Forbidden City

by William Bell

  But I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of — I don’t know — dread is too strong a word, I guess, but that’s the idea. I don’t even know what caused the feeling. Maybe it was just hangover from whatever nightmare woke me up.

  I sipped my tea and watched the street. People. I remembered that impression I had had on the way to see the Great Wall. People. You couldn’t look anywhere, across a field in the afternoon, down an alley at night, into a street before dawn, without seeing people. I followed the tail-lights of a taxi speeding west toward the square. There, I knew, thousands of students were camped out, lying on narrow cots or cold concrete, waiting for the dawn. And the soldiers they knew would eventually march on them. It came into my mind again that many of the students are only a year or two older than me. They’re trying to change things. People like Lan and Hong are sacrificing a lot to change things. I remembered, too, stories my Dad had told me about his days in university. He had demonstrated, too, about South Africa, environmental stuff. What have I done, so far? Watched TV, listened to the radio, gone to school. Played with toy soldiers.

  I stayed perched on the desk, sipping green tea, watching the light leak onto the street from my left, turning it grey, then grey-white. I could tell by the red flags on top of the Great Hall of the People in the distance that the wind was stiffening.

  The street below me stepped up its life. Buses snorted along, the bikes came out in force, pedestrians hurried here and there, taxis turned into the hotel parking lot or slipped out into the street and away.

  It wasn’t too long after that when I realized that something was going on. What tipped me off was that a lot of the pedestrians had stopped moving and soon the sidewalks on both sides of Chang An Avenue were jammed.

  It was another demonstration. The marchers came into view from my left along with the bright sunlight. They filled the street, walking slowly under huge banners which bellied and dipped in the wind. As the procession came by, people from the sidewalks joined in.

  I got off the desk to wake Dad and Eddie.

  The demonstration turned out to be the biggest yet. More than a million people took part, students, factory workers, women pushing bamboo baby strollers. The banners shouted Democracy Now! and Support the Students! and Stop the Corruption! There were a lot of what Lao Xu called “rude” posters, too — what I call Down Withs. And there were posters with cartoons on them, showing Deng Xiao-ping and his two sons driving Mercedes Benz cars, and other guys I didn’t recognize counting stacks of money.

  In the afternoon I was up on the roof with Dad, who was, naturally, watching everything through the lens of his Betacam, when the big wind — the da feng — started to blow. Then the rain came. The storm turned vicious fast, driving the rain like nails, drenching us in minutes. We went back to the suite and watched from the windows, wiping the steam away with wet hands. The marchers didn’t quit. They kept it up, flowing slowly, like cold syrup, towards the square, hanging on to their posters and banners like drowning sailors.

  Today Beijing Radio broadcast a report on yesterday’s big demonstration. Lao Xu translated for us and I taped his translation. The report was telling about the demonstration as if only a few thousand people had been involved. It didn’t say that workers from the factories took part, or ordinary citizens. It gave the impression that the demonstrators were all rebellious students and “bad elements” and “hooligans.”

  I was laughing at those 1930s gangster-movie terms when I noticed Lao Xu’s face go pale. His mouth dropped open and he stopped translating.

  He just stared at the screen for a moment, then he whispered, “No, no.”

  Dad noticed before Eddie did. “What’s the matter, Lao Xu?”

  Lao Xu gulped and said so low I could barely hear him over the voice on the TV. “The government has said that the student demonstrators are counter-revolutionaries!”

  “My god,” Eddie gasped. “My god. Now they’re really in for it.”

  Dad looked as confused as I felt. But he and I had been in China long enough to know that propaganda labels mean a lot. “What does that mean exactly?”

  “It means,” Lao Xu answered, “that the student demonstrators are enemies of the state. It means that if they are arrested they can be shot.”

  “What?” I shouted. “Enemies? Shot? That’s dumb! They haven’t done anything wrong! They’re just trying to improve things!”

  Dad chimed in, “But all the demonstrations have been remarkably peaceful, Lao Xu.”

