JUNE 3-4
Eve of Destruction
The groan of an engine caused a collective shudder. The armored invaders were back, clawing across the thickly peopled pavement, heading our way. The ominous rumble and thunder brought an instant and unceremonious end to John Simpson’s hasty on-camera introduction to Tiananmen Square. We scrambled to the side of the road for safety—sticks, camera, lights, and all. Due to the sudden upsurge of danger on all sides, the “according-to-instructions- from-London” argument was permanently abandoned.
An armored personnel carrier careened in from the east, hurtling down the Boulevard of Eternal Peace with the abandon of a drunk driver. The square’s lampposts provided as much shadow as light, making accurate estimates of trajectory and distance difficult. Like its reckless predecessor, which had buzzed the crowd along the central concrete divider, this metallic vehicle was weaving back and forth, veering off unpredictably to the side at times, oblivious to or scornful of the many people in its path.
Self-appointed vanguards snapped into action again, daring the vehicle to head towards them, dodging it when it did, and pounding the vehicle with bare hands as it rolled by, like cavemen taunting a giant armor-plated dinosaur.
Armed with chunks of broken concrete and iron rods extracted from the broken road divider, men and women in the path of the beast focused weeks of pent-up anger and frustration on the green monster. Metal rods loosened from the road barrier were angrily tossed like spears.
How dare this killer machine violate the hard-won sovereignty of the people’s square?
For a fleeting moment, the sheer pluck, reckless taunting, and the pelting of the reinforced vehicle with rocks and bits of concrete seemed to have the desired effect. The rumbling sound faded and the hated armored vehicle retreated from view.
This time around, however, I was not caught up in the incendiary heat of the throng but standing on the sidelines rather more coolly as a witness. The relative objectivity provided by distance and having time enough to calm down after the last encounter made room for the return of common sense and thoughts of self-preservation. I no longer sought to enter the fray; it was reckless and dangerous and out of control. If anything, I wanted to distance myself from it.
Bearing Bright’s warning in mind, I led the crew on a cautious retreat out of the roadway and onto the broad sidewalk that runs along the walled compounds of Chang’an Boulevard.
The camera crew took a moment to catch their breath and assess the new location. It put us on the northern edge of the square, well out of the path of passing vehicles. What’s more, there was a massive wall behind us. The raised curb and roadside trees offered a degree of protection, if only psychological, in contrast to the exposed open road.
We scanned the open plaza for developments, comforted that we were close, but not too close.
The crew first turned the lens south and let the camera roll to get some establishing shots of the square from our new vantage point. Then he turned his attention to goings-on closer at hand to get some close-ups of the people around us.
But who were the people around us but people curious to see what we were up to. We were attracting a crowd, par for the course, providing a little sideshow. We were ruining the news, the news “out there” by being dragged into it. We were despoiling any semblance of objectivity and neutrality by making news of ourselves.
As the throngs around us grew thicker, the most junior member of the crew became the object of hostile attention. Even before he complained about it, I could see Wang Li was getting taunted, roughed up and elbowed. His seemingly clever plan to pretend not to be Chinese by not speaking Chinese, that is to say impersonating a British citizen of Chinese descent, offered him no meaningful protection from ill-wishers in this crowd. The wide boys weren’t about to let passport stamps get in their way.
I don’t know why he was singled out, maybe he said something, or refused to answer a question, but since he was holding the lights, the little altercation was immediately magnified. The slightest bump or shove caused the lights to jerk around and swerve. As the unsteady source of bright light bobbed left and right, up and down, it drew upon us even more onlookers keen on finding signs of conflict.
Some of the background faces caught inadvertently in the dancing light were macabre and frightening. Nobody could say who anybody was for sure anymore. I thought I knew a student when I saw one, but these fairly youthful fellows defied easy categorization.
One couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the crowd had been infiltrated with pro-government agents, or even volunteers, bent on harassing foreign news crews. It would certainly fit the bureaucratic pattern of intimidating foreign journalists by first threatening their local hires.
