Oracle Bones (34 page)

“That’s hard to say.”

“Well, what sort of things do you think might still be there?”

The woman stares at me. There are moments when a journalist catches himself fishing for quotes—leading questions, obvious setups. And then there are moments when a peasant catches a journalist fishing. A sly smile crosses the woman’s face.

“Well, if you’re so interested, then maybe you should start digging,” she says. “I’m not going to stop you.”

The crowd laughs. I stammer and try to change the subject; I ask about her husband, who was one of the original excavators and does some part-time maintenance work at the museum.

“He’s out today,” she says. “You know, his photograph hangs in the museum. It’s a picture of him and some of the other people who dug the pits. That photograph has been to many countries all over the world. But the museum still pays him only two hundred yuan a month.”

“Well, that’s not so bad, if he has to work only some of the time.”

“What do you mean, it’s not bad?” she says. “You probably make that much in an hour!”

More laughter. I ask about their farm: they have one-sixth of an acre; they grow rice in the summer, wheat and rapeseed in the winter, and the vegetables are—

“How much money do you make?” she says suddenly.

“Uhm, it depends. It’s not the same every month.”

“I bet it’s a lot,” she says. “You live in Beijing, right?”

I nod my head.

“I can dream for days and I still can’t imagine Beijing!”

Laughter.

“Chongqing is the farthest I’ve ever been,” she says. “It must be nice. I bet you never have to pay for anything yourself. Eating, traveling, going around in cars—your work unit pays for all of it, don’t they?”

I admit that this is basically true.

“How much money do you make?”

My last hope for distraction is the digital camera. I take the woman’s photograph and show her the screen. “It’s a type of computer,” I explain.

“My brain’s a type of computer, too,” the woman says, playing on the Chinese word for computer,
diannao
, “electric brain.” She glances at her audience and then delivers the punch line: “But it doesn’t work anymore!”

Later that week I meet with Chen Xiandan, the vice-director of the Sichuan Province Museum—“Teacher Chen” to the peasants. The man grins when I mention the woman’s comment about the gold mask. “We stopped digging once we found that,” he says. “At that point, I was worried.” He tells me that they found the mask at 2:30 in the afternoon, and the military police didn’t arrive until five. It was those two and a half hours that he worried about.

P
ERSPECTIVE
IV

Distance: one thin layer of cotton. Location: the storeroom of the Sanxingdui Museum.

The provincial museums are my favorites. Invariably, their curators are thrilled to see a foreign journalist, and they will do almost anything to make sure that I have good access. They seem to believe that writers work best through contact. Sometimes, they become excited and hand me a series of artifacts, one after another, moving faster all the time, until I’m afraid that I’m going to drop something. Feel the edge of this sword; see how heavy this one is. Look at this bowl. Check out this goblet. It’s like drinking
baijiu
as the honored guest at a banquet: toast after toast, until finally I have to push myself away from the table. I’m afraid that I’ve had enough. My tolerance isn’t what it used to be. Thank you for your hospitality.

At the Sanxingdui Museum, they won’t let me handle the pieces with my bare hands. I’m provided with a pair of white cotton gloves, but they are as thin as linen; I can feel the texture of the bronze through the material. The metal is cool and roughened by the centuries—the bumps and irregularities that give ancient bronze its character.

They have arranged a half dozen heads on a table, lying on their side, and I walk around and pick up each one. Two caretakers watch; occasionally, I ask a question, but mostly we are quiet. It feels like a classy jewelry shop—they give me plenty of time; nobody has to push the sale.

After a couple of trips around the table, I decide on a favorite. The head is over a foot long, ending just beneath the chin. It weighs about twenty pounds. Some patches of bronze are still burnished, shining with a color that is even deeper than jade. The face is stylized, almost modernesque—sharp lines and bold angles. The ears: elongated, jutting outward. Brow: sweeping down in two arched ridges. Nose: creased in the center and then flaring out into strong cheekbones. Mouth: as straight as a line across a page.

The head is long and thin, and the exaggerated shape invariably draws your attention straight to the eyes. They are sharply angled, and instead of a pupil, a long horizontal crease runs through the center of each eye. That crease gives the object an otherworldly expression: maybe human, maybe not. The eyes could be blank or they could be full. This piece of metal was manufactured more than thirty centuries ago. I hold the bronze head in both hands and the room is completely silent.

10

Anniversary

October 26, 2000
12:50
P
.
M
.

THE MESSAGE HAD ARRIVED THE DAY BEFORE. IT APPEARED IN AN
encrypted e-mail, sent to foreign reporters:

There will be a big gathering on the square on Oct. twenty-six. People will go at any time. We know one of the big waves will be around one o’clock in the afternoon. Between flag and monument. This will be the biggest party ever…. There will be no big party like this in the foreseeable future. Have a good day!

A Beijing-based Falun Gong adherent had sent the message. He was a computer expert who knew how to cover his electronic tracks; he was always careful about the encryption. Nevertheless, he was destined to be caught in less than two years, the victim of an Internet café stakeout—off to a labor camp. From the tone of the e-mail, though, you couldn’t imagine what the “gathering” might involve, or that the author was at risk (“Have a good day!”). His use of the word “party” was particularly troubling. Throughout the year, the protests had gained strength, accumulating days like some brutal sacrificial ritual. April 25 had been followed by May 11, the birthday of founder Li Hongzhi. May 13 was next (the anniversary of the founding of Falun Gong), and then July 22 (the anniversary of the first anti-Falun Gong law). October 1 marked fifty-one years of the People’s Republic.

