A Heart for Freedom (14 page)

Four hours later I had looked for him everywhere on campus. Twice I had gone back to our little room, hoping to find Feng asleep and out of harm’s way. He hated it when I worried about him. He hated any demonstration of concern or affection he hadn’t initiated. I couldn’t help myself. Finally I wrote him a note and left it on the bed before going back out to look for him.

I took a bus to Tiananmen. A huge crowd had gathered there, bigger than any I had yet seen. It would be impossible to find someone in such a teeming mass, but like a crazed woman at a rummage sale, I pulled people aside by the shoulder in search of Feng’s face. Nobody seemed to notice—maybe because it was raining so hard. I found my bike next to Feng’s, where we’d left them two nights earlier. By the time I got home, pedaling through the dark streets in the rain, it was almost midnight. I couldn’t stand the idea of waiting at home again for Feng to come back, so I bicycled over to Beida through the dark alleyways.

Back at the Triangle, I once again questioned the students there. One of the stalwarts holding an all-night vigil in the rain immediately took me to Dormitory 28, one of the boys dorms on campus. I followed him upstairs to the second floor and to a room down the hall. He knocked on the door; when no one answered, he barked out Feng’s name. A man opened the door and immediately closed it again. Moments later, Feng appeared.

When he saw me, he held me so tightly I could feel his heartbeat. We kissed in the darkness. In that instant, we rediscovered how much we missed each other.

“Oh, baby,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much I want to go home and curl up in bed with you right now.”

The man who had opened the door reappeared.

“You can’t take Feng away,” he said. “We need him.”

I could see the man wanted me to go, and that Feng was going to tell me to wait for him at home. I wasn’t about to let that happen. Now that I’d found him, I didn’t want to give him up.

I followed Feng and the other man into the dorm room, where five or six students were huddled by candlelight, talking in low voices. It reminded me of stories I’d read about the early days of the Chinese Communist underground movement.

This was the beginning of the democracy movement, when few people even knew how to conduct a productive meeting. These boys were debating proposals and taking votes. Whoever lost to the majority would protest by citing Lenin’s claim: “The truth is often in the hands of the minority.” As the only girl present, I was the true minority in the room. I sat on the fringe of their debates and listened. Soon enough I could see why they were having trouble resolving their disagreements. I offered to mediate. I just wanted them to get the job done so Feng and I could go home. That was my sole objective. They all listened to what I had to say, probably because I spoke in a soft, feminine voice amid this conclave of males.

I told them we all came from different backgrounds and experiences, so of course we would have disagreements. That was normal and should be accepted. Though each student had important ideas, it was vital they work together as leaders and compromise, if necessary, to agree on one action plan they could execute. Then they could lead the other students in constructive action.

This may seem like common sense in a free world. But in a Communist dictatorship, we did not have much leadership experience. That’s why we tended to act like little dictators, fighting hard for our own ideas. But democracy requires listening and working together.

The meeting broke up at dawn with one decision: They would call for a student strike, a boycott of all classes.

12

The Funeral for Hu Yaobang

The funeral for Hu Yaobang was scheduled to take place at the Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square on April 22. On the twenty-first, the government announced that the entire Square would be closed to the public on the day of the funeral, starting at eight o’clock in the morning. To the students of Beida, this was unacceptable. We wanted to pay our final respects to this man who, more than anyone, had stood up for democracy in China. The Preparatory Committee decided to move students onto the Square during the night, before the police could close it off and shut us out.

When I returned to Dormitory 28, the scene of our candlelight gathering had morphed into a hive of energy, buzzing with activity and excitement. I went to work on preparations for our march to the Square. We had to work fast. Within hours, the march grew to include students from all the major universities in Beijing, including Beijing Normal University, Tsinghua, People’s University, and others. It was a massive job to coordinate so many people in such a little time, and when we were all finally on the Square, it was thrilling to see thousands upon thousands of students all standing in formation. We almost entirely filled the vast space.

I devoted my efforts that first day to creating slogans and preparing banners. Students assembled in columns beneath the banner for their particular school. Student marshals with red armbands formed picket lines around the perimeter. We took the government by surprise, and not a single policeman appeared on the scene to disperse this well-ordered open defiance of a government decree. We settled down for a long, cold, early spring night on the Square. While Feng went off to another meeting of the student leaders, I stayed with my group from Beida. Together we would greet the dawn on Tiananmen Square and take part in a memorial service from which the government had intended to exclude us.

After a cold night on the hard concrete, I woke up with a terrible sore throat. The day began when a troop of honor guards marched out of Tiananmen Gate and stopped at the foot of the national flagpole on the north edge of the Square opposite the Forbidden City. Tens of thousands of students stood at attention as the flag slowly rose against the brilliant golden rays of the early morning sun. We all raised our hands in salute and then thundered the Chinese national anthem in unison. We filled the vast Square with roaring, heartfelt song. When we’d sung the national anthem, the flag began a slow descent from the top of the pole to the middle, to honor the passing of Hu Yaobang. We all began to sing “The Internationale,” a somber dirge that reinforced the death of a lost leader. Many wept.

After the honor guard marched back to Tiananmen Gate, loudspeakers on the Square broadcast the voice of a government spokesman.

“Students on the Square,” the voice screamed, “there has been misconduct in the city of Beijing these past days. You should all be aware that a small handful of people are using the death of Hu Yaobang to attack the government. If these people continue their actions, they will have to take full responsibility for the consequences.”

Unease spread quickly through the students gathered on the Square. Feng met with the other student leaders to discuss what to do. A few minutes later, a group of students from the University of Law and Politics raised a big wooden banner on which were emblazoned the words “According to the Chinese Constitution, Article 35, the citizens have the right to free speech and assembly.”

The crowd broke into applause.

