by Liao Yiwu
That happened pretty quickly. Did your dad’s tongue slip? Or did your dad betray you?
I wouldn’t call it a slip of the tongue. When police came to our house and asked about my whereabouts, my dad immediately confessed, telling them that I had gone to live in his native village. He even gave them a detailed address.
He trusted the government and the Party. He had a friend who was the deputy chief of the public security bureau in Yanshan. My dad visited him and asked for help. The friend promised: “If you turn your son over to the police, we’ll offer him lenient treatment.” The deputy chief also contacted the local public security branch near my home, instructing them to take care of me. My dad thought that they would detain me for a few days, teach me a lesson, and then release me.
My dad came to fetch me at my grandma’s house. He looked happy. He told me: “Wenjian, let’s go home. The situation in Beijing has settled down. Everything is okay now.” The two of us chatted, laughed, and walked toward the car. But when the car approached the village entrance, I saw two other cars blocking the road.
So it was a trap?
All the policemen got out of their cars. Someone came up to me and asked: “What’s your name?” Before I even finished answering, he barked: “We are here to arrest you.”
How many policemen were there to capture you?
Capturing a “violent criminal” who had escaped from Beijing was a great opportunity to showcase their accomplishments, so the entire county police force, over sixty men, was mobilized. They drove me to the Hengshui County Public Security Bureau, where they tied me to a big tree. Then I heard them excitedly phoning Beijing: “Wu Wenjian is now in our hands.”
They interrogated me briefly. Before long, police from Beijing arrived. A police director from Hengshui led a group of his men to meet up with his counterparts from Beijng. He even brought a cameraman to record the moment. That director behaved like an actor. He stood at attention, saluted, and then raised his voice solemnly: “I want to congratulate our government on the successful crackdown on this counterrevolutionary riot.”
Despite the fact that I was tied to a tree, I laughed so hard that I almost passed out. That director was apparently still living in the Cultural Revolution era. He didn’t appreciate my laughing. He came over, pointed his thick fingers at my head, and mumbled through his teeth: “How could you be so arrogant?” He spewed out his words with venom. It was as if I had raped his daughter.
I was handcuffed and taken away. They put me in a detention center for two months. Then the municipal public security bureau officially arrested me, charging me with “counterrevolutionary activities of propaganda and instigation.” On September 7, 1989, I was transferred, with a group of people facing similar charges, to the Beijing Municipal Detention Center. I was locked up there for more than six months.
How many people were detained in one cell?
A big one could accommodate a few dozen people, a smaller one seven or eight. The detention center was actually an old prison built by the Soviets in the 1950s. It looked very formidable. Once you walked into a cell, bunk beds were lined up on both sides of the wall. At the detention center, I saw Ye Wenfu, the well-known poet who wrote the famous poem, “General, You Must Not Do This!” During the student movement, Ye publicly resigned from the Communist Party. I sometimes heard him yell at the guards downstairs: “Fuck you.”
The three people who had thrown eggs and defaced the Chairman Mao portrait that hangs over Tiananmen Square were also imprisoned there. One of the guys, Yu Zhijian, used to share a cell with me.
During the first wave of the crackdown, nine “violent criminals” from Tiananmen were taken out of the detention center and executed. There was one legendary case. A guy called Zhu Zhongsheng jumped onto a tank when the government troops first entered Tiananmen Square. He tried to pry open the hatch but couldn’t, so he jumped off. Later, he was caught on camera. During both his first and second trials, he was sentenced to death. His hands and feet were shackled with heavy metal chains. They locked him up with other death row inmates. He was waiting for a final review, after which he would be on his way to the execution ground. Somehow the final review never came. So he ended up in that death row cell for two years. He was so traumatized that his body deteriorated into a skeleton. The court eventually commuted his death penalty. As you probably know, living in a death row cell was a nightmare. Every couple of weeks there were people being dragged out to be executed. Each time the door opened, Zhu Zhongsheng would go through the same fear and anxiety. He lived in that fear for two years. While doing hard labor in prison, Zhu slept on a bunk bed above mine. We talked a lot.
I used to be locked up with twenty or so death row inmates. Getting your death penalty commuted was almost unheard of. He really lucked out. In comparison, didn’t you feel pretty lucky, too?
I was nineteen years old and got seven years. I was lucky. On the day of my trial, they put me on a prison bus and drove me to the Beijing Municipal Intermediate People’s Court. I was led down to the court basement where our trials were supposed to take place. A policeman shoved me into an iron cage. The whole trial process was embarrassing. Since all the rooms on both sides of the basement were fully occupied, the judge started the trial in the hallway. He looked like he needed to take a piss or something. He ran through the procedures fast. I had a court-appointed defense lawyer. He defended me by saying something like “Wu Wenjian was young and ignorant. I ask the court to consider lighter punishment” and so on.
It lasted a little over an hour. After a brief deliberation, the judge announced that my sentencing would be delayed. About a month later they delivered my official indictment. I was shocked to learn that I had gotten seven years. On second thought, it wasn’t that bad, since I was only nineteen, and by the time I got out I would be twenty-six. Gradually, I got used to it. After I received my indictment, I filed an appeal. The intention was to buy some time and avoid being sent to do hard labor right away. The second trial was very formal. I didn’t ask for a lawyer.
