Bullets and Opium

by Liao Yiwu

  Early the next day I was transferred to a detention center in Dongcheng District. Every cell was crammed to overflowing. Even the corridors were full. We were all June Fourth rioters. During that special time, a total of twenty-six prisoners were packed into a space meant for eight. We were packed in tight, like spoiled canned fish. It was nauseating. Even my dreams were nauseating.

  How did you sleep?

  I had been beaten so badly that everyone had the heart to let me lie down. I lay down for about twenty days. After I got a little better, according to the rules, I would straighten up like a rod and sleep lying on my side, so that I would take up as little space as possible. I couldn’t turn over. If I badly needed to turn over, I would beg the people on my right and on my left in advance and open myself up like a clamshell; then, once I had moved, I would close myself up again as tightly as I could.

  With everyone packed so tightly, flesh against flesh, the steamy, stinky sweat turned the cell into a misty public bathhouse. But we never bathed. We couldn’t even wash our faces or our hands. Fortunately, the food was very bad, and the hunger made us all lethargic, too weak to move. Later our bodies were covered with scabies, every single one of us. That gave us something to do. Everybody scratched themselves everywhere. Pieces of skin flew all over. Later, large sections of our flesh began to rot. The itching drove us crazy. Somebody who had been scratching for hours and hours without being able to stop the itching suddenly screamed at the top of his lungs, “Please kill me!” That got the government’s attention. But except for applications of tetracycline, we got no medicine. Lice, fleas, and mosquitoes all had their way with us. It was torture.

  Tetracycline can’t stop the itching.

  We got hungry fast. It shows that even when you put people in ratholes, they can still survive. We were supposed to get two steamed buns at every meal, but the police hated us rioters, so they cut it back to one bun per meal. When I first went to jail, I couldn’t swallow those buns. I thought that even stray dogs on the outside wouldn’t eat that stuff. But after being in jail awhile, that steamed bun started smelling better than chocolate. I couldn’t just gulp it down in two or three bites; I would savor it in small mouthfuls.

  Things went on that way for nine months. Many of my fellow rioters got their verdicts and sentences and left. Many more common criminals were put in the cells, and they ranked above us in the prison pecking order. The guards would tell them to supervise us as we mopped the floor and cleaned the toilets. Because each bed took up at least the space of two people standing, they ordered the rioters to sleep in shifts. If it wasn’t your turn to sleep, you had to stand up straight.

  The criminals even mimicked the police by interrogating us. They would pretend to be judges delivering verdicts and handing down sentences. You had to tell your story in detail. If you refused, they would find ways to have even more fun, like ordering rioters to slap one another. When it came to me, I thought to myself, We’re all brothers from the patriotic movement. You can hit me, but I certainly won’t hit you back. The jailer saw that I was disobeying orders, got angry, and punched me. The back of my head hit the wall hard and left a scar that still hasn’t gone away.

  Even stranger were the farting investigations. If someone was found to have farted, he would immediately be given a good beating. In there, they control your thinking, your behavior, your eating, drinking, and shitting, and even your farting is not spared. What kind of country is this?

  A hermetically sealed country.

  Later it got colder and a single layer of clothing was no longer warm enough. The detention center allowed family members to send packages to prisoners. Our jailers ordered us to write letters asking for good-quality soap and toothpaste, and then they stole the packages when they arrived.

  From the Dongcheng detention center, I was transferred to the No. 7 Prison, where I stayed for another year and two months. The No. 7 Prison was a little better. At the very least, it was only one prisoner to a bed there. Just after I arrived, though, I was shocked by a cattle prod many times. They just wanted to show a new prisoner that they were tough. They trampled all over me and gave me shocks for a long time. They even stepped on my face, nearly breaking my nose.

  (Wu Wenjian interrupted to ask, “Did they shock your thing down there?”)

  Sure they did. I think they’d just shocked my mouth when they moved down to my anus, asking me, “Did that feel good?” Then they shocked my thing. All the hair on my body stood up straight, then I lost consciousness. I’m embarrassed to say it, but I also . . . I also lost control . . .

  (Wu Wenjian asked: “Shit or urine?”)

  Why do you need to ask about it in so much detail? Anyway, everything just came out.

  When did you receive your judgment?

  On November 17, 1991. My court appearance was the day of the U.S. attack on Iraq during the First Gulf War. The Communist Party took advantage of international upheavals and the fact that the West’s attention was turning away from the June Fourth massacre to pronounce hurried verdicts on our group. That morning, still suffering from a fever, I got my ten-year sentence. The lawyer was very fair-minded and tried his best. I also tried to do everything I could. But things were going in a certain direction already, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  When I was imprisoned at Qincheng, my lawyer made a special trip to see me. My crime was incitement to counterrevolutionary armed mass rebellion. What weapon did I have? Throughout the entire period of the student protests, I never yelled any reactionary slogans like “Down with the Communist Party.” I didn’t throw any bottles or bricks. But they just convict or kill whenever they please.

  Although I was a low-level political prisoner, I stayed at Qincheng for two or three months before being sent to the Beijing Municipal Detention Center in Daxing County. About one hundred June Fourth rioters were jailed there.

