THE GREAT RED GATE
I wanted to post something in memory of June 4, 1989 and I found this photo, attributed by the novelist Ma Jian to an unnamed friend of his. It very much suits the mood I was looking for, one of hope and fear in equipoise.
Below, a short excerpt from a scene in a novel set in the minutes just before the crackdown began:
Huamei and I were never drawn so close, nor thrust so far apart, as during that searing historical moment when China started to tremble, heave, and crack at the seams. On what turned out to be the penultimate day of the protests, it still seemed anything was possible, and then all of a sudden, nothing was possible.
The crackdown was fierce and unforgettable.
I’m talking about Tiananmen, of course, the jubilant and ultimately tragic juncture in the spring of 1989 in which China unveiled itself to the world, raw and unadorned, full of life and hope, for a fleeting transcendent moment. I saw an unbridled defiance in the uprising that I had not seen before nor have I seen since, except perhaps as parody or farce. The eruption of spontaneous protest exposed a hauntingly beautiful aspect of China that was utopian, vulnerable, eternal, all-encompassing and open to all.
It was an intoxicating time fueled by youthful defiance and a whiff of danger. An organic mass action, borderline orgiastic, but not meant to last. How could it? It was too anarchic, too joyful, too unwieldy and threatening to those not in on it.
We attended a few disjointed rallies in those heady days in early May when everyone was out on the streets gawking and cheering for the naïve but spirited student protesters. But once tensions rose, she withdrew to the watchtower of the high communist command where she resided with her well-positioned husband. Though she had once made a point of telling me “everything is political” she wasn’t a particularly political person, not even after she married into a dominant political clan.
Those initially jubilant weeks of protest in which the stuff of history was being forged did not see us together for more than a few fleeting moments, but the little time we did spend together still haunts me.
It was a kind of a communion, a focal point, the center of the wheel, the high point of the service. It was a timeless moment, a memory for the ages, a transcendent delivery from the fragile, imperiled material world into a realm of seemingly indestructible spirituality.
Under the circumstances, I didn’t have any reasonable expectation of seeing her, nor she me.
I’d hitched up with a foreign news crew as a local hire, ostensibly to help them secure on-the-spot interviews during the protests, and while talking to random people on the square was interesting, it was not without risk. Huamei didn’t want me to take the job, but I did, and that put a distance between us. The injunction against Chinese mingling with foreign journalists was but a minor worry; her real concern was her in-laws.
We spoke a few times on the phone during those end times of upheaval, careful not to be too explicit when we hashed out a plan to meet under the “beady-eyes-of-you-know-who.” The idea of meeting by Mao had nothing to do with old man Mao. The portrait, suspended from Tiananmen Gate above the central axis of the square, was just a landmark. Geomancy good, location impossible to miss. It also happened to be halfway between where we were making our separate beds at the time.
Huamei slept in a lakeside villa inside the Zhongnanhai compound, while I was shacking up in the historic Beijing Hotel, a designated foreign habitat, a foreign legation of sorts for an age when foreign legations were supposed to be a thing of the past.
Despite the widening gyre of chaos, she was intent on meeting me.
Counting down to the appointed hour, I busied myself lining up shots and deciphering chatter for a nervous film crew. It wasn’t entirely for optical reasons that I had them set up the tripod on a marble bridge that traversed a sacred ceremonial stream near the mighty walls of the gate, though the optics were good. The newly-erected Goddess and the encampments of the protesters were in plain view and the relatively secluded location offered me a place to meet someone without abandoning my charges altogether.
When the time came, even with the backbone of the square being an unmistakable main coordinate, I couldn’t locate her.
The amber light from the ceremonial lamps that towered over the square was diffuse and subdued. The fifty-acre public plaza was still thronged with people. Not nearly as numerous as before, but seething in certain corners. Everywhere I turned my gaze, a blur of human movement, but no sign of her.
And then I heard her call my name. She had come up from behind, her approach as stealthy as a ninja. I had been looking in the direction I expected her to come from, but she had somehow looped around. She stood in front of the giant slogan mounted on the mighty vermilion wall that read:
“People of the World Unite.”
