Beijing Coma (91 page)

Liu Gang rode up on his bike, having just returned from the Fuxingmen intersection. There were bloodstains on his shirt. ‘Cao Ming’s afraid that our phone lines are being tapped, so he’s gone back to the campus to tell the organising committee that the army has been given orders to clear the Square.’

Bai Ling screeched hoarsely into her megaphone, ‘Fellow students, this is Bai Ling speaking . . . The martial law troops have begun forcing their way through the barricades, and they’re heading for the Square. There has been bloodshed at most of the major intersections. Fellow students, citizens, we will remain in the Square until the bitter end! Please find yourselves some weapons. You will need to defend yourselves . . .’

‘That must be another of Wang Fei’s stupid ideas! What weapons do they expect the students to find here that will be the slightest use against tanks?’ Hai Feng stamped on some boxes of leftover food. Lin Lu’s walkie-talkie was clucking in the background.

‘Xiao Li’s been injured, Dai Wei,’ Yu Jin said, taking off his cap to wipe the sweat from his brow. ‘He’s in the broadcast station.’

I walked in and saw that the scarf wrapped around Xiao Li’s head was soaked in blood. He said that martial law troops had used tear gas to try to disperse the crowd at the barricades, but when that hadn’t worked, they’d attacked the crowd with their rifle butts. I told him to lie down on the floor and stay still.

A retired soldier was explaining to the students how to disable army tanks and prepare Molotov cocktails. He’d utter a few sentences into the microphone, then turn to the side and gesticulate with his hands to clarify what he was saying. But each time he turned away, his voice became inaudible. An announcement came over the government speakers fixed to the lamp posts, saying that a counter-revolutionary riot had erupted in Beijing, and that everyone should leave the Square immediately.

Big Chan and Little Chan rushed over with an injured foreign reporter, but there was no room left inside the tent. Big Chan said that if he and Little Chan hadn’t pulled the reporter out of the way in time, he would have got crushed under the wheels of a tank. Little Chan had cut his fingers. His nails were covered in blood. Streams of people kept turning up to show us the cartridge cases, steel helmets and compasses they’d pilfered from abandoned army tanks.

‘Where’s Wang Fei?’ Bai Ling asked anxiously. Her skin was sallow and her eyes were red. Having seen the blood-soaked cloth around Xiao Li’s head, she was probably afraid that Wang Fei might get injured too.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Chen Di’s gone to fetch him.’

‘Send some students to the intersections to remind the citizens not to use violence,’ Hai Feng said. ‘If the soldiers are attacked, they’ll treat us all as the enemy, and none of us will come out of this alive.’

Lin Lu glanced at him angrily and said, ‘Everyone’s pretty disgusted that Shu Tong ran away to America. I think you Beijing University students should keep quiet from now on.’

‘Stop bickering!’ Bai Ling said. ‘This is the time to show what we’re made of!’ Perhaps because she spoke so softly and was the only girl in the tent, we all deferred to her.

‘Everything here will be razed to the ground,’ Zhuzi said, walking up. A continual crackle of commands and reports was coming over the walkie-talkie fixed to his waist.

‘My intelligence unit has drawn up a diagram of the situation,’ Lin Lu said, pulling out the annotated map. ‘Look, we’re done for. The 27th Army is moving in from the west, with a unit that’s been given specific orders to arrest the student leaders. I’ve just heard on the walkie-talkie that a secret unit is now guarding the intersections on all the roads leading back to the university district. The soldiers have photographs of each one of us. If we tried to return to the campuses now, they’d seize us and put us in jail. It would be better to let them come into the Square and arrest us in full view of the public.’

‘Shao Jian, get your policy implementation unit to tell everyone to leave their tents and gather round the Monument,’ Bai Ling said. ‘Everyone must stay awake tonight and wait for further orders.’

‘There are 200,000 troops heading our way, but there are only 10,000 of us left in the Square,’ Liu Gang said, his face deathly pale. ‘The citizens are still managing to hold the army back, but they won’t be able to do so for much longer.’

