A Heart for Freedom (25 page)

* * *

With the morning sun radiating through the fabric of the tent, I woke up sweaty all over. The fumes from the new tents made me dizzy, and my back hurt from sleeping on an uneven surface all night.

As I thought about the events of the previous evening, I realized my trust and fellowship with Li Lu was broken. I could no longer depend on him for support or guidance. This time I searched my own heart and asked, “What should I do as a commander in chief for the Square? What is the right thing?”

I felt a deep conviction that the real battle was not at Tiananmen Square or in who would be the people’s spokesman. The most important thing was to reach the army and convince them not to execute martial law. If we could accomplish that, we could achieve real and prolonged peace and success. But that was a dangerous job—stepping out of the protection of the limelight and into the darkness of the unknown. Tiananmen Square, contrary to general assumptions, had become the only safe place in China by then. As the darkness was marching toward us, we all knew that anyone who left the Square could easily be apprehended or disappear, as had happened already to a few key leaders.

Who should be the one to try to contact the army? What would be the duty of a real commander of the movement versus just a figurehead on the Square?

As I began the day, I felt convinced about this new direction. But before I tried to contact the army leaders, I thought about what would happen if I were arrested and disappeared. What would be my last will and testament? I wanted to leave a record of my experiences and my thoughts about the movement so others could pick up where I left off if something happened to me. But amid the chaos of the Square, I didn’t have time to write everything down. That’s when the idea of quickly taping something came to mind.

I saw a young student named Wang Li, whom I had met once or twice during the movement and who had mentioned he might know some Americans. I wanted to find a safe place to record my thoughts, and I didn’t want to talk to the media. I wasn’t intending to conduct an interview. I just wanted to make sure that what I had experienced during the movement wouldn’t be lost.

When I asked Wang if he knew of anyone who could tape my statement for me, he said he knew an American student who might be able to help. He took me to a hotel and introduced me to a tall, Caucasian man named Philip Cunningham. Philip’s Chinese wasn’t very good then, and I wasn’t certain how much he understood what we were talking about. I explained that I needed to find a quiet place to tape my thoughts before I went on a dangerous mission. He said he knew someone who could help us. He didn’t tell me he was working for a media outlet during the Tiananmen crisis.

While I waited for Philip to be ready to go, a female reporter from Hong Kong saw me and insisted on joining us. Wang Li made it clear this would not be an interview, and she agreed. She just wanted to be part of the action.

* * *

Along with the Hong Kong reporter, Philip Cunningham and I took a taxi to the apartment of one of his friends. When we arrived, he made room for me to sit on one of the beds while his friend set up a video camera. Then I started talking.

“My name is Chai Ling. I am twenty-three years old. Isn’t it strange that my birthday is on April 15, the same day Hu Yaobang passed away?”

Speaking rapidly as the words flowed from my heart, I told the story of how I became involved in the student protest movement and the circumstances that led me to become commander in chief of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters. As I relived the events of the past six weeks, I became emotional and started to cry. I had an overwhelming sense we would not be able to achieve our fundamental goals, to convince the government with our peaceful requests for reform. And this made me sad. Still, we had made vows to persevere until the very end and to continue to put forward our requests with integrity and peace.

I thought of what it might mean to my family if something happened to me; about whether my dad would be able to console my mom and younger siblings. I thought of the moments of joy and unity in the early days of the movement, and the recent friction and infighting, the ugly side of human nature. I hoped that in a new free and democratic China, the people’s eyes would be opened, they would be cleansed of the friction, and they would be truly united once and for all to change the nation for peace and a better society. What would this mean for China as a nation? Was it worth our sacrifice? I promised myself that if I survived, I would devote my life to raise up a new generation of Chinese. I was not sure whether I would be given that opportunity.

Still fresh in my mind were Li Lu’s words about the government coming after us with knives and the Square awash with blood and his tirade about abandoning Tiananmen. At one point in my statement, I repeated what Li Lu had said, and these words later became a source of confusion and misunderstanding.

What I meant to communicate was my concern that while many on the Square seemed to have an unrealistic sense of optimism because major foreign media outlets were covering the protests and others had started focusing on certain individual gains, I felt an inevitable crackdown was getting closer. That’s why I had the idea to try to contact the army, to somehow forestall their enforcement of martial law.

When Li Lu told me on May 27 that allowing the students to withdraw from the Square would hand the government a victory, I felt terrible about initially going along with the decision to leave. And when Wang Dan told me that the motives of the people who attended the Capital Joint Conference were no longer as pure as those of the students in the Square, I put those two things together.

I was led to believe some people were selling out the movement by trying to move the students out of the Square so the crackdown could happen under cover of darkness, as it had in 1987, when plainclothes security officers came into the Square at night, beat up some people, and arrested the leaders of a tribute to Zhou Enlai. If that happened again with our movement, no one would know about it, and the government could imprison or kill all the key leaders, making it hard or impossible to start another successful movement. So, for me, it was important for the true face of our government to be known to the Chinese people and shown to the world. However, even in my worst nightmares, I was not prepared for the extent of the crackdown. I didn’t know that words like “blood running like a river” could become so close to reality.

When I heard the phrase from Li Lu the previous morning at Tiananmen, I thought it was insightful, powerful, and moving rhetoric. It might be compared to how some people in America seem to idealize warfare, even though anyone who has been in combat will tell you that war is neither glorious nor glamorous, but brutal, ugly, and cruel. In today’s China, we still find banners in support of the one-child policy that say things like, “We would rather have blood flow like a river than one extra child to be born.”

As I processed my thoughts during the taping, I started realizing what it might mean to ask the students to stay at the Square and face the crackdown. I felt I couldn’t ask people to sacrifice their blood as we had asked them to volunteer to burn themselves during the hunger strike. At that time, more than ten students had stepped forward to volunteer. But this time I did not feel right asking them to make that kind of sacrifice. We each had to make our own decisions.

