The Monkey and the Dragon

by Linda Jaivin

  Nick and I volunteered to go pick them up, but Nick’s superiors at the embassy vetoed the suggestion. The army was still shooting people, and the area around the hospital wasn’t safe. The embassy wouldn’t allow us into the line of fire. Nick and I fretted over what to do.

  Meanwhile, Hou phoned Jimi FlorCruz. He told him where he was and said he’d disguise himself. Jimi jumped in his car and drove through the back roads to the hospital. There was little traffic. Passing still-smoking carcasses of torched army vehicles and small clusters of people examining bullet holes in storefronts and walls, Jimi jumped when gunfire sounded from somewhere unnervingly close by. Easing his car through crowds that thickened as he approached the hospital, he finally arrived at the gate.

  ‘Hou stepped out from the crowd wearing a doctor’s white robe and little round sunglasses. My heart sank,’ Jimi recalled. ‘It was, like, this is supposed to be a disguise? It was so obviously Hou. As he got in the front, this girl and then Liu Xiaobo peeled off from the crowd and leapt in the back. They weren’t disguised at all. I felt a bit pissed off about this. As I turned the car around, one guy shouted, “Hey, that’s Hou Dejian!” Everyone was looking really animated now, so brrrooom brrrooom I stepped on the gas and drove off. Bye! Yeah.’

  No one said a word the whole way back, which, as Jimi put it, ‘was completely uncharacteristic of all of us.’ Halfway there, they ran into a convoy of PLA troops coming in the opposite direction, four trucks filled with armed soldiers. ‘It felt like we’d stumbled into the Germans in the middle of World War II,’ Jimi said. There was no trouble, however, and the security guard at the Jianguomenwai gate was in such disarray that the group drove straight in.

  By now, Nick and I were back at his flat. When Hou and Xiaobo appeared at the door, I burst into tears. ‘I heard you were both killed,’ I sobbed into their necks as we rocked in a three-way embrace.

  ‘Linda,’ Hou said, ‘there was probably no safer place in all Beijing than where we were in the centre of the square. That’s where the students were. No way was the government going to take the decision to kill people there lightly.’

  ‘But…’ I was confused. ‘I listened to the BBC and watched CNN all night and I’m sure they said the troops were massacring people everywhere.’

  ‘Not on the square itself,’ both Hou and Xiaobo corrected me.

  A little later, as we were making some tea, I asked Hou, ‘Did you actually, you know, see people getting killed?’

  ‘No.’ Hou shook his head. ‘I saw no one killed at all.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ Xiaobo said.

  ‘But how could that be? The massacre…’

  ‘The actual killing didn’t take place on the square. Not where we were anyway,’ Hou repeated. ‘We knew what was going on. We heard reports and talked to witnesses. And we saw the carnage at the hospital. But we didn’t witness it ourselves.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘What’s there to eat?’ Xiaobo demanded. ‘We’re famished.’

  The population of Nick’s two-bedroom flat swelled to over a dozen people as other Chinese and Australians took refuge there. For at least a day, the gates of the compound went unguarded and the lift attendants— employees of the security forces—were nowhere to be seen. So long as Hou, Xiaobo and the others didn’t leave the flat, no one would know they were there.

  Outside, gutted army vehicles lay smoking from fires lit and relit by defiant citizens. Over the next three days, we saw seven lorries burn.

  Once we saw people setting fire to one with a covered trailer attached to the back. It occurred to us that the trailer could be an ammo store. Panicked, we debated whether we’d be safer with the windows open or closed if things started exploding. As it turned out, the trailer only held a field kitchen.

  Just up the street, near the intersection of the Second Ring Road with Jianguomenwai Dajie (which became the Avenue of Eternal Peace as it approached the square), a mangled corpse lay under a blanket. We watched from our seventh-storey vantage point as crowds gathered around the corpse, lifted the blanket, withdrew in horror and then drifted over to confront troops massed just across the road. Then the troops would do something we couldn’t quite see and the people would run for their lives.

  We found Nick’s liquor cabinet and started drinking.

