JUNE 3 Evening
Of Tanks and Men
After grabbing a quick bite to eat, Meng and I cut through the Beijing Hotel lobby and took the elevator up to my room, 1413, for a more comprehensive vantage point. Along the way, I introduced Meng to Lotus, who we ran into in the lobby of the hotel. She wanted to join us for another look-see at the Square, but when she called her husband Albert, he implored her to find the first cab and get back to their apartment right away.
Lotus lived in a small apartment building adjacent to the Lido Hotel which we had used on May 28 to conduct a long interview with Chai Ling. A week ago Chai Ling spoke to me for an hour, half of it in tears. She spoke in wildly apocalyptic terms and when she had concluded she said she wanted to run away to Hong Kong. Later that night she changed her mind and decided to stay.
The charismatic but mercurial student leader’s florid language was starting to take on a reality I hadn’t granted it when she first confessed her worst fears to us.
We all knew something was going to happen, and we had a pretty good idea of where it would happen. We knew it was likely to happen at night, but we knew nothing for sure.
No sooner did Lotus go downstairs to get a taxi than there was a commotion at the door. It was the Panorama crew. I had already told them I didn’t want to go out with them and intended instead to go to the square. They had come unbidden, as flustered by the rapidly changing political situation as everyone else. I led them to the porch to take a good look at the commotion below, fully expecting to be hit with a renewed request to take them on the routine assignment I had already declined.
We exchanged pleasantries on the porch, but it was the bird’s eye view of the street leading to Tiananmen that did the real talking. Things were getting erratic and worrisome. The swirl of bodies below was mostly headed in the direction of the square, but there were people beating an exit, too. Overall the crowd was diffuse and dispersed, more agitation and chaos than unity.
Correspondent John Simpson stared fixedly at the street below, opting to stay out of the conversation about the night’s assignment.
“We got your message, Phil,” producer Jenny Clayton started. “It’s a shame we can’t go to the disco—we need it for our piece—because this is our last Saturday night here.”
“Disco?”
She paused for a moment, turning her gaze to the agitated blur of a restive crowd. “But you are right, this is more important.”
She was both contrite and curt about it, and that was the end of that.
No reprimand for my refusing the disco assignment. I was a freelancer, but we were of one mind now about where the film crew should be.
All arrows were pointing to the square.
Yet as willing as Jenny had been to accede to my demand that it was Tiananmen Square or bust, she could not entirely let go of her desire to get the “cultural” shots for the documentary. Could we not do both?
The crew picked up its gear. Wang Li eagerly accepted an assignment to carry the tripod and lights and we trundled into the elevator and trudged out to the street.
No sooner were we outside than Jenny and John resumed a nagging argument about what the crew was and wasn’t going to film. It served to slow our progress to the square, which, given cumbersome night gear including lights and the distractions and obstacles of a skittish, uncooperative crowd, took longer than usual.
Ingo was a veteran cameraman, and he knew from being in other conflict zones that cameras can draw unwanted attention. So he draped a black cloth over his gear and carried it under his arm like a package. It fooled nobody on close examination but it might pass at a glance. Mark held tight onto the microphones and recorder he carried. Wang Li walked next to him, tripod and lights in tow.
“Look! Laowai!”
A film crew can only be so unobtrusive, and it was inevitable that would garner attention as we slunk our way across the square.
“Several of them!”
“Are they going to the square?”
“Look! Foreigners! Journalists?”
“Don’t the laowai know about martial law?”
Not all of the comments about us were in Chinese. Believe it or not, there were tourists wandering about. An unexpected taunt on the part of a passing foreigner proves hard for the crew to ignore.
“Ha, ha! Look at that man!” cried out an American-accented voice. “He’s carrying a big camera! Look, he’s got it hiding under a black sheet.”
“The bloody Yank can laugh all he wants,” Ingo muttered. “If things get bad I can use this to hide the camera. It could be a matter of life and death.”
The cloth-draped camera was rather comical looking, somewhat akin to a magician’s prop. But it was no joke to our news professional. “Sniper fire is often aimed at people with cameras,” Ingo said, adding that he knew what it’s like to be shot at.
