—
Late in the afternoon, he woke suddenly. Here was his daughter’s face hovering above him, slowly sharpening. “Ba,” she said. “Ba!” She kept repeating that representatives from Wire Factory No. 3 were in the living room. He got up. Ai-ming brought him a basin of cold water. Sparrow dunked his face, thinking he had been reprioritized out of his job. Instead, he came out to find Miss Lu and Old Bi, in their factory uniforms, sitting on the sofa, eating peanuts. They smiled nervously when Sparrow said, “Have you just come off your shift?”
Miss Lu recovered a peanut that had fallen between two cushions. When she had it firmly between her fingers, she pointed it at him and said, “Old Bi and I have finally decided to join the independent union. They’ve been canvassing in Tiananmen Square, you know? The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation.” She cracked the shell and threw the peanuts into her mouth.
Old Bi leaned forward. “Let’s just say we’re tired of sitting on the hilltop and watching the tigers fight. Maybe you are, too, Comrade Sparrow, and if so we should stick together.”
Ai-ming had followed him out, he could hear the flat squeak of her slippers behind him.
“Yes, okay.”
Old Bi and Miss Lu kept looking at him, as if they were still waiting for an answer.
How could he learn to see around corners? What mistake was about to lunge towards him?
Miss Lu said, “You need to show your work unit ID and register your real name. We understand if you’d rather not. After all, you’ve got a family to think of…”
“Wait. I’ll get it.”
Sparrow went to the bedroom, found his ID card and put it into his pocket. A new letter from Kai was sitting on the dresser, in plain sight. Ai-ming must have placed it there. She had followed him in the bedroom, but before she could say anything, he told her he was going to the Square. “I want you to stay inside.” He said it sharply, as if she had already disobeyed him. He picked up the letter and placed it, too, in his pocket.
“But, Ba…”
“For once, Ai-ming, do as I ask.”
Outside, he watched, lightheaded, as Old Bi unlocked his bicycle. As they left the alleyway, Sparrow pedalled behind them. Miss Lu was balanced on the back of Old Bi’s bike, and her old-fashioned cloth shoes sat daintily in the air. She stretched a hand out, handing him a cigarette. It was a good brand, Big Front Gate.
“Baby Corn was on the barricades last night,” Miss Lu said. “He told us two million Beijingers are on the streets. He said he ripped up his Party membership card.”
The cigarette tasted opulent in his mouth.
“It’s all getting so emotional,” Old Bi said. “All these tears and threats are obscuring the bigger issues. We could help these students steer the ship but who listens to the older generation?”
Smoke clouded from Miss Lu’s mouth. “That’s right. We had our day and look how well we served the country. Oh yes, we Red Guards were very first class, very rational.”
Old Bi pretended he hadn’t heard.
They came to a large tent on the northwest corner of the Square, temporary headquarters of the independent union, where a lineup of uniformed workers stretched along the boulevard. Jokes were passed from person to person like midday snacks. Two hours later, upon reaching the front, Sparrow signed his name below thousands of others. He felt too afraid to be afraid. A giddy volunteer informed him, hands gesticulating, that workers were organizing themselves into various battalions, some were in charge of gathering supplies, some would battle the army at the roadblocks, and others had joined the Iron Mounted Soldiers, a motorcycle reconnaissance network.
Distracted by the sound of helicopters, Sparrow told the volunteer he would do whatever was needed, but he didn’t own a motorcycle.
“Oh-oh,” Fan said, suddenly appearing with her booming voice. “Be practical, Old Sparrow! You’re not a kid anymore! I don’t see you leaping up on barricades, just falling off them!”
“Falling down is also a form of obstruction.”
Fan rumbled a laugh, gave him a stinging slap on the back, and then another.
On a nearby bench, Old Bi and Miss Lu were sharing a cigarette, entranced by the workers’ radio broadcast, read by a young woman with a heart-shaped face and a soprano voice.
Sparrow went outside and onto the Square. Conditions had deteriorated, the students looked bedraggled and destitute. There was garbage everywhere and the camp smelled very bad. One after another, people scrambled up to the microphone, identifying themselves as teachers, intellectuals, or student leaders.
He watched for a long time. Their speeches (“No kneeling!”) grew increasingly vehement until, driven by their passions (“No compromise!”) and by the high tide of emotions, they, too, finished by asking the protesters to stand firm and risk everything (“No retreat!”). The sky opened and heavy rain broke free. Tarps collapsed onto the huddled students, and he heard them cry out, a mix of laughter, groaning and cursing. Banners drooped, flags stuck to their poles, a pair of abandoned shorts and a few wet T-shirts sat like turtlebacks before the portrait of Chairman Mao. Sparrow saw a tall girl standing alone, a pink headband in her hair, and wondered if it was Yiwen, the neighbours’ daughter. The rain blurred her figure, and he felt he was looking into the past, or into a future that would not arrive. He heard footsteps behind him and turned. Fan was running towards him, a graceful hop-skip-jump-jog, holding a bright blue umbrella like a prize in the air.
—
He was assigned to the blockade at Muxidi Bridge, which was so close to home it was like watching over his backyard. Sparrow and a dozen neighbours took up a position on the roof of a city bus, whose tires had been punctured. Songs from the 1920s and 1930s proliferated around them, and neighbours, including Ling, handed out candy nougats, tea and pastries. All night, he followed Ling’s figure in the crowd below. She was distributing copies of an unauthorized supplement to the People’s Daily, printed covertly by the newspaper’s staff. In the last week, Sparrow had hardly seen her. Ling was never home, she had thrown all her energy into the ongoing dispute at Radio Beijing. Journalists and editors, including Ling, had come down firmly on the side of the students and were no longer waiting for official approval before broadcasting their reports. The Ling he had first met in Kai’s room, the sharp-eyed philosophy student, had been biding her time and here she was now, as if she had never been away. In fact, all over Beijing, people who had seemingly resigned themselves to always wearing ten layers of coats were now shedding them all at once. They carried themselves differently, they were proud, even joyful, in bloom.
Battling sleep, Sparrow found himself remembering the swaying of the Wuhan bus, when he and Kai had gone in search of Comrade Glass Eye, when a red-cheeked girl had fallen asleep in Sparrow’s lap as he played “Bird’s Eye View.” He, too, had felt purely happy then. The music had seemed to scour everyone clean. Perhaps the messages of the students had done something similar: simplified ideas had set in motion a train of desires. A slogan on a headband or a T-shirt, “Give me liberty or give me death,” had led to a hunger strike and a political impasse, and both the will and desire to change one’s conditions.