdomen. Gao did not set out to become a dissident.

"I didn't do this because I wanted to become involved in politics," she says. "I just saw that the AIDS patients were so miserable. They were so miserable."