I removed my sunglasses then quickly put them back on again. Although everything looked darker through the lenses, they blocked out some of the frenetic dread in the atmosphere.

The sky darkened suddenly and a heavy rain began to fall, accompanied by strong gusts of wind. I thought of Tian Yi, who’d gone to telephone various professors to invite them to the Democracy University’s opening ceremony, and of my brother, who was helping her out, cycling through the back lanes to press bureaus across the city to remind the journalists to come. Tian Yi was determined that, whatever happened, the Democracy University’s opening ceremony would still go ahead that night.

This 1950s red-brick apartment building has thick, sturdy walls, as do the buildings that surround it on either side. At dawn, the compound is as quiet as the graveyard in my ancestral village. Whenever I think of that place, I smell the earthworms squashed on the stone path.

The migrant labourer who’s renting the flat below has stopped shouting and swearing. A few days ago, the police dragged his wife away because she wasn’t able to produce a marriage certificate or birth permit.

My mother forgot to close the window of the covered balcony last night, so my nostrils are filled with a green, tranquil scent. It’s coming from the old locust tree outside. Its blossom must have fallen by now. There’s dust on its branches. The fresh coat of whitewash around its trunk smells like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg.

I remember that there’s a building with a steel cooling tower at the end of the compound. In winter, it looks like an ice sculpture. The iron chimneys of the boiler room behind it often spew rusty debris into the air.

The sparrow has been lulled to sleep by the ticking of my heart. Its wings are splayed softly over my chest. Its presence seems to have breathed some life into my stinking corpse.

After my mother gave birth to me, she lay in this bed for six days. I’ve been lying in it for almost ten years. When my mother came in last night to remove my bedpan before she went to sleep, she mumbled, ‘When I brought you back from hospital, you sucked my nipple all night and wouldn’t let go . . .’ She tried out the special massage technique that Master Yao taught her, but I didn’t feel her qi. As she rubbed the arch of my foot, she sighed, ‘How many years will I have to practise these exercises before I can heal you?’

The most solid object in this room is the iron bed I’m lying on. It’s so heavy, you can hardly lift it. It’s as sturdy and durable as this brick apartment block. The khaki-coloured paint has chipped in a few places, revealing the rusty metal beneath, as well as the underlying coats of maroon, blue and brown paint. The lowest coat is white. It covers the orange anti-rust primer like a layer of white underwear. My mother said that her parents bought the bed when they got married. It had belonged to an English family whose textile factory in Tianjin went bankrupt in the 1930s crash. Since white is considered inauspicious, my grandparents repainted it maroon. After my grandfather committed suicide in 1951 following the confiscation of his factory, my grandmother painted it sky-blue. When she died, the bed was passed down to my mother, who covered it in brown emulsion to hide all traces of her dead parents. When my father died, I painted it a dark khaki colour that was popular at the time.

During the day, the little sparrow hops around the bed. Sometimes it flies up and circles the room; then, when it’s tired, it settles on my chest and grips my skin with its shaking claws. Since it arrived, the room seems to have grown much larger. I follow it as it flutters through the air. It has given me back a sense of night and day.

I imagine slowly lifting my hands then bringing them down to touch the feathery warmth of its body. It pecks out a hair from my nostrils, rubs its beak against my cheek, and chirps. An episode from my past suddenly returns to me. It’s so vivid, my whole body seems to clench. I see A-Mei look up at me and say: ‘If you could have one wish, what would it be?’

‘To travel the country and climb Mount Everest. And you?’

‘That sounds too tiring for me. My wish would be to come back as a bird in the next life and fly through the sky.’

‘I often have flying dreams, but when I reach the clouds, I start feeling cold and have to come down again.’

She looked into the sky and said, ‘In the next life, I’ll be your lovebird and keep you warm. We can fly off to the heavens together . . .’

‘Open up! Open up!’ There are people banging on our front door. I can tell at once that it’s the police. They always turn up at dawn. It’s 2 June today. I wonder where they’re planning to hide us this year.

‘I’m coming,’ my mother croaks sleepily, turning on a light.

‘Are you – Chen Huizhen?’ This man’s voice is unfamiliar. He hasn’t visited the flat before.