I walked in tandem with the camera crew with admiration for their quiet professionalism. But I also wanted to avoid the others. The producers were locking horns again. Meanwhile Wang Li and Meng were going at it too, though for the moment they were studiously ignoring one another.
Alas. Who wasn’t feeling irritable, afraid, and confused on this weird evening?
At certain junctures, the flow of the crowd reverses itself, provoking tiffs and heated exchanges between those entering and those exiting the square.
“Why are you going that way?”
“Cowards! What are you afraid of?”
“Going home already?”
“Someone said the fighting has started to the west!”
“Got to get out of here before one!”
It was getting scary. Who wasn’t frustrated, if not afraid, as the transformative dream of the collective crumbled and the crowd spiraled out of control?
The “pulse” of the pedestrian flow grew irregular, erratic. Every shiver a shudder, every paroxysm packed with apocalyptic portent.
Although the dominant spirit of the movement, at least since the days of the hunger strike, had been making a show of self-sacrifice, self-preservation seemed to be replacing it as the mood of the moment.
You didn’t have to be a fortune-teller or have inside connections to know Tiananmen was the target. But just what did the party leaders have in mind? What crowd control techniques were they going to apply and put in place? Mass arrests were likely, maybe even hand-to-hand scuffles. The long-anticipated crackdown had been postponed so long that getting it over with once and for all might bring a certain amount of relief, so long as nobody got seriously hurt.
The tension in the air was electric. It was starting to provoke the kind of static irritability you feel as the barometer falls before a storm.
Something had to give, and give soon.
I put my ear to the wind, hoping to pick up what bits of wisdom the trembling masses of people around us might be willing to share. The collection of bodies was like a complex organism, a throbbing, contiguous unit made up of many small parts. We were there as observers, but we were being observed too, and not entirely apart from that which we observed. We were breathing the same air, breaking the same rules of martial law, taking similar risks by walking the same forbidden paving stones.
We were further linked by bumps, shoves, shouts, cheers and the sympathetic gaze of fellow risk-takers. In the government’s jaundiced eye, we were all trespassers and trouble-makers engaged in counter-revolutionary activity
Word of mouth warnings and news alerts ricocheted back and forth across the square. Already there were intimations of violent conflict and minor signs of panic.
Once the people’s square was breached or came under sustained, unyielding pressure from the military, all bets were off. Where was a safe place to set up our gear? Where was a safe place to escape to if things got out of control?
Even on the perimeter, the shock of conflict was ever-present.
The whole was not only greater than the sum of its constituent parts, it was a vital, living, writhing thing. We’d know something was happening almost right away, even if we couldn’t see what was happening. The crowd that remained, as steadfast as it was in the intent to make a stand, was likely to seize up the moment it was attacked.
Gone were the ecstatic, ebullient voices of mid-May. The mood here was now wary, suspicious, excitable, and at times unfriendly.
A different day, a different flow, a different river of people now.
We followed the footsteps of those in front of us in silent communion. Once we hit Tiananmen, the general flow assumed the habitual counterclockwise movement that the marchers had taken during rallies in the glory days of the movement.
Soon we found ourselves at the place where Chang’an Boulevard intersects the top of the square, but the only significant traffic was on foot.
Ten thousand eyes and ears watched our every move. Those observing us were mostly protesters, I mean you have to assume that’s what they were, but it had been getting harder and harder to tell who was who.
Ever since martial law declared the square off-limits, fears of infiltration and police action had gotten high. Everyone was hyper-alert, borderline paranoid. Wang Li in particular always seemed to be on the lookout for plainclothes agents and agents-provocateur, and yet Meng was telling me Wang Li was the one who shouldn’t be trusted.
When it came to asking questions, which I saw as central to my task, I had no choice but to canvas total strangers with unknown agendas. It was near impossible to record vox populi, though, and I didn’t encourage it. There were still people more than willing to talk to a foreigner on the side, but they wisely refused to say anything direct to camera.
