I had been working on something for months, but it was not a seminar project, nor was it something I shared with anyone, not even Macaw. I kept it completely to myself. At first the notion was hazy, I don’t believe I really intended to follow through. Nevertheless, one day I was in the students’ office and came across a prospectus for an exchange programme that offered a year’s study in various universities around the world.
At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would flick through it, gazing through the pages into worlds I could scarcely imagine. One in particular caught my imagination. It was Toronto University, in Canada. It was not as distinguished as some of the bigger universities in the US, UK or France. But the picture in the pamphlet showed a silvery-grey building with ancient doorways, high vaulted arches and turrets, and a looming tower of grey stone at the main entrance. It looked more like some great medieval church. But whereas the latter might have been forbidding, this building was festooned with the pluming green of cheerful trees and well-kept bushes. Leading to it was a vast plain of flat grass, rippled with a hue of gold where it had been struck by the clean, clear sunlight. The sun was high, set in a blue sky without a cloud. There were groups of students lazily picnicking on the grass. In the darkness of my room, by candlelight, the idyllic glow that seemed to emanate from the picture helped offset my loneliness.
For it gave me the feeling that beyond the pall of black outside my window and the shadowy cityscape, there was a gentle, undescribed world that maybe one day I could settle into, leaving my troubles behind. It was a simple, almost childlike fantasy – but nevertheless, in the months following, I found myself filling out the lengthy application form, a bit here, a little more there, whenever I had a spare moment. And then one day it was complete. I addressed the envelope and took it with me to university. I sat in the cafeteria nursing a cup of coffee for a couple of hours, the envelope snug in my pocket. The lunchtime crowds gradually melted away, until it was simply me and a few odd bodies left, lingering as the afternoon light faded and the objects of the cafeteria were softened by the creeping shadows of the coming evening. Finally, I slipped out and went to the students’ office, where, after taking a deep breath, I posted the application form.
It was early April, some weeks after I had visited Anna’s house, and the evening air was unusually sweet and balmy, glowing with the fragrance of spring. Students were milling about, ready for the night ahead, and there was a sense of expectation in the air. I didn’t feel like returning home right away, so I walked to one of the bars on campus and had a large glass of white wine.
I watched the people around me as the bar became busier, and the enormity of what I had done began to sink in. I felt nervous but exhilarated and somehow proud. Some months before, I had lost my virginity, and beyond the pleasure and excitement of the experience lay a more abiding feeling: I had reached some kind of invisible milestone, and my path into adulthood and independence was that much more complete. I felt something similar now. I had applied to go to a country on the other side of the world, not just to visit, but to live there! I thought it was unlikely I would be accepted for the programme, but the very fact of applying not only made me dizzy with possibility: it gave me the sense I could shape my destiny according to my own requirements in a way I never had before.
Were I to be accepted, though, I couldn’t even begin to frame the conversation where I would inform my parents and my brother of my decision to leave. I had applied on a whim, on an impulse that wasn’t wholly serious, but the more I filled out that application, the more I realised I didn’t want to stay in Beijing. I wanted what my grandmother had wanted for me. To do something no one in our family had done before: to travel the world, to encounter new horizons.
When I got back to the apartment, I could tell something was different. There was a soft light coming from the living room, my mother was there, at the table, and she was talking, but her voice was raised slightly in a shrill, overly enthused way, striking a note of artificiality. I assumed one of the more well-to-do neighbours had come round for a visit, for she would often use this tone in company. But when I stepped into the room, I saw her sitting with Gen.
Gen glanced up at me and smiled, that small smile of his, ironic, tinged with a little melancholy.
‘Hello Lai, it’s been a while,’ he said quietly.
I stood there lost for words. Although it had been only a few months, he looked thinner, taller, more adult somehow. My pulse began to race, but with it I felt something sickly.
‘Hello. I didn’t … erm … I didn’t realise you were coming. We hadn’t arranged to meet!’
‘Ha, my daughter! As if a dear childhood friend requires some kind of formal invitation. Gen knows he is welcome here anytime. And he has been telling me about his activities on campus. His campaigning to make the university a better place. You,’ she said, looking at me accusingly, ‘could do with some of his ambition!’
Her expression softened as she turned to Gen in amusement. ‘I’ve known this lazy one to sleep until ten on a Sunday morning!’
I felt something clench inside me. Gen being here with my mother in our home seemed wrong, and made me feel helpless somehow.