  Lao Xu suddenly looked tired. “I know, Ted. But none of that matters now. If the students don’t leave the square …”

  Eddie was already banging away on the computer. He talked while he typed, his hands a blur. “They’d better leave,” he said. “They’d better. Ted, get the fax ready, will you?”

  Rumours, rumours, rumours.

  It’s hard to sort out all the rumours. One says that Deng Xiao-ping is seriously ill and the Chinese embassies around the world have been notified to expect an announcement of his death. Another says he’s already dead and the power struggle to replace him has started and the hard-line conservatives, headed by Li Peng, are in control. Another says he’s healthy and is hiding in Sichuan, his native province, to keep distant from the turmoil so he doesn’t get his hands dirty if something bad happens.

  Two rumours are solid. One, the army has Beijing surrounded. Soldiers have been moving into the area again since martial law was declared six days ago. I got out my map of the city and showed Dad and Eddie where soldiers would probably be massed. One place would be the main railway station on East Qian Men Street, not too far from Tian An Men Square. Another would be the Wu Lu railway station to the west of the city. I figured this because, in China, there isn’t a big network of highways like there is in North American cities, so the main way to move people and produce and stuff is the trains. They’d probably use military airports, too, but they were too far away to be on my map.

  I hopped on my bike and checked out the main railway station myself. I came at it from the south and scanned the huge network of rails with binoculars. Sure enough, there were dozens and dozens of railway cars resting on the sidings with thousands of soldiers sitting outside cooking noodles on open fires, washing clothes in little wash basins, doing what all soldiers have to know how to do — wait. It was awesome. I almost wished I could be one of them. Then I remembered Lan and Hong and why the army was in Beijing.

  The Wu Lu station was too far away to reconnoiter, but I was pretty sure there would be the same scene there.

  Eddie and Lao Xu went down to the square to see how the students were responding to the news. The demonstrators were shocked that the government had said they were counter-revolutionaries. There were lots of meetings going on to decide what to do.

  “A couple of thousand students have vowed not to leave the square until the government reforms itself,” Eddie told us, “but a lot of the students — maybe most — have already left. Who can blame them?”

  Things were pretty quiet today. We heard more rumours that tanks and armoured personnel carriers have massed on the outskirts of the city but, as Eddie says in his newspaper-ese, we haven’t been able to confirm these reports.

  As soon as he said that, though, he added, “There’s something going on here that’s a lot bigger than student demonstrations.”

  How come the heavy-duty hardware? When I saw the PLA on the twenty-third they weren’t even armed. Tanks? Armoured personnel carriers? Seems pretty demented to me.

  Something’s up.

  Students are beginning to come back to the square. Not in demonstrations or parades, but in trickles, and from all directions. Dad and I were down there this afternoon. Dad wanted to get some shots of the square after the students — most of them, that is — had left. We expected to find a desolate and messy expanse of concrete. But we didn’t. It soon became clear that a lot of students had come back. They’re still coming. What’s going on?

  The rumours about the heavy-duty
hardware have been confirmed.

  The square is packed with humans again. It’s pretty tense down there. Everyone is wondering what will happen next.

  This afternoon a bunch of those three-wheeled bicycle transports with the platforms in back arrived, inching through the crowds, with huge white objects on them.

  This evening, after dark, we all went down to the square again. The white things had been fitted together to make a statue. It’s a tall white figure of a woman, much like the Statue of Liberty in the States, only she’s using two hands instead of one to hold up the torch. Lao Xu says the students are calling her the Goddess of Democracy.

  What’s really interesting is where they put her. She’s standing in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where Mao Ze-dong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 and where his big picture hangs now.

  And she’s staring at the picture of Mao right in the face.

  Things are really intense.

  Journalists are going nuts, talking together in the hotel coffee shop, faxing photos of the Goddess and reports of the latest developments to their papers and TV stations, trying to find tourists who will smuggle videotapes to Hong Kong, Japan, Europe — anywhere. As soon as they’re out of China the tapes can be couriered back home or, better still, sent by satellite.

