by Liao Yiwu
A week later, on the morning of June 4, the dream came true. I was half-awake, half-asleep, lying under that same statue of Chairman Mao, and my eyes were open just a crack. By the dawn’s first light I saw two ambulances and then some medical personnel. Behind them were several police cars charging up to the reviewing stand with horns blaring. A voice yelled, “Clear the square!” and several dozen people were led away.
Get this: exactly six public security men walked up the steps in front of the statue and prodded me with their batons, barking, “What’s your business here?” Breaking into a cold sweat, I sat up and said, “Reporter,” producing the fake ID card I had finagled through a backdoor deal. They thought it over before waving me off: “Go home and stay there.”
After I escaped capture, I ran straight to Sichuan University to report to the underground student federation. A large group of students rushed to the square to give their support. I pedaled a rickshaw with a sophomore in it broadcasting our message. During the student-army standoff, we parked the rickshaw in the middle of the square and she rode on my shoulders, holding up a megaphone to plead our cause. Suddenly a swarm of green helmets and shields surged toward us. Exploding tear gas shot up to the sky, descending on us like a giant dissolving umbrella. My eyes started watering, and I fell off the rickshaw as the crowd stumbled in all directions. When the mist dispersed, both the rickshaw and our broadcaster were gone. Rumors went around that she was dead, and only years later were we able to verify that she had been captured, not killed.
We returned the compliment by throwing soda bottles at the police and scampering off like rats, running right out of our shoes. We were angry and sad beyond words. We went to factories to encourage the workers to go out in the streets, but we returned in despair. Back at the square, I happened to run into Yang Wei, a friend from Mianyang. Before I even had the chance to say hi, a tear gas bomb hit me in the ass with a thump. I howled; it was like needles boring into my eyes. My friend grabbed my hand and we ran blind. From near and far we heard screams and the dull thuds of batons landing on flesh. They must have flattened hundreds of skulls.
Meanwhile, Renmin Market was going up in flames, and many said the police had started it with their gunfire. Police and firefighters were on the scene, but they were chasing rock-throwing pedestrians instead of putting out the fire. A teenage girl yelled from a second-story window: “Don’t beat the students!” A cop tossed a canister of tear gas into her window, and crimson smoke spewed out.
Smoke spread in all directions. We could only go back to Sichuan University, but I was warned to leave immediately. Troops had already occupied Science and Technology University, and Sichuan University would surely be next. The students there gave me a rickshaw and a straw hat, and I took off running back into the streets, where I saw the most moving sight of the entire day. It was six older women kneeling in the middle of Dongfeng Road, begging the communications engineering college student support group not to go to the square. “Soldiers are everywhere,” they said. “Don’t go. You’ll be killed.”
Throughout that day and the following day, I wandered the streets of Chengdu. A seesaw battle went on between troops and the unarmed locals and students. A lot of blood was spilled. I saw many of the injured at the Chengdu Fifth People’s Hospital and one female university student receiving emergency care. People say that the fire at Renmin Market burned all night. When I went back there on the afternoon of June 5, I could still see some smoke rising from the ruins. One person picked up a bottle of orange soda from among the debris and was promptly surrounded by bystanders, who gave him a good beating and scolded him for taking advantage of a national disaster. Others went and pried up concrete stakes used in the roadside railings, barricading entrances to police stations so that police cars couldn’t get out.
By June 6, Chengdu was like a military camp covered in smoke. It was over. Seven or eight of us who thought trouble was coming for us—workers, students, and journalists—ran off together to Yunnan. I stayed in the home of a classmate in Kunming. Before I had a chance to catch my breath, the nationwide hunt for fugitives began on June 8. All kinds of people who had fled to Kunming from Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu converged and fled together to Xishuangbanna, heading to the southern border. When we got to Jinghong, we ran into the police. Most of us, including me, were captured. They kept me overnight at the Jinghong County Detention Center. I claimed that I was a journalist spending a few days looking into life in the border region and writing about local customs. Again I was able to get off.
After they let me go, I got in touch with a few others who had been able to evade capture. At Guangyun Temple we hired a monk to help us sneak across the border. Security at the border was touch-and-go. As we muddled our way through the checkpoint, we actually posed for a group photo. Soon after we entered the jungle, our monk-guide disappeared. I had always moved fast, and in my rush to get away I soon lost track of the others. That’s the way it goes, I thought. I used the way leaves and branches grew as my compass and hurried in the direction I imagined to be south. I was on the run for three days and three nights, by which time I was teetering on the edge of complete exhaustion.
I figured the jungle would be full of poisonous snakes and wild animals waiting to ambush me, so I bought a machete to carry at my side. Later, I decided that it was too heavy and threw it away. After getting out of the jungle, I lay on the ground for a while. Faintly in the distance, I could see a Burmese village gleaming in the sun. Tears ran down my face. I slid down a slope through a dense undergrowth of giant reeds. I stood up, pushing away reeds as tall as a person, crashing and crushing my way forward, and then walked for about another thousand feet until I suddenly came to a fork in the road.