There was a collective wisdom out there and it was worth listening to. The mass experience far outstripped the limited reach of individual senses. The collective sighs, cries, complaints and groans, not to mention the universal suspicion of cameras, were telling signs worth paying attention to.
There was a sea-change in the crowd compared to the heady days of mid-May.
The petty squabble between the BBC reporter and producer subsided with a compromise. The crew was free to report on whatever was, or wasn’t happening on the square. In the meantime, the producer continued to insist that the reporter do a piece to camera. The mixed signals resulted in a zigzag path that took us first towards the Goddess of Democracy, where I went to see what people were saying, and then away from it, because the camera got a better view from a distance.
The one thing we all agreed on was that the central axis of Tiananmen was the place to be. To the south, a clear view of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, the pedestal of which was still under the control of student protesters. To the north was the newly erected Goddess of Democracy and of course the spooky, iconic and photogenic Mao portrait that was hung from Tiananmen Gate.
The gear was unpacked at a considerable distance from the alabaster statue so that it would appear in the background for the standup.
“There’s supposed to be a ceremony at the so-called University of Democracy tonight,” I said as the crew went through the motions of sticking to script. Jenny, thinking like a good producer who had to get footage in the can before flying back to London, wanted the standup. John, who was being asked to do the standup, had rather more political instincts. He wanted to roam and observe what was going on at this fraught moment.
I concurred with John and suggested we go over to the monument where the students were camped out. Thinking that Chai Ling, Feng Congde, and some of the other activists I knew by face or name would be there, I figured we could do some spot interviews. I assumed they wouldn’t be afraid to speak on camera as they had long since implicated themselves. Even if it was only an off-camera chat, I wanted to see what the student leaders were doing now, to get a better idea of how things looked at student command central.
Jenny vetoed the idea, which had the effect of reigniting her argument with John.
My proposed excursion was scrapped, but so was the standup.
The shoot was falling apart.
The camera crew, now augmented by Wang Li’s presence as the lighting man and Meng as a guide, was sympathetic, but John and Jenny called the shots.
If I was to be of any use to the crew as interpreter and guide, I needed to tune out their insular voices, voiced in my native language, to take better measure of jittery Chinese voices around us.
I turned to Meng and talked to him in Chinese with Wang Li in earshot. I suggested we just strike out in the direction we want to go and let the crew follow.
It worked. Meng and I started walking through a thicket of protesters with the camera crew close on our heels. Jenny and John had no choice but to follow. As we got deeper into the ragtag crowd and closer to the beating heart of Tiananmen, I checked my watch. Nearing midnight.
The producer and correspondent trailed along in an uneasy silence. Everyone was mad about something, which was at once petty, but also emblematic of the overall mood. Things were touchy. No matter which way you looked, the tension was palpable.
As we plowed deeper into the big square heart of darkness, news tidbits about small scuffles and stand-offs with army personnel reached my ear, but this dynamic also applied to the groundless rumors that rummaged through interstices of the crowd. Already I was hearing tidbits about troubles to the west, further down Chang’an Boulevard near Liubukou and Fuxingmen. The whispers and word-of-mouth warnings were hard to make sense of in real time, but all indications pointed to worsening conditions, perhaps outright battling, somewhere further down the road.
A faint thunder.
It was overcast, not a star in the sky, but it didn’t look like rain. Again, that rumbling sound. Somewhere in the distance, an indistinct grinding, a metallic hum could be detected, however distorted and swallowed up it was by the agitated chorus of voices around us. A crescendo of muffled shouts in the distance alerted us to something happening just beyond the range of our vision, but we couldn’t make it out.
To think I could have gone to a nightclub “to see what young people were thinking” on the other side of town with the Panorama crew this evening, an absurd assignment, but a rationally safe one. Bright probably would have approved.
But for reasons I couldn’t explain to myself, let alone her, I had to be on the square. If there was a Tiananmen virus, then I had already been infected by it.
Still, Bright’s last message to me echoed in my ears. She had pleaded with me not to go out tonight. She had been displeased with my journalistic yearnings for some time now. She was not happy about the way Chai Ling interrupted a quiet meal we were having together to announce she wanted me to record her last will and testament. Seeing it from Bright’s point of view, the pushy Chai Ling had “hijacked” our day off, our day together. Nor was Bright pleased to hear I had signed on to help BBC again, after a brief stint with ABC.
