Bullets and Opium

by Liao Yiwu

  I heard that you were in college, taking advanced coursework.

  Yes, I looked like the lead in a movie about city life back then: handsome, carefree, honest, and stylish. I was working at the steel mill near Shijingshan and studying law at one of the branch campuses of Beijing Normal University. Our teacher was very enlightened. I learned from him that Western law was three hundred years ahead of China’s so-called Chinese socialist law. His ideas were essentially the same as Liu Xiaobo’s Olympian view that “China needs to be colonized for three hundred years.” My head was filled with ideas like “open maritime civilization” and “closed continental civilization,” and the question “where is China going?” from watching Su Xiaokang’s movie River Elegy, which became famous after China Central Television broadcast it. I was always looking for people to debate with.

  You were already very enlightened.

  Everybody else was enlightened, but I wasn’t. The student protests of 1989 reflected what the people wanted. It was in the natural course of events. Hu Yaobang’s character and the trust that he had built up in a few years had come to overshadow Deng Xiaoping. That nasty little shrimp was so envious that he became determined to tear Hu down. When Hu died, Deng quickly reversed course and rushed to proclaim him a “glorious proletarian revolutionary” and shed crocodile tears for him. Everyone from eighty-year-old women down to little eight-year-old kids could see through what Deng was doing. So everyone rose up demanding fairness, democracy, freedom—and that high officials make public all their ill-gotten gains. If they fucking didn’t like it, well, they could use high-pressure water hoses on us the way they did during the April Fifth Movement of 1976, couldn’t they? During that movement, some people got hurt, some people went to jail, but nobody got killed. But this time several hundred thousand soldiers surrounded Beijing. They opened fire and killed people. Who could take that? Who had ever seen that?

  Early on the morning of June 4, I was riding a bright red bicycle and wearing a bright red T-shirt and a pair of green pants on my way to work. At about seven a.m. I passed by the Shijingshan District government office. Unexpectedly, the main road was cut off, blocked by several thousand people. There was an armored vehicle stopped at an angle, with a big stream of people swirling around it like a whirlpool. I saw that I was stuck there, so I just locked up my bicycle on one side of the road and pushed myself deep into the river of people up to the armored vehicle as if I were swimming. I bent over it and noticed that there were metal rings with hooks stuck in the caterpillar treads, as well as an iron club stuck in at an angle, so the vehicle was stuck there, unable to move.

  That simple roadblock was quite something.

  Chairman Mao said, “The lowly are the most intelligent . . .” Meanwhile, the soldiers were nowhere to be seen. I asked everybody where they were, but nobody knew. Even more peculiar was that nobody knew what had happened there the previous evening. Anyway, people were arriving in wave after wave, and they all felt the same righteous anger toward the same object, punching and kicking it. The vehicle was splattered with dirty smudges. Clubs, rocks, and bricks hit from all sides, leaving marks that looked like a dog had bitten it.

  Everyone there was getting angrier and angrier, just as all of Beijing was getting angrier and angrier. They had shot and killed people, but we couldn’t do anything about it. We just blew off steam against that useless piece of iron slag stuck there. The crowd’s anger was so contagious that I got angry, too, turning into a bull who wanted to make his own run at the thing. I gave the armored car two quick kicks, which really hurt.

  Just then someone whispered in my ear, “Let’s burn it.” I agreed at once. Soon everybody was shouting like thunder: “Burn it! Burn it!” Then someone handed me a lighter and paper. I turned around and said, “How do I burn that shiny, slippery pile of iron slag?” Someone came out of the crowd and tapped it all over until he found the hidden fuel tank. He unscrewed the cover. I stuck the paper into the fuel tank to soak it first, then I lit it and dropped it under the vehicle. “That won’t work,” someone said, and told me to light another piece of paper and drop it right down into the fuel tank.

  The armored car immediately burst into fire, with flames that shot into the sky. The crowd applauded thunderously. It was satisfying! I took advantage of the confusion to find my red bicycle and continued on my way to work.

  Were you afraid?

