Things were coming to a head. Despite everything the students had gone through, all they had laid on the line, the government remained intransigent. In fact, the repression was intensifying. The World Economic Herald, a Shanghai publication, had run an article commemorating Hu Yaobang that resulted in the firing of the editor and the closing down of the publication by the local Party boss. Their journalists joined us on the square holding up posters that read: ‘Don’t force us to lie any more!’
It is difficult to explain just how unprecedented this was. Under communist rule in China, papers were tightly censored; the fact that there were now dissenting voices in the media suggested just how widespread the movement had become. It was now much more than a student protest. It was becoming a revolution.
And yet the revolution had been met by implacability on the part of the state. The boycott of classes, it seemed, had done very little. Now the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation pushed for more drastic action. They called for a hunger strike.
We were sitting in a bar. All of the Marauders: Lan and Min, and Jin Feng and Li Xin, and Pan Mei and Ai Xiu. And Anna and myself. Anna was holding forth.
‘You know how stupid this is, right? You know it’s insane, don’t you?’
‘Extreme times require extreme actions!’ said Jin Feng, laughing in his cocksure way.
Macaw turned scornful green eyes on him.
‘Extreme times require extreme actions?’
He grinned lopsidedly.
‘Well, yeah.’
‘And starving yourself, that’s what is needed? Cos that’s really going to hit the powers that be where it hurts!’
Pan Mei spoke up. She was tentative, her largeness wobbling with the strength of what it clearly cost her to raise her voice, to dissent from Anna, whom she clearly loved. But she spoke up anyway.
‘Look at me, Anna.’
She said this with such calmness.
‘The thing about being overweight … the thing about being a very fat woman is that everyone sees your size. Everyone feels it’s okay to make nasty comments about you, even total strangers. But while they see how you look physically, they don’t see who you are at all. The person that you are. Does that make sense to you?’
‘Yes,’ acknowledged Macaw, ‘but I don’t see what that has to do with—’
Pan Mei cut across her.
‘You don’t see, and that’s okay. But that’s the point about these protests. It’s our chance to achieve genuine recognition. Did you know that Mikhail Gorbachev is due to visit the country in the next few days? The leader of the Soviet Union is due here in Beijing. The hunger strike makes sense. We do that, and we make ourselves visible. We can embarrass them. We do that, and no one can turn their faces from us!’
‘Fuck yeah!’ muttered Jin Feng.
I think it was the only time I had ever seen Anna driven into a corner.
‘You are being fucking idiots. And you are crazy. Don’t expect me to join you in this.’
She got up and walked out. We were in shock. Macaw was our lynchpin. And yet, in the moments after she left, although we didn’t talk all that much, I think our resolution deepened. It seemed there was little else left to do. Years before, Brzezinski, a Polish-American politician, had come on a diplomatic visit. And on that day – that evening – my childhood had been unravelled by my terrifying awareness of the force and brutality of adults, of the security forces. They had hurt me badly. I suspected my timorous and gentle father – in his own time – had been hurt by such people too.
But there was fear now, on their part. However strong the government was, it was afraid of protest. Years before, we were just a few kids having an adventure, an adventure which became a nightmare. But it was different now. There were thousands of us, hundreds of thousands, and not just students. Working people too. And journalists and pensioners and shop owners, and everyone you might imagine. Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit was drawing close. The government might remain impervious to our protests, but they would be forced to heed us under the weight of a national embarrassment. The visit had come at the opportune moment. It was this which would make the hunger strike effective.
I didn’t see Macaw for some days. Perhaps she felt as though the Marauders were developing a will and direction independently of her. She had always been the centre of the organisation, and it must have felt like things were spiralling out of control. And yet, when I saw her next, she didn’t seem greatly perturbed. I had left my building, planning to head to the university, and there she was outside. I’d never given her my address. She was dressed in a leather jacket and dark sunglasses, and she was perched atop a motorcycle. I remember thinking how cool she looked, as though she had stepped out of a movie. With that same lazy charisma, she gave a single command.
‘Get on!’ she said.
I found myself doing just that.
I had never been on a motorbike. As the wind blew through my hair, I felt elated. The bike screamed through the city and beyond, onto the lonely, windy roads heading to the north.
‘I had no idea you could ride one of these. I didn’t even know you owned a motorcycle,’ I gasped.
Her voice floated back to me as the wind whipped my hair.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it depends on your definition of the word “owned”.’
I felt a familiar sense of anxiety. Despite my increasing activity and commitment to the protests, the thought of breaking the law was still abhorrent to me.
‘You mean you stole it?’
‘Well,’ she said sheepishly, ‘I guess it depends on your definition of “stole”. “Borrowed” would be more fitting!’
She twisted the throttle and the bike roared forward, the sound of my laughter lost to the wind. We rode out past fields and flatlands, along a smooth open road, and the bike hummed as the clouds above peeled away. We rode for a long time – it was surely the furthest I had ever been from the city – and yet that journey seemed to pass in the blink of an eye.
Eventually the smooth road became a dusty trail, and Anna had to reduce speed as the bike rattled and jerked its way across the ground. We disappeared into a thicket of trees with thin, tall trunks that shot upwards only to plume in light yellows and greens, soft and feathery like the decoration of birds. As we slipped under the canopy, we were cast into gentle shadow. The sun was high in the sky, and the light winked from within the trees. I flinched, for we were still moving rapidly across the jerky terrain, and the trees had gathered in from every side, branches and leaves whipping our faces, but it seemed as if Anna knew the route well. A few moments later, the bike shot out onto the hard grey sand that had formed a small incline around the rim of a great lake.
