She is as silent as a corpse. A sour, grimy smell wafts from her hair. I think she’s passed out.
When the sun begins to light up the sky, the sparrow chirrups. My mother stirs and lets out a deep sigh. She walks into my room, stands silently at the door like a stranger, then walks out again.
I’ve been alone for a week, but am still not dead. I feel guilty for having let my mother down.
There is a mountain called Mount Wilderness, where the sun and the moon set. The people who live there have three faces: one at the front and one on either side. These three-faced people never die.
After the rain, the sky cleared.
The crowd outside the broadcast tent became agitated. Shan Bo, the Beijing Normal teacher, stepped out of the hunger strike tent and squeezed through the throng holding an open letter he wanted to read out. Wang Fei followed behind him, with a megaphone in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other.
‘The broadcast station is the command centre now,’ Lin Lu whispered to Bai Ling, switching off his walkie-talkie. ‘We can’t allow the intellectuals to jump up and say what they want.’
‘Why not?’ Zhou Suo asked.
‘They have no idea how volatile the mood is in the Square. If he reads out his letter, it might trigger a riot.’ Lin Lu’s mouth twisted into a worried smirk.
‘Let him say what he has to say, then take him straight back to the hunger strike tent,’ Bai Ling said.
Mimi dragged the three microphones outside and handed them to Shan Bo.
Shan Bo held up the letter and began reading it out: ‘We four intellectuals came to the Square to show the world that we too are prepared to put our lives on the line to fight for democracy. We oppose martial law and support your demands for an equal dialogue with the government. But recently we have noticed that despite your good intentions, your movement has become riven with division. It is now badly organised and dangerously undemocratic. If military dictatorship is replaced by student dictatorship, the Democracy Movement will have come to nothing…’ Wu Bin jumped onto a box and shouted through a megaphone, ‘Teacher Shan Bo, we admire you for going on hunger strike. But how can you come here, at this crucial moment, and try to sow discord among the students?’
‘Lin Lu, quickly tell Shan Bo to return to his tent,’ Bai Ling said crossly.
Before Wu Bin had finished speaking, voices in the crowd shouted, ‘Spineless intellectuals! Traitors! If you don’t have the balls to continue your hunger strike get out of the Square!’
At this, Shan Bo angrily rolled up his letter, threw it over to Lin Lu and stuttered, ‘You will, re-re-regret not listening to me!’ then stormed back to his tent.
Lin Lu grabbed a microphone and said, ‘Fellow students, in this final hour, let us gather round the Monument to the People’s Heroes and allow history to pass its judgement on us. When the army comes to attack us, we will remain peaceful and non-violent…’
In the distance, Ke Xi was moving through a crowd on the shoulders of his bodyguard, shouting, ‘Fellow students and Beijing citizens! This is our bleakest moment. We can’t give up now! In perseverance lies victory!’ The crowd roared in support. An hour before, he’d been advocating a mass withdrawal.
The student marshals who’d been guarding the base of the Monument began to disperse. Some went to stand in a protective circle around the hunger strike tent. Apart from the broadcast station and the Taiwanese rock star, Hou Dejian, there wasn’t much else left in the Square that needed to be cordoned off.
Wang Fei suggested we hold one final press conference urging the foreign media to stay in the Square to witness the crackdown. Old Fu walked over with some students from his finance office. He agreed to stay, but said we should persuade the girls to leave.
As I set off to go and find Mou Sen, Yanyan walked up to me and said that Ge You, our old friend from Southern University, had travelled up from Shenzhen to give us another big donation.
‘That’s good news,’ I said. ‘Mou Sen will need more money for his Democracy University.’
She forced a smile then walked away and disappeared down the pedestrian underpass. I wondered if Mou Sen had spoken to her about Nuwa yet. She’d probably seen the photograph of their Tiananmen Square wedding. It had been printed in all the newspapers.
The broadcast station played a tape of the Internationale. The sound was louder and cracklier than usual. Everyone in the Square sang along. The announcements blaring from the government speakers on the lamp posts had become louder too, and the echoes added to the din.
‘Where can I get my batteries recharged?’ Wang Fei asked, walking into the tent. ‘My walkie-talkie isn’t working.’
‘Don’t use it, then!’ I said. ‘And keep it in your pocket. If the soldiers see you carrying it, they’ll shoot you!’
‘They can shoot me if they like. I don’t care! My body is made of steel.’ The black paint of his megaphone was badly chipped.
Bai Ling sat down and spoke into the microphone. ‘This is commander-in-chief Bai Ling speaking. On behalf of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters, I would like to ask everyone who is committed to defending the Square to stand up now.’
Everyone fell silent. The students sitting in the plastic shelters stepped outside to see what was going on. The atmosphere was very tense.
‘… Please raise your right hands, face the Monument to the People’s Heroes and say after me: “They may cut off our heads and make us bleed to death, but we will never give up our fight for democracy!” ’ Although surrounded by residents, tourists and even plain-clothes policemen, the students who raised their right hands ignored all distractions and focused on the solemn oath.
In the last glow before dark, I watched the crowds rush frantically back and forth between Chairman Mao’s portrait and the white Goddess of Democracy. They looked like swarms of nervous ants sensing the impending approach of a tidal wave.
West of the Beast With Nine Heads is a tree that never dies. If a man eats it, he will live a long life. There is another sacred tree that, when eaten, can bestow wisdom.
When dusk falls, the noises outside drift towards my iron bed, then everything goes dark.
My mother drags herself like an old cloth bag from the sitting room into the bedroom and slumps onto her bed. There’s a lot of phlegm in her throat. I can hear it move when she breathes. She’s fallen asleep now. Apart from an occasional crinkling of a plastic bag in the kitchen, the flat is deathly silent.
It’s the same kind of silence that pervaded the flat when we returned home from the cemetery after my father was cremated. Dusk had fallen, just like now. I hadn’t heard any noise from my mother for a long time, so I quietly opened her door and peeped inside. She was sitting on the chair, fast asleep, her hands hanging limply on either side. A slanting beam of light from the lamp beside her illuminated the wrinkles around her eyes. Her brightly patterned shirt didn’t match the look of despair on her face. She was perfectly still. For a moment I thought she’d followed my father into the netherworld.
The room is pitch black now. The last gleams of light have left the windows.
Nights without birdsong feel empty… Tian Yi often talked about the red-breasted cuckoo we saw flitting through the rainforest in Yunnan. ‘Why didn’t I take a photo of it,’ she would say to me. ‘I had my camera in my hand…’
Today is 1 October 1999 — the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. So as to ensure the celebrations are clean and orderly, the police have arrested thousands of illegal migrant workers and scruffy-looking peasants who’ve travelled to the capital to lodge complaints, and have locked them in detention centres in the suburbs. The restaurants in this street were raided, and they have now lost half their staff. Every flat in the compound has been inundated with leaflets from the National Day Organising Committee telling the occupants not to accommodate guests from other provinces during the week of the celebrations.