“Who?” the man asked.
“Xiao Bei. I… almost had her… out of the building,” Dawei said between breaths.
“I don’t know. They’re trying to move the debris. If you’re okay, I’m going back to help them. You should get yourself to the clinic.”
“No. I’m coming to help them,” Dawei said before the white colour all over the ground suddenly swelled to consume everything in his field of vision. Then everything went black.
Dawei woke with a searing headache sometime after the weather settled into silence. The first light of day defined the edges of the window’s heavy cotton curtains made from old quilts. Dawei remembered his mother waking him in the middle of the night to change the rags wrapped around his head and ask him his name, the day of the week. There was just enough light to make out the time on the wind-up clock that sat on a shelf over the foot of his bed, next to the rest of his belongings: A mug holding his toothbrush and comb, some school notebooks and a stack of glossy magazines featuring Hong Kong movie stars.
Only a hint of warmth remained under Dawei’s bed, a wooden platform on adobe blocks heated by a pipe connected to the stove just outside the faded sheet he had hung from the ceiling to separate his bed from the rest of the one-room house. The coal had burned out a while earlier and the blocks had almost completely lost their heat.
Dawei heard his parents mumble and manoeuver their way out of their bed against the opposite wall. He stood up, pulled his pants over his long johns, changed into a sweater and pushed aside the sheet. He looked out one of the grimy windowpanes on the front door as he put on a heavy jacket and slid his feet into a pair of boots by the door while his mother, Tieying, made a bed of kindling under a coal brick in the stove.
“You need to stay in bed,” she said. “At least let me change the bandage.”
Dawei pulled the rag from his head, wincing in pain as the blood-dried hair glued to the bandage separated from the fabric. He looked at the purple and black stains on the rag. Knowing that his mother would want to boil and hang it to re-use, he crumpled the rag into a ball and shoved it in his pocket.
“It’s fine,” Dawei said. “I need to find out what happened to Xiao Bei. Do you know what happened to her or any of the others?”
“A couple of them died on the way to the hospital,” Tieying said. “I haven’t heard anything about Xiao Bei.”
With a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, Dawei’s father routed through a toolbox at the foot of his bed. He was looking for plastic bags that he’d need to pull over his socks so the holes in his boots wouldn’t leave him with soggy feet. He needed to get to the toilet about 50 metres up the lane and would surely curse the whole way.
Dawei forced the door open against the snow that had blown into a slope that ran about a third of the way up the side of the house. He jumped outside and trudged through the snow in the soft pink light of dawn until he was far enough down the lane to see the roofless schoolhouse. The snow drifts around the walls, which had fallen inward along jagged and irregular breaks above the shattered windows, made the structure look like a geological formation.
Pushing through several metres of snowdrifts left Dawei out of breath and made the wound at the back of his head throb. The temperature began to drop and the frigid air stung his nose. He hopped back to the house where, a few feet from the door, he saw yellow stains left by his father. Dawei kicked his feet against the doorjamb to knock the snow off, ducked inside, pulled the door shut and slid out of his boots.
No school. Free for the day, or maybe for weeks or months. But the emerging adult in him knew this wasn’t liberation. With the spring thaw still a month away, what would he do besides help his parents with more chores? Sorting corn and sorghum seeds. Stacking coal and firewood. Repairing tools and cracks in the walls of their home. He listened to the crackling of wood in the stove and waited for the diatribe that his father would surely spew.
His mother poured water from a thermos into a large pot on the stove.
“It’s a curse to live here anymore,” Dawei’s father said in a gravelly voice bubbling with mucus. “Bastards. That was the only project here in years and they couldn’t build it to withstand snow.”
His mother ladled some water into a smaller pot and dropped in three eggs.
His father stood up, walked to the door and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.
With a pained expression, his mother marched to the door and jerked it open. “Get in here,” she snapped. “No jacket. Are you crazy?”
But father just stood in the snow.
“Crazy,” mother said as she smoothed her hair and her sweater. Then she turned the eggs in the pot as the water began to boil.
Father walked back inside. “Now the young will be just as helpless as the old,” he yelled. He took a last drag from his cigarette and flicked it into the kitchen sink.
“We need to get him to Harbin,” mother said. “We need my sister’s help.”
Dawei eyes opened but he didn’t see the soot-stained ceiling. He looked right through it and saw Harbin instead, the exciting city hundreds of kilometres away. Dawei’s trips to Harbin had only ever been annual events, at the New Year, lasting several days. They had always been the highlight of his year.
Aunt Dongmei, six years younger than Dawei’s mother, finished her degree at a Harbin teachers college. Within a year, she married Uncle Yiming, a chemical engineer whose research into corn processing was driving a new division at his company. “Starch, a food additive,” he explained, “was an especially sweet syrup that would soon be used in soft drinks.
The state-owned firm placed Yiming and Dongmei in a two-room apartment. The comfortable accommodations, the television programs, the reliable indoor heat and the variety of foods weren’t the only things that made Harbin delightful for Dawei. Uncle Yiming taught him how to play badminton and ping pong and played the latest pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan, often singing along in a booming voice that sounded like the stars on television. He always shared the seat of his bike, allowing Dawei to ring the bell and sometimes steer. Every trip outside, every errand run, every destination, was an adventure.
