Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (37 page)

“Get down!” I screamed. When he ignored me, as husbands do, I hissed, “If they don’t kill you now, I’m going to kill you later!” He got down. The shooting seemed to go on for an eternity. I couldn’t tell if they were firing in the air, at someone else or at us. Something smashed into my right elbow. I screamed, “I’ve been hit!” After the convoy passed, I got up and checked myself. I had been struck by a ricocheting stone. “You’re always screaming before you even know if you’re hurt,” said Norman disgustedly, but he looked relieved.

At the Palace, the suave maître d’ignored our head-to-toe grime. I suppose he was just thankful we didn’t have gunshot wounds. One of his waiters had been grazed by a bullet and was serving lunch with a bandaged arm.

By Wednesday, China seemed on the brink of civil war. A doctor, exhausted from caring for the wounded, tried to check himself into his own hospital with a bleeding ulcer. It refused to take him, citing secret orders to clear the beds for possible bombing victims. The
Canadian Embassy hastily dusted off contingency plans to move into its bomb-shelter basement. Officers at the People’s Armed Police headquarters in Beijing began stockpiling food. For a few days, frantic diplomats were unable to rouse anyone at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Just about the time we hit the ground in the hotel parking lot, the PLA was firing on the Jianguomenwai Diplomatic Compound. Two daughters of Sidney Rittenberg, one of our old China Hand friends, cowered on the floor as bullets ripped into their ceiling. Soldiers stormed the compound searching for a sniper they claimed had killed an infantryman. Hysterical diplomats and their families took refuge in their embassies and, after a sleepless night, fled to the airport at dawn, their national flags taped to their cars.

I panicked, too. Some foreign correspondents, especially those with children, had already left for Hong Kong or Tokyo. Ann Rauhala, my foreign editor, said the decision to stay or go was completely up to me. After five days of random killing, I was terrified the soldiers would raid the Beijing Hotel and murder us in our rooms. I started shivering uncontrollably. Troops had beaten up several television crews and smashed their equipment on the night of the massacre. At one point, they blindfolded a Reuters correspondent and threatened to kill him. A French reporter had been shot in the arm. A Taiwanese journalist was hit in the mouth. The bullet smashed his teeth, went clean through his throat and just missed his spinal cord. He spent a year in a wheelchair, but survived.

“What should I do?” I asked Norman, all but wringing my hands.

“Well, if I were a housewife, I’d go to Hong Kong,” he said dryly. “But if I were a journalist, you couldn’t pry me out of here.”

He was right. I calmed down and never thought about leaving again. Instead, I calculated how much telephone wire I needed if I tossed the phone out my office window and walked it across a construction site to the Canadian Embassy’s basement. I wanted to be sure I could keep filing stories.

Canada sent special planes to evacuate its citizens. The embassy urged me to get on one, but allowed me to give my seat to a friend. A skeletal staff stayed behind, including the ambassador, Earl Drake,
and his wife, Monica Gruder Drake. Although she wasn’t much older than I, Monica acted as my surrogate mother, cheerfully ordering me to call in daily so she wouldn’t worry. She also promised me some of her canned goods in the event of civil war.

Sun Microsystems evacuated all its expatriate staff to Hong Kong, but Norman refused to go. A couple of days later, when he was the only one left in the Beijing office, the U.S. computer company offered to fly us “anywhere, any class.” I thought longingly of first-class tickets to Paris. By the end of the week, Sun was threatening to fire Norman if he didn’t leave immediately. He gallantly declared he would stay as long as his wife did, dashing my dreams of croissants and café au lait. Finally, Sun’s lawyers in Silicon Valley faxed him a release form to sign, absolving them of liability should he be maimed or killed.

By this time, there didn’t seem to be any more point in counting tanks in the square. I decided it was time to move back to our apartment. The taxis had stopped running, as had city buses. Our only remaining means of transportation was the
Globe’s
old Forever bike. With our apartment a forty-minute ride away, I called the Canadian Embassy for advice on which routes through the city were safe. A military attaché came on the phone.

“This is Jan Wong,” I said.

“Do you look Chinese?” he asked.

“Well, yes.”

“Do you have a T-shirt with a Canadian flag?”