  Do you know what a “weng” is? It’s a big rubber tube. Each time it’s whipped, it makes a weng sound. Every time you committed an offense there, you’d get “wenged” at least a dozen times.

  We weren’t beaten up as often, but we worked longer hours. Mostly we did garment processing. We worked ten or more hours a day sewing on buttons, cutting thread, and hemming. Even if we had worked until the end of the world, we still couldn’t finish all the work. Working with fiberglass was the toughest. After finishing work, we’d lie down and feel all the stinging and itching on our bodies. By the time I got out of prison in 1998, I was in bad shape. I didn’t have the money so I didn’t go to the hospital, just bought some pills at random to take myself.

  After my ten years in prison, society and people’s hearts had all changed. I was pushed out to the margins of the margins of society. Nobody paid any attention to me. I had to depend on welfare to get by.

  Did you stay with your parents?

  They had an apartment that was about 200 square feet, with five mouths to feed in it: my parents, my elder sister, my nephew, and yours truly. I stayed put from 1998 until 2003, when the old house was to be torn down. Since I’d been in prison, my household registration was canceled. As a result, I didn’t get the 96,000-yuan rehousing fee that I would have otherwise gotten as the occupant of a house being torn down. All I got was the 20,000-yuan low-income supplement. I panicked and went to the precinct station and the street committee office, but it was useless. I was so upset that I bought a can of gasoline and was going to go to Tiananmen to self-immolate. My wife found out, but couldn’t stop me so she called 110, the emergency number. Then the police intercepted me and wrestled me to the ground.

  “What are you doing?” asked the police.

  “I’m not doing anything,” I said, “just taking a walk.”

  “What are you doing walking around carrying a can of gasoline?”

  “I found it on the side of the road,” I said.

  They didn’t know what to do with me, so they confiscated the gasoline can and released me. I had a good wife.

  When I got out of p
rison in 1998, a former colleague of mine saw that I was down on my luck and introduced me to her. She was a migrant worker from Chongqing. Beijing women looked down on me, so I had to look for a woman from out of town. We saw each other for ten months and then got married.

  We have a six-year-old daughter. My wife later started a small hair salon. I also found some odd jobs and worked hard to save money. Life finally got better. But all in all I won’t get anywhere in this life. I have no technical skills and no diploma. I can’t do hard labor for long periods, either, because my arms and legs get weak and clumsy. Society is changing. Even some Party members are being laid off, so who would want to hire a low-level counterrevolutionary like me?

  Can you go into business?

  I don’t have any capital. Anyway, if you’re not a swindler, you won’t make any money.

  Do you regret what you did during those days?

  Before I die, I want to tell my daughter how there came to be enmity and malice between her father and the Communist Party, and how I don’t regret a thing. I refuse to concede defeat. Her father may be a poor good-for-nothing, but when the critical moment came, he kept his honor and proved himself a man.

  The Street Fighter

  The name Jiugong means Old Palace—several generations of Qing dynasty emperors kept a magnificent residence there—but today the place is just a distant suburb of Beijing, a dump.

  The day Wu Wenjian and I showed up there, a gray mist was shrouding both heaven and earth. From time to time a few shafts of sunlight fell through the gaps in the dark clouds as if a filthy hand were scratching the surface of the clouds until they became bleeding scabs. A frigid wind hit us head-on and sent a few plastic bags scurrying into the air. A dark rain followed. We fought our shivering battle of attrition with the cold until twilight, when we finally sat down in a threadbare restaurant called Foolish Son’s Hot Pot City.

  We had an appointment to meet the Sun brothers. We waited until late that night, but there was still no sign of them. Fortunately, the slow-going Wang Lianhui did slink into the restaurant, looking listless. He worked as a security guard in a dance club. At first he shook me off, refusing to answer any of my questions, but after a few drinks he agreed to be interviewed in place of the missing Sun brothers.

  * * *

  Wang Lianhui: My family has been in Beijing for a long time. In 1989, I was twenty-two years old, doing temporary work in an electronics factory run by our village. I didn’t know anything about politics and had no interest in getting involved in it, either.

  But . . .

  But I plunged right in when it came up unexpectedly. I made my own bad luck. On the evening of June 3, on my way back from my girlfriend’s home, I happened to pass by my home village of Jixian, where I saw many people, angry like a raging storm, blocking the entire street. I got off my bicycle and hurried around the edge of the action. Just as I was about to avoid it all, and possibly could have gone on to live an uneventful life forever after, I ran into someone I knew. He called out to me from a distance, “Lianhui, Lianhui. It’s still so early. Why are you going home?”

  “It’s already past nine o’clock,” I replied. “I need to get up early to go to work tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” my acquaintance said. “How can you be going to work? Let’s join up with this patriotic demonstration.”

  I was astonished. He was right: it was Saturday night. I had been muddling along aimlessly. The gears of the factory machinery must have been wearing down my memory. So I turned around and followed the crowd. In the dim light I could see the crowd was getting bigger. They looked like they were walking to a fair.

