A Heart for Freedom (28 page)

“May God bless you,” he said.

After Liu Guang left the restaurant, I asked Feng his plans. He turned his back and said, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to my dorm to sleep for the night.”

I was shocked. I knew staying at Beida would lead us straight to prison. Surely our names were on a blacklist, and the government would not show mercy to the student leaders. But how could I leave my husband and run for safety on my own? I had stood by his side from the day we married. I had stood by his side throughout the movement. And I knew I would stand by his side under any circumstances, like the good wife my mother had raised me to be. I walked behind him, slowly and sadly.

Out of the blue, a little white rabbit hopped across the pathway in front of us. Paying no attention to our troubles, it stopped to nibble some grass before continuing on its way.

I let out a sigh. “Oh, how much I wish to live.”

The sight of the little white rabbit transformed my thoughts from the craziness of our life-and-death situation to the memory of the time when Feng and I first fell in love.

Feng stopped walking. He turned toward me and broke into tears. “I’ve been a lousy husband,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t prepare anything for our escape. Here we are, and I have no idea where to go.”

“Oh, that’s why you wanted to go back to your dorm to sleep,” I said. “That’s okay.” I patted his back, trying to comfort him. “Let’s promise each other we will try to survive, try to live on.”

“Let’s promise,” Feng said.

We had survived the massacre, but we had nothing left of what had once been ours—no home, no school, no dreams of studying abroad, no movement nor the million students who’d been part of our lives.

All we had was each other and our determination to survive.

* * *

Our promise to each other cleared our confusion and provided a new focus. But as the afternoon waned, Feng and I walked around campus like two caged animals trying to find a hole in the fence. When we ran across some leaders from the old Preparatory Committee, they were shocked we were still in Beijing. They immediately procured two bicycles for us, gave us money, and sent us out through the West Gate to meet up with a friend who would accompany us to the train station.

As night fell, we rode furiously across the city on our bikes. Before long, it was pitch-dark and the air was thick and heavy with the smell of smoke and death. In the occasional lamplight I glimpsed helmets, rifles, and bayonets. We rode with all the energy we had left, not knowing how far we’d gone or how much farther we would have to go. Sporadic bursts of gunfire punctuated the night. I rode with one idea in mind:
to live
.

Suddenly, a sharp pain shot through my knees and up through my entire body. I found myself facedown on the street with my bike on top of me. I thought I’d been shot. It turned out I had fallen asleep riding. The past fifty days of constant activity and anxiety had taken a toll. My body just wanted to curl up in the middle of the street and sleep. Yet, if I were captured and interrogated, I might never have the chance to sleep again. It took everything I had to gather my strength and climb onto the back of Feng’s bicycle for the remainder of the trip to the train station. Along the way, we and many others on the street had to duck and dodge to avoid random gunfire by soldiers who were trying to deter people rushing to the train.

At the station, our friend shoved us onto the train. It was like a war zone, chaotic and confusing. We could hear more gunshots in the streets.

“You’ve done your work,” our friend shouted to us. “We’ll take over from here. You’ll see.”

This friend, usually so calm and even-tempered, was suddenly overcome with outrage.

“This government will fall within weeks, if not days,” he shouted. “They are out of their minds.”

The train released a long, solemn whistle as it slid away from the platform. Feng and I put our heads down on the table between us and fell into a long, deep sleep. When we awoke, it was ten o’clock in the morning and the train was stopping in a city south of Beijing.

Feng got off the train and dashed to a store to buy new clothes so we could change out of the ones we’d been wearing—notably the green-and-white, short-sleeved sweater in which I had been photographed many times at the Square. Feng also managed to purchase a small radio so we could try to pick up news and maybe tune in to Voice of America or the BBC.

I changed clothes in the ladies’ room. When I came out, I saw a group of young students sitting outside the train station on a dirt road. Their clothes were caked with dirt and some were even bloodstained. They sat silently, with their heads bowed in what looked like terrible grief or pain, as if no words could relieve the horror they’d seen. My heart ached for them. How much I wanted to walk over to hug them and offer comfort; but seeing some policemen nearby, I walked back to the train instead.

“I am just a married student on summer break with her husband,” I told myself. In my heart I said to the students,
Be strong, my dear friends, be strong. There will be justice; someday, there will be justice
.

Feng and I changed from train to boat, from boat to bus, and from bus back to train again. We did our best to play the part of students traveling for leisure. From a distance, we nonchalantly observed the demonstrations we encountered each place we stopped. On one leg of the journey, after the police had scattered demonstrators who blocked our progress, a passenger suddenly turned to me and whispered, “Miss, there’s fire in your eyes. You’d better be careful. If those two men on the other side of the car see you, it could be trouble.” I looked at him and forced a smile as I buried the fury I had so carelessly exposed.

* * *

We finally reached Wuhan, the city where the government’s Second Command Center was situated. Many angry citizens blocked the train and forced it to stop. We got off and made our way to Wuhan University. There, in the dorm room of one of the student leaders, after watching a government spokesperson openly deny the massacre to the world, I was asked to record a statement telling the truth about what had happened.

“My name is Chai Ling,” I began, “commander in chief of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters. I am still alive. Today is June 8, 1989, and I want to tell the truth about the massacre at Tiananmen.”

That’s as far as I got. My mind went blank. The sound of the tape recorder clicking off seemed to ricochet off the walls of the dark room. On my forced flight, I had suppressed all the painful memories and they wanted to stay buried.

The leader pleaded with me. “Can’t you just try?” he said. “We need to know the truth about June 4. Voice of America and all the other foreign reports are so limited. Yesterday at a rally a classmate who came back from Beijing described the terror of seeing the soldiers slaughtering students. Some students want us to arm ourselves.”