  Chinese radio and TV are still railing against the students, calling them counter-revolutionaries, accusing them of trying to destroy the economic reforms of the last ten years, telling the citizens the demonstrators are all hooligans. But the people aren’t buying it.

  More rumours. The Beijing police have refused to clear the students out of the square or to tear down the goddess. The government is going to send in the troops again.

  And they did. Tonight, after dark, the troops tried to come in. The word went up and down the streets like an electric current. People poured out of apartment blocks and hu tongs and flooded into the streets, bringing all traffic to a halt. Dad and I and Eddie left the hotel and rushed east along Chang An Avenue. We didn’t get far before we saw the crowds. It was like the people were a sea and each truck in the column was the tip of an island.

  And the people were an angry sea — not like last time. They shouted and waved their fists at the soldiers in the trucks. I wondered why. I couldn’t understand what they were shouting.

  Dad was standing behind a tree, holding the camera against the trunk so it wouldn’t be too conspicuous, getting it all on video. We knew the pictures wouldn’t be very good quality, but we also knew this was too good to miss.

  I got as close as I could to the trucks. A bolt of excitement hit me. No wonder the people were angry. This time, the soldiers were armed! Each one carried an AK 47 machine gun. And each AK 47 had a wicked-looking bayonet fixed to the barrel. The PLA wore helmets and those big ammunition pouches on their chests.

  They didn’t look bewildered and embarrassed the way the soldiers had on the twenty-third. They looked tough. And mad. This time they looked like real soldiers, not those kids in green who “guarded” the doors of the Great Hall of the People or those wimps who sat in the trucks and got an earful from the civilians.

  The stalemate lasted for about three hours. Then the trucks reversed, turned around, and withdrew.

  The citizens, and the students, had won again. What an army, I thought. They lost face again. They looked stupid. I was glad.

  This morning I was grounded.

  I came back early from school because classes have been postponed indefinitely. Most of the diplomats pulled their kids out because they don’t think it’s safe enough to send them to school. It’s just as well, I guess, because I’ve been missing classes quite a bit lately. My tones are probably really lousy now.

  I got back home to find Eddie and Dad deep into a conversation that stopped short when I came through the door. They both looked at me guiltily, so I knew something was up.

  And here’s what they cooked up. Eddie wanted to go down into the square again. Rumours said the army was going to make another try.

  “Great,” I put in, “I’ll go with you. I don’t want to miss that.”

  Nope. The plan was that I would stay in the hotel!

  “We need you here,” Eddie explained. And he went on to say that he and Dad would go down with their two-way radios. I would stay in the office as a sort of base co-ordinator and, when I got something interesting from one of them, make an oral memo into my little tape recorder. Eddie said this would be a great way to record details for his book while at the same time letting him get on with his immediate job — E.N.G., Electronic News Gathering.

  Dad nodded all the way through this line of nonsense but I could see from the look in his eye that he knew I wasn’t buying it.

  “This is just an excuse to keep me here, right? Because you think it will be too dangerous, right?”

  Dad didn’t say anything.

  Eddie said, “No, really, Alex, you’d be more useful to us up here.”

  “Come on, Eddie, you could take the tape recorder with you and make the memos yourself down there. You don’t need me to do that.”

  “Yeah, I could, Alex, but you’re forgetting something.”

  “I’ll bet. What?”

  “Point of view. If I do it, all we’ll have is what I see. From up here you can record your dad’s observations, mine, and anything Lao Xu gets over the telephone.”

  I thought hard but I couldn’t argue my way out of that one.

  Eddie hammered his point home. “Your dad and I will take our Polaroids with us and try to get pics we can fax home. And we’ll send you oral reports of what’s going on. Not having to stop and write leaves us free to move fast. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to see a lot of action today.”