  I didn’t feel afraid at the time. But as I think back on it now many years later, I wonder just who it was who gave me the lighter and the paper and taught me how to set fire to that armored car.

  I don’t remember him; it was too long ago. But there were many plainclothes police in the crowd, so it may have been a plainclothesman who taught me how to set fire to the armored car. He might have wanted to provoke a big incident and then take advantage of it by calling it a counterrevolutionary riot. I was lucky, though. Most of the people who were accused of burning vehicles or smashing and looting during June Fourth were shot. Those who weren’t shot were sentenced to death with a delay of execution at the very least.

  At first Premier Li Peng promised, “We won’t be settling old scores later,” but after a while the newspapers and TV broadcasts were carrying stories every day about people who had been captured or were being brought to justice. I still went to work as usual. I had never been charged with anything and had never been to jail, so I thought that I was one of the lucky ones. That is, until the morning of July 23, when a notice arrived at the personnel and security office of my work unit, followed by swarms of police. I was arrested on the spot. Burning a military vehicle after the so-called clearing of Tiananmen was seen as a “heinous crime of flagrant defiance.” Everyone was sure I would be sentenced to death, and if I had been caught earlier, at the height of the executions, I would definitely have been a dead man.

  Things improved a little when I was transferred to the Beijing Municipal No. 7 Detention Center. I was at least able to lie down, and I was never beaten or mistreated by the other convicts. But I remember once a new person came in and was told to strip naked. Everybody was naked, so that was nothing unusual. But this new person was not only stripped naked but had to hold his underpants with his teeth, breathing heavily, dodging between everyone’s crotches and mopping the floor as he went. He had to be quick like a rat, since if he didn’t, he would get trampled or kicked. Then there was the miserable guy who was forced by the head of the jail to eat the roundworms that came out of his own body while everybody watched. He shat a total of six roundworms. He held the live worms in his fingers and put them in his mouth, crushed them with his teeth, and swallowed them. Then he picked up his soup, had a drink, and smacked his lips. He was not allowed to frown; he was only allowed to wear a smile on his face, as if roundworms and shit were the greatest delicacy on earth.

  I can’t take any more of this.

  I didn’t think that I was going to live. The judge announced that my verdict was life imprisonment. I was shocked. Was I going to appeal the sentence? Of course I wasn’t going to appeal it. When I was escorted back to prison, the handcuffs and shackles were still on me, but I was in ecstasy.

  I was transferred to Beijing Municipal Prison No. 1, like many others. In front is the infamous Turtle Mansion, with two floors, a domed roof, and thick iron bars all the way around. And so my “reform through labor” began. On December 26, 1990, several hundred June Fourth rioters were transferred together to Beijing Municipal Prison No. 2.

  Final inspection of latex gloves was the work they assigned us rioters. We trimmed extra material off the edges and then checked the gloves for leaks. Everyone puckered their mouths and puffed into the gloves. With the puffs of air the talcum powder between the gloves would be blown off and into the air into mist-like balls. Soon our faces were completely white. Next our entire bodies would become white, like those hanged ghosts in a Beijing opera. At first we weren’t good at it. Everyone had a daily work quota of two boxes, or 2,000 gloves. Then the quota kept going up and up. We
had to work night and day. The police, to boost our morale, took the unprecedented step of not locking our cells at night, so the reform-through-labor “battlefront” ran all the way from our beds to the classrooms where we worked.

  Why did they do that?

  The cells were as narrow as rat holes. With talcum powder flying all over the place, we couldn’t even make out the face of the person at the next bed, never mind go to sleep. The classrooms had windows and were spacious, so the air was much better there. In the dead of night, we were like a bunch of obsessed people, puffing air and packing boxes and crates. We were often still working at four or five o’clock in the morning like some kind of perpetual motion machine.