We had become targets, bringing undesirable attention to our presence.
We were being blinded by our own lights.
The peripheral location we had retreated to offered a modicum of physical protection, but it was a social no man’s land. It was far from any of the student-controlled zones or slogan draped protest outposts were thick with bright-eyed students and self-identified worker groups. Here the sidewalk was thick with rabble of a different caliber. Here on the edge of things, there were no barriers to entry or student checkpoints. There were identifying pins or slogans, no banners or flags. There were no student facilitators watching over things, no responsible persons urging restraint. Gone were the naive, clean-cut marchers singing “The Internationale” and dancing in the streets.
Even some of the folk who appeared to be nothing more than curious townspeople, the usual rubberneckers and gawkers who were usually content just to look, seemed less friendly than before.
The May Fourth spirit was gone, dead and buried, replaced by something more diffuse, spectral and partly malevolent. There was that new element I hadn’t noticed much of before, youngish toughs and street characters decidedly less than student-like in appearance, though it was hard to say who was and wasn’t a student at this point since some of the unwashed provincial students who lived in the open on the square could easily be mistaken for vagrants or even beggars.
Many Beijing students had already gone back to their dorms. As for the core student leadership, they stuck it out on the square when not retreating to campus or fighting among themselves. At the peak of the protests, the elite Beijing students controlled a crowd a million strong, but through a combination of fatigue, overload, attrition, bad decisions, fear and internal squabbling, they had lost hearts and minds and the control of the territory that went with it.
In the place of headbands and signed shirts with university pins the menacing young men around us wore cheap, ill-fitting polyester clothes and loose windbreakers. Under the shaky TV lights, their eyes gleamed with mischief. A few of them brazenly flashed Molotov cocktails that had been kept hidden under their jackets.
Who were these men? Who were these punks in shorts and toughs in sandals carrying petrol bombs? Gasoline was tightly rationed; they could not have come up with these things easily. How did they know how to make bottle bombs and for whom were the incendiary devices intended?
The unsung peacekeepers who had kept the peace for over a month were not in evidence. Student security could be annoying, of course, and as many of the student cops were as full of themselves as any petty bureaucrat, granting entry, denying entry, casting a suspicious eye on foreigners. But in retrospect, one could appreciate the role they played, if only because their absence created a vacuum that was filled with something worse.
Our lights, in this dark and troubling hour, seemed to attract all species of insect. Militants with agendas unknown emerging from the shadows, alternately taunting us and pretending to be our friends. No overt hostility was directed at the Brits per se, except indirectly but roughing up our local helpers. The wispy beard Meng was aloof and better at passing as a passerby. Wang Li, with his thick black glasses and youthful face was instead the lightning rod for unfocused anger.
One sensed that some of the agitators were positively seething for violence .
“Turn off the lights!” I yelled at Wang Li. “This isn’t working. Turn off the lights! Let’s get out of here!”
But the cameraman was mesmerized by the scene and Wang Li decided to give the lights another chance. Under the blazing lights, Ingo started shooting from the hip to capture what was going on. No one was mistaking the provocateurs for student protesters, even our freshly-arrived, non-Chinese speaking crew could see that.
The noose of spectators tightened.
Finally, it was lights out and the shoving match subsided. But the hot heads lingered, making weird faces as they stared at us. Having no desire to engage with them, I led the crew away from the action we had helped precipitate, aiming to retreat to the massive outer wall of the Forbidden City where there were few people and no need to watch our backs.
But even being non-confrontational had a price.
“Look, foreigners! Ha, ha!”
“What are they doing there?”
“The foreigners are scared!”
“Hel-lo? Where are you go-ing?”
“They don’t care about China!”
“Cowards!”
“The fuckers are running away!”