“Don’t go out tonight,” she begged over the phone earlier this evening. I told her I wanted to walk down to the square to see what was going on, with or without the camera crew.
“Well, if you must go out, make sure you go home by midnight. If not midnight, definitely go back by one!”
“Why?”
“Please, I can’t tell you any more. I can’t say . . . but please, better to stay in your room!”
What was I to make of her plea? Was it just the latest missive in her campaign to get me to quit working for the BBC or was it code for something far more serious?
It suddenly dawned on me that I might be endangering Jenny and the crew by my stubborn, irrational insistence that we be on the square. How could I convey to them that I believed tonight was the night, based in part on instinct, in part on a college girl’s solicitous warning?
During a quiet moment near the moat in front of Tiananmen Gate, I told the crew things were likely to get dangerous after midnight.
“I’m responsible for the safety of the crew,” Simpson responded, deftly appropriating the information while subtly asserting rank.
Wang Li rose to the occasion. He had initially attached himself to me, then briefly to John, and after managing to annoy both of us respectively, he found in Ingo yet another BBC “boss” to cling to. Wang Li was a question mark, but I admired his grit. And Ingo, for his part, was relieved to have some help carrying things, not to mention a useful pair of eyes and ears.
A cameraman needed an assistant to watch his back when he had his face pressed to the viewfinder at a time of conflict, and Wang Li, hyper observant, fit the bill. It pleased me to see Wang Li bond with the crew, as a threesome they moved in almost perfect concert, as if they had been working together for years.
Despite doubts about Wang Li’s real name identity and motivation, he had the makings of a natural journalist, and was thus an excellent addition to the BBC crew. Even if he was a bit of an operator, his pluck might well be an asset if the going got rough.
In contrast, the idealistic Meng, my direct line to the water strikers from the Academy of Drama, was something of a liability, as much as I liked him. The cachet of wearing a red headband and student-issued shirt emblazoned with the “1989 Democratic Tide” was plummeting by the minute. Unlike the provincial Wang Li, Meng was among the Beijing student elite.
John and Jenny finally resolved to do a camera setup near the portrait of Mao. Wang Li opened the tripod and tested the lights, Ingo set up the camera, and Mark tested the sound.
While the crew did their thing, Meng and I decided to do a little reconnoiter within a short radius to better gauge things. The “University of Democracy” was only about two hundred yards away to the southwest.
“Leave the square for safety of life and limb!” a disembodied taped voice blared out over a public-address system. The sound was not coming from the broadcast tent on the pedestal of the monument from which student pronouncements were issued, but rather from government-controlled loudspeakers mounted high upon light-posts around the square.
Li Peng’s grim propagandists had been warning people to leave the square for almost two weeks now.
The student loudspeakers rigged up in the center of the square were still audible, but just barely so. I thought I heard Chai Ling’s high-pitched voice, but it might have been my imagination since she had very much been on my mind. Would the hyperbolic rivers of blood she spoke of truly come to flow across the square?
Scratchy voices amplified by portable speakers not far away from where we stood also begged for auditory attention. It was the workers’ contingent, their spokesmen shouting something along the lines of “Vow to defend the students to the end.”
Pointing out a concentrated gathering of men in the northwest quadrant of the square, Meng said that the workers were led by activist Han Dongfang,
We were right in the middle of things, being walloped by the static of three strident outbursts at once, each dueling with the other, making for a nightmarish war of words.
Again I heard, or thought I heard, a low rumbling sound like that of distant thunder. Turning back north to hurriedly rejoin the crew, I found my route blocked by an undulating human wall. Without warning, the workers and students around me first stiffened, then surged en masse towards Mao’s portrait, like raging Red Guards turning to the red, red sun of their hearts.
Sparked on by some cue that I had missed, thousands more young men and women snapped to attention and began a rush to join an unseen fray somewhere nearby.
