by William Bell
I could hear the roar of the crowd over the radio, too. I switched quickly to channel one and passed the information on to Dad and Eddie. Then I switched back to five.
… have begun to attack the crowd with truncheons swinging. People are falling and being dragged away from the melee and onto the sidewalks. The crowd is giving ground, but not much. It appears at this point to be pretty much of a standoff. Over.
I left the radio on channel five and made some quick notes. Then, with an ear to the radio, I talked into the tape recorder.
When I stopped, Lao Xu said, “Why not record that channel directly, Shan Da? I’ll do that for you.”
He moved the chess set out of the way while I talked to Eddie and Dad. Then I signed off and sat back in my chair. I looked over at Lao Xu.
“What do you think is happening?”
Lao Xu looked worried. He ran his fingers through his brush cut.
“Same thing as before, Shan Da. PLA is under orders to clear Tian An Men square. The demonstration there is illegal. And the government is losing face, especially after that statue was put up. I’m afraid there will be big trouble, Shan Da.”
“But you said the PLA would never attack the citizens, right?” As soon as I said that I felt stupid. According to the anonymous voice on channel five the PLA was moving in with truncheons and tear gas.
Lao Xu’s voice got louder and higher pitched. “I’ve seen what happens in situations like this. The crowd will lose control. Nothing good can happen from this!”
He slumped back in his chair and let out a long sigh. “Shuang fang xiang chi bu xia,” he murmured.
“Pardon?”
“Neither side will give in.”
“Alex? Eddie here. Over.”
I grabbed the radio and keyed it. “I hear you, Eddie. Over.”
Eddie was breathing hard. As he talked, his voice shook as if he was running or walking fast.
“I’m heading towards the south-west corner of the Great Hall. Apparently troops have been seen there.” Lao Xu and I sat up straight in our chairs. “Ted, you on? Over.”
“I hear you, Eddie. Over.”
“You stay put for now. There might be some movement from the main train station. Over.”
“Okay, Eddie. Over.”
I quickly switched to five.
… continues to be a standoff, here. Troops have gained maybe thirty metres in the last fifteen minutes. They’ve tried tear gas again but …
Back to one.
“… on the street that runs north/south behind the Great Hall. Troops are here, all right. Hard to say where they came from. They’re completely stalled by thousands of people. Lots of shouting, fist-waving. Students are trying to control the crowd, using electric megaphones.”
“Eddie, Alex. Are the troops armed? Over.”
“I can’t see any with guns. I can’t see much, Alex. Wait! Yes, the troops on the front rank are slashing at people with their belts.” In a flash I remembered Lao Xu’s story about the Red Army on the Long March, boiling and eating their belts as they tried to avoid starvation when they were crossing the Grasslands. “I don’t see any trucks, but there must be some off on the side streets. Okay, now I see truncheons being used. This is amazing. The street is absolutely jammed with people. It’s as if someone drew a line about fifty metres from where I’m standing. On one side are the troops trying to move forward. On the other are thousands of men and women. So far it’s passive resistance. No one is throwing anything or —”
“I’ve got something here, Alex! Over!” It was Dad.
I was furiously jotting down what Eddie was saying, holding the radio in my left hand, a ballpoint in my right. Lao Xu had taken over the recorder and was talking into it quietly. I had a strange thought. I wondered if he was censoring what he was putting on tape. Right away I felt ashamed of myself.
“Go ahead, Dad. Over.”
“I’m right in front of the Qian Men. I can see down the street to my left towards the train station. The troops are coming and students are streaming towards them. I’m off! Wish me luck! Over.”
It went on like that for five hours. The guy at the Yan Jing Hotel came on every fifteen minutes or so. Things there didn’t change too much. The soldiers kept lobbing tear gas, but the wind reduced its effectiveness so the citizens surged back, only to be beaten with truncheons. At Eddie’s skirmish, the same thing but without the tear gas. He figured the army didn’t want tear gas floating around right outside the Great Hall. Dad was right in the thick of things on Qian Men Avenue West. He estimated that about twelve hundred troops were trying to get to the square from that direction. The students held them back. But they were paying a price.