  We didn’t hear the far-off crowing of roosters. When the wake-up buzzer rang, we shook all over. Our bodies were as soft as noodles, oozing onto the floor and sleeping like the dead. During those days, some people performed amazing feats. They would only sleep two hours and finish sixteen boxes, or 16,000 latex gloves in all. Some people would be so tired that they couldn’t get up, or ended up with silicosis for life. Some people just couldn’t take it anymore. They would go crazy, stabbing themselves in the chest with steel needles. They wanted to die but couldn’t.

  What were those latex gloves used for?

  The thicker ones were for daily uses such as washing pots and pans and could be purchased in any supermarket. The thinner ones were medical products that were used in hospitals. I heard that our gloves were exported from a Beijing latex products factory through many intermediaries. American companies had ordered the products. Everybody knew it. One day, another June Fourth “arson rioter” named Shi Xuezhi put many slips of paper, written in English, inside the gloves, saying, “Please, kind person, pass along this message. Save us! Save China! Long live democracy!”

  He was found out very quickly and had a very rough time. They threw him into a doghole, twenty square feet in size. After more than three months in there, he couldn’t straighten his back at all. This fifty-something-year-old man was stripped naked while the police took turns shocking him with electric prods—under his armpits, on his neck, on his face, his navel, between the legs, on the bottoms of his feet, over and over again. When one prod stopped working, they would use a different one. The smell of burned pubic hair wafted through the air. Shi Xuezhi groaned over and over, his eyeballs looking ready to pop out of his head. He tried to resist, only to be brutalized even harder. He lost control of his bladder; his urine wet the floor all around him. But he never begged for mercy. He never did beg for mercy.

  After that, work on the latex gloves screeched to a halt. We started knitting cashmere sweaters. On hot days we would be in there shirtless, threading needles and pulling the thread through, beads of sweat dripping everywhere. Our underpants were soaked through. The fine wool stuck to our skin. And the itch was like a hundred thousand ants hopping up and down on a hot pot. We would often knit for a while and then scratch our crotches for a while, pulling out a handful of pubic hair and mixing it into the wool sweater we were knitting.

  Cashmere and pubic hair are both expensive things.

  We also did some rock-bottom work, like processing plastic bottles and recycling foreign trash. That was dirty work, and after doing it all day we smelled of plastic bottles or of foreign trash. We folded paper boxes for Hanjing. Hanjing means stop snoring. It’s a kind of fake medicine. Some of the prisoners tried it, but they still snored as loud as before. The biggest swindle was the paper coffins. Those were the boxes that dead people were put into before they went to the crematorium. Just put a layer of paint on a stiff cardboard box and it looks very realistic.

  In prison, working for the crematorium?

  That’s what “stimulating the economy” means. Every convict is a machine for making money. Think about it. The cost of a paper coffin is very low, but it can be sold to the family of the dead person for many tens of times what it costs to make. For a while we spent a lot of time going in and out of a pile of coffins like we were ghosts ourselves. That was very scary. Some of us joked that if we just lay down in a coffin, all our problems would be solved. I expect that police would search around for a while and still not find us.

  With hundreds and thousands of paper coffins around, it would be easy for one or two people to hide in there.

  That’s why the paper coffin business stopped and we made a 180-degree turn and started processing “pussy hangers.”

  What?

  A gynecological speculum. It’s used to look deep into the vagina to check if there are any gynecological illnesses. Don’t make a fuss about it. We’re both adults.

  They were already made. We just had to sand off some of the metal burrs left behind by the machining. Don’t underestimate these tiny gadgets. It wasn’t easy. It was very demanding work and very tiring on the eyes. There were two June Fourth rioters who became model factory workers. Everyone nicknamed them according to their age, Big Pussy Hanger and Little Pussy Hanger.

  Altogether, how long were you in reform through labor?

  Not quite sixteen years, but the hardest part came later, when I got out of jail. Superficially I was free, but I still felt like a prisoner inside. I was forty years old. I had to adapt to society and learn some new skills. There was no use for what I had learned in prison. Times had changed too fast. Beijing was now several times the size it had been. Where could I find a place I belonged? My parents had grown old, and it felt awful to still be living with them, getting free room and board. I couldn’t sleep at night. Was my whole life a mistake? Maybe I shouldn’t have been such a hothead back then? Will the people of June Fourth ever be politically rehabilitated? And what then?

