On the second night, Sparrow was told to bring a cotton mask, towels and handkerchiefs, because the army was expected to use tear gas.
And yet, and yet. The next morning, the People’s Liberation Army started up their convoys, and began reversing out of the neighbourhood. The exhausted soldiers waved as they departed, some weeping and others laughing. Bright ropes of flowers flooded the streets they had left behind.
On Saturday, Ai-ming came home breathless, jubilant. She said that the students had entered into discussions with the government, and agreed to a full withdrawal from Tiananmen Square. “Yiwen is coming home.” She turned to Sparrow and said, “You don’t have to sit on that broken bus anymore pretending to be a fighter.”
When he touched his daughter’s cheek, Sparrow felt almost harmed by the softness of it. “Will you eat at home tonight, Ai-ming?”
“I’ll even cook. And you’ll be sorry you asked!”
Ling went out to buy groceries. The news of the students’ decision had not yet been broadcast, but in the alleyways, everyone seemed to know what had occurred. The streets vibrated with a hopefulness she had not witnessed since the first years of the Republic, as if all the years between then and now had only been a hallucination or a detour. Returning home, she ran into Yiwen’s father at the water spigot. Yiwen had not been home since the start of the hunger strike, yet it was her father, Comrade Zhu, who had lost so much weight. Seeing Ling, he said, “These children, ah! You give your life to them and they crush your heart!”
Ling took out the good cut of beef she’d bought and gave it to her neighbour. He lifted both hands, refusing. “Take it,” she said. “The students have called off the demonstrations. Now you can welcome Yiwen home.”
Water overflowed the bucket and Zhu turned the tap off. “You see how it is,” he said, accepting the gift, and beckoning her into his flat. “We sacrificed everything so that Yiwen could get a good education. She’s our only child. When Yiwen was accepted into Beijing Normal, I held the letter in my hands and wept. The first time I had wept in forty years! I thought I might have a heart attack. Yiwen is the first in both our families to go to university. She’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever known. I tried to make her understand how fortunate she was, to be born into this time, to have opportunities we never had.” He shook his head. “But these kids think it’s all up to them. They have no understanding of fate.” He took a container from his ice box and gave it to her. It was a chicken, already marinated. She tried to refuse but he wouldn’t hear of it.
“Perhaps it was us,” Ling said, picking up where they had left off. “We understood fate all too well.”
“Ah,” he said. “You’re right about that. Our children have ‘stood up,’ and now it’s we, their parents, down on our knees and begging forgiveness! But okay, okay, whatever. Look,” and Zhu pulled a small badge from his pocket. “I even joined the Beijing autonomous residents’ federation. You should join, too. There are all sorts of initiatives under discussion.”
—
Late that night, Radio Beijing announced that the students had overturned their own decision. They had decided to stay in the Square after all, until the Party conference scheduled for June 20. The date jolted Sparrow. It was the same day he was scheduled to fly to Hong Kong to see Kai. The radio also announced that General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang, who had already been removed from his post, had been stripped of all remaining duties and placed under house arrest.
Through the window of the little office, he saw Ai-ming and Yiwen sitting in the courtyard. They were holding hands and looking up at something in the sky. At the stars, he thought, or at the helicopters, maybe one could no longer be untangled from the other. His sonata for piano and violin, the first piece of music he had written in twenty-three years, was finished, he could do no more. He made a clean copy, signed his name and wrote the date, May 27, 1989, and the title, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square. He put the copy in an envelope to send to Kai. He wished to hear it performed, and he remembered how, despite his protests, Zhuli used to play all his half-finished pieces. When he looked over the music, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it had come from someone else entirely, or more accurately, that it had been written by himself and another, a counterpoint between two people alive and awake, young and old, who had lived entirely different worlds.
Outside were the usual voices — rainfall, laughter, a radio, sirens, good-natured bickering — but here in this room was music that existed in silence. In the Shanghai Conservatory, he remembered, paintings showed musicians playing the qin, a silk-stringed zither, only the qin had no strings as if, at the moment of purest composition, there was no noise. Sparrow had never made a sustained sound, the music came in beginnings and endings like the edges of a table. The life in the middle, what was it? Zhuli, Kai. Himself. Twenty years in a factory. Thousands of radios. A marriage and family. Nearly all of his adult life: the day after day, year upon year, that gives shape to a person, that accrues weight.
He saw himself putting down his pencil and standing up from the desk. He saw himself walking out of this room, this alleyway, this city, without turning back.
The following morning he woke early, put on his uniform and returned to work.
3
AS I WAITED IN Shanghai, one life unexpectedly opened the door to another. Three days after I met with Tofu Liu, he telephoned me. His niece at Radio Beijing had put him in contact with someone I should meet: Lu Yiwen, the close friend of a Radio Beijing editor who had passed away in 1996. This was the same Yiwen who had known Ai-ming and her parents in 1988 and 1989. I felt the impossible had occurred: I had plucked a needle from the sea.
Tonight, June 6, 2016, I went to her flat on Fenyang Road, near to the Shanghai Conservatory.
Yiwen was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman in her mid-forties. She wore jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals, and her long hair was tied up in a loose knot. She spoke with an intensity that I found riveting. She was restless, she made large gestures as she spoke, as if she were drawing on a screen. We spoke in English. After graduating with a degree in Chinese language and history from Beijing Normal, she had overturned her life and applied to study electrical engineering at Tokyo University. To her surprise, she had been accepted. She had only returned to China the previous year. She was divorced and had a teenaged daughter.
Yiwen had much to tell me. A story is a shifting creature, an eternal mirror that catches our lives at unexpected angles. Partway into our conversation, I opened my laptop and showed her a scan of the composition, The Sun Rises on the Peoples’ Square. I began humming the notes.
“This is Sparrow’s music,” Yiwen said immediately. “But…”
“How do you know?”
“He was singing it all the time. I used to hear him in the evenings, walking home late at night. In 1989, we lived in the Muxidi Hutong, all the flats were small and very close together, we were living almost one on top of the other. Sparrow would pass by my window on the way to his flat. And I could hear him in the little study, where he used to do his writing. His music was like something in the air.” Yiwen leaned closer to the computer. “But how on earth did you get this?”
“A friend performed it for me. A few years ago. I’ve learned to read the music a little.”
“But how did you find a copy of the music? It was destroyed in 1989. Ai-ming had only nine pages. I saw it destroyed.”