I defended myself: “I simply listened to Zhao Ziyang, who was then the Communist Party secretary. If I didn’t listen to our party secretary, who would I follow? You charged me with the crime of overthrowing the government. I was barely nineteen. Was I capable of doing that?”
But there was no point in defending myself. The decision had already been made. Mine wasn’t too bad. Many people suffered worse injustices. Have you heard about Zhang Baosheng? He was the youngest June Fourth thug in prison. No dad, no mom. He was only fifteen years old, and he got ten years, as I remember. Charged with the crime of beating up soldiers . . .
On March 9, 1990, I was transferred from the detention center to the Beijing Municipal No. 1 Prison. When I first arrived, I was constantly getting beat up by guards. That seemed to be the rule. Every new arrival would get beat up as an initiation ritual. The government seemed to pay a lot of attention to us. High-level officials kept showing up to inspect things.
Were most of the June Fourth thugs locked up there?
Those who had been sentenced to over ten years were mostly there. Those under ten years were incarcerated in Chadian, near the city of Tianjin.
What was it like in “reform through labor”?
Pretty brutal. We just worked and worked. After arriving at the prison, we went through some brief training and then began to work on export-related jobs, sewing coat linings and buttons for over ten hours a day . . .
The thugs were mostly ordinary Beijingers who had taken action out of anger with the government. They threw bricks or tossed bottles or baskets at the troops. Some had gone to halt a military truck or stood up to deliver an antigovernment speech. Others jumped on a tank. All had a common goal: to stop the troops from entering the city and slaughtering students. Later on, after the students retreated from Tiananmen Square, those guys became the core targets for persecution. But in a world where history is mostly created by the elite, people like us have no place in this histori
cal event.
I met a disabled person who got ten years in jail. I found it strange when he told me about it, so I grabbed the indictment papers from him. He was charged with “slamming his crutches on a tank repeatedly, before staggering away elated.” Another person, whose last name was Zhu, found an abandoned military supply truck. He and his friends emptied the vehicle and tossed the food to local people and students. He gave all the food away altruistically. When the truck was empty, he realized that there wasn’t anything left for him, so he searched around and dug out a package of roast chicken in the corner of the truck. When he was caught, that piece of chicken became part of the evidence against him. He got thirteen years. When he told me about this, he sighed: “That was an expensive chicken.”
We did every kind of work. We conducted inspections on rubber gloves used by sanitation workers and medical professionals. You would put each glove to your mouth and blow into it to check it for leaks. It was exhausting. During that time I also shared a cell with Wu Xuecan, former editor at the People’s Daily. We worked in pairs. I would sew and his job was to remove the extra threads with scissors. After a year I was so skillful that I could sew buttons with my hands behind my back.
The factory we worked for was called the Beijing Friendship Clothing Factory. We sewed summer clothing in winter and winter clothing in summer. Lint was floating all over the rooms. Sometimes we sweated so much that my underwear was completely soaked. I wanted to smash up the whole goddamn little factory. I went on a hunger strike for four days, and someone advised me: “Are you for real? Just pretend.” He then threw a piece of stolen sausage down on my bed.
I was released in 1995. They had reduced my sentence by several months. I hadn’t expected that the reunion with my father would take so long. But his trust in the Communist Party remained unchanged. He didn’t want to say a single bad word about the government. He still threatened me the same way as before: “If you torment me again, I’m going to kill myself.” What could I do? No matter how hopeless his situation is, he is still my dad.
One by one, most of the Tiananmen thugs served out their sentences. As the saying goes, silent and odorless farts don’t get people’s attention. Nobody cared about us. As time went by, the aspirations and passions we held dear dissipated like passing clouds. We’ve been thrown into a world without mercy. Most former inmates I know have developed a strong aversion to politics.
To make a living, first I tried my hand at selling clothes at a local market. Since I was a painter, I began designing advertising graphics. It’s simple technical work. My mind still lingers over that period. When I was first released, I was constantly painting tanks crushing innocent people, blood flooding Tiananmen Square, the Goddess of Democracy . . . I can’t control my dreams and my hands. I’ll never sell those paintings, even if the verdict on June Fourth is overturned. My hope is that by then, there will be a museum to showcase the deep disgrace of our nation during that time. I’ll donate the paintings to that museum.
Forgive the digression. As far as jobs are concerned, many of my former prison buddies haven’t been as fortunate. Most of them were ordinary workers. Times have changed, and they now have problems finding jobs and making a living. One buddy of mine ran a restaurant before 1989 and had a lot of money. When the democracy movement started, he gave away food and drink to students. He ended up in jail for more than ten years.
After his release, he opened a nightclub and helped many of our former inmate friends. He acted like a welfare agency. But when you mention the democracy movement to him, he doesn’t even care to talk about his past involvement.
Not long ago I had a phone conversation with a former inmate. He carves seals. We really clicked. I told him that I had done a series of paintings depicting the June Fourth massacre. He interrupted me by saying: “Why are you still messing around with June Fourth? Didn’t you have enough in jail?”