I was wearing an Irish green T-shirt, a freebie from the sports department of the
Boston Globe
. It had a cartoon of a football player that said, “The Globe’s here.” But I didn’t think the military attaché wanted to know all that. No, I told him, I didn’t have a T-shirt with a Canadian flag.

“Tie a scarf over your head,” he advised brusquely and hung up.

Great
, I thought.
I’ll look like a Chinese in a stupid T-shirt wearing a scarf in a 95-degree heat wave
. I didn’t have a scarf, either. So I slung the
Globe’s
laptop computer around my neck and climbed onto the unpadded rear rack of Norman’s bike. He pedaled, and I swayed, yelping every time we hit a hole. And that, with the recent urban warfare, occurred about every four yards.
On Thursday, June 8, Deng Xiaoping ordered the leaders of the warring 27th and 38th Armies, and their supporters, to a meeting where he forced them to shake hands. As quickly as the rumors of civil war had started, they died down.

That afternoon, I went with a friend to the Beijing Union Medical Hospital. Hysterical relatives, clutching pictures of loved ones, were besieging the front gate. Hospital staff were turning away all reporters. My friend, who had once worked there, steered me to an unguarded staff entrance at the back, and we slipped through unnoticed. As we walked down the dim hall, she remarked on the sweet, musty odor that filled the corridors.

“Smell that?” my friend said. “That’s the smell of death. I think they must be sprinkling lime over the bodies.”

She knocked on a door. Inside, she introduced me to a middle-aged doctor. He was nervous about talking. “I have a lot of opinions on what happened,” he said, “but I won’t say what I think until this is all over.” The morgue was jammed with more than a hundred bodies, he said. The hospital had obtained extra refrigerated cases that held four corpses each, but that still wasn’t enough. That Saturday night he had been called out of bed and had worked until dawn trying to bandage shattered bodies.

How did he feel? I asked. Had he been affected?

“Not at all,” he said. But I noticed his leg twitched uncontrollably and that he smiled at all the wrong times. “Everyone is terrified,” he conceded. “The government has stationed its own people in the hospital. All the wounded have been placed under guard in a special ward. The guards tell us who to treat, when we can see our patients, even when we can change a dressing.”

At People’s Hospital across the city, doctors were forced to carry their patients on stretchers to police interrogations. Only one young man, the factory technician who had been run over by a tank, was excused. As a special favor, his father was allowed to submit to the interrogation in his place.

Each night, I sat glued to the television set, horrified and fascinated by the evening news. For two hours, up from the normal thirty minutes, I watched footage of helmeted soldiers handcuffing “counter
revolutionary thugs” to trees or tossing them into trucks. Close-ups showed the detainees’ swollen, bruised faces. Ten days after the massacre, the government issued a Most Wanted list of twenty-one student leaders. Within a few weeks, thirty people were summarily executed for “counter-revolutionary crimes” ranging from torching a military vehicle to taking guns abandoned by the soldiers.

The universities were closed to outsiders, but it was easy for me to slip past the guards. In a Qinghua University dorm, I was interviewing a student leader, Li Xiaolong, when his class Party secretary burst into the room. “I understand you’ve been giving interviews to the
Globe and Mail”
the cadre barked. My heart beat wildly. Li was already under investigation for his leadership role in the hunger strike. Now I was going to get him arrested and myself expelled. I shoved my notebook under a pillow on one of the bunkbeds and turned my face to the wall. I picked up a book — it was an English grammar — and prayed the Party secretary would ignore me. Li kept his cool.

“I’ve never met the
Globe and Mail
reporter,” he lied smoothly.

“We have reports. We know you’ve been seeing the foreign journalist.”

“It’s not true. It’s unfounded gossip,” Li said. After interrogating him for several minutes more, the Party secretary gave up and left. Li resumed telling me about four of his schoolmates who died in the massacre, but it took me several minutes to start breathing normally.

The government opened eighteen snitch hotlines. Millions of Beijingers had joined in the demonstrations. Were people flooding the switchboard with calls? I dialed the hotline to see if I got a busy signal. An operator answered on the first ring.

“So how does this work?” I asked.

“We want concrete information. The more concrete, the better,” she said enthusiastically. “We guarantee you anonymity.”

“Have many people called in?” I asked. She hesitated. When I asked if she was getting useful information, she smelled a reporter and hung up.

