I knew the student he mentioned. He’d joined my student marshal team the night we went to Wangfujing Street to protect the shops from looters. He was Zhuzi’s secret intelligence officer. He had a walkie-talkie. Cao Ming had told me that everyone issued with walkie-talkies was bound to get tailed by government agents.
Qiu Fa stared into the night sky and said, ‘Troops armed with live ammunition ran up onto the overpass and shot at the crowd in the street below, yelling at the top of their voices. I took cover behind a telegraph pole… One of the soldiers looked like he was on drugs. Whenever he heard someone cry “Down with Fascism!” he’d point his machine gun at them and unleash a barrage of bullets. Sometimes the soldiers shot at the buildings, killing people who were leaning out of the windows. A teacher from People’s University climbed into an army truck to speak to the troops, but as he got on, a soldier pushed him off and stabbed him in the chest with a bayonet.’
Everyone fell silent. I could hear a walkie-talkie crackling nearby.
I helped Wang Fei down and we went off with Old Fu to join our gang outside the hunger strike tent. Old Fu turned to Bai Ling, Wang Fei and Lin Lu, and said, ‘As commanders of the Square, you must tell all students who are holding sticks, bricks or Molotov cocktails to put them down at once!’
‘And we must persuade all female students to return to the campuses,’ Sister Gao said. ‘They will be safer there, and it will help break up the troops. I’m going to try to sneak through the army lines and fetch reinforcements from the Business and Economics University.’
Bai Ling had changed into a yellow and white striped T-shirt. She was pacing around distractedly like a patient in a mental asylum. Tian Yi was helping Mimi and Chen Di drag a table over to the tent. The few girls still remaining on the terrace looked tiny compared to the guys standing around them. I wished A-Mei hadn’t chosen to arrive in Beijing now, just as the army was shooting its way into the city.
Chen Di put a chair in front of the table outside the tent, asked Bai Ling to sit down, then handed her the microphone.
Annoyed that no one had responded to her, Sister Gao walked off with two journalists. Soldiers were shooting into the air now. Glowing tracer bullets arced through the night sky then exploded with a brilliant white flash. When I glanced at Sister Gao, I thought I saw a bullet enter her back.
Bai Ling looked up at Wang Fei. The passion and resolve she’d shown during the twenty days we’d been in the Square had gone. She’d led the students to a precipice, and now they were trying to push her over the edge. But somehow she found the strength to open her mouth and say, ‘I am Bai Ling, commander-in-chief. I am asking all of you to put down your weapons, and for the girls to return to the campuses at once… Fellow students, the black day has finally arrived. At this final moment, I would like to read out a poem by Li Qingzhao, a female writer of the Song Dynasty: “In life, we should be heroes among the living. / In death, let us be heroes among the ghosts. / To this day we mourn Xiang Yu, / Who chose to stay and die rather than cross the Yangtse River!” When General Xiang Yu was surrounded by enemy troops, he stood firm and chose not to escape to his family on the other side of the river. Fellow students! We are still young, and perhaps we might lack courage when we come face to face with a ruthless army that has shot its way through the city. But we are honourable and upstanding citizens. Whatever happens, we must stay firm and not let our families down… Let us use our idealism to wake the Chinese people from their slumber!’ By the end of her speech, she was forcing the words out through sobs.
Everyone on the terrace stood still. Tian Yi and Mimi were wiping away tears. I edged over to them and said, ‘If you start crying, everyone will, and the mood could get dangerously volatile.’
‘Nonsense!’ Tian Yi said, pushing me away, her face as white as paper.
Through Wang Fei’s walkie-talkie, a voice crackled, ‘The tanks are coming!…’ then broke off. Wang Fei frantically pressed the buttons but couldn’t regain the connection.
I became anxious. I wanted to find a safe hiding place for Tian Yi before the army came. I could see she had no strength left.
On the slopes of Mount Shamen grows the herb of immortality. A large bird sits on the summit, keeping watch over a black snake that lives in the dark river below.
‘Where is it, where is it?’ my mother screams, banging her head against the wardrobe. She gnashes her teeth and cries in pain. She often has screaming fits, but usually manages to lower her professionally trained voice to a deep howl that’s inaudible to the neighbours.
My mother hasn’t thrown anything out of the flat for years, so she has trouble finding things. I imagine the flat is so crammed now that there isn’t much room to stand.
She goes to the sofa, which is piled with biscuit tins, paper boxes, and the letters, bills and leaflets that get stuffed into her mailbox downstairs. As she kicks some cardboard boxes to the ground, her stomach rumbles. I hear her jangling her keys.
She is continually changing our locks, but forgets to throw away the old keys, so they stay on the same ring with the new ones, together with the keys to her leather suitcase, bicycle, and to the small shed outside in which she stores cabbages and charcoal briquettes. Sometimes she sits down and goes through each key, telling herself which one is for what, but then loses track halfway and has to start over again. She’ll begin by saying, ‘Bathroom, front door, window,’ but will soon make do with, ‘Big, small, copper, aluminium…’
When she can’t find space in the sitting room for something, she’ll toss it into my room. The empty milk cartons, pill bottles and food packaging she’s flung under my bed have attracted colonies of ants. She doesn’t bother to cook any more. She eats instant noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner. She must have got through six big boxes of them in the last few months. She throws the paper packaging onto my bed. I imagine that the only clean objects in the flat are the many calendars hanging on the wall. Her collection continues to grow. The calendar she bought this year has twelve photographs of America’s Grand Canyon.
Finding she couldn’t switch on my bedside lamp because the socket was buried under a pile of rubbish, she went out and bought a new lamp. Unable to locate another socket for it, she let it lie in the corner for a couple of weeks. Yesterday, she placed it on a cardboard box at the end of my bed and plugged its lead into a portable socket she’d pulled over from the sitting room. This means that my door can’t be closed now. The lamp is buzzing. Its light shines on my left cheek. I can smell its plastic shade getting hotter and hotter.
The nurse who visits every week is scolding my mother as if she were one of her patients. She sounds younger than Wen Niao. ‘When did you last check his blood pressure? Pass me his medical notes. These are from last year. Why do you Falun Gong practitioners always seem to be in such a daze?… It’s on the low side — just 50 mmHg. Yes, put it there, where I can see it. Where are the kidney-function test forms I gave you?… I’ll take this urine sample with me and give you the results next week.’