Beijing Coma (35 page)

‘That’s Professor Chen from the Education Department!’ Chen Di said, observing him through his binoculars.

‘Are you sure?’ Liu Gang asked.

‘How did someone like him get invited to the funeral?’ Bai Ling said. ‘He’s a very lowly official.’ Her face was flushed, and her short bob was in a mess.

‘Even the vice presidents of the universities don’t get invited into the Great Hall!’ Yu Jin shouted. ‘He must be a secret agent. No wonder he tried to hold us back when we set off from the campus gates the other day.’ Yu Jin was wearing a sports shirt with a small embroidered logo of the Olympic rings. The white collar was squashed to one side.

At last Wang Fei, Mou Sen and Hai Feng rose from their knees. Then, still holding the petition above their heads, they came down the steps, followed by Han Dan and Ke Xi.

Liu Gang and the other members of the Organising Committee rushed over to them. Everyone burst into tears. Ke Xi sobbed, ‘I didn’t kneel, I didn’t kneel!’

Zhuzi was so enraged with them he began hitting himself on the head with his megaphone. He was taller than everyone else, so no one could stop him. I handed my megaphone to Chen Di, then jumped on top of Zhuzi and grabbed hold of his hands.

‘How could you kneel like that?’ he howled, blood streaming down his head. ‘You’re a disgrace to the Chinese race.’

‘They kneeled for forty minutes, and not one member of the National People’s Congress had the courtesy to come out and speak to them!’ Chen Di shouted through his megaphone.

‘A hundred thousand students have gathered here to mourn the death of a leader, and the government has treated them worse than dogs!’ Xiao Li said, tears streaming down his face.

Throngs of distressed students cried out as they squeezed past one another. No one seemed to know where they were going.

Although Shu Tong and Old Fu had resigned from the Organising Committee, they went straight to Liu Gang and Shao Jian and suggested they lead the students back to the campus before the situation in the Square got out of control. They could then inform the Beijing residents of the day’s events and start organising a class boycott.

Dong Rong tore off the sleeve of his white shirt and wrapped it around Zhuzi’s wounded head. Han Dan announced through his megaphone that the Organising Committee had decided that, in order to prevent any untoward occurrences, the Beijing University students should return to their campus.

The students began moving towards the south-west corner of the Square. They were in a volatile mood, and kept cursing, ‘So much for the bloody “People’s Government”!’

‘Phone every university in the country and tell them to organise an immediate class boycott!’ Chen Di cried in his clear, melodious voice.

‘Let’s hold another big rally on 4 May!’ Wang Fei bellowed, breaking out into a sweat. ‘We will march through the streets of Beijing, calling for democracy and change, just as Chinese students did seventy years ago in the May Fourth Movement. We will protest against this corrupt government just as they protested against the corrupt warlords.’

‘We can’t just let it end like this!’ said Mao Da, who was walking beside him with a look of despair in his eyes.

‘So you had the gall to turn up, did you?’ I said, wanting to punch the traitor in the face.

‘If we stage a class boycott, we won’t have to do those exams next week,’ Yu Jin said, waving his hands jubilantly.

Our bedraggled troops left the Square and set off for the two-hour trek back to the campus.

‘Did we do anything wrong?’ Bai Ling shouted from the back.

‘No!’ the students roared.

‘Did we have ulterior motives?’

‘No!’

‘We will lay down our lives 10,000 times for the sake of the Chinese people! When the emperor loses the hearts of the people, he will lose the empire!’

Some of the girls sobbed as they repeated the slogans.

Beijing residents standing on the pavements shouted out to us: ‘We support the students! The government can cut our bonuses, if they want to! We will speak our minds!’

Another man shouted, ‘Let the students be an example to us!’ then lowered his head in embarrassment.

A teacher walked up to us and said, ‘You’re amazing! We would never have had the courage to do what you’re doing now. This country is politically and morally corrupt, and inflation is out of control. The price of meat has shot up from eight mao to five yuan. I can’t afford to buy myself clothes!’ The jacket he was wearing was scruffy and torn.