Eddie and the guy at the Yan Jing Hotel talked mostly in calm media voices almost as if they were reporting a Kiwanis Club picnic. But Dad sounded like a kid at the picnic.
Then, as if all three battles were on the same frequency, the troops started to withdraw. On the two-way we could hear the crowds cheering. In the office, where Lao Xu and I had been furiously writing and listening and talking for hours, it was as if a strong wind had suddenly died. The radio reports grew more and more calm and reports were farther apart. Finally Eddie came on.
“Ted? Alex?”
Dad and I answered him.
“Let’s regroup back at the hotel. Over.”
“Ted here. Okay, see you back there. I’ll bring the chicken, but it’s a little spoiled. Tear gas. Over.”
I looked at Lao Xu. I think both of us were wondering if things really were over.
Dad looked pretty wiped when he came into the suite. His wrinkled dark blue Mao jacket hung on his long frame like a rag on a stick. Eddie didn’t look much better. They flopped down in their armchairs and sighed.
I went to the fridge and cracked open a couple of beers for them.
“Alex, you’re an angel of mercy,” Eddie said when I handed him the glass. Dad just smiled and took a long swallow.
While Dad and Eddie took turns in the shower and got into some fresh clothes, Lao Xu and I rustled up some food for them — stuff we had bought in the shops in the lobby, like crackers, some imported cheese that made Lao Xu wrinkle his nose when we opened it, a can of fish called dace that’s smoked and canned with black-bean sauce. It wasn’t exactly the kind of picnic that ants would fight over, but Dad and Eddie tore through the food in a few minutes, washing it down with beer, talking fast, interrupting each other, winding down from the excitement of the clash between the soldiers and the citizens.
“Well, what do you think, Lao Xu?” Eddie said after everyone had been silent for a moment, “I guess we’ve seen all we’re going to see tonight. Think the army will try again before tomorrow?”
Lao Xu was still looking pretty shocked and saddened by it all. “I don’t know, Eddie. I just don’t know.”
“I wonder what’s going to happen,” Dad said for the hundredth time. “I can’t see the army getting back on the trains and going back to wherever they came from, can you?”
Eddie and Lao Xu shook their heads “According to the rumours, there are troops here from all over the country. A guy from AP told me tonight that one army from Harbin had been told they were coming to Beijing to make a movie!”
Lao Xu cleared his throat. “One thing that is important, Eddie, is that the troops you saw tonight were not Beijing troops.”
Eddie raised his eyebrows.
“What’s the diff?” I asked. “And how do you know?”
Eddie smiled without humour. “Never ask Lao Xu where he gets his info, Alex.”
Lao Xu explained. “The PLA don’t wear any insignia that tells what army or division they belong to. But I heard that the Beijing troops have been pulled back because they failed to clear the square.”
“Clear the square?” Dad exclaimed. “They didn’t even get near it!”
That’s when I remembered the other night — it seemed like a week ago — when we saw the soldiers trapped by a sea of people on Jian Guo
Men Avenue. They were armed. The first troops we saw were not.
Lao Xu went on. “So it is an escalation in the conflict when troops from outside the city are brought in. Maybe that’s why the students and the people have been working so hard building more barricades.”
“I get the impression,” Dad said, “that all the streets that lead to the square are barricaded.”
“Apparently.”
“Lao Xu,” Eddie asked, “does the number twenty-seven mean anything to you?”
“Twenty-seven? What do you mean?”
“Well, you know how lousy my Chinese is, but tonight, when I was on my way back across the square to the hotel, a student was running along yelling something through a loud-hailer. All I could make out was ‘twenty-seven.’”
Lao Xu slowly put down his glass. He swallowed. “I hope not,” he said in a low voice.