  There was no sign of soldiers at all. There was just one armored car parked crookedly at the side of the road. People said that several dozen armored personnel transporters had come from the direction of Nanyuan Airport. They rushed by in a gust of hot air and soon they were in the far distance. Nobody dared to block them. No matter how angry we ordinary people were, even if we had the heart, we didn’t have the guts. This truck, however, had barely entered the highway before it came to a T-shaped intersection. It turned without slowing down and ended up hitting a big poplar tree. In a puff of smoke, a poplar tree the width of a washbasin was uprooted.

  That guy must have been blind.

  That chunk of iron was very solid! It could turn over without being damaged, but now the engine was stalled. The military situation was critical, so the army abandoned the car by the side of the road. It was very hot. Several university students stood on the armored car and made speeches with sweat and tears raining down their faces. They said that the martial law troops were shooting wildly, killing and injuring large numbers of unarmed people. That Tiananmen Square had become a river of blood. Who gave them the right to murder people? they shouted. Did Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping have the right to indiscriminately slaughter innocent people? These butchers called themselves the soldiers of the people, but in reality they were worse than wild beasts.

  The speakers attracted a large crowd of at least several hundred people. Everyone was furious, but with no idea where to direct their anger they just ran around cursing. I don’t know who it was who said in my ear, “Let’s smash the damn thing!” I jumped on top of the armored car a few times. Many others, all young people, followed suit. We punched and kicked it for a while, but the iron didn’t yield an inch. I got a brick and smashed it hard against the armored car but only succeeded in making my hand numb. The armor still didn’t budge. Someone handed up a crowbar. I took it but could find no place to use it.

  I wanted to pry the thing open, but there wasn’t even the tiniest opening. Hot blood surged into my head, but I couldn’t find anywhere to vent my anger. I smashed the scope of the antiaircraft machine gun mounted in front of the hatch and then smashed the two periscopes on either side of the vehicle. We wanted to paralyze that murderous machine completely. Then someone suggested dumping a few buckets of water on it while the machine was still hot. The parts would shudder and fall apart. But where would we find water along the edge of the road? “If we really can’t find water,” I said, “piss will do!”

  I was kidding. Besides, we were in front of a few hundred people, both young and old. I wasn’t crazy. Later the court verdict took that joke seriously, claiming that I was a congenital scoundrel who had pissed on an armored car, a crime that was especially serious. It claimed that my piss had nearly suffocated all the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] soldiers inside the armored car . . .

  There were still people inside the armored car?

  They hadn’t had time to get away. People said that after the armored car hit the tree it kept lurching forward for several dozen feet before the engine stalled. During those days, with everybody in Beijing raging mad, all it took was one person crying out and people from everywhere would rally together like when the Boxers fought the Western invaders back in 1900. The “people’s soldiers,” aware of the wrongs they had committed, feared that people would beat them. So they followed the example of the tortoise and stayed in their shell, determined not to leave it. But I had come later and didn’t know that. Besides, that hunk of metal, once its iron pimple was locked tight from the inside, was totally seamless and watertight.

  Later it became a joke in prison. Everyone would point to me and say that I was the June Fourth rioter with supernatural powers. “He pissed once and suffocated an entire car full of the government’s ‘revolutionary warriors’!”

  There were about ten of them in that armored vehicle. They waited until everyone dispersed before showing their faces. People came and went all night as if it were a night market. The weather was like the people that night: hot and dry, lots of thunder but little rain. Inside the vehicle the temperature must have reached 100 or even 120 degrees. Most ordinary people would have fainted after only a short while. Even well-trained special forces would basically have turned into steamed meat. If only I had known that there were people inside of it!

  Do you regre
t it?

  I was only twenty-two, a very ordinary, ignorant person. It was really extraordinary that I could emerge from the crowd and be so bold. Most Chinese people are insulted all their lives but just clam up and suppress their anger. The political atmosphere of 1989 transformed everyone in an instant, making them noble and pure. They weren’t thinking about anything, not even themselves, except stopping the martial law troops from going into Beijing to murder the students. If I had escaped that misfortune, some other hot-blooded youth, by some other strange coincidence, would have stepped forward to take my place.

  Finally when I was exhausted, I jumped back down, squeezed through the crowd, and went home. On the way I met a neighbor who called out, “Lianhui, Lianhui!” I stopped my bicycle and walked with her to a secluded spot. She looked carefully all around but didn’t look at me.

  Suddenly she asked, “Did you smash the armored car?” I hemmed and hawed. “If you really did smash it, you should hurry out of town and hide until things calm down and then decide what to do.”

  I was worried, too, but still I argued with her. “Who saw me smash the armored car?”

  “There were a lot of people around watching.”

  “I didn’t see any police,” I replied.

  “Do the police have the word ‘POLICE’ etched on their foreheads? There were many plainclothes spies around tonight. The Daxing County police station and the precinct stations turned out in full force. Even the county police chief went out dressed as an old peasant to mix with the crowd.”

  I thanked that woman from the neighborhood. I said that I would give her a gift when I got my pay. She waved her hand at me. “Don’t be an idiot. Don’t wait to get your pay. Run away tonight.”

  Someone tipped you off and you still didn’t run away?