Being part of the teeming mass, I had little choice but move in tandem. It was well nigh impossible to stand still; to move against the flow would beg insult if not injury.
Only when we reached the concrete and steel divider in the middle of Chang’an Boulevard, drawn by those in front, pushed by those behind, could we pause and wring free of the seething throng. While Meng stepped away to talk to someone, I climbed on top of the cement road barrier to get a better view of what was going on.
A military vehicle that looked like a tank could be seen careening recklessly our way. It cut through the sea of people with power and impunity, like an icebreaker cracking through thin ice.
Tanks on Tiananmen Square!
It was crazy, what was the PLA doing? What did they think a tank could achieve?
As the armored personnel carrier roared down the thickly-peopled thoroughfare, people deftly jumped out of its way, but there were some close calls. It pressed forward blindly, as fast as its heavy treads would permit.
This was no gentle peacekeeping maneuver, but a stark provocation. Then there appeared another metallic monster, also moving fast, also begging for a clash, beckoning blood.
The reckless charging of two heavy vehicles in the midst of thousands of unarmed civilians was shocking; the rules of engagement had drastically changed.
The admirable discipline and restraint shown by the military to this point had been abandoned, giving way to a reckless, violent strike at the crowd.
How long before someone got killed. The armored personnel carrier was so unforgiving, so heavy, so hard, while the bodies standing in its path were so vulnerable and soft.
So far, no one had been hit or run over, but it was bound to happen soon. The PLA and the people were engaged in a deadly game of “chicken,” in which the winner was the last to flinch. I dreaded seeing people mowed over, and thought this might cause the crowd to quickly disperse, but instead the men and women in the path of the military vehicles were emboldened rather than frightened.
It was as if the irrational showdown triggered a belief in mind over matter, like the martial arts warriors of the late Qing Boxer Rebellion who convinced themselves they were invulnerable to bullets.
Beijing had no shortage of daredevils and prideful individuals. I’d seen plenty of people tempt fate just trying to cross the streets in erratic traffic, I didn’t expect to see people jumping in front of tanks.
Numb and immobilized, I watched energized members of the crowd dart back and forth in front of the armored vehicle, taunting the unseen driver. The armored vehicle continued to forcibly part the crowd on straightaways, but then it had to slow to turn around. As it picked up speed on the return run, it was like a mad bull going for blood. With each sweep, the crowd leapt to the side. Some ran for their lives. Others hung around to taunt it some more. They held their ground, tempting fate.
The passion of the moment was insane yet contagious. Some silent signal that I missed which caused the people all around me to snap into action, moving en masse to the middle of Chang’an Boulevard. Still standing atop the concrete road barrier to get a better view, I suddenly felt the ground lift beneath my feet.
The heavy concrete and steel road divider that I had been standing on to get a better view shook hard and then was suddenly jerked into the air. It threw me off balance, and I toppled into the crowd, my fall softened by waiting arms. I tried to right myself, but I was off my feet and afloat now, suspended by a sea of hands.
When I regained my footing I was befriended by two concerned activists who were puzzled and amused by my presence in the crowd. They urged me to follow them, and then without really thinking about it, joined the fray. I found myself moving, en masse, with the turbulent crowd.
The task at hand was to continue to yank the cement road dividers from their moorings to construct a road barrier. After much exertion, akin to a tug of war, yet another section of the concrete and iron divider was cracked from its moorings and broken free.
The cement base with iron railings was rotated from its original east-west alignment with the flow of the boulevard to follow a north-south axis. The impossibly heavy impediment, made feather-light by hundreds of hands, was dropped to the ground with a thud, positioned in the likely path of vehicular intruders.
It was heave-ho, over and over, until the divider was repositioned in a way that blocked the boulevard. As we rotated the elongated concrete slab in slow increments, it jerked forward like the second hand on an old clock. Lifting, resting. Lifting, resting.
Whose idea it had been was hard to say, it didn’t seem like anyone was really in charge. It was more like an unspoken group dynamic. No one had told me what to do but somehow I found myself working in concert with the others. There was a kind of herd instinct in play, coordinating an impromptu defense to slow the attack of hostile invaders.