* * *

The funeral began at ten o’clock, as scheduled, inside the Great Hall of the People. All the major political figures of China were present.

A later report revealed that Deng Xiaoping stood before Hu Yaobang’s casket in the company of all those who had conspired to remove Hu from power, while Zhao Ziyang read a eulogy, calling Hu “a great Marxist and Leninist.” One can only imagine what Deng must have been thinking.

Then, apparently, Deng heard the great noise outside the hall. He asked someone standing at his side what the noise was all about. When the man whispered something in reply, Deng walked over to the window. There, on the Square below, he saw a roiling sea of people. In full view, on the steps leading up to the entrance to the Great Hall, three students knelt, holding an unfurled roll of paper above their heads. Deng stared through the glass window, trying to make sense of what he saw. It must have seemed to him as if the black hands of the Cultural Revolution had returned to haunt him.

Another old Party cadre who had fought with Deng alongside Mao Zedong in the early days of the revolution walked over to Deng and stood next to him, pounding the floor with his cane.

“They call us dictators,” he declared in a loud voice broken with age. “They call you the Emperor.”

That moment determined the fate of the student movement and all that followed. Deng would not tolerate anyone who called him a dictator. He had sent Wei Jingsheng to prison for fifteen years for calling him a dictator on Democracy Wall. He hated Fang Lizhi, the astrophysicist who had openly called for Wei’s release. More recently, the United States had invited Deng’s bitter resentment when it stood by Fang Lizhi, inviting him to a US embassy banquet.

Deng Xiaoping gazed out the window for a while longer and then walked away without a word.

* * *

Chen Mingyuan, a much-honored professor of Chinese language, emerged from the Great Hall and ran down the steps. He stopped in front of the three kneeling students and embraced them. “This is China’s conscience,” he cried, “embracing you all.” He burst into tears.

Seated on the ground, the students covered the Square like a human carpet, waiting for our turn to pay our respects to Hu Yaobang. Hunger and thirst had begun to take their toll, and some in the throng had gone off to buy food. Most of us, however, remained where we were as funeral music from the loudspeakers floated over the Square. Our opportunity to say farewell to Hu was going to come as soon as the service inside the Great Hall ended. The casket containing his body would be placed in a hearse, which, according to tradition, would drive slowly around the Square before it headed out to a crematorium on the western outskirts of Beijing.

We waited for what seemed an inordinately long time, even for a state funeral. And then came shocking news: The hearse had surreptitiously departed from the Great Hall, bypassing Tiananmen Square. It was now heading west down Chang’an Avenue, followed by a long trail of people on bicycles ringing their bells while residents of Beijing stood on either side of the avenue as the procession went past.

Students on the Square exploded in outrage. They pushed forward toward the gate of the Great Hall.

“Come out, Li Peng!” they thundered. “Come out, Li Peng!”

I could see catastrophe looming. If the students began to stampede, causing people to be trampled underfoot, the student leaders would be blamed for the chaos and imprisoned—including Feng. The fear I might lose my husband gave me the courage to climb onto a wall before the raging crowd.

“Let me go to the front!” I called out. Those immediately below where I stood stopped shouting to listen. “I’ll go see what’s happening and what’s being negotiated. I’ll come back as soon as I find out. Please don’t do anything crazy. We don’t want a bloody conflict.”

I seemed to have captured the allegiance of the crowd. They made room for me to fight my way toward the Great Hall, where students had clashed with the soldiers guarding the steps. When I reached the front, I saw a rope running between the soldiers and students. The crowd was packed tight, body to body. An empty space existed between where the soldiers stood and the steps leading up to the Great Hall. Scattered around the empty space were some army officers and a few students.

I felt a sense of kinship with the officers as I approached them. I was at home with men in uniform. At the army base, I used to call them “uncles.”

“Please let me cross the defense line,” I said to one of the soldiers standing at the edge of the crowd. “I have to find our student representative so I can report back to the crowd.”

I begged the soldier, telling him the crowd had been waiting without food or water for twenty hours, they had become emotional, and we had to keep them from getting violent.

The soldier was clearly moved. He directed me toward an older officer.

“He’s our lieutenant,” the soldier told me. “Ask him.”

The lieutenant categorically refused to let me through. Twenty minutes had passed since I’d left the students in my group.

“Then maybe you could go in there and find our representative,” I said, almost pleading with him.

He shook his head.

Just then I saw a student in a green military jacket walking toward the crowd. I shouted at him, but he did not appear to have heard me. One hundred meters from where I stood shouting, he turned back. Someone in the crowd handed me a megaphone. I aimed the megaphone at the Great Hall and addressed the leaders inside.

“Please come out,” I shouted. “Please hear us. We’ve waited for a whole day and night. We’re exhausted and upset. We don’t want a bloody conflict. We just want to talk.”

I went on and on. My throat was burning with pain.

A PLA soldier standing nearby said to me, “You don’t need to shout anymore. You should protect your voice.” Then he added in a gentle voice, “That megaphone doesn’t work. They can’t hear you.”

A second soldier passed a water bottle to me. “Your voice is cracking,” he said. “You need water.”

At that point, I had not had food or water for more than twenty hours. The water soothed my burning throat and cooled my head. I thanked the soldier with a deep, grateful look as I handed the bottle back.

Thirty minutes had passed. I felt I was under a death sentence if I couldn’t get information.

Three students appeared on the steps leading up to the Great Hall. Like the earlier petitioners, these students went down to their knees and raised a large paper roll over their heads. The entrance to the Great Hall remained shut.

Around me I could hear students weeping as tears ran down my own face. Even the soldiers wept. We felt betrayed. Our government officials had turned a deaf ear to us. The image of students weeping while our petitioners sat on their knees on the steps of the Great Hall before a silent bastion of stone became the symbol to me of our humiliation.