The hotline idea backfired. Some callers let loose a stream of invective. Others reported the names of two mass murderers – Deng
Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng. It was a turning point. Ever since the Song dynasty (960—1279), Chinese society had been organized on the
Bao-Jia
system, a feudal method of collective responsibility and control in which the security of each household was directly tied to that of ninety-nine others. If one household created a problem, the others would all be punished. Inevitably, it created a culture of snitching.

In the People’s Republic, betrayal had once been so common that a single anonymous letter could spark a lengthy inquiry. The Chinese had a saying: “A four-fen stamp buys three years’ investigation.” The massive demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, the people power, the calls for democracy, all were watershed events, but to me the hotline fiasco symbolized the beginning of the end of feudal repression. No longer would people abet their oppressors. There were still isolated cases of betrayal, of course, but I was startled and gladdened by the universal revulsion. As someone who had twice ratted on others, I rejoiced at the end of the “snitch dynasty.”

Beijing was like an occupied city. With many student leaders on the run, the army set up checkpoints throughout the capital. One night, gun-toting soldiers flagged down Jim Munson, Beijing bureau chief for the CTV television network. Munson had left his journalist’s identification at home. Thinking fast, he pulled out his American Express card. The young soldier examined the profile of the helmeted Roman gladiator on the credit card, sized up Munson’s Big Nose — and waved him on. “Don’t leave home without it,” Munson yelled as he drove off.

After the theft of the
Globe’s
Toyota, I went everywhere on bike or by foot. Two and a half weeks after the massacre, I was strolling home late one sunny afternoon when I noticed a car and a motorcycle trailing me on the bike path. They slowed to a stop. Three rough looking men in their late twenties made a bee-line for me. I thought they were muggers. Bracing for a fight, I slipped both arms through the straps of my backpack.

“Miss, we have something to discuss with you,” one of them said with a sneer. Before I could answer, two of them gripped my arms, and the third propelled me across the sidewalk to the car.
One man pushed my head down as the others tried to stuff me into the back seat.

As I struggled, rush-hour bicycle traffic came to a stop. A few weeks earlier, dozens of cyclists might have leaped to my aid. But the post-Tiananmen crackdown was already well under way. The terror was too great. Everyone just watched. For a split second, I couldn’t decide whether to scream in English or Chinese. Fu the Enforcer had ingrained in me a fear of incorrect tones. I knew I would get them wrong in my panic.

“Help! Help!” I screamed, in English.

The men abruptly stopped trying to cram me into the car. Still gripping my arms, they conferred briefly with one another. I didn’t register what they said. As suddenly as they had grabbed me, they dropped me. They got back in the car. I collected myself sufficiently to note it was a brown Volkswagen Santana. I concentrated on memorizing the license plate. But as the car pulled away, I saw that it had none.

Half a dozen soldiers on martial-law duty in front of the nearby Australian Embassy had heard my screams and stepped onto the bicycle path for a better look. I stumbled over to them.

“Some men in that brown car tried to grab me,” I said, still trembling. “Could you radio for help on your walkie talkie and tell the police to stop the car?”

“What car?” said a soldier sarcastically. His buddies laughed.

I must have been the only person on the street too dumb to realize my would-be kidnappers were plainclothes police. Maybe they knew I was a reporter and were trying to scare me. More likely, they thought I was a Chinese student, and when I yelled in English, they realized their mistake. Too bad, I thought later, after I calmed down. I should have gone with them. It would have been a much better story.

I never had nightmares after Tiananmen, but I found myself crying at the oddest moments. In the middle of doing something, I would suddenly have a flashback. Once, Yan Yan and I were in a restaurant eating lunch when we both gradually dissolved into tears.

After Tiananmen, one of the first questions I set out to answer was, Why had the massacre happened at all? The students had
already voted to leave the square. Most had drifted back to campus. To any neutral observer, it was clear that the protests were winding down. Why didn’t the government let hot weather and boredom take their toll? Why did the army launch a full-scale invasion of Beijing? Use anti-aircraft guns? Tanks? Armor-piercing bullets? I couldn’t just go on to the next story. I needed to understand what had happened, both as a reporter and for myself. Gradually, I pieced the puzzle together.