  By about midnight that first night, 4 June, we were all asleep, on the floor, on sofas and cushions, wherever, when at 2 a.m. a fierce rumbling sound, like thunder, woke us. Everyone rushed to the window. A massive convoy of tanks and armoured personnel carriers and lorries full of soldiers holding AK-47s was racing up the Second Ring Road and turning onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace towards the square. We counted more than a hundred vehicles.

  ‘What the f-f-fuck is going on now?’ Xiaobo cursed. Where were they going? Had people tried to reclaim Tiananmen Square? We eventually worked out that it was some kind of patrol, intended to terrorise as much as anything else. It certainly achieved that effect, with me anyway. My teeth were chattering so loudly that the others teased me. Hou, who was shaking too, put his arm around me and Xiaobo put his arms around both of us. The tanks and APCs did another round of the neighbourhood a few hours later, bringing us to the window a second time.

  The following two days passed in a haze of cigarette smoke, black humour, despair, speculation and rumour. The phone rang non-stop with all sorts of news, much of it bogus: Li Peng had been shot, soldiers pumped up on amphetamines were machine-gunning students in their classrooms, Deng had died, Deng had fled to Inner Mongolia, the soldiers were burning stacks of corpses in Tiananmen. Either I or the other Australians took all the calls. We decided that it was safest not to have any of the Chinese speak on the phone just in case it was being tapped.

  Every time a convoy approached the corner near the flat they fired a round of ammo into the air. Army helicopters cut through the ashy yellow sky, buzzing close by the windows. We strained to hear the BBC broadcasts on shortwave radio, drained every bottle in Nick’s stash, and roared with laughter at Liu Xiaobo’s imitations of Wuer Kaixi, complete with the full faint at the end of every pronouncement. ‘I am Wuer Kaixi. I am Wuer Kaixi. I now order everyone to leave the square.’

  ‘I am Jia Peilin. I am Jia Peilin,’ I interrupted. ‘I now order everyone to the dinner table.’

  Mealtimes became almost like parties, with good food, witty conversation, and laughter—and only occasional reports of gunfire in the background to remind us that no one would be going home after the coffee. Hou the storyteller had already managed to process his experiences over the last few days into a series of tales with which he now regaled the rest of us.

  Sang Ye and Sue Trevaskes had joined us by now as well. They’d just ventured out of their apartment when troops began firing tear gas onto the campus; they fled back inside in time to get a phone call from me passing on a rumour that the soldiers were about to take over their university. They packed a few bags, and came straight to Nick’s with Sang Ye’s mother and young daughter in tow.

  Jimi dropped by and Hou, introducing him to Sue and Sang Ye, called Jimi the most brilliant driver in the world. ‘Which organisation do you work as a driver for?’ Sue asked innocently, sending us all into gales of laughter.

  Gao Xin made it to Nick’s as well. The sense of mission that had driven Hou, Xiaobo and Gao onto the square in the first place now moved them to debate their next course of action. They chain-smoked cigarettes until the lounge room was so thick with smoke that everything began to look fuzzy around the edges, adding to the surreal ambience. An asthmatic, I could scarcely breathe. Finally, they called the rest of us together, and read aloud the proclamation they were working on. They’d already made a recording of it on a Walkman belonging to the Australian student Kristian Whittaker, who was one of our little group, and copied the recording onto a second cassette. It was a call to the ‘forces of justice’ to intervene decisively, militarily if necessary, to put an end to China’s brutal dictatorship. Hou had wanted an even more expl
icit call to arms; Liu, alarmed by the implications, convinced him to soften the message. When they finished their reading, Nick and I looked at each other in alarm.

  Before they ignited a world war, we suggested that they work out what they intended to do personally. Nick, Sue, Sang Ye and I all believed that Xiaobo, Hou and Gao were in serious danger of arrest. Arrest by the security forces on political charges was not nice at the best of times in China; arrest on charges of encouraging a counterrevolutionary rebellion at this, the worst of times, could mean torture, imprisonment and even death.

  ‘I don’t know. I think our role was pretty positive on the whole,’ Xiaobo mused. ‘I’m not so sure they’ll really want to arrest us.’

  The rest of us begged to differ. We discussed the options.

