“But there was no violence,” the boy said. “There was no violence. The police agreed with us. Some of them were weeping, too. We’re all brothers.”
He looked stunned. He turned away and rejoined the procession, buckling himself back into the connected arms.
“Boycott classes!”
“We must have the courage to stand up!”
A placard floated by, “According to the Chinese Constitution, Article 35, the citizens have the right to free speech and assembly.” Applause rippled down the avenue. Dust had gotten into Ai-ming’s eyes, she tried to rub it out but the rubbing only made it worse. The students looked crushed, their paper flowers were flattened against their chests. In fact, she thought, they looked as if they had come from another country, even though they had only come from a few blocks away. In her distraction, the bicycle slipped from her hands and smacked hard against someone’s knee. She dropped her head and began to apologize, expecting someone to call her an idiot country fool, but instead the bicycle righted itself and floated back into her hands. “Good for you students,” a woman said. Her voice was scratchy, she was rubbing her knee. “You’re braver than we were. Much braver. When my generation gathered in Tiananmen Square, it was a different world.” Ai-ming looked up, but either the woman had melted away or Ai-ming couldn’t affix the voice to the face. All around her, older people were looking at her as if she had given them lucky money. She could not see properly. She felt as if the sidewalks, the tables and chairs were all shifting, but she was frozen. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Everything flowed before her, the crowd grew denser and then it slowly loosened. It was not until they had nearly reached the Square that she could feel her own weight again, her two legs, the solidity of the bicycle.
Sparrow, too, was quiet. He had lost his paper flower and his coat looked naked. His bicycle creaked. She unfastened her own flower, pulled him to a stop, and pinned it to him. Behind him, the last remnants of the student procession turned right, north towards the university district. What world had they come from and to what world were they returning?
“Ai-ming, what are you thinking?”
What had the Square looked like this morning when the sun rose on a hundred thousand youth curled together on the concrete? She felt embarrassed because, in response to her father’s question, she, a young scholar, could only think of Yiwen’s favourite song, It’s not that I don’t understand. It’s that things are changing so fast.
Sparrow rephrased. “What were these students thinking?”
They had entered the Square now. The phalanxes of police remained, guarding the Great Hall of the People, even though it was probably empty. The day was quickly getting on. A conscientious few students were meticulously picking up garbage, but they left the paper flowers, which tumbled like pollen whenever a breeze came. The oversized Hu Yaobang gazed sorrowfully down from the Monument.
“I came here when I was a small child,” Sparrow said. “Big Mother brought me. She told me the Square is a microcosm of the human body. The head, the heart, the lungs…She told me not to get lost.”
“Did you get lost?” Ai-ming asked.
“Of course. The space is so large. It takes more than a million people to fill it. Even in 1966, the Red Guards couldn’t do it.”
“Ba,” Ai-ming said. “I want to go abroad.” There was some part of her that remained untapped, she thought, that would never come to life unless it was given space.
“A person needs money to go abroad. Your mother and I don’t have that kind of money.”
“The ones without money try to find outside sponsorship.”
Sparrow was quiet.
The Art of War, Ai-ming thought, ashamed. Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business. “If you know someone in Canada who could sponsor me, I could go.”
Her father looked at her as if from a great distance. Had she been too direct? Was it obvious she had invaded his privacy?
“Yiwen told me,” she said hurriedly, baldly lying. “She said she has an uncle in America. That’s why she applied to go overseas. I thought we might know someone.”
“But why would I know anyone in Canada?” Ba said. His voice was piercingly gentle, cutting her like a toothpick.
“I don’t know….you must know musicians who went away,” she said wretchedly. “With my grades. If I studied hard, I could…”
“Beida is a the best university in the country. Your mother and I don’t want you to study in Canada, it’s so far away.”
“But you could come with me!”
Sparrow shook his head, but not in a way that said no.
She said, “Once you told me that when you were young, you wanted to go abroad. To write your music. To hear other influences. Why is it too late? Ba, you’ve been working in the factory for twenty years and this is a long time in a person’s life. I think…I have a sense that things are changing. The whole point of Hu Yaobang’s reforms was to give opportunities to people like you, people who were unfairly treated.”
“Is that what you think, Ai-ming, that I was unfairly treated?” He touched the flower she had pinned to his coat, as if he had just noticed it.
She wanted to curl up into a ball. Even though her intent was good, the directness of her words made her feel as if she was poking him repeatedly with a sharpened stick.
After a moment, Sparrow said, “And what about your mother?”
“Ma lived nearly twenty years away from us. What difference would it make to her?”
“She lived far away because the government assigns our jobs and our housing.”
“But why? Why can’t we choose for ourselves?” Across from them, in the emptiness of the Square, there were posters asking this very same question. She was not alone in her thinking, she had nothing to fear. Ba doesn’t even know how afraid he is, she thought. His generation has gotten so used to it, they don’t even know that fear is the primary emotion they feel.
“I chose my life, Ai-ming,” he said. “I chose the life that I could live with. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way from the outside.”
She wondered if he believed his own words. She said, “I know, Ba.”
They stood together in the Square where funeral wreaths softened the emptiness. The architecture was intended to make a person feel insignificant, but Ai-ming felt confusingly large, there was so much room here, a child could run in any pattern, make any shape, never encounter anyone or anything.
“I want to know what it’s like in a young country with lots of space,” she said. “If you say something out loud, you hear your own voice differently.”
Sparrow nodded.
She said, “Canada.”
—
In Sparrow’s mind, lines of Chairman Mao came back unbidden.
We had much to do
and quickly.
The sky-earth spins
and time is short.
Ten thousand years is long
and so a morning and an evening count.
Near to them, in front of the Great Hall of the People, the first line of police, too, seemed to be melting. It could be, Sparrow thought, that a person does not even know that they have gone quiet. Qù could be a substance that begins as a strength and transmutes, imperceptibly, into loss.
They had reached the southern edge of the Square.
Now Ai-ming asked him, “Why did the students kneel down?”
“I imagine…they wanted to show respect. They followed the ways in which petitioners have always approached the government.”
“But why did no government official come out?”
“Because…even though they were kneeling, if a member of the government had come and addressed their demands, the students would have been in a position of power.”