Twice a year, Uncle Yiming travelled to Hong Kong where he bought the magazines, portals to worlds full of beautiful women and handsome, heroic men, that he then gave to Dawei as New Year’s gifts. The stories and advertisements within featured modern cities with buildings that reached into the clouds and were even more magical than Harbin. Sometimes there were tropical beaches with palm trees reaching out over blue water.
“This is no place for him,” his mother concluded, shaking her head as she lifted the eggs from the boiling water. If their son didn’t make it to university, she reasoned, at least his child, their grandchild, would have a chance. Something about the collapse of his school’s roof strengthened his mother’s spine. Her husband didn’t argue.
A week later, Dawei and his parents were at the bus depot.
“We’re lucky Uncle is good enough to make room for you,” mother told him as she refastened the buttons on his coat. She wiped each of her eyes with the tips of her fingers, then ran them through her dry hair to make the tears disappear. “Be careful with the jars in your bag,” she said. “Make sure they make it safely.”
Father looked at Dawei directly. He hadn’t ever seen the man’s eyes straight on. “Don’t spoil this opportunity,” his father said. “You don’t want to come back.”
SATURDAY, March 23, 2007
10:00 a.m.
Qiang moves the bounce umbrella to balance the daylight flooding in from a window to the side of his interview subject. He needs subdued lighting because the old man’s complexion is ashen, drained of moisture by regular infusions of chemicals that have never managed to shrink the tumors in his pancreas. His face will look even worse once rendered into video so Qiang brings the light levels down.
A sparse, gray fuzz wraps around the sides and back of the man’s head in place of the standard black coif requ
ired for China’s top leaders. Just this once, Qiang thinks, an interview subject might need some foundation. It might even be disrespectful to broadcast the image of this diminished man who once sat uniformed and shoulder-to-shoulder with other members of the Standing Committee, who used to project a strength gained through political struggles that saw him purged, rehabilitated, and purged again, as he appears now in front of Qiang’s camera. But there’s no time for makeup.
The old man’s home is furnished with spartan wooden furniture from decades earlier. A square table with one leg that’s been repaired with screws and a metal bracket sits against the far wall. One block-framed chair with frayed cotton velvet upholstery the colour of blood – the kind that used to crowd “soft sleeper” waiting rooms in train stations – sits in front of the man’s television which is tuned to a CCTV-2 morning news segment touting the success of an irrigation project in Guizhou Province.
Qiang has set the TV’s volume high enough to keep his interview subject’s comments indecipherable through the bugs that are almost certainly in the apartment walls. Low enough, he hopes, to keep the responses clear enough in the final sound mix.
Qiang clips the mic onto the old man’s shirt placket. The mic had arrived a few days before, a Sennheiser professional model that screens out background noise better than most models on the market.
“Can you count from one to ten?” Qiang asks.
“What?”
“I’m testing the sound, so I need to hear you speak.”
“Ok. The one thing you need to know…”
“Sorry Mr. Zhou,” Qiang says softly, like a parent coaxing a child about to get a dose of medicine. Qiang’s not sure if Mr. is appropriate. There’s also Uncle. In Zhou’s day, he would have been called Comrade.
“I’m just testing the sound. Please save what you want to say until I start recording. Just one more moment and I’ll be able to start recording. Please just count to ten.”
Zhou sighs. “One, two, three …”
Qiang brings up the sound levels. After a few more adjustments to the light and a final rotation of the camera’s lens, Qiang says, “Ok, Mr. Zhou. Thank you for your patience. I’m recording now.” He hits record as he says the last word.
Zhou inhales slowly, summoning strength. “I don’t know what has gotten out but one thing that must be understood is that we let Comrade Hu die,” the old man says. His eyes dart between the lens and Qiang even though Qiang had told him to ignore the camera. It doesn’t matter. No one will expect high production value, Qiang tells himself. He keeps the camera rolling.
“No one dared to put the orders on paper but they were clear. I delivered them to the clinic. I told the doctors face-to-face.”
“What were the orders?” Qiang asks quietly, hoping he doesn’t need to repeat the question.
“Don’t you understand? Just as I said. The orders were to withhold any treatment. Let him die. He was dangerous.”
Qiang drops his notepad and pen, then scrambles to recover them. This is more than he had expected. He figured he’d get more details about how the moderates in the government sided with the students, some key quotes that stayed with him over the years and how much resistance they put up against the plan to send tanks to the Square. Maybe even how they were too afraid to oppose the final solution, how they rationalized a decision that would reverberate across a generation.
Yet here is Zhou Xiaoyue, a revolutionary and then a reactionary, providing a detail that, if made public in 1989, might have led to a different outcome. The demonstrators wouldn’t have been limited to students. Many more might have concluded that the government had lost its legitimacy. The earth in and around Beijing and every other city in China might have rumbled with anger and demands for political reform.
“Comrade Hu’s ideas might have been risky, bold perhaps, but I don’t think they were dangerous. I didn’t think so at the time, either. But the chaos in the Square seemed to threaten everything.”