Worse yet, we were trailed by unfriendly comments. Among the rude words were some veiled threats. I pretended not to understand in order not to have to react. We were not running away, but I didn’t owe anyone an explanation.
Nor did the crew demand one. The technical requirements for a well-lit interview were impossible to meet under such agitated conditions.
We walked away with our heads down. We walked in silence, a solemn file of five Caucasians and two Chinese. The cul-de-sac by the palace wall seemed like a good idea at first did not allow for an easy exit, so we walked beyond the rostrums in front of Tiananmen gate and followed the wall further east, setting up the tripod and camera near a stand of trees by the wall of Worker’s Park on the northeast corner of the square.
The relatively secluded location had an oblique but unbroken view of the square, and this felicitous visual prompted one last attempt to record a standup. John’s mind was elsewhere, but he brushed his air, straightened his collar and took up a position in front of the camera as instructed.
But there was only time enough to record about a minute to tape before things got out of control again. The interference was not threatening this time around, but once again, we found ourselves creating news instead of reporting it.
There were almost as many ogling onlookers as before, though the random mix of townspeople in our new location was considerably less hostile than the Molotov cocktail gang.
When things tensed up, merely switching the lights off sufficed to relax the stranglehold of curious bodies.
Gazing at the indecision and fear on the illuminated faces watching us, I felt there was a shared dilemma. What was one to do at a time like this? What was right? What was wrong? Weren’t we staring at people, invading their privacy and looking for signs of conflict, too?
As for what would come next, how could any of us know for sure? We were all grasping at straws in the wind trying to figure out what was going on. Given the communal uncertainty, it was easy to understand how an incandescent circle of light in a dark corner of a plaza under siege might be mistaken for a meaningful vortex of activity.
I did my best to help BBC record some voices on tape but it was rough going.
The first order of business was to explain to the usual knot of people who we were and what we were doing.
“We are the BBC, English television, we’re just doing a random interview, please step back, we appreciate your cooperation, thank you.”
I was a novelty, the Chinese speaking foreigner, but people who had us surrounded were just as curious about the others.
Who’s the big man with white hair? Why is the flaxen-haired lady making notations on a notepad? Why is there a sheet on top of the camera? What kind of equipment is the man with the microphone carrying?
Wang Li and Meng, if they had so chosen, could have helped answer these elementary questions. But they were not in a talking mood.
In no time at all, interviewer became interviewee.
The tone of questioning wasn’t unfriendly, but it made it hard to get anything done.
“What do you think will happen?”
“What information do you have?”
“How many killed at Muxudi?”
While I was trying to field a limitless fount of questions, John shouted loudly.
“Look! Another APC!”
As the armored vehicle came careening down the road, everyone dropped what they were doing. As before, pedestrians and protesters in its way skedaddled this way and that, sometimes reluctantly and at the last second. There was still a great deal of defiance in the air, and the already moody crowd started to get visibly angry.
The BBC crew regrouped on the sidewalk, wisely relying on a few sturdy trees for a modicum of protection. Assuming a westerly direction on a boulevard still awash with demonstrators, the camouflaged APC, a dull gray-green under the streetlights, followed an uneven path, lurching wildly.
The mad dash was so reckless, the conductor of the military vehicle so apparently unconcerned about the human life in his path, that the crowd got triggered into action again.
Instead of running away from the vehicle, people ran toward it. It plowed its way forward, heading straight for the highway divider that had been swung around in a position to block traffic.
As the treads of the vehicle had to deal with chunks of concrete and rubble on the ground, the vehicle, unsteady in its trajectory to begin with, slowed down.
When it slowed, it was mercilessly bombarded with a volley of metal poles and rocky concrete chunks taken from the broken railing.
Everyone around me was reaching for the ground to pick up something, anything, to throw at the offending vehicle. The bombardment, even when it connected, was harmless but it was anger being vented, not rocks. Time kicked into slow motion as a huge crowd coalesced and again I heard the call to action, not just with my ears but my whole body. Another APC was careening down the boulevard straight towards where we stood, provoking some to advance, others retreat.