We marched on for more than an hour, shouting slogans as we went. When I could go no further, I sat down to rest on the pavement with Xiao Li and Yu Jin. It was then that I caught sight of Tian Yi. She was munching an apple, her hair falling over her face. I went over, grabbed the apple from her and took a bite.

‘That’s so rude!’ she said. ‘And anyway, my gums are bleeding.’ I looked down and saw traces of blood on the apple’s white flesh.

‘Where were you?’ I asked her. ‘We agreed we’d meet by the flagpole at sunrise.’

‘I was at the back, with the psychology students.’

‘I saw the Psychology Department’s flag, but I didn’t see you.’

‘I was busy,’ she said, tapping the camera hanging around her neck. ‘Do I have to get your permission before I do anything?’

She liked to take photographs then stick the prints up on her wall. She once cut out a picture of herself and pasted it to the bottom of a photograph of the Statue of Liberty. She kept the photo we’d taken of each other in the rainforest of Yunnan in her private album. I never got a copy.

‘Let’s go to a restaurant,’ I said to her, staring at the long road ahead. ‘I can’t walk any further. I haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours.’

‘The university sent out some vans to take us back to the campus, why didn’t you hop on one?’ she asked, waiting for me to say: how could I go back, when I hadn’t found you?

‘I’m not an invalid,’ I said. ‘I should be able to make it back on my own two feet.’ The few bites of apple I’d eaten had taken the edge off my hunger.

‘All right, let’s go for a meal. It’s not as if you’re needed here any more.’

The purple blossom of the parasol trees lining the road looked like a band of cloud reaching into the sky.

‘There’s a restaurant near here that serves Korean cold noodles,’ I said, taking her hand and glancing down into the dip between her breasts.

‘What are you looking at?’ she said, the skin below her collarbone turning red. ‘You won’t find your
Book of Mountains and Seas
down there, you know!’

It’s another sweltering summer. My skin has broken out in a heat rash. My mother rolls me over onto my stomach and sprinkles prickly-heat powder over my back.

She mutters that the skin over my shoulder blades is rotting. But I can’t feel a thing.

‘Your friend Chen Di was only detained for three months. His foot was crushed in the crackdown. I suppose the authorities thought that was punishment enough. He’s opened a bookshop outside the university’s rear gates.’ My mother has become used to speaking aloud to me as I lie here as listless as a hibernating fish. ‘He said he’ll come and visit you when he gets a chance. He’s made a lot of money . . .’

I don’t want my friends to see my rotting bag of bones. I don’t want Tian Yi to come again either.

‘The herbal doctor said that you’re not ill. You’re like a candle that’s been blown out. All we need to do is light you up again. He’s given you some herbs. I’ll have to find a way to get them into your stomach.’

There’s no point pouring herbal tinctures down my throat. They won’t do any good. A switch has been turned off in my brain. You must press it down again if you want the light to return.

‘Kenneth has sent us a thousand dollars from America. You’re lucky to have a kind relative like that. With this money, I’ll be able to bring you back to life, you lawless rioter . . .’

I have a raging fever. My thoughts seem to have disconnected from my body. I long for the cool air that wafts over me when my mother opens the fridge door. Although it smells of herbal medicine and sour leftovers, it feels as though it’s blowing from a land of ice and snow.

My mother turns the radio back on, as she always does when she wakes from her midday nap. ‘The Ministry of Public Security has announced that twenty-five Chinese cities and counties have been opened to foreign investment . . . There are now 11,000 Chinese students studying abroad . . . The Shanghai Women’s Association, in conjunction with the local law courts, has set up a Divorce College, and already more than three hundred of the four hundred students enrolled have successfully managed to repair their relationships . . .’

The stifling temperature conjures up images of roads scorching in the sun, sunburnt skin, hot, shadeless pavements . . . In the northern region of the Land of Black Teeth lies the Scalding Valley, where the ten suns go to bathe. A large mulberry tree grows in the hot water at the bottom of the valley. When the suns take their bath, nine of them sit on branches below the surface of the water, and one sits on a branch above it . . .