I glanced coldly at my mother.
‘You always said student activism is about pampered brats with more money than sense, mother. You said they know nothing about the real world, that they’re silly sods who don’t know they’re born. Do you remember that?’
‘Of course I do,’ she snapped.
Her voice lightened again.
‘But Gen isn’t like that. Gen isn’t always going on marches and screaming at people. He is working his way up in the hierarchy, patiently and diligently, so that he can make some sensible and moderate changes that will benefit everyone. Politics should be a discussion, not a fight!’
For a split second, a wincing discomfort passed across Gen’s face before he regained his equanimity. Even so, when he spoke again, I could hear a tension underlying the words.
‘Well, it is a good deal more complicated than that. Sometimes you have to show the authorities your determination, your conviction, your strength, so they know you mean business.’
He hadn’t raised his voice, but I realised that my mother – even though she was trying to compliment him – had actually irked him. He gave a brief glance at his surroundings, and for a second he looked as though he had tasted something sour. Again, it was only for a moment, but I saw it now.
My mother gave a vague, mirthless laugh.
‘Well, I don’t know about any of that, I am sure. I’ll leave you kids to it. So nice to see you after all this time, Gen!’
She bustled out of the room, and the silence settled upon us.
‘Would you care to take a walk?’ I asked.
He nodded. We left the apartment. The evening air was mild now. As we stepped out, Gen touched my arm.
‘Follow me?’ he asked.
He said it softly, tentatively, and just like that his confidence and aloofness seemed to drain away, and there remained the figure of an uncertain small boy. I was pulled back to those times spent in his vast empty house studying, the times he had told me about his father’s infidelities, his anger and, behind that, the hurt. The hurt that a child feels. I felt my heart rise in my mouth. I nodded.
We walked in silence. I had no idea where he was taking me, in my own neighbourhood. But perhaps I should have known. We walked uphill. It wasn’t too far. As the sun was descending, we arrived at a patch of gravel, an abandoned square of land, punctuated by patches of grass and spiky weeds. In the corner was an old gnarled tree, a shadow against the brightness of the sunset. Beyond, I could see on the horizon the shape and form of the buildings of the business district and, past them, the Forbidden City and the Great Gate leading to Tiananmen Square.
‘Do you remember this place?’ Gen asked softly.
‘We played here when we were younger!’ I said. ‘I could never forget,’ I added softly.
Gen smiled slightly, and reached into his pocket. He produced a tattered piece of paper, which he smoothed down and began to fold into sections. He shaped it into the semblance of a paper plane. He took a step forward and floated the plane upwards into the sky. It soared for a few moments before making a nose dive and clumsily meeting the ground.
I laughed.
He looked at me with a small smile, gently amused, but with a touch of regret.
‘Do you remember how Zhen would make them? So well, and they would fly so high you’d have to crane your neck to look at them. I was so, so jealous of him for that at the time. I never said anything, of course. But I wanted more than anything to be able to make paper planes like he did.’
‘Times change, I guess. You have a new set of friends now,’ I said softly.
I thought about the pretty girl who had surprised us while we were talking in Gen’s campus accommodation. I experienced a sudden rush of bitterness, and turned away. Tears sprung to my eyes, and I felt both ridiculous and exposed.
He put his hand on my shoulder. Turned his face towards me.
‘I didn’t behave well, I know that now. I nearly lost you …’ His voice trailed away. He gazed into the horizon, towards the outline of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen.
‘But I’d also like to think that we could never lose each other. Not truly. For better or for worse we have kept step together, your life with mine, mine with yours, for as long as I can remember. Nothing can change that.’
His voice was soft and husky.
‘The situation on campus is getting worse. The radicals and the conservatives are constantly at each other’s throats, and it seems to me they would prefer to squabble amongst one another than to see any kind of genuine change. But like it or not … I feel that I have been tasked with making that change happen!’
He looked exhausted then, and unbearably sad. My bitterness was at once vanquished.
‘But Lai, I don’t have the strength to do it on my own. I need you to be with me. I need your wisdom, and above all your compassion, to make me strong. I feel I can’t do what I have to do if you are not with me. I don’t have the strength.’
He turned to me, his eyes wistful and pensive, and then he kissed my cheek almost as a plea. His lips found mine, and for a few moments we kissed – a lingering, passionate kiss in this place where we once had played as small children. I had always loved kissing; for me it was in some ways more rewarding than the sexual act itself, the intimacy of your mouth against someone else’s was so close, so searching and yet so delicate.