Each anniversary had been commemorated by protests in the Square, where the participants quickly learned how to play their roles. The foreign journalists slipped into tour groups, never taking notes; often we just stood around with our hands in our pockets, watching and remembering. The photojournalists had to become more resourceful. One wire service photographer began draping multiple cameras around his neck; sometimes, he wore three or four, dangling prominently, and meanwhile he kept a small digital camera in one hand and shot from the hip. Before the inevitable detention occurred, and the police triumphantly stripped the film out of each obvious camera, the digital disappeared into a pocket. Somehow, a picture always made it into the next morning’s paper.

The protestors had also become more adept. They still played by the same basic rules—if questioned, they always declared their faith—but they did everything possible to reach the Square without attracting attention. Sometimes they wore the cheap baseball caps that were standard for Chinese tour groups, and it wasn’t unusual for them to purchase little Chinese flags, like proud provincials visiting their nation’s capital for the first time. But the one thing they couldn’t hide was their lack of money. They tended to be simple folk: many had spent their working lives in the state-owned factories and work units of the Communist era. Retirees often suffered in the new economy—old plants had gone bankrupt or been converted, and pensions were low or not paid at all. Reform and Opening was a difficult period for the middle-aged and elderly, and it wasn’t surprising that a number of these people found solace in Falun Gong. In the Square, one could often pick them out by their clothes: cheap suits, cheap shoes, cheap padded cotton jackets. It was rare to see a well-dressed protestor. The majority of them seemed to be women.

Their demonstrations had become more elaborate. Occasionally, timing was involved—everybody acted at the stroke of the hour. They raised their arms over their heads, and sometimes they unfurled banners emblazoned with the three basic principles:
TRUTHFULNESS, BENEVOLENCE, TOLERANCE
. They tossed pamphlets into the air. Since May, they had taken to scattering chrysanthemum blossoms, because yellow was an auspicious color. Afterward, the police swept up the petals as if they were filthy things.

The cops hadn’t improved. That was one part of the routine that hadn’t changed: the plainclothes men still responded with brutal, pointless violence. Sometimes it seemed to be nothing more than cruelty. But over time, as the ritual was played out again and again, one began to recognize that the plainclothes men were simply ignorant. Like the protestors, they belonged to a
recognizable class: the undereducated, underemployed young Chinese male. Whereas their elders might have encountered the reform years and felt a spiritual vacuum, these men were simply losers. They had missed out on the opportunities of the new economy.

Whenever timing was involved—say, a one-o’clock start—then it began to seem like some awful sport, complete with pregame period. The journalists positioned themselves strategically among the foreign tour groups. The plainclothes agents tried to pick out protestors, looking for old women in bad clothes. But the women often recognized the cops, and they did their best to avoid the interaction. It became a slow-motion chase: a crewcut man walked toward a pack of middle-aged women; the women scattered. For a spectator, this was one of the most depressing sights in all of Beijing—the great chase of China’s dispossessed, the used and the abused, the young men without education seeking older women without security. You knew whom to root for, but you also knew that nobody was going to win.

BY 12:30, EVERYBODY
was there. The cops: lurking, loitering, lingering. The believers:
jiade
tourists, clutching Chinese flags, avoiding the plainclothes men. The journalists:
jiade
tourists, hands in pockets. I was already tired: the morning had begun with the demolition of Old Mr. Zhao’s courtyard. This was turning into one of those Beijing days that felt like a week.

Most participants waited in the northern half of the Square. This expanse of flagstones was broken twice—first, by the Monument to the Revolutionary Martyrs, and then by the Mao Zedong Mausoleum, a squat, ugly block of granite that contained the Chairman’s corpse. On either side of the mausoleum, fleets of vehicles had been parked. Quick count: fourteen vans, eleven buses. The Square was busy with authentic tourists who had no idea that anything was about to happen.

Somebody jumped the gun. At ten minutes before one o’clock, in the southeastern corner of the Square, a group of
jiade
tourists suddenly raised a banner and shouted, “Falun Dafa is good!” Cops came running; a van roared away from the mausoleum. Near the Monument to the Revolutionary Martyrs, another group of protestors followed suit, raising their banner. In front of the flagpole, somebody tossed a flurry of flyers; two more vehicles sped across the Square. More banners, more flyers; more buses and vans. On the eastern side, where I happened to be standing, a believer hurled white pamphlets onto the stone. Instinct: I stooped, snatched a piece of paper, shoved it into my pocket:

HEAVEN CAN’T CONDONE PERVERSE ACTS
RETURN OUR FELLOW ADHERENTS
AND RETURN THE PURE NAME OF FALUN DAFA

I stood up and the Square was unrecognizable. Movement everywhere: flyers scattering, banners unfurling, people running and shouting. It was impossible to stand still, and so I walked across the flagstones—instinctively, aimlessly. Glimpses: a man bleeding badly from the face, a woman in the fetal position, getting kicked. Another man tackled onto stone. An old woman shoved into a bus. And then at last, after all the anniversaries, all the protests, there was a plainclothes cop with education, speaking English, sent specifically to handle the foreigners. Public relations.

“Please leave,” he said to me, with practiced pronunciation. “These people are disobeying the law.”

Next to us, a woman holding a child suddenly unfurled a banner. The child was about two years old. The banner was yellow with red writing; it appeared for such a brief moment that I couldn’t make out the characters:
. The first plainclothes cop hit the woman. The second one snatched the banner. The third grabbed the child. The woman fell; the child screamed. One cop—the first, the second, the third, the fourth; what difference did it make?—kicked her hard. The educated cop said again, in English, “Please leave.”