The Middle Kingdom

The
Middle Kingdom

P
ATIENT:
I've experienced a feeling of general malaise for quite a long time.

D
OCTOR:
Since when?

P
ATIENT:
For nearly one year.

D
OCTOR:
How is your appetite?

P
ATIENT:
I have no appetite at all. I have a feeling of fullness in the upper abdomen – often I really feel very heavy. My gums bled and my tongue is coated with a thin layer of whitish fur.

D
OCTOR:
Have you lost any weight?

P
ATIENT:
Yes, I have lost ten pounds since last year.

D
OCTOR:
Let me feel your pulse. Lay your wrist on the little pillow, like this.
(Patient puts his right wrist on the pillow with the palm facing upward.)
Your pulse is deep and thready.

P
ATIENT:
What does it mean?

D
OCTOR:
It means there is a deficiency of vital energy.

—adapted from
A Dialogue in the Hospitals, English-Chinese (
a handbook designed to help Chinese physicians care for English-speaking patients
)

A
LL OF
B
EIJING
was blanketed with smoke and rumors. From midnight on Friday, when we first heard that soldiers were trying to jog down Changan Avenue, through the chaos of Saturday and the horrors of Sunday morning, those of us still on the Qinghua campus clustered around radios and televisions and ringing phones, relaying whatever we heard and trying frantically to understand what was going on. We heard that the soldiers were unarmed, armed, armed and pumped full of amphetamines. We heard they were crashing through Tiananmen Square, crushing the demonstrators and mowing them down with machine guns; then that workers were ambushing soldiers in the streets. Someone said a soldier had been disemboweled and hung from his burning truck. Someone said snipers had shot out the windows of the Beijing Hotel. Deng was dead, we heard. The army was in charge. Li Peng had been shot in the leg and the statue of the Goddess of Democracy was down. There were two armies, six armies, the armies were fighting each other. Deng was alive and the armies were under his control. Ten thousand people had been killed, someone said. A hundred. None. In the square, someone said, the soldiers were burning bodies with blowtorches and flamethrowers. The students had captured some of the soldiers' guns and were shooting back. The soldiers were driving over the students' tents.

Jianming arrived wild-eyed on Sunday night and said she had seen the whole thing. Unbelievable, she said. A massacre. Worse than the worst days of the Cultural Revolution. She and a group of her friends had been huddled at the base of the Monument to the Revolutionary Heroes during the height of the shooting; at first the tracers had soared over their heads, she said, over the top of the obelisk, but then the ribbons of white light had moved lower, lower, until bullets were ringing off the granite. They'd fled then, she said; the streets were burning. She had ridden her bike north through the alleys and back roads, avoiding the columns of smoke. Smashed buses and trucks lay on their sides, and the intersections were blocked by barricades of twisted rubble. Troops guarded the square and were still firing at anyone who approached. A truck was making a mournful procession from campus to campus; in the back, Jianming said (and she was a thoughtful, quiet girl, not given to exaggeration), in the back the bodies of five students crushed by tanks had been packed in dry ice.

That night, on Beijing Radio, we heard the Mayor talking about how the brave soldiers had crushed the counterrevolutionary riot instigated by foreign influences and hooligans, but on Monday, a student from Beijing University arrived with an armload of posters and leaflets that contradicted everything the Mayor had said.

Jianming left Monday morning for her parents' home in Changsha, after hearing that soldiers and security men were beginning to sweep the campuses for troublemakers. She hadn't been deeply involved in the movement, nor had the other students I'd been living and working with for the past few years. But all of them had participated – they'd gone to the square in the late weeks of April, when the mood was festive, almost joyful; they'd marched in the big parade on May Fourth and had returned to the square for the demonstrations during Gorbachev's visit. But then they'd come back to campus, dismayed by the declaration of martial law and the growing rumors. And except for Jianming they'd stayed there, gathering in the courtyards and the empty rooms.