Eddie’s eyes lit up the way they always do when he sniffs a story. “Why?”
“The Twenty-seventh Field Army is based in Hebei Province and is led by Qian Guo-liang, the son-in-law of President Yang Shang-qun. They are hardened troops. Many of them have seen action in Vietnam. They have the reputation of being very tough and bitter because they are mostly illiterate and fanatically loyal to their leader.”
“Ah-hah!” Eddie exclaimed. “I knew there was more going on here than a student demonstration.”
I didn’t get it for a moment. Then it started to fit together. I knew from my reading that the PLA was still, in spite of so-called modernization, a primitively organized army with ten major units made up of twenty armies from around the country. Most of the armies are loyal to individual leaders rather than to the central government. Back before Liberation, far back into Chinese history as a matter of fact, leaders with their own armies were called ‘war-lords’. That’s really what Cao Cao had been.
Lao Xu was talking again. “The army that tried to get to the square a few days ago was the Thirty-eighth, the Beijing Garrison. They are mostly city kids. Apparently they refused to go farther when the citizens surrounded them those times.”
“So you think,” Dad said to Eddie, “that the armies are surrounding the city for more reason than getting the students out of the square?”
Eddie nodded. “I think that all the players are getting their chess pieces set up on the board, waiting for the game to start.”
Lao Xu said, almost to himself, “When the Gang of Four were deposed and arrested after Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, first the city was surrounded with troops. Then the arrests happened. And the man who led the armies then was —”
“Was our little friend Deng Xiao-ping,” Eddie cut in. “The guy who now runs the whole country. The guy who is said to be on his deathbed.”
“So if Deng is dying, some people are getting ready to move into power,” Dad mused.
“Yep, and if he isn’t, he’s behind all this troop movement and making sure that moderates like Zhao Zi-yang are ousted.”
“And either way, “I put in, “the students are just being used.” My eye caught the remains of my and Lao Xu’s chess game. “The students are pawns.”
Eddie and Dad looked at each other for a split second before they both got up.
“We have a long night ahead of us,” Eddie said as he walked to the desk. “Alex, help me get my gear together, will you?”
“This time,” Dad announced, “I’m taking my camera.”
Lao Xu was wringing his hands. His face was drawn and pale.
“What’s wrong, Lao Xu?”
He looked up at me. “I am afraid, Shan Da. I’m afraid maybe the da feng has come again.”
We used the same system as we did earlier in the evening, and I liked it about as much. I was hot to go back to Tian An Men Square with Dad and Eddie but they used the same arguments against me as they had before. Lao Xu was really worried they’d get into trouble if they were caught reporting on the events in the square and he tried to insist that he should go with them in case they needed an interpreter to get them out of a jam. Eddie said no to him too.
So Lao Xu and I sat frustrated at the desk, with the tape recorder, the two-way, a pad and pens, and the chess set. The office was like a dimly lit cave. We only had one desk lamp turned on because we wanted to be able to see down into the street and it’s too hard to see down there if the office is lit up like a dance hall.
Eddie situated himself on the southeast corner of the square, where Dad had been earlier in the evening. Dad wanted to photograph the Goddess of Democracy. He said over the two-way that he got some terrific mood shots, with the Goddess all lit up and surrounded by thousands of students and citizens. He commented that the students still seemed really well organized. The mood down there was tense. Everyone, he said, was waiting for the army to come. A lot of people were strengthening the barricades. Buses and cars couldn’t get past anymore, of course. After Dad hung around the Goddess for a while he went west to the corner of Chang An Avenue, right in front of the Great Hall of the People.
Leave it to my dad, I thought, to break the law right out in the open, in the most conspicuous spot possible.
By midnight my body wanted to lie down and call it a day but my brain wouldn’t let it. I was worried about Dad. I kept thinking what a nut he is, and if he got arrested, he’d probably ask them to let him tape the trial.