* * *

In speaking to Philip Cunningham, I was far too trusting. I really had no idea who he was. He kept the tape of my statement, as we had agreed, to be released to the public if something bad happened to me. Several years after the massacre, and without my knowledge or approval, he gave the tape to a group of people who were making a documentary about Tiananmen Square. That’s how my statement came to be used, out of context and selectively edited, to brand me as a leader who had deliberately exposed her student followers to bloodshed and death at Tiananmen Square, a notion the Chinese government quickly adopted. This distortion of reality caused me immense pain, especially when the filmmakers minimized the fact that I stayed at the Square until the last hour. My statement was presented in the worst possible light, as if I had somehow twisted the government’s arm to provoke the massacre and had hypocritically called others to sacrifice their lives while I ran away to save my own. Neither of those inferences is true.

For the past twenty years, I have shouldered much of the blame on behalf of the students. To my great disappointment, Li Lu, the one who scolded me for agreeing to take the students out of the Square, has never owned up to anything he said or did at the time. He has even been back to China several times, as if nothing ever happened. Feng, on the other hand, has devoted time over the past sixteen years to write books and articles defending my actions and my reputation. He told me he did this not out of personal affection, or because of our past relationship, but out of passion for the truth about Tiananmen and to honor the sacrifices of the entire Tiananmen generation. Zhang Boli, another deputy commander, who later became a Christian pastor, stood side by side with Feng when the time came to sign a letter of truth and support, along with more than 160 other students and scholars from Tiananmen.
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So did Zhang Jian, the head of the student guards at Tiananmen, who suffered a gunshot wound to his arm on the night of June 3. During the dark nights and days when I felt most sad and betrayed, I was always grateful for their trust and support.

This is the first time I have told my side of the story about the last days at Tiananmen. Back then, I thought I was responsible to speak for the student body at large. But now I realize I can only represent myself. The other student leaders and I may have been misled, or we may have done exactly the right thing in staying at the Square; I don’t know. But even though I was concerned for my safety and my future, none of my decisions were made out of cowardice or to try to make all the students suffer for what might have been my punishment as one of the leaders. I don’t believe I can speak for Li Lu anymore, but a few of the other student leaders with whom I was closest operated in good faith, and we tried to do the best we could for our country and our people, including the sacrifice of ourselves and our families.

Some of the victims’ families may feel that if the students had left Tiananmen Square sooner, their family members might not have been killed. As a mother now, and as one who has lost loved ones, I understand the deep pain. I hope you will forgive my limitations in not foreseeing the massacre and my inability to follow up with my plan to try to persuade the military officers to abolish martial law. There was never any intention in my heart for anyone to make the ultimate sacrifice. We all wanted to live—and live in freedom. I know the irony that I am still alive while your loved ones are gone. I am so sorry. This is one thing that has tormented me for the past twenty-two years, and only recently have I had a measure of peace. I pray that one day you will receive peace and healing, and be given renewed hope and joy, as well. And that one day you will know there is a higher force who knows all truth and all hearts and deeds. Through him, true justice will be served.

* * *

After giving my statement to Philip Cunningham, I went back to the Square to find Feng to go with me to contact the army. But he was too deeply immersed in other things. When I told him my idea, he said plainly and firmly, “That is an important task, but as the commander, you have become a symbol for the Square. You can’t leave. Find someone else to do it.” Then he walked away.

I sighed and thought to myself,
If I cannot persuade my husband to agree with the importance of this job, who else can truly understand me?

That night at a meeting with movement representatives, I offered to resign. The students kindly gave me one day to rest before making my decision. Feng took me home, and I slept all night and most of the next day. The rest restored my energy and clarity, and by evening I was back on my feet, determined to live up to my pledge to defend Tiananmen Square to the last person. Li Lu made an effort to repair the breach in our relationship, and that rebuilt some of my confidence, though I was no longer able to trust him unconditionally. After May 29, I never left the Square until the end, when the students voted to leave on the morning of June 4.

The support we received from Hong Kong at this time was crucial. Our supporters in Hong Kong, which in 1989 was still a British colony, held a marathon concert and raised twenty-six million Hong Kong dollars in support of the democracy movement. When they sent the money, they also sent tents. At last, a much-needed order reasserted itself on the Square. The infusion of money provided renewed energy. Tiananmen Square was transformed overnight into an orderly tent city.

Early on the morning of May 30, students from eight art schools unveiled a thirty-foot-tall statue of the Goddess of Democracy near the national flagpole directly facing the giant portrait of Chairman Mao on Tiananmen Gate. The presence of the Goddess drew new waves of support to the Square and buoyed the spirits of those who had been at Tiananmen since the beginning.

A student from Beida arrived with a thick envelope addressed to Feng. It was a letter of acceptance from Boston University, granting Feng a full scholarship to BU’s doctoral program in remote sensing. Feng and I sat in the headquarters tent and perused these pages. Paperwork was included for visas we’d both need. It was the next step in our American Dream. We looked at each other and realized how much our lives had changed in the past fifty days. Our Chinese Dream now took priority.

That night we arranged to occupy a small tent of our own. We had not spent the night together for a long time. I was very tired and fell asleep quickly. At four in the morning, a hand choking my throat woke me up in terror. It reminded me of the time when I was drugged and gagged at Beida. A few men, led by Wang Wen, were twisting my arm and forcing Feng and me to get out of our tent. When they began to bind us and gag us, I thought they were assassins sent by the government to kidnap us. I asked them to let me put on some clothes, and they agreed. As I was dressing, I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Help, help, the commander in chief is being kidnapped!” That brought some other students to our aid.