But although we had never spoken of it, I was aware that Gen was a self-conscious kisser. He never fully gave himself to the experience, his contact was often brief and perfunctory as though he was holding something of himself back. I think that is the only day I remember where he kissed me properly, where – for a few moments – he abandoned himself to the experience.
He withdrew, still holding me gently, and looked me in the eye.
‘So you will come? You will return to the Triangle? We can … work together again.’
‘Yes, Gen, of course I will,’ I said softly, my heart still fluttering with the surprise of the kiss.
Just a few months before, I would have paid a devil’s ransom to have him hold me like that, to hear him speak such words. And part of me was happy. Yet that feeling no longer went all the way, it no longer reached my fingertips. I was happy to be with him in that moment, but the emotion did not possess me in the way it once had, for there was now something in me that was abstract, separate and perhaps even cold.
A Scottish poet once wrote: ‘The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry.’ Gen and I did not link up in the way he had intended, for events overtook our plans. I arrived at the campus one day in late April, and straight away I knew something was different. It was early evening. I’d come for a lecture, but when I got to the auditorium it was almost empty. I rarely, if ever, missed lectures, but on this occasion I slipped out and made for the centre of the campus. All around students were gathered in groups, muttering furiously. As I walked by, I was met with quick, furtive glances. I plucked up the courage to ask a passing girl what was happening.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ – her whisper a combination of awe and shock. ‘Hu Yaobang is dead.’
I stopped in the middle of the path as she hurried by. This was indeed momentous news. By politicians’ standards, Hu Yaobang had been much admired and respected, because he had not toed the line. A couple of years before, he had been the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, a position of incredible power and prestige. But as a result of his outspokenness – his suggestion that the Chinese political bureaucracy should reform in favour of a more democratic model – Deng had demoted him.
For the students, then, he appeared to be someone who put moral values above self-interest, and at that time – against the backdrop of the ambitious and ruthless apparatchiks that populated the Politburo – he was seen as an almost romantic figure. Both the liberals and the radicals in the student section admired him. But, as I looked around, I realised what was happening was much more than that. This had gone beyond the somewhat closeted and introverted world of the student union and its internal politics. There were vast numbers of people now, forming in crowds, at a time in the evening when the campus would normally have been quiet. And the emotion I read on every face was a kaleidoscope of grief, sorrow, disbelief and anger. One group of students had already raised a poster with the provocative slogan:
Those who should die do not, and those who live have gone – forever Yaobang
I shuddered, not necessarily because I disagreed with the sentiment, but because the wording was so extreme, and I knew it could very well get those students indicted. I think that was the first time the level of bravery of the students was brought home to me; they were so very brave.
I made my way to the Triangle, along with so many others, a stream of people filtering through. When I arrived I couldn’t see Gen anywhere, such were the numbers. A young man was making a speech.
‘Why can’t we choose our own jobs?’
‘Why must we let the Party assign us to a workplace?’
‘Why does the Party keep a personal file on each of us, and why don’t we have the right to see it?’
They were simple questions, and ones we had all asked ourselves over the course of our lives; yet to hear them uttered in such a plain yet anguished tone was moving. It was as though, over the years, certain questions had been exiled to the silent shadowlands of one’s inner thoughts, one’s private moments, and you were never sure if others thought the same. Because you didn’t feel you could ever ask. A strange kind of loneliness that you weren’t even fully aware of, but one that was with you all the time.
Reading the ardent, angry expressions of all the people who had gathered in the Triangle, I felt a deep sense of solidarity. I don’t remember the name of the speaker, but his simple, plaintive questions brought us together as if we were of one mind, as though the invisible walls that separated one person from another – walls of loneliness, self-consciousness, fear – had now been collapsed by our presence here together. It was a heady feeling, almost frightening because of its intensity, because it would carry us along in its wake like a great wave, but it was also a most wonderful thing.
And just like that, suddenly the collective emotion was too great, and the students spilled from the Triangle, back into the main grounds of the campus, and onward, gathering more and more to their numbers. I had been due to meet Macaw after my lecture, and now it was almost time. I found her in the grounds, outside the cafeteria where we often met, though it was closed for the weekend. Macaw was watching the crowds roll by with real fascination; spectacle and drama were at her core, I think.
‘Hey, Lai! Get your ass moving! Let’s see where they are going!’ she said.