‘You’ve come to drag us out of the city before the tenth anniversary of 4 June, haven’t you? So I’m sure you know who I am.’

‘You took part in the Falun Gong siege of Zhongnanhai on 25 April.’

‘It wasn’t a siege, comrade. All we were doing was trying to lodge a complaint at the Central Appeals Office.’

‘Ten thousand people surrounding the residential compound of our top government leaders! If that isn’t an attempt to subvert state power, then what is?’

‘We’re a timid lot. We don’t dare march through the streets, or even stick up posters. How could we possibly topple the state?’

‘Haven’t you read the newspapers? Falun Gong is a deceitful, dangerous organisation. 1, 400 practitioners have died as a result of refusing medical treatment. Some followers have become so unhinged that they’ve committed suicide. One woman even strangled her own daughter.’

‘Falun Gong fosters the cultivation of truth, compassion and tolerance. What’s evil about that? If it opposed the Party, I wouldn’t have joined it. I’m stuck at home all day with this mute son of mine. As soon as I step outside, my every move is monitored by the police. When I fall ill, there’s no one to help me. Why shouldn’t I do a little meditation to help release my tension? And I’m not just doing it for myself, I’m doing it for my son as well. I can’t afford to buy him any more medication. If I continue to practise the exercises, my energy field is bound to have a beneficial effect on his health.’

‘You think your meditation can heal him?’ says a female officer. ‘If you’re not careful, you’ll end up a vegetable yourself.’ She walks in and rifles through the drawers, then frisks my mother’s mattress. The police always bring a female officer with them. This one has been here twice before.

‘You went to the People’s University to speak to Ding Zilin.’

‘Of course I did. She asked the international community to provide humanitarian assistance to the relatives of the 4 June victims. I wanted to thank her. But that was three years ago now.’

‘You know that you’re strictly forbidden to have contact with such people. And what about those other women from the Tiananmen Mothers group? They come here every week. What have you been plotting?’ This policeman speaking is the officer who interrogated me when I was fifteen. He is now the head of our local public security bureau.

‘They only come here for a chat. Aren’t we allowed to have a bit of companionship? Do you really think that a few old ladies like us could bring down the government?’

‘Just a chat, you say? You can’t fool us.’

‘I wrote a statement supporting the government crackdown nine years ago. What more do you want?’

‘We want to know why you joined the siege of Zhongnanhai. Tell us who sent you there.’

‘No one sent us. I was practising my routines in the yard with my neighbours that morning. We were upset about the arrests of those Tianjin practitioners. After our session, we decided to go to Zhongnanhai to appeal for their release. We didn’t know that so many other practitioners would have the same idea. It wasn’t a siege. All we did was stand on the street meditating. No one is giving us orders. You must believe me. Falun Gong practitioners never lie.’

‘We are high-ranking officers, so you’d better watch how you speak to us.’

‘We were afraid the government would accuse us of staging a demonstration. That’s why none of us sat down, apart from Granny Pang. After standing up for a few hours, her legs began to shake, so she had to rest on her knees for a while.’

‘Don’t give us any more lies. We’re treating this matter very seriously. Pack your bags now. We’re taking you and your son away from Beijing for a few days. We don’t want you causing any trouble during the 4 June anniversary.’ I remember this officer shouting to me in exactly the same way when he kicked me in the shins nearly twenty years ago.

‘I’m a law-abiding citizen. You have no right to take me away.’

‘If you’re so law-abiding, what were you doing demonstrating outside Zhongnanhai?’

‘This is my home. You don’t have an arrest warrant. I refuse to leave.’

‘I warn you, things are going to turn nasty. The government will pronounce its official verdict on Falun Gong soon. If a religion that causes the death of 1, 400 people isn’t an evil cult, I don’t know what is.’

‘You can knock me to the ground, but I will crawl back up again, and the Falun wheel will still be spinning inside me. Arrest me, if you want! I don’t care. What difference will it make? China is one huge prison. Whether we’re in a jail or in our homes, every one of us is a prisoner!’ She turns abruptly and storms off to her bedroom.