I backed up a few feet, but taking cues from the townspeople around me, screamed at the vehicle.
In a relapse of the emotion I first felt when helping the crowd move the road barrier, I was swept into a frenzy with no room for rational thought. Again I felt the tug, the call to act in concert with the tribe, revealing to myself, as much as others, a one-sided partisan defense of the movement. The rock I tossed perfunctorily into the abyss fell a few feet short of the target, perhaps hitting the APC weakly on a bounce. The vehicle passed and the mad moment was over before it started. I wasn’t scared of the armored vehicle, I was scared about what I was getting into.
I withdrew from the road and put my hands in my pockets, shirking from further partisan madness.
The collective power of hundreds of enraged men and women had surged right through me in a way that caused me lose my pride and autonomy as a rational being.
I desperately needed to cool down, to collect my senses, to break the trance, the pull of the crowd, that was inciting me to act in an autonomic way.
So when the army of partisans leapt ahead, running after the vehicle, I stayed behind. When I heard voices in the horde shouting slogans of hate, some of them even screaming for blood, I wanted nothing to do with it.
Why did so many people choose to run after the threatening vehicle once it had already passed?
The BBC camera crew was on autopilot too, though in a more productive way. Oblivious to danger, they too closed in on one of the armored vehicles which had come to a halt. I was proud of the crew, Wang Li included, as they ran after trouble, recording the chaos that unfolded before them without flinching.
Then the hundreds of shoes slapping the pavement in mad pursuit of the vehicle came to a sudden halt. A chorus of voices erupted in a primitive war cry. The monster had been stopped! People had stopped a tank with their bare hands!
That should have been victory enough, but the smell of blood was in the air, and the less temperate members of the crowd wanted revenge. The hot heads were enraged and almost unstoppable now, racing like arrows in flight, anxious to come down hard on their target. The camouflaged vehicle, stalled by rubble and road barriers, was attacked on all sides. Angry fists and chunks of concrete bounced off its metallic skin without much effect, but one or more of the metal poles, strategically inserted in the vehicle when it slowed down, had gummed up the treads.
My pulse quickened but I kept my pace steady as I approached the stalled vehicle. I knew by now I was not immune to the contagious madness of the crowd, but the toxic glee I was seeing now made no sense to me. Why was I even going to see the stalled vehicle? Because everyone else was? I slowed down, letting myself be passed by impatient members of the thundering herd in the wake of the trapped vehicle.
The madness of the crowd immediately brought to mind of the fanatical actions of fanatical sports fans in the US, only this was no game. There was one time I witnessed such madness at close hand. A particularly emotional Michigan home game against Ohio State ended in a victory for the home team which was no small matter in a stadium packed over one hundred thousand people. Emotions ran high until the clock ran out and then spectators descended from the stands onto the field, easily pushing past police and helpless security officers. Tens of thousands of spectators poured onto the field, in a ritualistic way, in accord with some deeply felt tribal instincts, trampling several hapless bystanders in the process. I too rushed onto the field, and I wasn’t even an avid fan, rather more motivated by curiosity, wanting to be part of the fun and, following the worst reasoning of all, because everyone else did.
But I was a mere onlooker watching fanatics take the day. One group of daredevils mounted the goal posts while another group of people were yanking hard on the posts, trying to pull the posts down. Eventually the goalposts did come crashing down, narrowly missing the fans assembled underneath. Bodies went flying, but miraculously nobody was seriously hurt. And that was just a football game.
Thinking of that made me realize that if the hyped-up fans of “Team Democracy” got out of hand here on the square, there would be no stopping them. Shocked at how susceptible I had already proved to be to such unthinking tribal behavior, I refused to follow the crowd in attacking the vehicle and instead went looking for Meng.
