Beijing Coma (33 page)

‘I went to see that primary school teacher whose husband was shot near Muxidi. She told me that crematoriums are now forbidden from keeping the ashes of people killed in the crackdown. She had to collect her husband’s box of ashes and bring it home with her. She’s put it on top of her wardrobe.’

‘Yes, I heard she told her mother-in-law that he’s gone missing. She couldn’t bring herself to tell the old lady he’s dead. Apparently, the old lady isn’t too concerned about her son’s disappearance. During the Sino-Japanese War, she was told that her husband died on a battlefield, but a few years later he turned up at her house, alive and well.’

‘You know that woman in Mahua Lane, well, she got so sick of being harassed by the police and having to care for her injured husband around the clock, she packed her bags and left home. No one knows where she’s gone.’

‘I feel like running away too sometimes. But it’s helpful to be able to chat to you like this . . .’

‘My husband spent five thousand yuan on health insurance, but the company has refused to pay up. They said they’re not allowed to pay compensation to victims of the crackdown. What kind of world are we living in?’

As I listen to them talk, my mind drifts to
The Book of Mountains and Seas
 . . . In the northern region, a wild beast called Qiongqi is devouring a man with dishevelled hair. The Qiongqi looks like a tiger, and has two wings on its back. When it eats a human it starts with the head, although some people say it starts with the feet . . .

‘All university representatives, hurry up, our meeting is about to start!’ Ke Xi yelled, pointing his megaphone at the students camping out in Tiananmen Square. The black scarf he’d wrapped around his sleeve as a sign of mourning made his arm look shorter.

I was dozing on the stone steps leading to the lower terrace of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, but Ke Xi’s shouting woke me before I had a chance to sink into deep sleep. Shu Tong’s face was right next to mine. His eyes were still shut. I turned his wrist around and checked the time on his watch. There was a bitter chill in the air.

I sat up and looked out over the tens of thousands of students and the red-and-white flags and banners surrounding the Monument. Jutting above them was a black banner emblazoned with the words
HU YAOBANG
,
THE STUDENTS OF BEIJING UNIVERSITY MOURN YOUR DEATH
! I felt a sudden panic, the fear that grips you when you wake up in a place that feels unsafe. The foreign and Chinese television crews that had filmed us when we’d arrived in the Square the previous night were nowhere to be seen.

The sky slowly brightened. Hu Yaobang’s state funeral was due to start in two hours. The cold of the night, and the smells wafting from the thousands of sleeping bodies, began to dissipate in the morning sun.

A couple of hours previously, Wang Fei and I had succeeded in getting the students crowded in front of the Great Hall of the People on the west side of the Square to stand in neat rows. Wang Fei had marched confidently through the orderly ranks with a megaphone in his hand. At the front of our troops, we’d placed the law students’ three-metre-high wreath of flowers, and a large poster proclaiming the citizens’ constitutional right to protest. By the time we’d finished organising everyone, I was too tired to search for Tian Yi, so went to lie down on the steps.

‘What are we going to do?’ Ke Xi said, shaking Shu Tong awake. ‘The authorities won’t let us attend the state funeral, or even send any representatives.’

‘Don’t ask me! I’ve resigned from the Organising Committee,’ Shu Tong said, opening his eyes and catching sight of Ke Xi’s black armband.

‘The police have promised that as long as we don’t cross their cordon, we won’t come to any harm,’ Ke Xi said. ‘But they won’t let us go in and see the body.’

‘Have you had private discussions with the funeral officials?’ I asked. I was afraid that Ke Xi’s hunger for power would destroy our unity. During the night, we’d held new elections for the Organising Committee and made Han Dan its leader. Ke Xi had then gone off and set up a temporary coordinating group to supervise the rally, but he still felt that, since the Organising Committee had been his idea, he should remain in charge. I’d been worried he would butt in when I was trying to organise the students into lines in front of the Great Hall of the People. Two cadres had walked over and asked me to move the crowd back twenty metres so that the guests attending the funeral could drive to the entrance. I’d talked this over with Zhuzi, and we’d decided to do as they asked. Han Dan walked over holding a cassette player that was blaring out the Internationale and said to the two cadres, ‘We’re here to pay our last respects to Hu Yaobang. All we want is to see his coffin being carried in. After that, we’ll leave the Square.’ The cadres raised their eyebrows and walked away. It appeared that the government had resigned themselves to our presence, but I wasn’t sure their nonchalance would last.

