When I got back late that evening, I was exhausted but elated. As I walked in the stillness towards my building, I turned to look out over a cityscape spread across the darkness, a swathe of lights glittering against the black, and it seemed to me that each of those lights burned with possibility. Every one of them represented an existence determined to forge itself in the dark and I felt a moment of great hope, and a sense of power too. We all of us were shaping the horizons of the future and creating the types of possibilities our parents’ generation could scarcely have imagined.
I was insignificant, I felt my own smallness every day of my life – and yet I contained within myself whole worlds which were unfolding, for I was part of this wonderful and terrifying uplift that went beyond the classroom and my family and the narrow confines of my life, drawing me into the great and interminable movement of thousands upon thousands of souls stirred to their very depths. Macaw was sceptical of the students, but the image that burned itself into my mind that day was of her – eyes gleaming, face upturned, luminous in the darkness – delivering those final lines to the crowds, while behind her the lines and lines of police began to move.
Many years later, I saw Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People. I was hardly an art aficionado and, although the context was so very different, seeing the figure of Liberty bearing her flag in the midst of the people manning the barricades, defending the streets, at once took me back to the image of Anna on that day, strident and so fiercely beautiful, delivering those words in the smoky dark. I was with my husband and my two small children, but I had to turn away from them – for the force with which the past had risen up to claim me had so easily unravelled my emotions. I found myself coughing into my hands, making my excuses and heading for the toilets, trying somehow to stifle the violence of my crying. It was unexpected, and yet inevitable, perhaps, too.
Looking back on the night of the performance, everything still seemed possible. In childhood things often seem wondrous, in adult life less so. But that night was imbued with wonder and surprise. I returned to the apartment, my head buzzing. I was exhausted, yes, but I was seized by the momentum of the occasion and I wanted to write down what had happened, to record the extraordinary happenings of the day. But as I entered the apartment, I caught the flickering glow of the TV. At first, I imagined my brother was watching his cartoons, but it was eleven at night, far too late for him to be up. And my father, despite his rational and scientific mindset, was distrustful of anything broadcast on television. So I went into the living room to investigate, that sense of euphoria still kindling inside me.
My mother was there. She had a glass of wine. It occurred to me that I saw her more often with a glass of wine these days. Not all the time by any means. But more so. It didn’t bother me greatly. As little more than a teenager, my own reality offered scant room for that of my parents. And besides, my mother was too brittle, too self-controlled to slip into alcoholism. Still, it was a little incongruous seeing her there, at that time of night. Did I have a sense of her loneliness? Perhaps. But when great events are in the air, the smaller details are that much easier to forsake.
‘What are you watching?’ I asked, for want of anything else to say.
She turned to me. She smiled but her eyes were closing a little.
‘Have you never seen this?’ she murmured. ‘It’s Farewell My Concubine.’ She turned away. ‘What is the point in a university education if it doesn’t teach you about something like this? Something which is so important to our patriotic spirit. Something which informs who we are!’
I felt that familiar ball of tension, a small dot inside my being. I glanced at the TV. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the opera, but it had always struck me as being turgid and clichéd, perpetual war coupled with garment-rending, operatic warbling and the customary suicide in conclusion. More than this, I suspected that deep down my mother was not all that keen on the performance herself. But the fact that she hadn’t been to university like my father rankled with her. The opera was considered highbrow and elite, and her ‘appreciation’ of it allowed her to balm her feelings of insecurity with an elevated sense of superiority. She looked at me slyly.
‘But there it is. So much money we spend on your education, yet instead of learning the classics, you spend your time in the streets shouting and drinking!’
‘I am on a scholarship. You don’t pay the majority. And it seems you like a drink too!’
The words had tripped from my lips, almost involuntarily. My mother got to her feet, shaking, already furious. And I kicked myself because I realised that this was exactly what she had wanted. Some part of her required this confrontation.
‘I am sorry, mother. I should never have said that. I appreciate all you and father do for me. It’s late and I’m tired.’
She looked at me hard.
‘I am not surprised. It’s been on the TV, you know? What you have been doing!’
I knew she was referring to the protests, but she encompassed them under the one pronoun ‘you’, as though I was collectively responsible for the movement and action of hundreds of thousands of people. It was so ridiculous that I couldn’t avoid a slight smile.