When I found him, we stood together and watched from a distance as the crowd went to work on the APC. I needed a compass and I admired his dedication to the cause. He was a student leader, a hunger striker, a militant water striker even, but he didn’t countenance the idea of violence. If the peace couldn’t be kept, the dream was over.
Despite his reassuring comments, and my own pacifist inclinations, it gave me a secret thrill to see a gang of unarmed men pounding on the tank-like vehicle that very nearly killed them. Two APCs had been stopped. The treads of the other APC had somehow gotten enmeshed with mangled poles from the road barrier I helped move into position. The engine of the APC nearest us whined, ejecting hot smoky exhaust, but it was entirely without traction. The wheels inside the treads spun uselessly. So terrifying a moment ago, the big armored vehicle now as helpless and immobile as a beetle flipped on its back.
Adrenaline raced through my veins. I foolishly related to Meng something to the effect, “We’ve done it! We’ve stopped the monster!”
Meng took my arm and held it, as if to steady me, to calm me down. Then someone tossed a Molotov cocktail, setting the APC on fire. I even had a vague idea of who the Molotov cocktail assailant might be. Flames spread quickly over the top of the vehicle and spilled onto the pavement. The throng roared victoriously and moved in closer, enraged faces illuminated in the orange glow.
But wait, I said. There’s somebody still inside of that, it’s not just a machine! There are people inside! This is not man against metallic monster, but man against man!
Sharing my distress, Meng protectively pulled me away to join a handful of head-banded student activists who had come to the scene eager to assert some needed control. Expending what little moral capital his hunger strike signature-saturated Democratic Tide shirt still exerted, he went against the mood of the mob and spoke up instead for the soldier.
“Let the man out,” he cried. “Help the soldier, help the man get out!”
But the agitated congregation was in no mood for mercy. Angry, bloodcurdling voices ricocheted around us. “Kill the motherfucker!” one said. Then another voice, even more chilling than the first, screamed, “He is not human, he is a thing.”
“Kill it, kill it!” shouted bystanders, their bloody enthusiasm whipped up to a high pitch through repetition.
“Stop! Don’t hurt him!” Meng pleaded. He dropped my arm and ran over to the scene of conflict, trying to reason with the vigilantes. “Stop! Stop it! He is just a soldier!”
“He is not human, kill him, kill him!” answered a malevolent voice.
“Get back, get back!” Meng screamed at the top of his lungs. “Leave him alone, the soldiers are not our enemy. The government is the enemy!”
The former hunger striker howled and whimpered until his lungs failed him, his voice weak, raspy, and hoarse.
Meng’s head-banded comrades descended on the stricken vehicle but had no more luck than he did in calming vigilantes keyed up for action.
“Make room for the ambulance,” another student activist yelled out.
“Please cooperate, please step back!”
I stayed where I was, distraught at the sight. I had nothing but admiration for the handful of students tried to extract safely from a burning vehicle the very man, who, had he not been stopped, might have killed others. The man from inside the tank appeared to be injured and limped in pain, but the quality of crowd mercy was uneven.
“He’s not a person, he’s a thing, kill him!” cruel voices continued to shout. Hotheads were deliberately instigating violence, in sharp contrast to a small group of conscientious demonstrators who dreaded seeing anyone hurt.
The mad assembly of angry men idling around the armored vehicle shared a paroxysm of joy in stopping it, but was of more than one mind about what to do next.
There was some forbearance on the part of some of them. I watched as at least one soldier was safely evacuated to a waiting ambulance, but then some really crazy people attacked the ambulance itself. I watched in horror as the back door of the rescue vehicle was almost ripped off its hinges by crazies determined to punish the military man.
Up until now, the volunteer ambulances had been practically sacrosanct, widely appreciated symbols of the movement’s caring side, especially during the height of the hunger strike when they carted away dozens of collapsed hunger strikers every day, taking them to hospitals for health checks and physical restoration. Until this hellish night, city ambulances, plying slowly through crowds along lifelines designed for emergency access, were universally appreciated. The up-and-down we-ow, we-ow wail of the ambulances was an integral part of the soundtrack of Tiananmen. I even heard people say they liked to hear the wailing sound because it meant someone somewhere was being saved.