About 12:30 A.M. I found out that the guy who had been broadcasting from the Yan Jing Hotel that afternoon was an American from ABC. We talked for a minute or two after I heard him signing on with his colleagues. He was now at the Min Zu Hotel, which is a couple of blocks east of the Yan Jing. He said that ABC had four reporters covering the story — him, a woman in the square somewhere, a man near Zhong Nan Hai, which is just a bit west of the Forbidden City and is where the Party bigwigs live — and guess where their base was? The Beijing Hotel! Two floors below us! We agreed to keep in touch. He sounded almost as nervous as I felt.
I tried to get interested in the chess game Lao Xu and I had started. Lao Xu kept tapping his long thin fingers on the desk and flinching every time the radio crackled. I couldn’t concentrate. Finally we gave up the game. He sat on the couch and leafed through a China Reconstructs magazine — not too interested, obviously, because he didn’t even turn on the lamp.
After a few minutes he closed the magazine and tossed it onto the coffee table. He lay down in the shadows, his head resting on the arm of the couch. His narrow chest rose and fell gently. His brow was creased. His mouth was a straight tense line.
I thought about Lao Xu and what he’d been through the last couple of days. His beloved PLA didn’t seem to be acting the way he had told me it would. All his life he had believed in them. His dad had been an army man who had survived the Long March. A hero. They were all heroes to Lao Xu.
And I knew he was walking a really tight line with us. Eddie might be right about him being a spy, but Lao Xu had stuck with us for more reasons than surveillance. I was convinced of that now. It was as if he wanted to help explain what was happening so that we wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Who was he trying to convince, I thought. Us, or himself?
As I watched him trying to rest, it suddenly struck me how much I liked him. He was intelligent and a scholar, but he wasn’t snobby about it. He had a great sense of humour. And he was really kind to all three of us, especially me. He was my friend.
I started doodling nervously on the pad, sitting in a little pool of yellow light in a hotel room in the middle of a strange city, thousands of miles away from home, waiting for something to happen. And mad, because if anything did happen, I wouldn’t be there.
“Shan Da,” Lao Xu said from the couch, “maybe we should turn on TV and …”
… armoured personnel carrier is approaching the barricade just outside the hotel. Red and white flares have been fired into the sky, giving off a harsh eerie light.
I dropped my pen and turned on my tape recorder. “Lao Xu!” I hissed.
The couch creaked as he jumped up and h
urried to the desk.
Thousands of people are in the street, some lining the sidewalks, some behind the barricade across Chang An Avenue. It looks like they are throwing rocks and bricks at the personnel carrier. The carrier has struck the barrier and climbed it. The crowd is parting like water as the carrier picks up speed. It’s heading towards the square now. Over.
I snatched up the two-way and switched to channel one. “Dad! Eddie! Can you hear me? Over.”
They answered. I told them what I’d heard. I wrote 1:00 A.M. on the pad.
“I see it — and hear it — coming this way,” Dad said excitedly. “The crowd here is massed across the avenue in front of the barricade of buses. They’re actually running towards the personnel carrier!”
I heard some scratchy noise and then Dad’s muffled voice came back on. “I’ve put the two-way in my pocket so I can use the camera. Hope you can hear me, Alex. The carrier … yes, the carrier has been stopped by the thousands of people in the street. They’ve surrounded it! Someone has tossed a molotov cocktail under it and the flames have already started to engulf it. The crowd is forced back by the heat. I can’t … a couple of students have climbed onto the carrier. Beautiful! I can see their white headbands. They’re helping the men inside the carrier to get out. This is great! I’m getting all of it!”
Dad was so excited he didn’t seem to realize that with his two-way transmit button locked on I couldn’t talk to him.
“The soldiers appear to have gotten out safely and away from the burning personnel carrier. The students have disarmed the soldiers and they seem to have disappeared into the crowd. I’m going to stop shooting now.”
I heard the scratching and scraping again and Dad’s voice came in, clearly now. “Did you get all that, Alex? Over.”