‘You’d better come down!’ Xiao Li said, poking his red face round the door of the dorm. ‘The Organising Committee is going to hold another election. Shu Tong’s very nervous. He wants to get reinstated. Now that it’s clear the government aren’t planning to clamp down on us, lots of students are putting themselves up for election.’

Since I’d forced Xiao Li to join our rally in Tiananmen Square on the day of Hu Yaobang’s funeral, he’d written a poster entitled ‘My Utter Disappointment with the Authorities’ and had become very involved in the student movement.

‘I thought the Organising Committee was going to hold an oath-taking ceremony this morning,’ I said. I’d been up all night with Tian Yi, collecting donations for the student movement outside the Dongzhimen subway exit, and had only just got back to the dorm.

‘They’ve cancelled the ceremony and decided to hold the election this afternoon instead,’ Xiao Li said, sitting down.

I called out to Chen Di, who’d been up all night playing cards in the television room. Then I checked in on Wang Fei and Shu Tong’s dorm, but there was no one there apart from a couple of students who’d travelled up from the provinces.

‘So how did the speeches in the Triangle go?’ I asked Xiao Li.

‘Wang Fei accused Han Dan of being a saboteur, then Han Dan accused him of being a spy. Most of the students who’d come to listen laughed and walked away. Wang Fei’s new girlfriend, Nuwa, had persuaded lots of foreign journalists to attend. She was so furious about the argument, she threw down her microphone and stormed off in a huff.’

‘So where’s Wang Fei now?’ I asked. ‘The idiot!’

Xiao Li looked exhausted. ‘He’s probably gone to the election meeting,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get the science students to cast their votes, none of us will make it back onto the executive.’

‘This is the fourth reshuffle. Go and see if Old Fu is at the meeting. I’ll do a tour of the science block and ask everyone to go and vote.’

I climbed up to each floor of the science block, shouting through my megaphone, but there was hardly anyone around. Since the class boycott had started, many science students had taken advantage of the chaos to return home or go travelling. The ones who’d stayed behind lay on their beds all day with their noses in their books.

By the time I’d managed to round up twenty or so science students to come to the meeting, there were already more than three thousand people packed in the history block’s lecture theatre.

Sister Gao was chairing the meeting. She talked through the rules and procedures, explaining that the candidates would be called one by one onto the stage to give a five-minute talk about the contribution they could make to the student movement. When she finished speaking, a man jumped onto the stage. He said he was a crane operator on a nearby construction site, and had been sent by his fellow workers to convey their support for the students and appreciation for their efforts in building a new China.

Shu Tong, who was standing next to him, took a sip of water, thanked him cursorily then launched into his speech, setting out his vision for a three-stage democratic campaign. In the first stage, the students would focus on class boycotts, demonstrations and dialogue with the government; in the next stage, they would set up independent radio stations and newspapers. Before he’d finished explaining the third stage, which involved taking to the streets in October in a nationwide movement for democracy, his five minutes came to an end and he had to cut his speech short. He’d worked himself up into such a state of excitement that his face was dripping with sweat.

Then it was Old Fu’s turn to speak. He said the student movement shouldn’t be turned into a national salvation movement, and proposed that, during times of emergency, the members of the Organising Committee be granted absolute powers. He ended by urging the committee members to read the posters in the Triangle every day, to ensure they stayed in touch with grass-roots opinion.

His speech didn’t go down very well. He’d sounded like a logistics manager. I doubted that he’d get many votes.

The next candidate walked up to the microphone. Zhang Jie, who was supervising the proceedings, asked to see his student card. The man replied loudly, ‘I don’t have a student card. My name is Shang Zhao.’

‘Which department are you from?’ Sister Gao asked. ‘Who are your guarantors?’

‘I don’t have any guarantors. I study from home, so I seldom come to the campus.’

‘Well you can’t put yourself up for election, then,’ Sister Gao replied.