The old man expels a slow, tired sigh.
“Who issued that order?” Qiang asks.
“It came from the Standing Committee. No signatures. Just a chop. You can look at the records to see who was in control at the time, who had the upper hand. But as far as I’m concerned, we were all responsible. The ones who disagreed didn’t disagree with enough force. I just can’t go to the grave with this secret.”
Qiang wants to ask more questions but he can’t afford to leave any more evidence that he’s conducting this interview.
“Something changed in the air when I left the clinic on that day.” Zhou says. “We were the generation that… We were supposed to have thrown out all of that superstition, but…”
His milky eyes look past the camera and through walls, in the direction of Tiananmen Square and Zhongnanhai, as though he’s looking at ghosts.
“With that decision, with that directive, we ran afoul of the universe. All of the bloodshed could have been prevented if we had just showed a bit of compassion towards Hu.”
Zhou goes quiet and Qiang glances at his watch, wondering if he should cut.
“There’s a resonance between our actions on this earth and the cosmos. The cosmos was telling us to let go of some of the controls but we grabbed them more tightly.”
Zhou then names the officials who wanted mercy for Hu Yaobang, those who later found themselves marginalized, and those on the other side, including himself, who insisted on burying reforms along with Comrade Hu.
“Hu wanted the best for China. He was an honest man. And we let him die. And we wonder why we need to, year after year after year, launch anti-corruption campaigns.”
Qiang stops recording and removes the SD card from his camera.
“Let’s take a break for a minute, Mr. Zhou,” Qiang says as he slides the card into a space between two layers of the sole on his left shoe, a separation Qiang created by digging into the rubber with a razor blade. He erases the temporary file that saved automatically on the camera and then slides in another SD card. An empty one.
Qiang walks over to the television and turns it off. There’s no need to mask the next part of the interview. He turns off the space heater, leaving the room silent except for the sound of neighbours going about their morning business. A door slams a few floors up, or down. A ration of garbage ricochets down a chute. A pipe rattles.
“Ok, Mr. Zhou. How about you now tell me what you think about all of the changes you’ve seen around Beijing as the city prepares for the Olympics.”
Turning to look out the window, Zhou ponders the question.
“I think it’s time,” he says. “These buildings served their purpose. They provided a degree of comfort and dignity, enough for their time. But they weren’t built well enough to meet the needs of today’s citizens. No elevators. You know how long it takes me to get up one flight?”
Zhou leans forward, looking at Qiang, and gesticulates with an open hand as he asks the question.
“How can you realize the value of a neighbourhood near the centre of Beijing if you can only build up five storeys? You see the skyscrapers they have now from one end of Shanghai to the other? I believe this city should also reach the sky.”
Settling back into his chair with a grimace, Zhou runs through his argument about how economic reforms can’t proceed without a physical transformation.
A van with official plates pulls up outside of his building, stopping in the bicycle path. Inside the van, two officers listen to the conversation. It’s clear enough to hear every word since Qiang silenced the television. Three men in nondescript suits step out of the van, leaving the driver and another officer in the passenger side front seat inside. A police car pulls up behind the van with two police officers who stay in their car.
“I know some people complain about having to move but there’s no way to completely avoid disruption in some areas as this country re-engineers,” Zhou says before he’s interrupted by someone pounding on the front door.
Qiang’s heart jum
ps into a full sprint. He had prepared for a bust-up, placing the odds somewhere around fifty percent. Kendra, his collaborator in Washington, warned him to make contingency plans. In their correspondence, Kendra gave Qiang the directions, suggesting that he shoot the questions about the death of Hu Yaobang first, obscure the sound, and then hide the video file as soon as he got the answers. She warned him to keep the sensitive part of the interview short. Better to get a few comments that make it out of Beijing than an hour’s worth of thoughts that get confiscated. Months of safe-channel communication prepared Qiang for this moment. But the preparation means nothing now that the Public Security Bureau has arrived and the hypothetical becomes a meaty fist pounding on a door. Qiang surveys the room, wondering if there’s a way out.
With a deep breath, Qiang regains his composure. He looks down at the side of his shoe sole and uses the point of his pen to push the SD card in further. They can’t detain him if they don’t find it. Or can they?
“Who is it?” Zhou calls out.
“We’ve received a complaint,” snaps one of the men just outside the door. “You need to open the door now.”
Qiang shakes his head. Complaint, maybe. But not from anyone living in this building.
6:00 p.m.
The officer sits across from Qiang handling the SD card they took from his camera, flipping it from side-to-side like it’s a new discovery, as though he hadn’t spent the last five hours viewing the clips it holds and deliberating with officers who had interrogated the old official.
He scrunches up his face while reading the details on the card, reciting the specifications in heavily accented English. Qiang notices the stains on his teeth, yellowed from the smoke of 10,000 cigarettes, matching the colour of the walls and ceiling. The walls were also pure white at one time. Scuff marks on the floor and on the walls where the chair backs have rubbed also mar the interior of the windowless room in which he sits.
The Wounded Muse Page 2