Now the professors left on campus urged the students to go home. Yan and Liren and Yuanguang left that afternoon; Yulong and Qingxin went on Tuesday. Wenwen was the last to go – Wenwen, who had tutored me in Mandarin after classes and who had proved to be the brightest of the students working in Dr Yu Xiaomin's lab. Wenwen and I had dissected hundreds of fish together, shared a rowboat when we went to sample the lake, cobbled together a paper chromatography setup for a demonstration.

‘I have to go,' she said, after we'd heard that the student leaders had been ordered to turn themselves in, and after we'd seen some of the TV footage the government had spliced together from the tapes of the remote-control cameras mounted in the main streets and on the square. The military actions had been edited out; the images that repeated again and again were of protesters burning Army trucks, attacking soldiers, throwing bottles and bricks. Rioting, the voice-overs said. Threatening the city with chaos. Then we heard another rumor: that those cameras had been rolling quietly throughout the six weeks of demonstrations, photographing the ebullient marchers long before there was any trouble. The student who told us this warned that hundreds, maybe thousands of security men were combing those tapes now, blowing up pictures of individual demonstrators. Mug shots of the student leaders were already pasted all over the city, he said. Hot lines had been set up, so that people could turn in protesters they recognized.

‘What if my face turns up?' Wenwen said. ‘I was carrying a banner when I was there on the eighteenth.'

In Xiaomin's absence – Xiaomin had been gone since Friday, and no one knew whether she was at home, or with her husband at the hospital, or caught somewhere in between; no one even knew where to hope she was, since we'd all heard that the hospitals were full of troops and that the area where Xiaomin's apartment was had been particularly hard-hit – in Xiaomin's absence, I knew Wenwen was hoping I'd have some advice.

I was Xiaomin's assistant – not a professor, but not a student either – and the students looked up to me. I'd brought books and equipment into the lab that they'd never seen before, castoffs from my friends at home, which had turned into treasures here. I'd lectured to Wenwen and the others in the halting Mandarin they'd taught me, and I'd listened to their stories of the Qing Ming demonstrations and the Democracy Wall movement. But despite those tales, and despite all Xiaomin had told me about the other crackdowns and campaigns she'd survived, I didn't know what to tell Wenwen now.

‘Why would they come for you?' I said. ‘You didn't do anything.'

‘Why would they do any of this?' she said.

From the window of my room, we could see students milling around the latest batch of posters and the copies, faxed from Hong Kong, of photographs of the dead and wounded. Many were crying. Some stood frozen, as if they'd never move again. ‘Where would you go?' I asked.

‘To find my brother,' she said. ‘And if I find him, I'll take him to some friends we have in the country. It's too dangerous here.'

She was the last person on campus that I knew well. ‘You should go too,' she said, studying my face. ‘Home, I mean. You hear the radio – the government is blaming all this on foreign instigators. Americans are not safe here. Especially not women. Especially not a woman with a baby …'

‘Jody,' I said. ‘I know.'

He'd been sleeping, but he woke when he heard his name – my son, whose second birthday had fallen on Friday, before our world collapsed. ‘
Muqin
,'
he said then, smiling at me sleepily. Mother. He knew as many words in Mandarin as he did in English.

‘
Juehan
,'
Wenwen said, which was what she and the others called Jody – a rough translation of John, as close as we could get. Wenwen kissed Jody and me good-bye and we promised to keep in touch, although neither of us knew how we'd manage that.

‘You'll go?' she asked.

‘I'll see,' I said. ‘I have to find Xiaomin, first.' We said good-bye again, and then I gave Wenwen most of the money I had and watched as she made her way from the building and through the crowd below.

I took my passport, a few clothes, some food for Jody; Jody's passport and birth certificate, which Xiaomin and her husband had helped me get from the US Embassy a few days after Jody's birth; and the contraption I used to carry Jody on my back. I left everything else behind – I still thought I might be coming back – and then I closed the door to the tiny room that Jody and I had shared, which despite its size had been luxurious compared to the dorms where the students piled four or six to a room. From the window in the stairwell I saw four trucks filled with soldiers head for the main courtyard. I moved the sheaf of Chinese documents that certified my right to be here, to teach, to live, from my bag to my jacket pocket, and then I ran down the stairs and headed for my bicycle. And then I turned around, spinning so sharply that Jody, on my back, giggled and cried, ‘Horsey!'