  Neither Xiaobo nor Gao could escape overseas. Gao had no passport and Xiaobo had lost his on the square. They could, however, make their way to the countryside and lie low until things cooled down a bit. That option was no good for Hou, however, because his face was too well known. He had a passport, though it was at his home in Double Elms with Cheng Lin. Hou and Xiaobo were devastated at the thought of separation, but they agreed that they had little choice.

  Hou turned to me. ‘I’m not afraid of being arrested, but I am afraid of disappearing. We’ll get my passport and you and I will leave for Hong Kong together. If I’m detained as we’re passing through immigration, Linda, you mustn’t make any fuss or try to do anything about it. Just get on the plane, fly to Hong Kong and call a press conference immediately.’

  ‘All right.’ I was so fiercely loyal to him that I felt more proud of being given this role than worried about any possible consequences.

  On Tuesday, 6 June, I called Cheng Lin. ‘A friend of ours needs his travel documents,’ I said carefully. ‘He says he left them at your place.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Cheng Lin, look, I can’t talk now. But someone will be at your house in about an hour to pick it up. We’ll talk soon. I promise.’

  Another series of terse, tense and coded conversations later, we had arranged two tickets on CAAC and a kind of bicycle relay that would collect money, grab the passport, scoop up the tickets, and return to Nick’s with, we hoped, a minimum of attention being drawn to the whole operation.

  Even as one messenger was bicycling across town to Cheng Lin’s, however, she was driving to the compound in the Lada. The security systems were back in place and she was unable to get in, so she called from a nearby phone. I couldn’t believe she’d done this—what about the fellow who would be arriving at her place any minute? He needed the passports to pick up the tickets, and the contact at CAAC was only going to wait at the designated place for a short time.

  ‘I have to see him!’ she yelled into the phone. ‘Come down and get me!’ She told me where she was parked.

  ‘I’ll be right there.’ I hung up the phone and turned to Hou Dejian. ‘It’s Cheng Lin. She’s outside the compound. What should we do?’

  ‘Don’t let her up. It’ll blow everyone’s cover.’

  Hou’s decision was approved by everyone present.

  Sue, Sang Ye and I went out to find her in the car, not far from the gate, in a state of near-hysteria that seemed composed of equal parts fear, anger and resentment. She was blowing the horn and creating quite a scene. ‘That bastard Hou Dejian is trying to abandon me!’ she screamed. ‘Just like he did his first wife! Take me up there,’ she demanded.

  Cheng Lin was heavily made up and dressed to the nines in a hot-pink outfit. You didn’t have to be working for police surveillance to recognise her as Cheng Lin, ultra-famous Chinese pop star, and police surveillance was what all the compound guards and lift operators were again working for. If we took her inside, it wouldn’t have taken a genius to conclude that Hou was in the flat, and guess that Xiaobo and others were there as well.

  I was sweating from the heat and the tension. ‘Please, Cheng Lin, try to understand. Hou says you mustn’t come up. He wants you to go back home and wait for the messenger.’

  She’d brought her own passport as well. Sang Ye recalls that we were only able to persuade her to return to Double Elms after we promised to take it and get her a visa to Australia. (On what authority, I don’t know.)

  By this time, I was completely frazzled. I hadn’t had more than a few hours sleep since Saturday, and my encounter with Cheng Lin had pushed me to the verge of hysteria. We told Hou and the others what had transpired.

  ‘If Cheng Lin can get out, I’ll feel better about all this.’ Hou smiled sadly. ‘Linda, I hope we both have better luck with my next wife,’ he joked, fell backwards onto a spare bed and fell soundly asleep.

  Liu Xiaobo was sitting on the floor. He opened his arms to me and I collapsed into them. I sobbed as he stroked my hair and cooed soothingly. He had gone from being the annoying friend of Geremie’s and Hou’s whom I could barely tolerate to a hero—and a source of solace in an insane and frightening world.

  Outside the window, tanks and APCs had moved into what looked to military experts like battle formations. Shouting in Chinese through bullhorns, officers warned that anyone in the compound who tried to film them or even stepped out on the balconies would be shot on sight. Next door, some European kids, hearing the commotion, went out onto their balcony to get a better look. We screamed at them to go back inside.