Yet now there were people trying to attack people who were being saved. A savage man grasping a length of metal pipe smashed the rear of the ambulance, breaking the taillight. Two or three other like-minded vigilantes pounded on the back door demanding that the limp body of the soldier be handed over.
The driver rolled down his window, pleading with the angry men to leave the injured man alone, to let the ambulance driver do his job.
But after being smashed again, the rear door of the ambulance swung back open. The injured soldier was about to be extracted for a bout of “people’s” justice when the driver hit the accelerator and the vehicle lurched forward, racing off in the direction of the Beijing Hotel.
Student traffic facilitators did what they could to clear a path in advance, while others like Meng, tried to reason with those seeking blood. The ambulance escaped, but just barely.
So it had come to this. The dream was dead. People in the streets were killing one another. The mutual restraint, one of the things I most admired about all parties engaged in this lengthy and monumental conflict of wills, was breaking down.
The students had lost control, the crowd had started cracking, and the movement was breaking up into splintered mobs. There were calls for cooperation and shouts for vengeance. The blood lust made me nauseous.
Meng was distraught.
“Don’t use violence!” he cried out, straining what was left of his damaged voice to persuade anyone who would listen. “Don’t fight!” he implored hoarsely, over and over.
But once whipped up into a state of true turmoil, few cared to listen to the voice of reason.
The ambulance was gone; the APC was now a flaming hulk, billowing black smoke so thick it masked the sky. There was a ghoulish glow of distant fires—vehicles on fire—One could hardly imagine what might be going on elsewhere but if the dynamics were the same, the outcome would not be good.
After the camera crew got what it wanted, a shaken BBC crew reassembled. No one was hurt but we were all in some kind of shock after witnessing the sudden turn to violence. Before we could gather our wits, however, the sky was suddenly pierced with red shooting stars.
“What in the world?” I had never seen anything like it before. Meng hadn’t a clue. “Tracer bullets,” John Simpson shouted. “We better get out of here!”
The red traces of speeding projectiles crisscrossed the sky above Chang’an Boulevard. And now for the first time, the thump, rattle and crackle of gunfire could be heard in the distance. As we edged slowly in the direction of the Beijing Hotel, I heard many people in the street cursing the government, venting violent epithets.
There was anguish on Meng’s emaciated face, tears welling in his eyes.
“This is no longer a student movement,” he said. “This is . . . ” He paused, fists clenched with both rage and resignation. “This is a people’s uprising.”
The fighting around us only got worse. We couldn’t see the bullets but we could hear the gunfire. It was close by, and getting closer.
We all agreed it was time to call it quits, time to get off the street. It didn’t seem like a good idea for the BBC crew to go all the way back to the Palace Hotel now that gunfire had erupted, and they readily agreed to join me in my small room for shelter. The BBC crew already knew the porch provided a commanding view, they had taken pictures from there already. And Wang Li already had his things in my room so he needed no convincing. But Meng wanted to stay outside, to linger in the streets. We argued about it all the way up to the driveway of the hotel. In the end I had to take him by the arm and pull him into the hotel, so reluctant was he to leave “his people.”
This did not go unobserved. The hotel was under guard, and entry limited to residents and their guests only. I had gotten him in, just barely. If Meng tried to get in later, he would have been refused entry as others were.
We sullenly filed into the lobby to catch a breath and count our blessing. We were safely removed from the lethal madness for now, even though it was going on right outside the door. In the darkened lobby I ran into a journalist acquaintance from Hong Kong. Patricia was distraught, afraid the police now patrolling the corridors of the hotel might arrest her. I invited her to join us in my room.
The Beijing Hotel felt safe, it was a big building with thick walls and many places to hide, but it was no longer a safe haven.