Dressed in dark colors, she was wearing her hair long again, the ebony blackness of which only added to the ninja effect, betrayed only by the vermilion hue of her lipstick and bright red nail polish. She was wearing a scuffed leather jacket of the kind I associated with gruff men on motorcycles, probably as part of a ruse to slip out of her tightly-guarded compound unnoticed.
Face impassive, but eyes dancing and alive, I could tell she was bursting with things to confess and confide, but something in her gaze told me to hold off on the questions. By unspoken mutual agreement we kept things simple and the outpouring of words to a minimum.
When I look back on it, I don’t think it mattered that we hardly said anything at all. We were partaking in something extraordinary, there was bigger than any individual, something flowing in us and through us and around us that made a mockery of words.
The air was filled with the jingle of bicycle bells and snatches of song, passing fragments of conversation and indistinct cries. Already there were tumultuous shouts about a clash further down the road and the persistent wee-ohwee-oh wail of rescue sirens. The mood was at once intensely communal, as befitting a mass vigil, and startlingly lonely, as if we were the last two people on the square.
Quietly bracing ourselves for whatever would come next, I tried to reassure her.
“Common sense and humanity will prevail in the end.”
Huamei bit her lip and frowned. “You really think so?”
“You don’t?”
“It sounds nice, but you don’t know China.”
“Something bad?”
“Very bad.”
She then shot me with a look so hard I lost the will to argue, but it told me a storybook ending was out of the question. Her lack of uncertainty scared me.
We stood as if rooted to the spot, trembling quietly, shoulder to shoulder, gazes directed not at one another, but in the distance where a multitude swirled beneath the faint figure of the alabaster goddess. We were alone for only a matter of minutes, and even then we were not alone, let alone free.
She had been trailed by someone, a middle-aged auntie who looked more like a household servant than a bodyguard, but could have been either. I saw the auntie bobbing in and out of the shadows, and while she kept her distance, she never dropped entirely out of view.
We were also being watched by an impatient monolingual camera crew from Britain. Some of the lads had begun to make faces and were casting skeptical glances my way. When I excused myself, I had told them I had some business to attend to, but they didn’t expect it to involve a woman.
The day had been long, hot and humid, so the faint stirring of a fitful breeze brought a hint of relief on the exposed expanse. The meager movement of air was enough to cause Huamei’s fine, flowing locks to stir ever so slightly. I looked past the loose strands at her finely-sculpted face. She had an uncanny knack for looking great under pressure and on this night she looked indescribably beautiful.
A weary singalong of theInternationale could be heard coming from the northwest quadrant. A few minutes before I would have said the square was more than half full, but now I could only see it as being far too empty. When martial law was declared two weeks ago, the crowd swelled, seeking strength in numbers. It was thought the sweep and clearing of the square was imminent, but fourteen days and fourteen nights had gone by and nothing had happened.
“Is this the night?” I asked, spellbound by the obsidian glint to her gaze.
“This is the night,” she answered, her voice breaking as she looked down.
Her expressive brow was animated by a mix of hopelessness and hope. Dreamy doubts doing battle with steely resolve.
The stand-off had reached a moment of equipoise. The protesters still controlled the square, and the advance of troops, reportedly approaching from both directions along the east-west axis of Chang'an Boulevard, had momentarily stalled.
For a fleeting moment we were in mind-meld. Most of all with one another but also in mysterious communion the young men and women assembled, idealistic youth who had staked out a piece of the square to call for reform and a better future.
A murmur swept through the broken clusters of the crowd, setting off a slow-motion chain reaction of alarm. Already there were people headed to the exits, an explosion of hasty farewells.
“Go home,” Huamei turned to me, pleading.
“What? What do you mean?”
“This is not your home.”
“Home? Wait, I mean, what about you?”
“I am home.” There was grim determination in her voice.
“Yeah, but…”
“Someday you will come again.”
“Yeah, but…”
“It is dangerous.”
“But you just...”
“Please. Be careful. And you must go back to hotel by midnight. Promise?”
“Uh, ah, okay, I guess. But it’s almost midnight already.”