In a synchronous fit of frenzy, uncoordinated and unauthorized by any authority other than the collective heat of the crowd, people started throwing stones. Rocks, bits of brick, chunks of broken concrete.
I threw one, too. The very frustration of not being able to stop a powerful vehicle provoked a desire to strike out, however futile.
In a more rational moment, I would not have lifted a hand. I would not volunteered to help build a barricade, I would have stepped back to watch.
But I was part of the crowd now, and for a moment at least, in synchrony with those who desire to strike. Our futile expressions of resistance were unlikely to slow traffic, let alone deter tanks and armored vehicles, but in the heat of the moment, energized by the sight of the deadly intrusion, taking fate into one’s hands to do something felt better than doing nothing.
By the time we had the concrete barrier in place, the armored personnel carrier which had triggered the move was already gone, having disappeared from view somewhere to the east. Immediately the men started to slap one another’s shoulders and massage aching arms. The sudden bout of intense activity was at least as strenuous as heavy-duty weight-lifting.
Coast clear for the moment, the men and women around me breathed a collective sigh of relief. Only after the intense and immediate sense of danger had subsided did it become readily apparent to some that there was a foreigner in their midst.
I was rowdily feted by several sweaty men in T-shirts, one after the other, who beamed broadly while slapping me and offering energetic hand-shakes.
“Huanying ni!”
“Pengyou!”
I was being welcomed, I was being called a friend. As stilted as the exchange might sound, it moved me, almost to tears. At such an unreal juncture, their embrace was reassuringly real. For a fleeting moment, we were brothers-in-arms.
But I didn’t have time to linger with my newfound comrades, to lose myself in the horde. Not only had I lost sight of Meng, but I had to get back to the BBC crew.
It wasn’t hard to find them, a bunch of weirdly dressed foreigners in a crowd of Chinese people is usually easy to spot.
I breathlessly related the news of my encounter in the crowd.
“Did you see that tank? It was crazy. I can’t believe the way that tank went speeding through the crowd!”
“That was not a tank, Phil,” Simpson crisply corrected. “That was an APC, an armored personnel carrier.”
“Well, whatever it was, it nearly killed a few people,” I said, still riled up, still gesticulating wildly. “It was speeding through the crowd like crazy, so we tried to block it.”
Although Simpson had been only about a hundred yards away, he had seen it differently.
“Perhaps it was sent in to survey the crowd,” he said archly.
Meng, who was back with the crew, had closely observed the roadblock incident from the other side of the divider.
“I saw it. They were taunting us,” he muttered bitterly. “They are trying to break our will. They are trying to incite violence.”
“So, what’s next?” I asked, wanting to know, wanting him to have the answer.
“Nothing will happen, I think. The government is just trying to scare the people.”
“Well, I think we should have an emergency plan,” I added. “Like if something happens. Let’s go over by Mao’s picture or some safe place like that.”
“Phil?”
“Yeah?”
“See if you can’t find some people to interview.”
“No, John. We’re going to do the standup. I insist,” countered Jenny. “Ingo, Mark, are you ready?”
“I don’t want to do that now!” Simpson snapped.
“This is not a news crew,” she answered, “This is Panorama, and you, John, you are the presenter for this documentary.”
I had to agree with John Simpson. This was no time for a fuckin’ standup.
As if still intoxicated by the aura of bonding with the militant workers, I started looking around the crowd again.
I craved to be with my Chinese friends, rooted in the land, in full possession of the moment. Even though terror lurked on the perimeter, even though there was bound to be more confrontation and chaos, there was also a preposterous sense of joy to be united with others in a quixotic quest. It was irrational, I know, but it felt as if time had stood still. I felt at one with a mass of unknown strangers, bonded by a primitive, positively prehistoric, solidarity in the face of a daunting beast of prey.
Meng and I talked quietly, once again drifting away from the crew. We were sharing impressions, scanning the swarming multitude for some indication of what might happen next, when two women pushing bicycles came walking our way. Meng’s face lit up in recognition of familiar faces from the Drama Academy.