We joined the crowds of people as they rolled out of the university grounds, spilling onto Chang’an Avenue, chanting and roaring and clapping, and soon we found ourselves before the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the entrance to Tiananmen Square. At this time of night, any access to the square would have been restricted by security, but as we flowed through I caught the expressions on the faces of a couple of security personnel: astonished, frightened even, before the flood of people that had been unleashed.
But that was just the beginning. When we swept into the square, something else was going on, something quite remarkable. From the southern entrance, from the Xinhua Gate, there was a great commotion, another flood of people spilling through. We didn’t realise at the time, but students from all the major universities in Beijing, including Beijing Normal University, Tsinghua, People’s University and many others, were converging on the square in their thousands.
I remembered all the occasions my mother had dismissed the students as wealthy good-for-nothings with too much time on their hands. Even though I hadn’t liked what she said, part of me had seen the students I encountered through my mother’s gaze. But now something had changed, in the protesters perhaps, but in myself for sure. It was dangerous to be here, and yet almost everyone had come out. The fear I felt virtually every day was overcome by this rushing sense of solidarity and compassion, for these were young people with little power, prepared to risk everything.
The crowd ebbed and flowed towards the Xinhua Gate where the other students were arriving. This gate also guarded the compound called Zhongnanhai, where the headquarters of the Communist Party were located. Soldiers marched in, rifles in hand, gazing at the students with blank fatal gazes, and yet the students kept coming.
I was trying not to cry, but I had never in my life seen anything more noble, more beautiful.
At my side, Macaw giggled. ‘This is completely bonkers! I can’t wait to see what happens next!’
I looked at her, shocked. I realised that for all I was feeling – all these emotions swelling up inside me – for her this was simply another performance, a theatre of a kind that was exciting and surreal but meant little more. That was what she took from everything that was happening.
I realised, by that point, I had come to love my friend. But that was one of the few occasions when I came close to hating her as well.
Perhaps she registered my expression, perhaps she said something. It’s hard to be sure. All I remember was that the mood of solidarity on the part of the crowd had graduated into one of building fury and now they were chanting with thundering resolve.
‘Come out, Li Peng. Li Peng, come out!’
Li Peng was the premier; in fact he had reached that position at the expense of the late Hu Yaobang when Hu had been compelled to resign. It was well known that Li Peng was an engineer with zero political qualifications. But he had connections in the upper echelons of the Communist Party and held deeply conservative views, and this was why he had been selected. For months, he ignored the polite letters sent by the student lobby conveying their protest at the ‘lights out’ regulations the government had enforced the year before. But it was as though we would no longer be denied. We had occupied the square, we had taken control. We had only ever been the children of those who shaped and moulded the world; now, for the first time, we were shaping it in our own image.
There was a sudden, shrieking scream.
‘The police are coming!’
I looked back towards Chang’an Avenue. A large number of people were streaming in, but it was different now. They were no longer moving with the ebb and flow of the great feeling that had passed through us. Instead, they were running for their lives, staggering and falling. Behind them, uniformed men, police, were going to work, hitting them furiously with batons. I remember the expressions on the faces of those police. They weren’t professional or dispassionate; rather, they were etched with sadistic rage, flushed with an obscene hunger as they struck the heads of the students in their midst over and over.
I was rooted to the spot. The chants of solidarity that the students had raised had been transformed into a cacophony of shrieking anger and fear. I tried to look around, to get my bearings, but suddenly it was difficult to breathe.
I sank to my knees. It was more than panic, though. Sensations flashed across my mind like lightning; memories from years ago – the feeling of the softness of my body and then the sharpness of the pain … my arm wrenched from its socket.
In the midst of those crowds on Tiananmen Square, I was as a child again. I was on my knees. I couldn’t breathe. I was struggling for breath.
The crowds were rushing forward, the people running past, their movement a violence that buffeted us one way and the next. I think Macaw took an elbow in her side, she screamed out, ‘Fuck!’ and then I felt her hands on me, pulling me up. I was gasping for breath.
She took my face in her hands.
‘Look at me.’
I did. All the movement, all the violence, seemed to diminish and slow, until I heard only the softness of her voice.
‘It’s okay. You don’t think so, but you are going to be okay!’
She was holding me, cupping my face. The police were still going to work – she must have been panicking herself. But she was so calm. And she calmed me. She gently led me out of that place, out of Tiananmen Square, even as other students were being beaten down all around us. I never imagined the authorities would hurt us that way. But they did.