Meng was interrogated by one of the guards in the lobby on our way to the elevator. In my haste to get the crew inside, I had failed to notice that the gatekeepers whose role it was to keep Chinese out of the hotel unless they were guests or on business, were in place again, guard posts fully operational. The men in white shirts and gray slacks armed with walkie-talkies were back.
Wang Li was already a familiar face to some of the doormen, and was probably passing himself off as a member of the press, if not BBC, by now. He’d been in my room ever since the Chai Ling interview the week before. But Meng’s scraggly appearance, with his “Democratic Tide” shirt and long hair screamed student agitator.
“He’s with me!” I answered firmly. But there would be guards to deal with at several steps along the way to my room. Not wanting to get stuck at the guarded elevator lobby, I told Wang Li to take the others upstairs while mapping out a more circuitous route to take with Meng. The key was to avoid the security desk and guarded entrance by the main bank of elevators on the fourteenth floor.
But first a dodge, so the guards who reluctantly let Meng in wouldn’t see me taking him directly into the residential wing upstairs.
We wandered the lobby, now dark. I took great comfort in discovering that the deserted coffee lounge just off the main lobby was still operational. We sat for a few minutes in the soft chair, catching our breath and regaining our senses. I negotiated with the counter clerk to sell me as many bottled yogurts and soft drinks as the two of us could carry, and then we went upstairs by a service elevator.
From my balcony high above Chang’an Boulevard, we surveyed the panorama of terror unfolding below. It looked like nothing less than war, war just as I had imagined it as a child: fire and flares, the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire and billowing smoke in every direction. Burning vehicles, which seemed to account for most of the fires, emitted dark oily smoke that funneled upward. Seen from a distance, the rising columns of smoke linked the murky sky with the haze on the ground.
Tracer bullets were intermittently fired from somewhere across the street arched upwards along a parabolic path and fell behind the hotel.
The frequency of gunfire intensified.
Screams and gunfire were constant, some really vicious action was taking place right outside the hotel. directly below. More distant cries and rumbles were intermittently carried by the breeze.
We watched in stunned silence as the tanks rolled in. There was sporadic gunfire all night long. We were warned by security to get off the porch, someone had reportedly been shot on the porch of the room next door. Police conducted security patrols, up and down the long hotel corridors, knocking on door after door for inspection.
As the police approached our room, the crew sprung into action, hiding the valuable videotapes in a ceiling vent in the bathroom. It was impossible to sleep, and almost as impossible not to look outside. Despite the warnings, John, Wang Li, Meng and myself spent much of the time on the porch. But first it was lights dimmed and curtains pulled, lest our silhouettes be seen by snipers.
Once we all reconvened inside, sprawled out in unlikely positions, eight of us in a room meant for two, it made for a comical tableau. We were like one big dysfunctional family thrown together and drawn together by crisis.
Patricia wept quietly, Jenny Clayton read a book of poetry, Wang Li lay sprawled out on the carpet, Meng kept in a corner to himself. John and I alternated with Ingo and Mark, who tried to get what footage they could in the exceedingly low light. Most of the time, they had a long lens trained on the northern rim of Tiananmen Square, distant, but visible until the lights went out at four AM.
Then only the smoke floating above the square was visible from our perch. We could not determine what was happening. We couldn’t see much; it was too dark, we were too high, too far away, and even through the telephoto lens not much detail could be worked out, not in the direction we wanted to see, Tiananmen Square.
The bulk of students who chose to remain on the square were last seen gathered at the foot of the monument, but the view of that part of the square was blocked by the massive museum. Closer to home, in fact right below us, we saw people running the streets, pedicabs carting away bleeding bodies.
There was smoke and gunfire throughout the night.
But the detritus of battle piled up right in front of the hotel: smoldering clouds of tear gas, burning vehicles, abandoned bicycles, repeated rounds of gunfire, bloodcurdling screams, fallen bodies, hasty civilian evacuation of those injured, many rushed away on bicycle carts. There was one body placed face down on a cart, white shirt oozing with blood.