The two well-dressed women were weaving through the jumpy crowd pressed close to the entrance pathway to Tiananmen Gate. They negotiated the human obstacle course with consummate skill and grace, at last parking their bikes next to the BBC’s tripod as if it were a parking meter.
Soon the drama school comrades were engaged in deep conversation about the latest news, pouring out words too soft, subtle and fast for me to keep up with. I stood back, content to watch the beautiful, expressive faces of three people who knew each other well sharing information and baring their souls in the subdued lamplight on the square.
“Jin Peili,” Meng said, pulling me over to include me. “These are my classmates. They study acting at the Central Drama Academy.”
We all shook hands, exchanged smiles.
We traded updates. Prospects were troubling on all sides. They had hurried to the square on bike after things got violent further down the road.
“Blood has been spilled, the fighting has already started!” the one closest to me said. “We just came from Muxudi.”
The other woman, still talking intently to Meng, was saying something about blood, about people being shot, adding ominously, “The army is coming this way now.”
Despite the unsettled and frightening outlook of their reports, there was something beautiful in their soft-spoken outreach. They cared. They were involved and they were taking chances. They cared enough to cycle around telling people what they knew, what was likely to happen next.
It was a poignant moment for the four of us, standing under Tiananmen Gate, a moment imbued with a terrible beauty. Ordinary life, as we had come to know it, was going, going, gone. Nothing would be the same; nothing could be taken for granted. Win or lose, the final showdown was at hand.
As we chatted about Tiananmen and other things, the company of the students from the drama academy made me yearn for better times. I missed the simple but peaceful way of life in hutong alleys near their school. I missed the reassuring rhythms of daily life on a college campus. Inasmuch as I yearned for the old days, and the old days weren’t that long ago, it was nothing fancy. Just normal everyday life.
But in just a matter of weeks, things had changed in a lasting way and we still didn’t know the outcome.
Suddenly I craved to be somewhere far from politics, somewhere far from Tiananmen.
I shared the updates from Muxudi with the BBC crew, while parrying the predictable request that the drama students be interviewed on camera.
“They may be actresses, but they don’t want to talk on camera,” I said, peremptorily answering for them.
“We must go now. We must share the news with others,” the student standing next to me smiled appreciatively. I’m pretty sure she knew English and heard me nix the request that the two girls go on camera.
“I wish it wasn’t like this,” I said resignedly. “I wish we could talk longer.”
Meng and his two college classmates might as well have been on the stage at the Central Academy of Drama, given lighting and optics of their finely chiseled faces in the foreground against the backdrop of the pale glow of Goddess of Democracy and the streetlamps of the square. Then there was the real-life drama of their courageous task as sentinels reporting army movements, giving fair warning to all fellow protesters still gathered in the army’s path.
The night sky of June 3-4 was absolutely black—no moon, no stars—which seems like a poetic aside but it could also be construed as a strategic military calculation.
What horrors might be committed on a night with no moon?
The Central Drama Academy classmates exchanged heartfelt expressions of concern. Meng, the stoic hunger striker who had already courted death, insisted on staying with us, staying on the square.
So in effect, he was getting yet another send-off, only this time his journey was mine.
“Jin Peili! Nice talking. Be careful!”
The two beautiful activists pedaled away, cycling east along the northern perimeter of the square. I stood shoulder to shoulder with Meng, watching their gentle figures recede until they were swallowed up in the dark between street lights.
I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of foreboding, the bitter presentiment perhaps intensified by the pumped-up adrenaline coursing through me ever since joining the mob in erecting a tank-stopping barricade. I felt a desperate longing for cycling in the moonlight, for the bright days of May, marching in the spring sunshine with friends and friendly strangers.
The departure of the sentinels made me long for better times, better days. It was probably the emotions of a hard night playing on my mind, but as they left and peddled away to safety, I felt the square was seriously diminished in some way. With the departure of regular everyday people like that went any chance of normalcy.
I had no idea what to do next, but the haunting words of someone I had met during the rowdy drum performance celebrating the installation of the Goddess statue kept running through my mind:
“To walk away is best.”