I answered: “We haven’t avenged our sufferings yet.”
“The passion in me is long gone,” he said. “Don’t touch politics again. It’s too brutal and dirty.”
He might be right. In the past two decades, the so-called Tiananmen elite both inside and outside China has written hundreds of articles about the movement. I used to read some every year. Not a single piece has been written about us thugs. It is as if we had never existed. The whole world seems to know only about the confrontations in Tiananmen Square between soldiers and students. Anything that happened elsewhere in the city has long been forgotten.
How do we define our group? Officially we’re called “thugs.” And people like you—historians, writers, journalists, sociologists, or the elite, all of you who have the opportunity to air your views—what will you say about those thugs who formed the core of the Tiananmen movement? The students and scholars delivered some stirring speeches in Tiananmen Square. They talked about fighting for democracy and freedom for the country and for the people. They sounded so idealistic, as if they had been determined to risk everything. They were so impassioned that the residents of Beijing were moved. People like us went to block military trucks so bullets wouldn’t hit the elite. Little did we know that the student elite would run faster than rabbits . . . The student leader Chai Ling stood like an innocent angel near the Monument to the People’s Heroes. She instigated and urged us into action. Then she ran away to the West and completely dropped out of the democracy movement. Of course, it’s her freedom to quit. But don’t forget about the fact that regular people joined the student movement because they were inspired by people like her, like Wang Dan, Wu’er Kaixi, Li Lu, and Feng Congde.
In my case, on June Fourth, I heard rumors that Chai Ling, Wang Dan, and Wu’er Kaixi had been killed. I was full of grief and anger. That was what inspired me to go up on that scaffolding. Too many people have paid too high a price. You guys will never be able to pay it back. But in one memoir after another, the writers only focus on what the students did. Right now, most of the former student leaders are doing very well. They’re smart and figured it all out.
You probably expected too much of the intellectuals. In fact, Hu Yaobang’s death in the spring of 1989 heralded change. Different intellectuals joined the movement out of different motives. Some thought that it would be like a change of dynasty, and they didn’t want to be left out. They realized that if they didn’t seize the historical moment, they would be deprived of the right to speak in the future.
Those who don’t have the right to speak won’t have a place in history.
Historically, that’s the rule. The only thing that we can do is to dig out the truth and change the history that’s written by the elite.
But I can’t write. Many of us can’t write—and even when we speak, no one listens. Families who lost their children in 1989 are lucky to have Professor Ding Zilin of the Tiananmen Mothers group as their spokesperson. But who is there to speak for the thugs of June Fourth?
The Idealist
Late one winter night, as an angry north wind was blowing through Beijing, Wu Wenjian, now my go-between with other thugs, led me along winding streets for nearly an hour. Bewildered, we were just about to give up when a dark shadow popped up out of a residential building on the opposite side of the street. Wu gestured and called over in a low voice, “Buddy, don’t take the overpass.” The dark shadow dashed across the road, coming right at us.
The shadow consisted of three men, and they pulled in their necks as we met. There was no need for introductions: everyone knew who was who. Wang Yan, tall and thin, explained that he hadn’t been able to come out until his parents were asleep, because his parents watched him closely, afraid he would get into trouble. “Not bad,” snickered Wu. “Forty years old and your parents still tell you what to do.”
We walked for half an hour until we came to a little unlicensed hotel, where Wu took out his identity card and asked for a standard corner room on the top floor. By the time we were sitting cross-legged on the filthy bedding, it was nearly midnight.
We were
all ex-cons, so of course we all smoked. Before long, clouds of smoke filled the whole room. We not only didn’t open the windows, we pulled the curtains shut. My stomach was bothering me, but I just clenched my teeth. The tape recorder had been running for quite a while, but the others just blurted out one burst of nonsense after another. Time passed one drop at a time. I don’t remember when it was that Wang Yan, the one I was going to interview, finally got around to answering my questions.
We didn’t leave the hotel until six in the morning, our faces pale as wax, our heads heavy, and our feet light like a bunch of johns who had indulged too much in sexual pleasures. The markets were starting to come to life, although the curtain of darkness still hung closed over the city. A nearby breakfast shop turned on its light. We went in and had steamed stuffed buns and rice gruel. Wang Yan gobbled up his food. “Eat more slowly,” said Wu Wenjian. “Isn’t it too hot?” Wang Yan looked up from his bowl and said sadly, “Just think of me as a sleepwalker. I’m exhausted and I want to hurry back home.”
* * *
Wang Yan: My name doesn’t matter one bit. People despise poverty but not immorality, as the common saying goes. Everybody thinks people like us are stupid pussies.
During the 1989 student protests, the demonstrators filling the streets were all “stupid pussies.”
After the death of Hu Yaobang, everyone rushed out onto the streets. It all happened so fast, there was just no time to think about things clearly. It wasn’t at all like the Cultural Revolution, which lasted ten years and started white-hot, then was just kind of hot in the middle and then gradually cooled off. I was a worker, only twenty-four years old. Wasn’t I just going along with the patriotic spirit of the times?