  The Arsonists

  It was a year later, another winter evening in Beijing, the sky turning the color of dark ink as the streetlights came on, when I saw Wu Wenjian standing with two more “arsonists,” Zhang Maosheng and Dong Shengkun. We shook hands warmly and walked the streets before stumbling on a bright red storefront that drew us right in. We rubbed our hands together against the cold, sat down, and ordered food and a 56-proof bottle of Red Star erguotou sorghum liquor. Zhang Maosheng went first.

  * * *

  Brother, please excuse my directness. You were very young then. Were you really the one who burned that army vehicle on June Fourth?

  Zhang Maosheng: Yes. I was sentenced to death with a two-year delay of execution and sent away for forced labor so they could observe my behavior.

  What year were you born? What did you do before June Fourth?

  I was born on June 23, 1968, so my zodiac animal is the Monkey. Before June Fourth, I was an ordinary worker at a machinery company in the Fengtai District of Beijing. In June 1989, I was not yet twenty-one years old.

  My family used to live in Chadian, not far from Tiananmen. Every day after work I liked to take a stroll in my neighborhood. Starting in April, there were many student demonstrations. The demonstrations kept getting bigger, so the students stopped going to classes and the workers stopped going to work. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went out on the streets every day looking for excitement. Back then I was young and not well educated. I had no idea what politics was. I thought that the Party and government were having a hard time, what with so many people demonstrating against them day and night, occupying Tiananmen, making speeches, singing, distributing leaflets, going on hunger strikes and all. Those demonstrators were really messing up the heart of the country, and I thought that wasn’t right. But what provoked me to burn that army vehicle was something that happened on the evening of June 3.

  That day after dinner I went out as usual and wandered around. Just when I got to Fucheng Road, I saw a big group of Beijingers on the side of the street, discussing something. Curious, I squeezed into the crowd to see what was going on. A heartbroken woman pulling a small cart was crying inconsolably by the side of the road. Inside the cart was the mangled body of a small child. The people surrounding her were all talking and gesturing. They were very angry.
From what they said, I gathered that the child, who was only eight years old, had been playing on the grass when the troops came. What does an eight-year-old child know? A soldier’s bullet flew by and killed him.

  Suddenly I felt my head explode and I started getting very angry. How could anyone do that? Not even an animal would do that. I really wished then that I had a rifle in my hands, so that if I came across some soldiers, I could wipe them out right on the spot! I don’t know how much time went by. The crowd dispersed. I don’t remember how I got home. I only remember that I felt dizzy, sick at heart, sick in the pit of my stomach, and that I was crying the whole time.

  The next day, which would have been the afternoon of June Fourth, I wandered through the streets again. I came to a spot near one of the Peking University hospitals, where I saw many Beijingers carrying injured people on stretchers, running toward the entrance of the hospital, and trailing blood behind them as they ran. At that time there was a Beijing Normal University student standing up high somewhere, making a speech about different places and the numbers of people who had been shot at each one. There were just too many people to rescue. He said the beasts had gone crazy. Some people from the Red Cross had come to help the wounded, but they were shot down, too. How could the rifle barrels of the People’s Liberation Army be turned against the people? My grief and my outrage grew as I listened, and I thought of the murdered child I had seen the previous day.

  My heart felt like it had been stabbed. I wanted to find a soldier and do the same to him. What do you say, Mr. Liao? Wouldn’t any Chinese person with a conscience, in those circumstances, have felt the same way? I wiped away my tears and kept walking ahead. When I got to the Madian Bridge, I came across a convoy of military trucks headed south but blocked by some students. You can see that kind of scene only in the movies these days. An astonishing, chaotic scene, like an invisible powder keg placed right in the middle of the street. The locals were all cursing, and spit was flying all over the sky. At first I kept wiping it off my face, but then I didn’t care anymore. People kept jumping up to throw things at the soldiers.