Throwaway Daughter (9 page)

The girls followed him into the room.

“Nice going, Dad,” Megan said. “It says so on the bottom of the screen.”

“Why are we staring at some stupid picture?” Dong-mei grumbled. “This is a waste of time.”

“Be quiet, Dong-mei,” I said.

The girls were allowed an hour of TV per weekday, and they had to have a reason for watching a show; no sitting-and-surfing allowed. On alternate weekends, Megan or
Dong-mei had first say in what we should watch. While Kevin and I had been weeding the flowerbeds, Dong-mei had regaled us with the lineup of shows she planned for the weekend, starting at eight o’clock that night. She was grumpy and impatient because she was afraid her plans were unravelling.

I wasn’t surprised to see the report from Beijing. All spring, it seemed, I had been reading newspaper articles about growing student unrest in China, and when Russia’s President Gorbachev paid his much-anticipated state visit to the capital city, press from around the world were there, and it wasn’t long before they trained their cameras on the protesters who occupied Tiananmen Square. The still photo on the screen showed what looked like a vast, messy campground. It appeared more festive than threatening.

“This is boring,” Dong-mei tried again. “A picture of buildings and crowds.”

“Be patient,” Kevin told her, sitting down in his favourite chair. “Jane, should we bring our supper in here?”

“Okay,” I said, but, distracted by the commentary, I didn’t move. The girls looked at each other in amazement.

“The protesters are trying to force the government to stop corruption in the Party,” the reporter said. “The army has surrounded Beijing, waiting for the call to move in and clear them out.”

“Hey, that’s the Forbidden City in the background,” Megan cut in. “We read about it in Politics this year. That’s where the emperor and his family used to live. No one else could go in. Or something like that. Now it’s open to tourists.”

“Why can’t those students stay where they want?” Dong-mei asked. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”

“Grace, you can be
so
out of it sometimes,” Megan replied in the superior tone she knew her sister hated. “China, a free country?”

Kevin said, “Let’s hear what the reporter has to say, girls.”

The journalist, whose photograph was on the screen—there was still no video—said that the students were highly organized and had been joined recently by factory workers. The government was raging mad because China had lost face in front of the entire world. As soon as Gorbachev had gone home the army had been called in.

“This looks bad,” I murmured. “Dad says some China experts are predicting a civil war.”

The photo was replaced by live video. Stiff-faced soldiers in olive drab, with bags criss-crossed on their chests and rifles in their hands, stood tightly packed together on the bed of a truck. The camera zoomed out to show a long line of trucks stretched down a wide avenue, swamped by a sea of people, women and men who looked as if they had been coming home from work or the market. The trucks weren’t moving. A young woman climbed onto the front fender of one of the trucks and shook her fist, shouting something at the soldiers.

Another shot, this time showing the students massed in the square.

“How can the soldiers possibly move all the protesters out?” Megan asked. “Even if they
could
make it to the square?”

Dong-mei continued to fidget. Our supper grew cold in the kitchen. Finally, the voice on the TV announced, “We now return to our regularly scheduled program.”

“Hooray!” Dong-mei shouted.

O
f all days, I liked Sunday best, especially in the morning, and I still do. It was the only time I could while away a few hours free from the watchful eyes and supervising ears of my parents and my big sister. I would wake up early and go downstairs in my PJs, park myself in the centre of the family-room floor or curl up in the leather easy chair, usually the turf of my father, and turn on the TV with the volume low because my parents’ bedroom was also on the ground floor. As I watched my favourite shows, I would have a picnic—a bag of potato chips, some candies or a chocolate bar—content and master of the house.

This Sunday morning I checked the clock on the mantel as I passed the fireplace: ten past
seven. I was up earlier than usual because my parents had stolen my TV time watching the news. I settled in the chair, pulled a blanket over myself, and turned on the TV, ready for some solitary quality time watching music videos, which were against the rules because I was “only eight and a half,” as my sister loved to gloat. But no music could be heard, no rock stars pranced across the stage. A movie was playing instead. A murky evening sky filled the screen. A wide avenue, dimly lit by amber street lights. But this was no movie. It was Tiananmen Square again, and its tent city and confusion of people and buses and barricades. In the darkness, people running in all directions, fleeing in waves. Their fear and desperation were obvious. I turned the sound up a little and got out of the chair and onto my knees, close to the TV. Panicked screaming rose up, more real than any movie I had ever seen.

Then the street lights went out. The sudden darkness seemed to bump up the sound. I could make out the shadowy forms of thousands of people, a burning bus in the distance, then trucks and a tank moving quickly down the avenue as people dashed out of the way. A man and woman on a bike didn’t make it. My stomach churned as the tank ran over them and sped on.

A second column of trucks appeared and soldiers spilled out of the backs, lining up in formation. More screams, more panic as people tried to run away. Then came the gunshots. The camera zoomed in on a white object that jerked and fell to the ground. The man or woman—I couldn’t tell—lay twitching. A dark stain spread across the shirt front as the twitching slowed and stopped. More gunfire. More bodies hit the ground.

I was never so sure in my life that everything that appeared on the screen in front of me, the blood, the shouts, the gunshots, the bodies, and the death were as real as the screams I heard in my ears. My own screams.