  Nick phoned from the embassy. Reports believed to be reliable had it that south of the city, near Nanyuan military airbase, rebel army units unhappy with the army’s role in killing unarmed civilians were exchanging artillery and automatic weapons fire with other, rival units. The defence attachés of a number of western nations were meeting secretly to evaluate the situation. They took the possibility of civil war very seriously.

  In a kind of lunatic overdrive, I rushed around packing a bag with bandages, candles, matches, chocolate, a shortwave radio, and towels which we could dampen and hold against our faces in case of tear gas. I imagined the little band of us hiding out in some peasant hut, and tried to think what else we’d need. I was so tense my collarbone had practically wrapped itself around my ears. Xiaobo massaged my shoulders.

  A shot was fired on the compound. This broke diplomatic protocol and was a further sign that things were descending into chaos.

  Nick informed us that Australia was evacuating all its nationals the following day. We were to go to the embassy immediately, where we’d camp out in the large Great Hall downstairs until it was time to go to the airport.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere without Hou Dejian,’ I told Nick. Something occurred to me. ‘And besides, I’m not technically Australian. I’ve still got an American passport.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Nick assured me. ‘Everyone knows you. You’ll get on the flight.’

  ‘But what about Hou Dejian? I refuse to be separated from him. We’ve got those tickets out on CAAC together, so I shouldn’t even need to be on the evacuation flight. But if we separate now, in this chaos, we might not meet up. He really could be “disappeared”.’

  Nick was a good man. ‘Okay,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Here’s the plan…’

  It was well into the afternoon. Hou donned his risible ‘disguise’ of sunglasses. We bid an emotional adieu to Xiaobo, Gao and the others, who planned to head off to the countryside the following day, and begged them to be careful. The lift was a long time coming. On an impulse, I returned to give Xiaobo, who was standing in the doorway, one last hug. He grabbed me, pulled me hard to him and tried to slip the tongue in. It’s hard to describe my emotions—shocked and appalled, revolted and weirdly attracted all at once. I pulled away and ran to the lift where the others, having seen nothing, were waiting. I put my hand to my mouth and felt Xiaobo’s saliva all around my lips. I wiped this off as discreetly as possible.

  Downstairs, Jimi waited with his car. We piled in. Hou kept his head down as we drove through the streets to the
embassy. When we got to the embassy gate, the Chinese guards wouldn’t let us through.

  ‘Do you have any Chinese nationals with you?’ one asked roughly.

  Somehow, we blustered our way inside the gate. Hou was safe from the Chinese, but we hadn’t cleared our action with the ambassador. We were bringing someone possibly on a wanted list into the embassy at a time when a great number of Australians might be endangered by his presence, should the Chinese find out and decide to do anything about it. Hou and I held hands. Mingling with the other Australians, I chattered at him senselessly in English, with him replying ‘oh yes’ and ‘of course’ and ‘oh no’ at appropriate intervals. We prayed no one would recognise him before Nick could open the door to the secure diplomats-only area upstairs. Just before the appointed time, Richard Rigby appeared from somewhere and did a double take. He grinned. Just then, Nick hissed at us from behind the door, and we scooted upstairs, only allowing ourselves to breathe a sigh of relief once we were inside Nick’s office.

  The plan was that we’d stay up there overnight along with Sue and Sang Ye and a few other friends, and then Hou and I would go to the airport in the evacuation convoy and take the flight we’d booked for ourselves.

  Nick returned to the apartment one last time to pick up some of his stuff, for the embassy had decided he would be evacuated as well. Finding Gao Xin, Xiaobo and Xiaobo’s friend still there, he told them it was no longer safe for them to stay. Nick drove them to where Gao Xin and the girl had left their bikes, taking Xiaobo, who was wearing Nick’s jeans and Kristian’s jacket, to Gao Xin’s place. He stopped the car first outside the embassy. ‘Do you want me to get you in?’ he asked Xiaobo. Xiaobo said no. He didn’t want to seek the shelter of a foreign embassy, nor to leave China. He also had some personal matters to sort out. Nick asked if he was sure. Xiaobo said he was. Nick took Xiaobo to Gao Xin’s and then joined the rest of us in the embassy, where we busied ourselves with all manner of last-minute arrangements.