A middle aged woman in the crowd had greeted me with a familiar “Where are you from?” It was a surefire way to jump-start a conversation, though I was already in conversation with someone else. I stood under the statue as it was being prepared for unveiling, still wrapped with scaffolding and tarps With me was Cui Jian. A soulful musician and canny self-promoter, he was cautious about visiting the square, but had been there a few times. I think it came as a relief to him that the gregarious woman wanted to talk to me, not him. He had his fans and I suppose I had mine, or perhaps he wasn’t recognized, whereas I stood out like a rock star.
“Are you American?” The questioner persisted.
“Yes. I’m from America, and you?”
“I’m Lina, from Beijing,” she affably offered her hand.
She seemed harmless enough, and given the context, was probably a supporter of the movement, but way above the average age at Tiananmen. She had approached me on the southern side of the roped-off area where the structure, its name not yet formalized as the Goddess of Democracy, was wrapped in temporary tarps and scaffolding, getting its final touches. She was not alone either, but with a group of friends who she introduced as teachers. They were likewise friendly and self- effacing mostly in their late thirties or forties.
The conversation was in Chinese but Cui Jian wanted no part of it and quietly moved away.
“My friends come from many different parts of China,” Lina said. “We are intellectuals in support of the movement. After the death of Hu Yaobang we decided to support the students.”
“Why?”
“Hu was a good man,” she added “And he did such a great job as the head of our school!”
“What school is that?”
“Why, the Communist Party Cadre School of course!” She snapped, as if it should have been self-evident. “We are all from the cadre school.”
“But wait. This is illegal, isn’t it? I mean, you know, martial law?”
“We are not afraid,” Lina said, speaking for herself and her associates, some of whom were nodding as she spoke. “We are teachers and researchers. Being here is our responsibility.”
The topic turned to the Cultural Revolution. Lina and her friends, unlike the current crop of student protesters, who were just toddlers in the 1960s, were old enough to remember that topsy-turvy tumult of Mao’s end days clearly. Once on the topic they all jumped in, speaking animatedly about the tragic fate that befell so many party members back then. Dunce caps, cowsheds, loyalty dances, banishment, and suicide.
The violence was not so much committed by the state; rather, the state had first provoked things, then withdrawn precipitously, stoking populist passions and allowing persecution and humiliation to follow. The radicals riled up the masses and then let them fight it out.
Then changing topic, Lina asked me if I had ever heard of a man named Deng Tuo.
“He was a writer, persecuted in the early sixties, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. Deng Tuo was my uncle. So you see, I must be here tonight. We must stand witness.”
It touched me to see, hovering tentatively at the foot of the yet-unnamed statue, these party members, repentant Red Guards, making a voluble show of support for the students. They knew better than anyone that political frictions could release ideals like a genie from a bottle, but they also knew of the troubles that could follow. But as party school students and teachers of communism, they were not so much critics of the regime as idealistic insiders who hoped things would go in a more democratic direction.
Lina had a book tightly clutched in her left hand. Twenty years ago it would have been the sayings of Chairman Mao. What was she reading?
“Oh this? It’s the Thirty-sixth Stratagem.”
“Something from San Guo, The Three Kingdoms, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s also a philosophical guide. Do you know what the thirty-sixth stratagem is?”
“Tell me.”
“If you face overwhelming odds, it is best to walk away,” she said, pausing for a moment. “You must remember that!” she said in a motherly tone.
“I get it.”
“Here, please read it for yourself,” she said, handing the book to me.
“Are you sure? I mean, like, you haven’t finished reading it.”
“I want you to keep it. Someday you can tell me what you think about it; my name and address are written inside the cover.”
“Phil?”
It was the BBC crew, rousing me from my reverie.
“What? Oh, yeah.”
“What next?”
“Listen, I have an idea.”
The mechanical groan of another armored vehicle could once again be heard, coming in from a distance, but coming in fast. There were already disquieting shouts erupting along the perimeter of Tiananmen Square.
Zou wei shang ji, the so-called thirty-sixth stratagem, the wisdom of knowing when to walk.
Had the time come at last?