“Mom! Dad! They’re killing people!” I yelled, backing away from the TV. Suddenly the room shook with the deafening roar of the crowd, the hammering of machine-gun fire. I had fallen back on the remote and boosted the volume.

As I scrambled backwards from the horror on the screen, Mom and Dad rushed into the room, pulling their robes on. Dad picked up the remote and muted the TV, then turned it off.

“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.

“What have you been watching?” Mom said sternly.

“I don’t know. It was the same place we saw
last night,” I told her, my voice shaking. “I didn’t mean to see it, honestly. I wanted to watch my show. But they put something else on instead. A war.”

I began to cry, still unable to believe or understand what I had seen. I hated fights and violence, real or acted. The sight of blood, mine or someone else’s, sickened me. Killing or deaths on TV or in movies repelled me. What I had just seen was far worse; it was real.

“It sounds like live coverage from Beijing,” Dad said quietly to Mom. “God. Murders on Sunday morning.”

Mom put her arm around me. “Come on,” she said gently, “let’s go make some tea and we’ll talk about it.”

As soon as we left the room, I heard the TV go on again. When the tea was made and Mom and I were sitting at the kitchen table, Dad came in.

“It’s on almost every channel,” he said. “They’re already calling it the Beijing Massacre.”

Mom looked up at him and pointed her chin at me.

“I won’t go into detail,” he said.

“It was real gunfire, wasn’t it, Dad?”

“Yes, it was.”

“And all those people were really shot?”

He nodded.

“The army must have gone mad,” Mom murmured, staring into the cup between her hands.

For the rest of the day I stayed away from the family room, on orders from my parents—unnecessary orders. Either Mom or Dad would be in front of the TV and would bring updates to the other. At noon, Megan got up, had her tea and toast while Mom told her about the events of the morning, and joined the “team” that monitored the reports.

I went up to my room for a while and tried to play with my dolls, changing them into different outfits, trying new hairstyles, but the images of what I had seen that morning kept pushing into my mind—the eerie red sky, the dim street lights and sudden darkness, the screaming people, so many of them, and their desperate attempt to escape the soldiers’ bullets and the tanks. And on top of it all, the faces of the soldiers were just like my face. So were the faces of the victims.

Later on in the afternoon, I went outside and lay on the grass. It was pleasantly hot and the sky was clear blue. The image of the dead person in the white shirt slipped in and out of my mind, no
matter how hard I tried to erase the memory of the blood-soaked clothes. What would the government say to the parents? I wondered.

Dad went into great detail with me after I asked him what was going on. He said that the government of China had labelled the demonstrators counter-revolutionaries. “It means they are enemies of the country, and their families are considered guilty, too.”

“But they weren’t doing anything wrong!” I protested. “I saw them. The soldiers attacked them! Do you mean the family of the person I saw killed are enemies now?”

“I’m afraid so. That’s how it works over there.”

“But it’s not fair!” I said, tears coming to my eyes.

Dad lifted me onto his lap, something I hadn’t let him do for a long time. He held me close to him and rocked the easy chair a little.

“Dad,” I said a short while later, “is Yangzhou close to Beijing?”

“No, it’s a long way south of Beijing. Why?”

“I was just thinking about those people you told me about, the ones who helped you and Mom adopt me.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re okay,” he said quietly. “They’re a long way from … the event.”

“What about Chun-mei?” I asked.

“I’m sure she’s all right, too.”

Our eyes met briefly. I looked away.

It was the first time I had said the name Chun-mei without anger.

A few days later Mom asked me if I wanted to go to the Chinese consulate in Toronto to take part in a ceremony to mourn the people who had been killed in Beijing. “It’s the least we can do, to let the Chinese government know how we feel about what they did to their own people,” she said.

I agreed. I liked the idea, and the way she asked me, which made me feel older and more mature.

In the days that followed, the June 4th Tiananmen Square Massacre was on the radio and TV day and night. I followed some of the reports. I wanted to know why it happened. Miss McKerrow, my teacher, talked about it in class. There were many protests, marches, and demonstrations all over the world, especially in Hong Kong, she said, pointing to a spot on the map.

In the halls, the teachers looked at me in a different way, and so did some of the kids. Did they blame me for what had happened? Did they sympathize with me? But why? I wasn’t Chinese. They all knew that.

M
egan called out, “Mom, no meat for me, please!”

“But you love barbecued chicken breast. Take a little bit.”

“No way,” Megan persisted. “Do you know how many growth hormones there are in chicken nowadays? Tons. We learned about it in biology. All those chemicals can’t be good for us. And Amy says meat has cholesterol that makes you fat.”

“Yuck,” said Dong-mei. “I don’t want to eat chemicals!”

I shot Megan a look that she blissfully ignored. Kevin helped himself to a second piece. “Maybe Megan is right,” he suggested in
his ironic tone. “She’s only seventeen and she’s almost full-grown. And as for Grace, in a couple of years she’ll be the tallest in the family.”

Megan had become almost obsessive about food lately, since she had become friends with Amy, a girl as thin as a stick who wanted to go into modelling. To Megan, growing seemed a sort of crime, and getting bigger was sinful. She had cut down on her meat intake, then asked me to do stir-fries with only bits of meat among the vegetables. I went along with her. I knew what she was afraid of. The hormone angle was just a ruse.