A commentator on the radio argued that these revolutionary youth were part of a deliberate attempt to humiliate the government and the nation. “Why else begin a hunger strike two days before our historic summit with Mikhail Gorbachev? This is the first visit from a Soviet leader in forty years….” Another said the students’ intentions were good, but their methods were immature, and it was imperative that they refrain from damaging the nation’s image. The news also seemed to be wrestling with its own head; the newsreader announced that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang favoured far-reaching press reforms, so that content and analysis would be decided by news editors and not Party officials. A sharp pain in Sparrow’s back flared unexpectedly, and he felt like an old piano that couldn’t be tuned.
At work the following day, the factory was unproductive. Half his co-workers had signed on to the new independent workers’ union operating from under a tarp on Chang’an Avenue. They had gone so far as to identify themselves by their real names, even showing their work badges. His co-workers only wanted news of the Square. Sparrow hadn’t yet signed on, he was trying to imagine himself boarding the plane for Hong Kong. Kai had been true to his word and Sparrow’s exit visa had been approved. For the first time in his life, he would travel outside China. Kai had begun to float other ideas. We could teach at the Hong Kong Conservatory. I have also made inquiries at the Vancouver Conservatory of Music. What have you been composing? Send me what you have. He began to suspect that Kai was living an illusion more complex than his own.
Fan, who worked the line with him, tapped her pencil on his desk. “Comrade Sparrow,” she said. “You look hideous. Do you have a fever? Is it contagious? Maybe you should get home and rest.”
Fan was still so young, Sparrow thought suddenly. If Zhuli were alive, she would be thirty-seven years old. These days, she entered his thoughts freely, as if some barrier between them had broken down.
“I’m not…”
“Go on. Production is non-existent anyway.” Fan got up, he could see her in the next aisle talking to the floor supervisor, known to everyone as Baby Corn, Sparrow didn’t know why. His hands were trembling. Perhaps he did have a fever. Baby Corn came over, deferential, as if Sparrow were his ancestor.
“Comrade Sparrow, you’re looking dead on your feet. Take the afternoon off. You’re back on shift tomorrow anyway, aren’t you?”
“I would prefer to stay.” Sparrow was afraid he would be criticized, later on, for not working to his full capacity. They would use this weakness to reprioritize him and lay him off. If he lost his job, they might revoke Ai-ming’s Beijing papers, and she would not be allowed to sit the university examinations.
“I insist,” Baby Corn said, distracted. He wandered a few steps away and gazed into the large face of his brand new watch.
“Come on,” Fan whispered. “He’s a real pain when he’s angry. Besides, you look awful…Did you injure your back? At your age, you’ve got to take better care of yourself.”
As he left, he heard the newsreader saying that talks between the government and the students, scheduled for the morning, had been cancelled. Outside, even the breeze felt sticky. He had started cycling to and from work because the buses were not reliable. Ling had told him that youth from across the country were pouring into Beijing by the tens of thousands. They were painting democracy slogans on train cars so that wherever the trains went, the student messages, too, would go. Sparrow pedalled slowly across the factory grounds, ashamed of his exhaustion. If he was not careful, they would all be calling him Grandfather, which was ludicrous because he was not even fifty.
He ended up on Chang’an Avenue, his bicycle inching through traffic as if he were part of a larger procession. He hadn’t meant to go to Tiananmen Square, it was only that he neglected to turn right after the Muxidi Bridge, and had continued straight. Chang’an Avenue was jammed; now he couldn’t turn around even if he wanted to. He had grown up in Shanghai, the most modern of Chinese cities, and yet he felt like an outsider here, out of his depth. The flood of Beijingers carried him forward until, glimpsing the Square, he saw that it was once more overrun with banners representing more universities than he could count. And now Sparrow truly did not wish to be here. Loudspeakers were broadcasting continuously. A young woman’s frail voice crackled over the street: “The country is our country. The people are our people. The government is our government. Who will shout if not us? Who will act if not us?”
Sparrow got down from his bicycle and began to push it. The young woman was using the exact words of Chairman Mao, written when Mao Zedong was a young fighter.
Beside Sparrow, an enormous man with a grizzled face was reading the newspaper as he walked.
“This hunger strike,” Sparrow said to him. “Is it real? Will the students really refuse food?”
“Ai! These kids…” The stranger’s badge, stamped with the words Capital Iron and Steel, trembled from a clip on his shirt. “It’ll be over in a few hours. Old Gorbachev will be escorted into the Square tomorrow and the Party will shake the kids off Tiananmen like ants from a stick.” He folded the paper in half. “That’s what my son tells me anyway.”
“And all these people?”
“Exactly. I came to see what’s gotten everyone so worked up. Of course, I admire their ideals. Who doesn’t? But even a nothing like me can see that the students and the government aren’t speaking the same language. Everyone wants to fix the country, but everyone wants power, too, don’t they? That’s what we’re talking about in my danwei….” He tapped his badge. “Our work unit alone has over 200,000 workers and if we support the hunger strike, that changes everything, doesn’t it? That’s a bloody revolution.” He took a bag of buns, as if by magic, from his other hand and offered one to Sparrow, who accepted. The man ate half of one in a single bite. “Any kids, Comrade?”
“A daughter.”
“Not a university student, I hope.”
“Thank heavens, no.”
The man swallowed the bread in his mouth and washed it down with a gulp from his tea thermos. “Frankly, I don’t understand what’s wrong with us. The stupidity we went through, a whole generation slapping its own head…how come we keep arriving at the same point?” He screwed the lid back on his thermos. “Hey, you’re not a plain coat are you? Someone told me there are thousands of plain coats snooping around.”
“A spy?” Sparrow smiled. “No, but other people have thought the same.”
“Because you’re so unthreatening,” the man said. “Don’t take offence. It’s just that you’ve got such a listening face.”
—
It was twilight. Behind the Monument of the People’s Heroes, hundreds of students were lying on the ground. They were guarded by other students, wearing red armbands, who made a kind of human barricade around them. Sparrow felt that a world he had been living inside was being forced open. But weren’t these students also living inside a world of their own construction? The hunger strikers had the brightest futures in the entire country. As Beijing university graduates they would be responsible for their parents and grandparents, for their siblings if they had any, yet here they were, lying on the bare concrete. He felt a gnawing fear scraping against his lungs. Three boys on one bicycle rolled by, acrobatic, joyful. They shouted, “We won’t eat fried democracy!” and a ripple of laughter came from the pyjama-clad students. Where were their parents? he wondered. But now a boy with a red armband came to him and said sternly, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Comrade, but only we are allowed here. It’s for the security of our hunger strike revolutionaries.” Sparrow nodded, backing away. The recording on the loudspeaker began again, it was the same fragile voice as before, “Today freedom and democracy must be bought with our lives. Is this fact something the Chinese people can be proud of?”