“
Arm
yourselves?” I said. “Are you out of your mind? The students can’t get weapons. And even if you use chains and clubs, how can you fight against armed soldiers? We cannot invite more sacrifice, and we cannot lose more people.” I was once again filled with fire. “This movement,” I said, “has always been peaceful. It has always been nonviolent. At Tiananmen, we didn’t violate this principle, even at the last hour, because we didn’t want to give the government any excuse whatsoever to carry out more repression.”

“That’s the point,” the Wuhan student leader agreed. “That’s why you have to speak. You have to explain that to the students here. They never had the chance to go to Beijing, so they don’t know what happened. They have no idea. Everyone was furious about the massacre and wanted to arm themselves so they could take revenge for all the dead.”

“Revenge? The most important thing to do now is get the truth out.” With renewed resolve, I pressed the record button on the tape recorder and once again began to speak.

“It is now four o’clock on June 8, 1989,” I said. “I am Chai Ling, commander in chief of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters. I am still alive . . .”

After I finished my statement, Feng and I continued our journey. We had no idea where to go or how to travel; we just knew we had to go south—the farther south the better.

Two mornings later, Feng shook me awake in the small bedroom we occupied in the home of a stranger who had taken us in. He wanted me to hear something. A voice, vaguely familiar, penetrated my sleep-logged brain.

“My name is Chai Ling. I am commander in chief. . . . I am still alive.” I shot up in bed, fully awake. Feng had tuned in to Voice of America on the little radio he’d bought. “Oh, if they catch me, they’ll torture me to get me to change my story,” I told Feng. “I’m not afraid to die for my own sake, but what if they threaten my family?” I was in a state of panic. The full consequence of the words I’d put on tape hit me like a jet of freezing water. “We’ve got to survive,” I told Feng. “Being captured is not an option.”

My resolve to escape became a single, overpowering drive.

* * *

We traveled by bus to the edge of the South China Sea. I had never traveled this far from home. When we stepped off the bus, the sun was high in the sky and gleamed on the water. The gentle breeze smelled of the ocean. People wore summer shorts and shirts and sandals. Palm trees rustled in the breeze. It was heavenly. We really felt like students from the North on summer break, which was how we described ourselves to people who offered us places to stay. In our thick spring jackets and long black trousers, we looked like northerners, out of place among the locals.

By sundown, we had found a place to stay, and I was able to take my first shower in days. I was relaxing under a flow of warm water when Feng burst into the bathroom and told me to come out right away. He and our hosts had been watching Hong Kong TV, and Feng had seen an image of my face on the screen, accompanied by the audio of my June 8 statement. This was followed by scenes of the massacre, most of which were new to me because I had been on the Square when the killings on Chang’an Avenue took place. I watched in horror as the cameras showed people rushing a flat cart with a bleeding body on it to the hospital. I shook involuntarily. I wanted to cry out, but I forced myself not to scream.

That night, I was filled with pain and agony for the families of the dead and injured. The pain found its expression in an old toothache that flared up and vibrated like a drumbeat in my head, keeping me awake all night long. By the time dawn broke, a stubborn question had emerged:
Why am I still alive?

It was a Sunday, and our host couple was still asleep. Their son, who looked to be in his late twenties, had arisen early and was seated in the middle of the living room floor, meditating. When we came in, he stopped what he was doing and engaged us in conversation.

“How was your sleep?” he asked me. “You looked troubled last night. Is everything okay?”

This young man radiated a peaceful calm, and I sensed I could trust him. I sat on the bamboo sofa, shook my head, and briefly told him what was on my mind. It felt so bad, I said, to be a survivor after what I’d seen on TV. Now that I knew how many people had died, I felt so guilty. “Why did I get to live?”

“I understand why you might feel that way,” he said, looking at me with a spirit of tranquility. “In the Buddhist world, we are all born with a special mission. The people who died may have finished their mission in this life, and they are now in heaven. Your job is not yet done. That is why you are still alive.”

His words soothed my aching heart.
Your mission is not yet done.
With one sentence, he lifted me from utter confusion and grief to a new vision. Buddhism opened a new world to me.

“Please tell us more,” I said.

“In this world, we believe in reincarnation. All material things are fabrications. They do not last, and they are not of any importance. Money, material stuff, our flesh, our looks. What is truly lasting, what endures, is our souls, which are our real selves. We have to nurture our souls every day through meditation and care.”

“That is so different from what I learned when I was growing up,” I said. “We were encouraged to study matters having to do with the real world, like physics. We were never educated in matters of the soul. How is this different from Christianity?”

“That’s a really good question,” he said. “I’m not qualified to give you an answer. I believe that somehow Buddhism and Christianity become one and the same at the highest level of understanding.”

As I looked at his serene expression, I marveled that he was so tranquil. He knew the kind of trouble we were in and that it could affect him and his family if we were caught.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him directly. “Why are you risking your safety to protect us?”

“Oh, that,” he said with a smile. “I watched you students on TV during the demonstrations. If I had been the person I once was—in the world—I would have joined you on the streets. But I am committed to the world of the spirit now. I have decided never to marry or have children. Worldly things such as politics are no longer my concern. Buddhists don’t involve themselves much in the real world. But you came under my care, and it is my responsibility to save you. There is a reason why we met. Perhaps, in one of our past lives, we shared a long journey, perhaps something else. Either way, we are bound together by this unusual situation. In our world, saving one life is the highest form of worship.”

“I want to know more about your world,” I said.

“Well,” he continued, with a certain excitement, “each life is an independent spirit. After the body dies, the spirit goes on living. It leaves the body, finds life, and is reborn. It may be reborn as a cow or as a person. It really depends on the situation.”

I was drawn to this new realm of the spirit, as if it were touching a hidden part of me.