And that enraged her all the more.
‘You and your student friends’ – she sneered the word ‘student’ as though it were a dirty, contemptuous word – ‘you and your student friends are so busy marching and shouting because you can! Because you have never had to struggle in your lives, because you have been given everything and you don’t know you’re born. What do you think actual real people make of your tantrums? What do you think they care about how loud you and your friends shout?’
I felt myself bridle for a moment, but with her I’d spent a lifetime controlling my anger. I saw her – the glass of wine raised in her hand, her red-rimmed eyes, the spittle flying from her lips – and I felt a great distance, a sense of pity even. I wanted her to know what we were fighting for; it felt like if she could come to terms with that, she might somehow come to terms with me.
‘Mother. It’s no longer just the students …’
I found my voice growing hoarse with emotion.
‘Mother, if you had been there, you would have felt it too. The students were there first, yes. But we were joined by others. So many people. The workers of Beijing were cheering us from their balconies. They came to give us food and drink. Almost everyone in the city is behind us now.’
I stopped speaking. I had never spoken to her so frankly but I was imploring her to understand. Hoping she might.
She smiled slightly and for a second I thought there was sympathy there. Understanding. Just for a second. And then she spoke in a silky, cloying voice, thick as treacle, a parody of kindness.
‘I understand that you are not the prettiest of girls. And since Gen has obviously abandoned you, it is clear that you are searching for some kind of meaning. And maybe these protests provide you with that …’
Her voice trailed away but she was still smiling that small, slight smile.
I felt the knot of tension in my belly harden like rock.
‘These protests provide me with something,’ I said softly. ‘They help me determine my own future. And that way, I might not end up a housewife who is angry and bitter and trapped, and has never in all her life left Beijing!’
My mother blinked. And then she slapped me.
She put everything into that slap. The suddenness of it reverberated through my head. For a few moments, we just looked at one another, blinking. I felt the flush of angry red climb up one cheek.
She looked at me. Her eyes were moist. And then she walked out.
I stood there in utter shock. Although she had hit me before, it hadn’t happened for some years. The sound of the opera was still cascading gently in the background, the images still casting their flickering blue light. I went over to the TV and hit the switch. At once everything was dark. My heart was pounding. I made my way to my room, undressed and slipped into bed.
I lay there, furious. I felt so angry. I rejected her assessment of the students as dilettantes – as spoilt brats with too much time on their hands. But by allowing her to provoke me, to make me lose control, I had let my mother win. I’d returned to the apartment buoyed up by a sense of optimism for the future and my own possibilities as an adult, but she had reduced me to a bickering, desperate child again. I lay there hating her with a passion and at the same moment hating myself. Lying in bed, fists clenched with rage, I felt as though I was seven years old again.
. . .
In the days that followed, a few things happened. The students and their new representatives had been trying to press their demands. I say demands, but these were, for the most part, simple and patriotic appeals for free speech and a more democratic structure. The watchword of the protests had been ‘dialogue’, after all. We were, in the majority, reformists at that point – people looking to shape and change the tone of the government. Not to overthrow it. But the state remained deaf to our petitions and protests. However, given our surging numbers and the increasing support from the citizenry for the students, the government finally issued a direct proclamation. Representatives of Li Peng, the hard-line premier, appeared on television to say that they didn’t recognise the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation and refused to negotiate with a ‘dissenting group’ that had used the protests to usurp the ‘democratic’ power of the ‘legitimate’ students’ union.
In other words, they weren’t prepared to give an inch.
Everyone knew, of course, that the students’ union had long since been co-opted by the interests of the government, that it was morally bankrupt; the very nature of the protests had thrown its impotence into relief. But even as hundreds of thousands flooded the streets, day in, day out, the government and the media continued to insist it was just a handful of subversives who were intent on violating the will of the people.
It would have been comical had the stakes not been life and death.
The protests continued. I returned to the Triangle some days later. I knew more people now, not by name, but so many faces were familiar to me, and we would nod at each other and smile. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was, that feeling of solidarity and friendship even among strangers. That evening, the speeches were in full flow, and whereas before the mood had been careful and trepidatious, with the government continuing to ignore all our requests and demands, we were now growing more militant. The speeches were still couched in patriotic language, but there was a growing sense of betrayal, and a much more vivid opposition had emerged.