  I couldn’t think of anyway out of it. I wanted to go with them and be in the middle of things, right where it was happening — if anything did happen — not stuck in a hotel room yapping into a tape recorder.

  Dad was talking. “Alex, I would rather have you up here in case anything happens, but we also need you to do this. Okay?”

  “Okay, Dad.” What else could I say?

  They left about ten o’clock, dressed in Chinese hats and blue Mao coats. Eddie wasn’t fooling anybody, though. For one thing you have to walk a lot of miles before you’ll find a chubby Chinese man, and even Eddie’s coat couldn’t hide his thick body and potbelly. For another, his florid complexion would be like a flashing red light. Dad didn’t look convincing, either. He was much too tall and gangly.

  I set up shop on Eddie’s desk. I had a pad to take notes so I wouldn’t miss details when I got the reports. I had the two-way radio on receive mode and my little tape recorder with fresh batteries and a new tape. I had batteries cooking on the recharger right on the desk, and a couple of spare tapes.

  And nothing happened.

  What a letdown. Well, Eddie called in to report that he was going to hang around the Great Hall of the People, and on the way there he radioed that the Goddess was still standing there, staring Mao in the face, and thousands of people were milling around her, including dozens of foreign correspondents. Dad called in to say he was going to hang around the south end of the square. I called back to tell him he probably picked that spot because that is where the chicken restaurant is.

  Lao Xu came in about noon and did a little paperwork. Then he got a chess set out of his bag. He unfolded the paper board on the desk beside my stuff and laid out the round pieces with the characters carved into the tops. He has been patiently teaching me Chinese chess lately. We started to play.

  I wasn’t too interested, though. While I waited for him to move I was fiddling with the channel selector on the two-way when suddenly I heard this: … just in front of the Yan Jing Hotel and I can see troops in the distance moving towards the centre of Beijing. They must have broken through the barricade at the moat at Mu Xi Di. A crowd has already begun to gather. Yes, people are pouring into the streets, moving east, towards the troops. I’
m going to try to get to the roof of the hotel. Over.

  Lao Xu’s eyes snapped up from the chess game. “Who is that, Shan Da? Not Ted or Eddie.”

  “No, it isn’t. I got that over channel five. Hang on a sec.”

  I switched back to one. “Dad, this is Alex. Over.”

  “Got you, Alex. Feeling bored? The chicken is great, hah, hah. Has Lao Xu arrived yet?”

  “Eddie, can you hear me too? Over.”

  “Loud and clear. You sound like you won the lottery. What’s up? Over.”

  “I just picked up a voice on channel five from someone at the Yan Jing Hotel. He says troops are moving towards the centre of the city. Just a minute. Over.”

  “Supposed to say ‘Stand by,’ not ‘Just a minute,’” Dad joked. Lao Xu had pulled the map of Beijing closer and put his finger on the location of the Yan Jing Hotel.

  “Dad, this is Alex. That hotel is on Fu Xing Men Avenue. That’s the western extension of Chang An. The hotel is west of the Second Ring Road. The troops must be moving in from Wu Lu train station. Over.”

  “Alex, Eddie. Okay, monitor that channel and get down everything you can. Pass it on to us and we’ll let people here know. Must be a reporter you’ve picked up. Over.”

  “Okay, Eddie. Over.”

  Wow! This was great! I looked at my watch. Two o’clock. I made some quick notes and switched to channel five.

  … clear view of the scene now. The street is jammed with citizens who are tying to halt the progress of the troops as they have before. The first few ranks of troops have long truncheons —

  “What’s that word?” Lao Xu cut in.

  “Truncheon? It’s like a club. Cops use them for crowd control.”

  Lao Xu frowned. “But the PLA would never —”

  … teargas cannisters … Yes, I can see the white smoke. The troops are using teargas. The crowd has begun to fall back somewhat, but the wind is blowing the gas off the street, away from the people. The crowd is surging towards the troops again. Some are throwing what looks like rocks. The entire expanse of the street is a mass of people. I can hear them now.