The years that followed, the years that have led to me writing this, have been uneventful, at least from the purview of my own existence. I am writing this over thirty years later. I’ve led a quiet life. I teach literature. I am the mother of two beautiful, wonderful children, the youngest almost thirteen, the oldest now twenty.
It strikes me, often, that my eldest – whose name is Anna – is much the same age Madam Macaw was when I first met her in that university room with the grand piano. But my own child seems so much younger than Anna ever was. Perhaps that’s because Anna herself has become frozen in my mind: an eternal emblem of someone youthful and fearless, brilliant and charismatic, perfect such that she has become some kind of impossible idol. Isn’t it always the case that slain saints enter into our minds in terms of a perfection that could never be achieved in reality?
And yet, not a day goes by that I don’t think of her. Sometimes I am wandering down a Toronto street and I see a Chinese woman, and for a second I imagine it is Anna, grown as old and flabby as me, a couple of kids dangling from her arms. On the one hand, Anna wasn’t the maternal type: the thought of being responsible for the lives of small, vulnerable, needy human beings would have repelled her; on the other, she would have made the best mother in the world. Imagine the stories she would have told, how easily she would have enraptured childhood with a single one of her creative fingers.
Sometimes I allow myself to fantasise that she made it out, because sometimes the pain of what happened that day is just too great. But I know she is gone. She was in my life for less than a year, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, I know she saved me. Sometimes I go back to our last conversation. I don’t want to, but I can’t help it. The wan smile she gave me, the V for Victory gesture she made. By that point, she had already decided on her fate. She refused to live life on anyone else’s terms, whether that meant a cruel lover, a best friend, or even the Chinese state itself. In the moment she made that final gesture, I am certain she knew she was going to die. She wanted, perhaps, some moment of kindness from me. And it is the single, biggest regret of my life that I turned away. Sometimes, in my dreams, I see her again, and she is happy. We both are.
But I am happy most of the time. My job satisfies me, my children inspire me. Originally, my move to Canada was supposed to be only temporary. But I ended up falling in love, in a gentle, nondescript way, with a gentle, nondescript partner. Underneath it all, however, has always been the fear. I have never really stopped being frightened. But I return to Beijing every so often. For the funeral of my father who died in the way he had lived, quietly and with little fuss. For the marriage of my brother, which took place on a wonderful bright winter’s day.
When I visit Beijing, I do it alone. Without children and without husband, because I have had to cordon off that aspect of my life, partly because of the pain, partly because of my shame. When I took that plane out of Beijing at nineteen years of age, I was fleeing. And I have never since stopped running away.
I remain tied to that world, however. My mother is still alive. My brother has brought into existence my three wonderful nephews. On Facebook’s Chinese equivalent, I am in touch with some of the people I once knew. On there, I even have a ‘mutual friend’ with Gen. She tells me that he has achieved a ‘respectable’ position in the state bureaucracy. He is married with two children. And it is common knowledge that he regularly cheats on his wife.
As I get older I watch the world. Tiananmen Square fades into the past, but new protests arise. In Hong Kong, as I write, there is a new generation of protesters challenging the authoritarian central state. Deng may have died, blessedly, but his cruel, rigid, waxwork replacements are always waiting in the wings. And yet the bravery of the protesters – this too is replenished as the generations roll forward, and I am certain there are a good few Madam Macaws in their number. I have watched protests erupt across the world: the Black Lives Matter movement and #MeToo. The young people who put their hearts and souls into those fights inspire me, my eldest throws herself into those struggles with a bravery and fierceness her mother is incapable of. I fear for her. I am in awe of her.
Her name is Anna, and I have never told her the story of the person she was named after. But I will. For my daughter deserves to know. And the story of Macaw deserves to be told. I have been so very frightened, for so many years, but I have at last decided to put pen to paper – which, in my own way, is the greatest bravery I can offer up. It is small and negligible in the scheme of things, but it is something at least. Although I have spent my life living in fear, I know what courage is. For I am there with Anna as she steps out into the great stretch of Chang’an Avenue as it was that day with the sun glittering brutally in the sky. I am there with her as she obstructs that first tank, and I see her beautiful green eyes, sardonic and mocking, as she brings them to a halt, with all the casualness of someone playing a game, only it is anything but a game, a last-ditch dramatic performance, the fatal creativity and charisma of a single person who forces one of the mightiest armies on earth to a standstill while the whole world watches.
Could she possibly have known? Could she have realised that, in stepping out onto Chang’an Avenue that day, she was also stepping out into history? That her image stepping out in defiance of those tanks would come to represent millions of people struggling for freedom the world over? That her figure would become a symbol of resistance and hope that would echo down the generations, symbolising human courage and human sacrifice? For perhaps as long as there is time itself. Only Anna could have done something like that, because her light burned brighter than that of anyone I’ve ever known. And I feel, every day of my life, that the world is so much poorer without it.
I wish I could have been braver, stronger. I wish I might have been there for Anna in those last days. But although I have not been a protagonist in great historical events, I have, nevertheless, been a witness to them. And that is why I am writing to you now, having held all this inside for so very long. It is the only lasting thing I can give you. As women across the world explode in protest, in the MeToo movement, in the fight to attain abortion rights, in the struggle against rape and murder, I want to tell you, all of you, that I knew Anna and I loved her so very dearly.
I knew who she was and what she did.
I knew that ‘Tank Man’ was in fact … Tank Woman.
And now you know that too.