Why were people being shot in the back?
Lotus called me several times from her suburban outpost. The news she had was second and third hand, mostly gleaned from her satellite TV. She shared several shocking but unsubstantiated reports. It was tempting to think one could just turn on the TV and find out what was happening, but from what she was telling me, the TV anchors and newscasters didn’t know what was going on, certainly not any more than we did.
Indeed, TV news relied on people like us, people on the scene, film crews in the streets where conflict is taking place. There was no satellite transmission going out of China for the time being, and there would be none. The government terminated satellite transmissions, so BBC’s videotapes would have to be smuggled out of the country by hand before anyone could get even a glimpse of what we saw.
Very early in the morning I called Bright. She was up, following the news as best she could, but most importantly she was at home, safe and sound. She was unusually choked up, not her normal talkative self. She’d heard through her well-connected family that the fighting was fierce and the casualties were heavy outside the square, with “several hundred dead.” She was relieved to hear I was back in 1413 and insisted that I stay inside.
I dialed another friend who happened to live in the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai. Her father was a retired member of the politburo.
The phone rang a long time before it was answered.
“No one’s here now,” answered a familiar voice. It was the family nanny from Anhui; I recognized her distinct regional accent. She immediately recognized my distinct “regional” accent as well. “How are you?”
“Is anyone home?”
“They were here before,” she said, hesitating as if unsure how much to reveal. “They went to a meeting.”
“Where?”
“Can’t say.”
“What’s happening out there?”
“They said about three hundred people were killed. Not to worry, everything’s under control now.”
I gulped. “Three hundred?”
“That’s all.”
“What do you mean that’s all? Where is everyone now?”
“I’m not clear about that.”
“Take care.”
I put down the phone and sat in quiet meditation. Three hundred dead, and counting.
Outside there were tanks still rolling down the street. Volleys of gunfire still echoed in the urban canyon.
By the time dawn broke, the people’s army had shot its way through the streets of Beijing and taken complete control of Tiananmen Square.
How many people died for the government to save face? How many died for that big empty expanse of concrete and stone?
One of the wall posters I had seen on campus a month earlier turned out to be eerily prophetic. It was a florid poem, submitted anonymously to the Beijing Normal University bulletin board on May 5 by someone who signed simply as “the wild man.”
Drawing blood on Chang’an Jie
Until the dawn dawns red
Smashing to bits
The dream of the people.
With the first inkling of dawn comes a light rain, damping the metallic stench of the cordite-scented air, but insufficient to cool a city in flame.
“Even the sky is crying,” Meng declares, leaning against the porch railing, staring vacantly in the distance. “It’s dangerous to sit out here,” I warn him, tugging on his sleeve. “Come on! Some back in.”
“I don’t care.”
“Don’t be crazy, I care, we care,” I implore. “Please, come in!”
“Let them come and get me,” Meng swears under his breath. “I’ll fight to the end!”
“Xiao Meng! Get inside, it’s too risky outside.”
“I want to die tonight. My friends are dying,” he answers. “I want to die!”
After coaxing him inside, I close the porch door and the curtains.
“I don’t care if the police come, they won’t take me without a fight . . . ”
The unsettled dawn of June 4 brought not hope but more despair as the hidden horrors of the night were slowly revealed. Blood on the streets, bodies crushed by the curb, bodies piling up in hospitals, wounded men and women being led away from gunfire by brave souls on pedicabs. There are civilians taunting soldiers, soldiers abusing civilians, buses burning, and military vehicles on fire. The remains of makeshift barricades litter the street, smashed to bits under the weight of the long column of gun-turreted tanks that had passed in front of our hotel and now guarded the square.
The dream of making China a better place died on that night, a night of no moon.
The sun rose and shone briefly.
And then it started to rain again.