The university authorities sensed this. At 9.30 that evening, the power was cut to the Triangle, and to the campus more broadly. Deprived of electricity, the loudspeakers ceased to function, the lights went out, and the whole area was plunged into darkness. But we were not deterred. Using torches and cigarette lighters we streamed from the campus, making our way towards the square once more, chanting and singing in the darkness. I was in a crowd, a mass of people making their way towards Tiananmen, when someone grabbed me. The shock of it stunned me, but when I regained my bearings, I found myself face to face with Gen. His face was distorted, panicked; I had never seen him like that. He looked drained, pale, as if in the grip of a fever. He didn’t greet me. He seemed to stare right through me.
‘You know this is insane, right?’
Taken aback, I stuttered:
‘What? What’s insane?’
‘This whole thing. The madness of crowds. The mob mentality. These people. They are teetering on the edge of a cliff.’
He had forcibly grabbed me, pulling me to the side. I was still shocked. I managed to find some words.
‘Maybe they feel there’s no other choice. When you are desperate for recognition, when everyone around you makes you feel invisible and unheard, perhaps all that remains is to shout at the top of your lungs!’
His expression calmed then, and that ironic smile which I knew so well tripped across his lips. Only now it seemed ghastly, the rictus grimace of a stroke victim.
‘I would have thought you of all people might know better. That you were smarter than this. That you wouldn’t get caught up in all the emotion and propaganda. My father once said that hasty climbers have sudden falls. You really can’t see it, can you? How all this is going to end.’
Sheer rage overcame me. It wasn’t just that he’d manhandled me. It wasn’t just the cavalier way he’d treated me over the years, expecting me to always be on tap for him. It was about the protests more broadly – and that group of men in the Politburo, so entitled that they could brush off the feelings and privations of hundreds of thousands like dust from their shoulders.
‘Your father?’ I said with barely repressed fury. ‘You are quoting him, now? Of all people? No wonder!’
He blinked at me, taken aback by the strength of my feeling.
‘No wonder what?’
My words evened out. I spoke calmly.
‘You are more like him than I ever realised. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before. But I do now. I really do.’
He flinched. His right arm jerked and I genuinely believe at that moment he had to stop himself from striking me. But he regained some semblance of composure.
He looked at me, blinking, as though he were seeing me for the first time. And then he spoke, as if to himself.
‘I can’t believe it. I didn’t think I’d have to deal with this. I thought being with a girl like you … I wouldn’t have to deal with all this crap.’
I looked at him.
‘A girl like me?’ I queried softly.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he muttered.
But it did matter.
I knew exactly what he had meant. I felt it instinctively. It was what my mother had said before. I wasn’t beautiful like the girl I’d seen in his dorm that day. I wasn’t charismatic like Anna. I was plain. And that is what he had meant. I knew this with absolute certainty. That a girl like me should have continued in her subservience to him. It was suddenly so clear, and yet it felt like a body blow. The tears welled up, and I was so angry I couldn’t avoid it.
I turned away from him. I walked towards a nearby restaurant. I heard the last words he ever spoke to me.
‘Hey, I didn’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Why do you have to be so emotional?’
But he didn’t come after me. I felt that same constricting pressure on my chest. I made it to the restaurant toilets. My stomach lurched but nothing came out. I washed my face. And I looked at myself in the mirror. I saw a young woman with dark eyes, a nose too small to be pretty, lips too thin to be considered sensual. There was something in my appearance which was dowdy, almost moth-like. I looked at my reflection in the mirror in that restroom and felt a deep hatred for myself. The scars across my arms tingled. If I’d had access to a knife, I would have started cutting myself again.
And that was when I saw her.
She was standing behind me. She wasn’t moving, she was stood so still. Her ancient toad’s face was creased with a smile of great warmth. My grandmother was there, looking at me with kindness and compassion and an expression of such great love. I saw in the mirror her image, faint but indelible, and although I knew she was not really there at all, for a few moments it felt like she was. And now the tears came flowing down my cheeks. And I had to wash my face again.
I stepped out of the restaurant. I watched the masses of people flowing towards Tiananmen Square, their lights blinking in the darkness; a series of winking, glittering flames set against the black. I was no longer angry at Gen. And perhaps I was no longer angry at myself either.