She nodded but this wasn’t what she meant. It was the whole idea of answering, the fear that every word had multiple meanings, that she was not in control of what they said.
Sparrow said that he was going to the factory to see what was happening.
Had he forgotten what year this was? And why did he look like he was in pain? It was only now that she realized he was wearing his factory uniform. “But Ba!” she said. “Everyone says the army will come in from that side, from Fengtai.”
He nodded without hearing. “Ai-ming, don’t go to the Square today. Promise me.” He looked at the door then back again. “Where’s your mother?”
“Radio station.”
“Oh.” He nodded but his eyes were glassy. “Ai-ming, I have a friend in Canada who might sponsor you. I’m willing to do everything I can. I’m going to meet with him in Hong Kong in June—”
“What friend? You’re going to Hong Kong?”
“—but first you must write the examinations and you must do well. Without a high score, even sponsorship won’t help you…” He was talking in a kind of perturbed state. Was it a trick, she wondered. So that she would stay where she was, live inside books, ignore what was happening to her thoughts? And who was this friend?
“I’ll excel in the examinations.”
When she said this, the Bird of Quiet looked incredibly glad, like a child. She tried to steel herself against her father’s innocent smile.
“You’re a good child, Ai-ming. A good daughter. I’m a lucky father.”
Sparrow left for the factory. Ai-ming changed her clothes, pulling on a dress of Yiwen’s. In the courtyard, she took Yiwen’s clothes down from the laundry line, stuffed them into a bag along with a toothbrush and washcloth, books, and a few coins her mother had given her. She hopped onto her bicycle and hurried out.
—
The city seemed loosened by the heat. She pedalled hurriedly to Tiananmen Square but found it unexpectedly quiet. One of the student marshals, a physics student who called himself Kelvin, told her that Yiwen had gone out with a “battalion” to the western suburbs in an effort to blockade the roads and prevent the army from reaching the Square. Ai-ming turned around and cycled back the way she had come.
At the Muxidi Bridge, nobody could pass: bicycles, buses with punctured tires, burned-out sofas, shouting people, and stockpiles of wood overflowed the intersection. When Ai-ming finally made it across, she glimpsed broken glass, swerved hard and nearly collided with a scooter. The driver’s “Sorry, sorry!” fluttered backwards. Her front tire made a sad, sucking noise before going flat. She got down and began pushing the bicycle on. The scraping of the rim against concrete made her teeth ache. Unable to see through her tears, Ai-ming locked the stupid, useless, unforgivable bicycle to a tree, took the bag of clothes and kept walking. Her whole body was coated in sweat. A bus came and she jumped on, but almost immediately the bus stopped. She tumbled out with the other passengers: here was the army now.
Army trucks, stretching as far as she could see.
Ai-ming walked towards them. Tears, confusion, hysteria. The military trucks were surrounded by people. “Brother soldiers!” an old man was shouting. He lurched in front of Ai-ming. His blue factory uniform sagged around him like a riverbed. “Do not become the shame of our nation! You are the sons of China. You, who should be defending these students with your lives! How can you enter our city with guns and bullets? Where is your conscience?”
A few officers tried to make themselves heard above the commotion, they said their only mission was to keep the peace. Everyone was hysterical and calling out.
An ancient grandmother had taken it upon herself to lie down in the road, in front of the trucks. “Who are you retaking the streets from, eh?” she said hoarsely. “I’m no rebel! I was living here when your great-grandfather still wore short pants!”
A man in a factory uniform, carrying dozens of individually wrapped cakes, began dropping them, indiscriminately, over the railings of the trucks. “My daughter is in the Square,” he said. “My only child. I appeal to your courage! I appeal, I appeal…”
Ai-ming could not see Yiwen anywhere, it was a thousand times more crowded here than it had been at Tiananmen Square. She hugged the bag of clothes to her chest and stood in the mayhem, hungry, thirsty, shivering with fear, ashamed at having disobeyed her father. A soldier her age stared at her with palpable longing. How did I end up here? Ai-ming thought. This is my country, this is the capital, but I don’t belong in Beijing. Where is Yiwen? If I only I could find Yiwen, I would know what to do.
The afternoon was disappearing but the crowds only grew larger. Some soldiers climbed out of their vehicles and stood in the road, humiliated. Some were in shock, some looked angry, some wept.
—
On the fifth floor of the factory, all the seats were empty. Sparrow sat at his work station, basking in the absolute stillness. This was the first peace he had known in days, and the quiet inside him now felt freed, it sat on the table, uncaged, like a house bird. Despite the emptiness, he felt as if his co-workers had left an afterimage: every work station belonged unassailably to someone. Perhaps, in a moment, Dao-ren, Old Bi and Fan would reappear, and it would be Sparrow himself who would dissolve, as if he had always been the illusion. The freedom of departure comforted him, and he put his head down on his arms and fell into a sound, peaceful sleep.
—
It was nearly ten at night by the time Ai-ming found Yiwen, huddled with two other girls. One was called Lily and one was called Faye. The girls were draped over one another and looked like a single body with three heads. Yiwen’s father had told her that, until she quit the student demonstrations, she was no longer welcome at home. She had been sleeping in Faye’s dormitory room.
After learning that all three had been part of the hunger strike, which had officially been called off this afternoon, Ai-ming coaxed them to a nearby noodle stall.
The vendor was a sleepy-eyed woman with a thick northeastern accent. “Take your money back,” she said to Ai-ming, after the other girls had floated away to a table. “No, no, I mean it. I’ve got nothing to offer you kids but these noodles. They’re good noodles but they won’t change the world.”
Embarrassed, Ai-ming thanked her.
“So, what do you study?” the vendor asked.
Ai-ming looked into the woman’s puckered, hopeful face. “Um, Chinese history.”
The woman pulled her head back like a bird. “What’s the use of that? Well, at least you know that my generation was tossed around by Chairman Mao’s campaigns. Our lives were completely wasted…We’ve pinned all our hopes on you.”
“The other girls study mathematics,” Ai-ming said, trying again.
“That’s what we need!” the vendor said, smacking her chopsticks against the metal pot. “Real numbers. Without real numbers, how can we fix our economy, make plans, understand what we need? Young lady, I don’t mean to be rude but you should really think about studying mathematics, too.”
“I will.”
She carried the noodles to their table. There was something wary in the girls’ eyes, but they softened when they saw the food.
“What will you do now?” Ai-ming asked.
Lily swallowed a mouthful of noodles. “What can we do? I’m afraid to go back to the university. Maybe it’s all a trap and they’re waiting to arrest us on campus. In 1977, Wei Jingsheng got seventeen years in solitary confinement for writing one wall poster.”
“We can’t let them take the Square.” Yiwen’s voice seemed to come from the plastic tabletop. “We have to stop them here, in the streets, we have to fight the army. We can’t let them through.”