“At one they will strike.”
“Like what? Are they gonna push people out of the square?”
“No.”
“Arrest everyone?”
“No.
“What then?”
“Open fire.”
“Open fire? What!”
A chill ran up and down my spine.
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
“Who decided?”
“It has been decided.”
“No. No way! Really?”
“I can say no more.”
Her delicate face seized up, as if she were guilty of revealing a state secret to a foreigner, and in a way she was, but she quickly regained her composure.
There was a sudden lull in the background noise. I’m not sure if I’m remembering it exactly right, perhaps confusing subsequent dark dreams with real-life dread, but it was like an eclipse. There was a total cessation of activity. Everything got eerily quiet, becalmed. All motion seemed to cease. It was as if time itself had been swept aloft into the harrowing vortex of the impending storm.
In that deracinated instant, I felt closer to her than I thought possible to feel.
Huamei leaned in close, not quite touching, but close enough for me to feel the heat of her breath as she tugged lightly on my sleeve.
“What?”
She peered into my eyes, as if looking for something, looking for a sign.
“What?”
“I will miss you.”
And with that she spun around and left.
Stunned, I could barely produce the words “miss you too” with my lips, and by the time I did, she was too far away to hear.
I stood there, stunned and preternaturally still until I realized the camera crew was shouting at me. The producer found someone who was willing to be interviewed, someone who said he spoke English, but once the lights switched on and the camera started rolling a ring of suspicious onlookers formed and the subject froze.
“Could you tell this bloke to start talking?” the producer asked when I got back to the decorative bridge where we had staked the tripod. “Camera’s already rolling.”
The man was almost as tongue-tied in Chinese as in English.
“Yeah, ah, I don’t think he wants to. He’s saying he has nothing to say.”
“Say what? Oh, never mind. Cut!”
The luckless man scurried off.
“It’s been one hell of a night,” the producer complained. “Nobody seems to bloody know what’s going on.”
“I heard, I mean, hey, listen fellas. I think it would be a good idea, you know, if we got back to the hotel by midnight.”
My warning provoked unexpected laughter from the macho crew.
“Midnight? Is that what the Yank says?”
“Well actually, one, but…”
“What is it, then?”
“Something’s gonna happen.”
More grunts and nervous laughter followed, but I eventually won the argument.
The crew agreed to follow me back to my hotel room, though they weren’t quite done yet. News crews, often courageous, are nothing if not persistent in their attention to the task, and they managed to record a few babbling expressions of confusion and fear on the fly as we beat an exit.
The sound of gunfire broke out. Columns of uniformed troops started moving in. We accelerated our disorderly retreat, taking snatches of video along the way, all the way back to the guarded entrance of the hotel and then up to my rented room on a high floor facing the boulevard below.
From the balcony we watched, with cameras rolling, as the unforgiving sweep of state terror emptied out the streets below.
Huamei’s warning helped us stay one step ahead of grievous danger, for the Chinese army showed little mercy for anyone who got in their way on that calamitous and catastrophic night.
The crackdown took its cruel and irreversible course, running from before dawn to after dark on the fourth of June. The following day, after the student encampment on the square had been crushed and swept clean, the Goddess of Democracy toppled and the last pockets of street protest squelched, the cameraman captured the shot of a man standing in front of a line of tanks on the road below the hotel. Other journalists holed up in the building got slightly better angles on the same shot, an act of singular defiance that seemed trivial after a night and day of courageous mass resistance in the face of horrifying violence, but an image whose stature grew with time.
So, too, did the passage of time heighten my appreciation of Huamei’s late-night foray onto the square. Breaking ranks with her people to reveal the timetable for attack to a foreign friend didn’t seem a significant act of courage or commitment in the thick of things, there was so much else going on, and so many other things to worry about, but her warning made a difference.
In a more lasting sense, her phantom-like appearance at a moment of need fueled my irrational belief that she was my guardian angel, and conspired to confirm my even more whimsical notion that she was the reincarnation an old soul I had known forever, and would know ever more, forward and backward in time.
I left China several days after that and did not see her again for many years.