I raced around the building toward our lab. Jody had his hands on my shoulders, and he greeted every person we passed with high-pitched cries of ‘
ni hau!
' – hello. People who hadn't smiled in days smiled at him, at me, as they had since the day I'd first brought him here – he was something of a mascot, at least in the science wing, and in better days he'd been much fussed over in the nursery. ‘
Ni hau
, Grace,' my colleagues said, after they'd smiled at Jody, and I tried to slow my steps and respond to them. But they were moving quickly too. Their greetings came to us from heads turned over their shoulders as their bodies rushed away, and my responses trailed me like a tail.

The lab door was open, but no one was inside. The long wooden table was littered with equipment from the experiments we'd been running before the demonstrations. The pH meter a scientist visiting from California had brought, the micropipette and the precious pipette tips I'd had Page send me from Massachusetts, the jars full of lake water, the dissecting trays, the slides and the workbooks and the stained filters and nets – all Xiaomin and I had worked so hard to assemble.

‘
Yu!
' Jody called, tugging at my hair. Fish. Along the wall the fish we'd kept as live specimens were still moving in slow circles through their murky tanks.

In the bottom drawer of Xiaomin's desk were the notebooks we'd kept for our project, and drafts of several papers we hadn't completed. Everything else in the lab could be replaced but these, the only records of our attempt to map the populations of the lake we'd studied in the Western Hills. A simple project – I'd worked on one similar to it when I was a student in Massachusetts, but then it hadn't meant anything to me. Then it had all been tied up with Walter, who had been my advisor; and after we got married I'd come to find the work tiresome and unimportant. But here I'd found the students' enthusiasm contagious, and I'd worked late into the night, trying to learn enough to stay ahead of them.

I slid the notebooks into the sack that held Jody, so that they were pressed between my back and his clinging chest. I fed the fish and stowed what I could in the cupboards, and then I tore off again and mounted my bicycle and pedaled along the edge of campus toward the north gate. Jianming had said that most of the fighting was concentrated along Changan Avenue and the areas south of it, and so I planned a circular, northern route. East on East Qinghua Road, I decided, studying my city map; and then south on Changping, east on Deshengmen, and south at the Lama Temple on Dongsi, which would turn into Dongdan and drop us – unnoticed, I hoped – east of Tiananmen Square and north of Changan, at the hospital where Xiaomin's husband worked.

Jody fell asleep on my back as I pedaled through the heat of the afternoon. Things were quiet up here, and the fields stretching along the road were green and soft. Only when we approached the northern end of Beihai Park did I begin to hear the occasional distant pop of gunfire. Jody woke up and tickled the back of my neck. I sang him a couple of songs. The soft popping might have been fireworks, rising into the air to celebrate a new year. The streets were empty, which seemed even eerier than it would have in Boston or New York; I'd grown used to bicycling as part of a moving wave of people, a particle massed so closely with the others that I almost didn't have to steer.

When we turned down Dongsi we began to see people again, clustered in knots around the posters and photographs pasted on trees and poles. They were crying, shouting, reading the posters out loud. I passed a burned-out bus and then a group of grim soldiers clearing away a heap of rubble at an intersection. The soldiers looked at us but didn't stop us; maybe Jody's smile disarmed them. I pedaled faster, toward the noise and smoke, and finally reached the gate to the hospital. The soldiers stopped me there.

‘No admittance,' one of them said to me. We spoke in his language, which had become one of mine. ‘And you are forbidden to be on the streets. Please return to your place of residence.'

‘My baby is sick,' I said, but Jody, no help at all, reached for the soldier's cap and laughed.