The water was smooth and unblemished in the early afternoon, a turquoise glow that expanded outward as far as the eye could see, and beyond, the tawny ridges of ochre mountains were flushed at their foothills with dark streaks of wild grass and moss. I felt dizzy as I got off the bike, not simply because I had stood up so suddenly, but because of the great dome of deep blue sky and the vastness of the open space, the crisp, clear beauty of the lake and the outline of the mountains. For much of my life I had read about beautiful landscapes of every variety, but all from the confines of my bedroom. The air here – sweet with the fragrance of flower and leaf, yet cold with the kiss of the water and the breath of the wind – was reviving and disorientating in the same moment. I felt a flush of joy. I looked at Anna, exhilarated.
‘What is this place?’
She shrugged nonchalantly.
‘The original name is in the Mongolian language, but a much older form of it. Spoken at the time of Genghis Khan. Nobody knows what it actually means. So everyone just calls this place No Name Lake.’
‘It’s wonderful,’ I gushed.
‘Yeah, I suppose,’ she said, though I think she was pleased by my admiration.
‘What are we doing here?’
‘Just thought we would eat, drink and hang out.’
She unhitched her bag from the bike. She took out a pack of beer. And she tossed me a package wrapped in foil.
I caught it automatically. Opened it up. It was tuna sandwiches.
I looked at her, astonished.
She squinted in the sunlight.
‘What? I can’t come prepared?’
‘The beer isn’t much of a surprise. But I can’t really see you in the kitchen making sandwiches,’ I said, grinning.
I thought she would laugh then too. But instead she smiled softly, as though embarrassed.
‘Well, you know. I do a lot of that sort of thing for my father. The lazy sod rarely does much for himself these days!’
I felt as though I had been unfair to her. I started to mumble my apologies, but she curtailed them with a laugh.
‘Take a bite!’
I did. Perhaps it was the setting itself, that sweet crisp air, but the flavour of the sandwich was deep and smooth, the soft paste of the fish fresh in my mouth.
‘It’s delicious. It really is!’
‘It’s only a sandwich.’
She smiled again, softly, secretively.
All at once she seemed different; and I different for being with her. I felt shy, as though we were strangers sharing a meal.
She leaned the bike on its side and motioned me to a place on the sand. We lay back, popped open the beers, and ate the sandwiches.
I lay for a while, listening to the sound of her breathing – and to the sound and rhythms of my own body under that great expanse of blue, and the gentle lapping of the waves, not far from our feet. She gave a chuckle.
I looked at her.
‘What?’
She shook her head. But she chuckled even more. She was laughing now.
I found myself laughing too.
‘Seriously, what?’
‘You remember those two guys from the hotel?’
‘Yeah.’
‘My one. When he was … getting close. He made these …’
By this point she had dissolved into tears. I had never seen her laugh so hard. I was shaking with laughter myself.
‘Go on, go on!’
‘He made these … Oh fuck, I can’t even say it …’
‘He made these … these … hooting sounds. Like an owl. Just as he was … you know! Hoooo … hooooo.’
I was crying with laughter.
‘I did hear … some really strange things … that night … I have to admit,’ I spluttered through my tears.
‘Haha. Hahahahahaha,’ she laughed.
Eventually we managed to pull ourselves together.
‘It’s good though!’
I looked at her. I felt myself blush.
‘You mean the sex?’
‘Well, that was perfectly fine. Plus the two of them – your one as well – they were both nice guys. And not all of them are. But I wasn’t talking about that so much.’
‘What were you talking about?’
She took a long drink of her beer, put the bottle down. Turned towards me. Her laughter faded into a simple smile.
‘I mean everything happens so fast, sometimes. To me, it seems like only the other day I was a child. My father was still working. My mother was still around. And then I blinked, and everything changed. I am at university with you. My father is … as he is now. Perhaps when I blink again, I will be in my thirties, or forties even. I think life happens that way, especially when you look back on it. Everything before fades, it’s gone in the blink of an eye. But …’
‘But?’ I asked.
‘But, if you have formed certain memories – even those which involve some guy making like an owl when he … you know. Even strange and weird ones like that. Especially the strange and weird ones like that – they remind you …’
‘Remind you of what?’ I smiled.
‘They remind you …’
She turned those beautiful green eyes towards the mountains.
‘They remind you that you were around, you know? That you lived.’
We popped open another couple of beers. We sipped them for a while in amiable silence.
Across the lake appeared a boat carrying fishermen. Although they were some distance away, I could just about make out the old wood of their barque, the crusty nets that were draped over one side. One of the men caught sight of us. He began to wave. And both of us – Anna and I – started to wave back, gently at first, then furiously. We got to our feet, waving, calling out. Soon more of the men had gathered, and they were waving too. We waved at one another until the boat had faded into the middle distance, until our arms were tired.
And I remembered when I was very young and my grandmother would take me out to the park. There was a railway line nearby with a bridge across it, and we would wave at the trains as they passed underneath. Waving at the boat, I felt that same sense of childhood exhilaration. Often, it was a risk for young women to wave at men they didn’t know, but on that day, it wasn’t like that at all. It was about people taking simple joy in human contact.
As the boat disappeared from sight, something in Anna’s mood changed, her face shadowed by a frown. At first she didn’t say anything. And then:
‘You really believe this hunger strike to be a good idea?’
I considered the question. I took a little more of the beer.
‘I don’t know. But I don’t see what else we can do.’
She thought about this for a while and nodded fractionally. She didn’t say anything more.
She popped open another beer, drank most of it in a swift elegant motion.
The blue of the sky had paled into a deeper colour now.
The air grew colder, filtering through the mountains and across that great lake, bringing with it a touch of ice from the Mongolian north, pricking my skin.
Macaw took another swig of beer.
‘Are you going to be okay to drive us back, Anna?’ I asked.
She looked at me, her eyes bereft of any emotion, her voice flat.
‘I don’t know. But I don’t see what else I can do.’