It had taken Zhuzi and me two hours to get the Beijing University students to move twenty metres back. I discovered that it was essential to tell the students where we wanted them to go while they were still standing, because once they’d sat down it was almost impossible to get them to move again.

I’d been given a megaphone with a square-shaped funnel. It was white and made a good noise. It looked great hanging around my neck.

‘When the funeral is over, we will ask the government to send someone out to receive our petition,’ Ke Xi declared loudly.

‘Where can I go to have a piss?’ Shu Tong asked me, opening his red, swollen eyes. He hated it when Ke Xi started holding forth.

I needed to go as well. ‘The public toilets in Qianmen are too far away,’ I said. ‘Let’s go behind those trees over there.’

‘The science students have managed to collect about three thousand yuan in donations,’ Shen Tong said, ‘so I think we can afford to buy everyone breakfast, don’t you?’

‘Yes, we should sort that out straight away,’ I said. ‘Some of the students are already wandering off to find something to eat. We don’t want the crowd to break up.’

‘Who’s in charge of logistics?’ Shu Tong asked, looking more alert now, and stroking his chin as though there was a beard there to rub.

‘I’ve forgotten,’ I said.

We squeezed through the crowd and walked over to the trees. A banner hanging from the national flagpole read:
WE ARE IN THE PRIME OF OUR YOUTH
.
OUR COUNTRY NEEDS US
! Shu Tong smiled when he saw it. ‘Someone climbed twenty metres to hang up that banner,’ he said. ‘That’s quite something.’

I wanted to find Tian Yi. Mimi had told me she was with some students from the Chinese Department. I’d bumped into her before I left the campus. She told me she was going back to her dorm to get some indigestion tablets. She said she often suffered from stomach complaints in the spring.

The students on the steps were beginning to wake up and complain about the cold. A few couples had spent the night huddled up together, with banners wrapped around themselves for warmth. People stood up and skipped about, trying to warm their feet. Pop songs and funeral dirges began blasting from portable cassette players and radios. The group from Tianjin’s Nankai University, who’d been the first to occupy the Square the night before, set off for a morning run around the perimeter. A guy in a red down jacket jumped up and down, trying to hit a ray of morning light with his head. His friends pushed him into the crowd. Everyone laughed. The girls he landed on shrieked, then quickly sat up again and smoothed back their hair. The confusion of noise began to shake the air above the Square, and make our hearts tremble as well.

‘How many Beijing University students do you think we’ve got here?’ Shu Tong asked me. The earth below the trees was steaming with warm urine. I was surrounded by thirty or forty penises, all shooting streams of yellow piss.

‘About four thousand students left the campus. But when I organised everyone into rows a couple of hours ago, there were only about three thousand left. A lot of them must have returned to the campus to sleep. They won’t be able to get back to the Square now, though. Look, the police have blocked off all the roads.’

Changan Avenue, which runs along the north side of the Square, and Tiananmen Gate, which lies beyond it, were completely deserted. It reminded me of the empty forts I’d read about that generals of ancient China used as a ruse to scare their enemies into retreat.

I glanced over at the Monument and saw Liu Gang and Shao Jian draping our banner over the white marble balustrades at the edge of the lower terrace. A large crowd had gathered around to watch.

‘Look at that huge crowd of Qinghua University students,’ I said, spotting them in the background. ‘There must be about five thousand of them, and they’re all sitting in orderly rows.’

‘Yang Tao’s responsible for that. They didn’t have a leader, so he went over and took charge.’ Shu Tong shivered as he zipped up his flies. I wondered where the girls went when they needed to piss.

Xiao Li walked up. He’d been reluctant to come to the Square, but I’d persuaded him. He’d brought over a young man in a blue woollen hat who wanted to speak to Shu Tong. The man shook Shu Tong’s hand and said, ‘We’ve both got a petition to submit, so I thought we should have a talk.’

‘We’ve stuck a copy of our petition on the Monument,’ Shu Tong said with a guarded look on his face. ‘Go and read it, if you want.’ Before the man had a chance to reply, he added, ‘You do your thing and we’ll do ours. It’s best if we come up with different demands.’

‘What I’m saying is, I think we should make our requests specific, like the workers who are demanding a five-mao wage increase.’ He looked like one of those petitioners who travel up from the provinces to lodge complaints with the central authorities. I often came across them when I walked through Beijing. Some would wander around publicising their grievances on cardboard signs hanging around their necks. Others would gather in small groups and make public speeches about the injustices they’d suffered, until the police came and shooed them away. Most of them slept on the streets. A few built themselves makeshift shelters in quiet rubbish depots, pasting their complaints on the surrounding walls. On National Day, the police would round them all up and fling them into detention centres in the suburbs.

I turned to the man and said, ‘Why not go and talk to Ke Xi? He’s the leader of a coordinating group that’s supervising the rally.’

Shu Tong brushed past the man and walked off, clearly wanting nothing more to do with him.

‘I’ve heard that Premier Li Peng has agreed to meet with you . . .’ the man said, trying to keep up with us. Then someone stood in his way, and we managed to lose him.

The students had converged around the Monument in the centre of the Square, and in front of the Great Hall of the People to the west, but the rest of the vast space was deserted. Occasionally, I saw lines of armoured police in khaki uniforms wriggle like caterpillars through the shade of the trees along the Square’s eastern edge.

‘We must stay vigilant,’ Shu Tong said, glancing back at me. ‘The police have sealed off all the entrances to the Square, so the only people getting through now will be undercover agents. They’ve asked workers and cadres to man the cordons, which is a good way of ensuring they won’t join us. They’re killing two birds with one stone.’

I heard a commotion break out near the Great Hall. The students from Beijing Normal had gone to sit in front of the Qinghua crowd, right inside the twenty-metre exclusion zone. The Beijing University crowd jumped up to see what was going on. I rushed over as fast as I could.

Han Dan and Ke Xi were struggling to persuade everyone to return to their original places. Hai Feng and some of his fellow social science students went over and tried to help them. In the mounting chaos, I lifted my megaphone and shouted: ‘Student marshals, stay where you are!’

Mou Sen struggled to break free from the throng. I tugged him out and said, ‘What are your students up to? We promised the officials we’d keep the road in front of the Great Hall clear. No one’s allowed to sit down there.’

‘They went over to the Monument a while ago to observe a minute of silence. When they returned, they found that their places had been taken, so they pushed through and plonked themselves at the front.’

‘Whoever is commander of the Beijing Normal division, get your troops to move to the back!’ I shouted.

Mou Sen was chairman of Beijing Normal’s Organising Committee. He’d mentioned that the committee members didn’t communicate well with each other. ‘This is too much!’ he said, trying to pick up the white flowers that had been knocked from the wreaths in the crush. ‘I’ve no idea who our commander is.’

‘There’s no point trying to push to the front,’ I said. ‘We asked that the hearse make a circuit of the Square so that we can see Hu Yaobang’s body before it’s taken into the Hall, but it will probably drive in through a back entrance, in which case we won’t see a thing.’

A few Beijing residents had also spent the night in the Square with us. They began jostling through the crowds like shoppers in a busy marketplace. I was very angry at the Beijing Normal students for causing so much disruption.

Hundreds of armed police suddenly charged out of the Great Hall. When the students at the front saw them approach, they tried to move back, but the crowd behind refused to make space for them.

Wang Fei yelled, ‘You rushed to the front, Beijing Normal, and now you’re scared! Don’t move back for them, the rest of you! Just clear a passage in the middle and let them file out, if they want to!’

The crowd dissolved into chaos again.

I squeezed my way through to a lamp post, and stood on its concrete base, shouting at everyone to stop pushing. I told my student marshals to form a human chain around the giant wreath of flowers at the front, but the crowd continued to push past it, knocking more petals to the ground. Zhuzi and Hai Feng pleaded with everyone to stay still. The marshals with megaphones yelled angry commands. Compared to the lines of armed police standing in solemn ranks opposite us, we looked like an undisciplined mob.