My instinct said to turn right. As if possessed by demons, I went straight. I had dreamed this exact scenario many times where my legs would not obey me. By now the leaves were so dense, it was impossible to take another step. A branch slid under my glasses and stabbed my eyelid. Voices began to echo right next to my ear, which made no sense to me. By the time the word had registered—“Freeze!”—I was surrounded.
Seven or eight people were pointing their guns at me. I heard the words, “Hands up!” and I obeyed. Suddenly I saw a beam of red light rushing toward me. It was the bright sun shining off the black nozzle of the gun. With a wham, my knees buckled, my soul fled, and I pissed my pants.
By the time I regained my senses, I was being carried into a village by two men, my two legs dragging behind me. Can you guess what happened? The guys who caught me were from Sichuan. They had been educated youths from Chongqing who crossed the border illegally in the 1970s to join the Burmese Communist Party’s People’s Army. At the time, China was supporting the People’s Army in its guerrilla campaign against the forces of the Burmese government. So although they were from my own province, they still had to send me back.
No matter how much I pleaded with them, it made no difference. They took me past an ethnically mixed Chinese-Burmese village, hogtied me, and handed me over to the Chinese border police. After loosening my bonds, eight border police lined up, spread their legs apart, and ordered me to crawl through their eight-groin tunnel. The squad leader gave me a kick that sent me flying until I landed facedown in the dirt like a dog eating shit. An excruciating wave of pain shot through my crotch. They left me with a hernia. In the summer, when I’m out cooling myself, a big lump can still protrude if I’m not careful.
I was nearly beaten to death. Later, a sentry tied me to the back of a tractor and started driving until my face was bent out of shape and my clothes were reduced to rags. That’s how they dragged the “slave” back to Jinghong, where they locked me up in the detention center. The interrogator asked me, “How many army trucks did you burn? How many PLA soldiers did you kill? Did you steal anything?” I denied everything. They laughed at me. “Then why did you sneak across the border?”
I still stuck to my story: “I am a journalist. I came to the border to experience lif
e on the border and write about local customs. I inadvertently got lost and crossed the border.” They found my journalist’s credentials and, surprisingly, let me go.
With only the 1-yuan compensation I got when I was released, I slept on the streets of Jinghong. I had nowhere to go, but I didn’t dare contact anyone. I didn’t dare go back to the temple, either, because if the monk-guide was exposed, the situation would get even more serious. All I could do was go back across the bridge over the Lancang River, walking a day and a night to the Simao District, up one long slope and then down another. After another day on the road, I reached Pu’er.
I spent my 1 yuan to buy food. I knocked on people’s doors asking for water, but I was too ashamed to beg for food. There were mango trees and plantain trees along the way, but I couldn’t climb them, so I couldn’t steal anything. I threw rocks at them. I tried and tried until I was exhausted, but I couldn’t get any mangoes to fall. The plantains were very bitter. I felt faint after taking a few bites, like I’d gotten food poisoning, so I didn’t dare eat any more. When I reached Pu’er, I was completely exhausted. I couldn’t move another step. Showing my journalist’s pass, I shamelessly stopped a vehicle and bummed a ride, vowing to repay them extra when I got to Kunming.
When I got to Kunming, I found my classmate. Without saying a word, he cooked up a washbasin full of noodles. I slurped them down, rubbed my belly, and recovered enough strength to talk: “I can’t serve my country and I can’t escape, so I might as well just go home.” My classmate gave me 20 or 30 yuan so I could spend the night somewhere in a hotel and then take the train back home. What I hadn’t expected was that shortly after I left his place at ten p.m. that night, before I’d even walked very far, around ten plainclothes police would approach and arrest me.
All told, how many times were you caught and released?
I went to the Jinghong detention center twice. I was in the Kunming detention center for seven days and then released. They told me to go back to Sichuan and give myself up to the police there. Then I really got it in my hometown of Mianyang. When they interrogated me, the Mianyang police showed me photographs of myself during my escape and told me who I had been in contact with, all the evidence they had in my case.
My Kunming classmate got caught up in it. He was held for several days and then released after reeducation. In 1998, after I came to the attention of the authorities again, I went to see him once more. A few minutes after I left his home, I was caught again. The second time I went into “the palace,” he was ordered to report to the public security bureau every day and was fired from his job.
For June Fourth, I got five years in prison for “propaganda and incitement.” If you add on the time I was held for interrogation, I was held in detention centers for over a year. They punched and kicked me. They brought out other prisoners and gave them a good beating while forcing me to watch. They used electric prods to burn my tongue, which produced a blue curl of smoke and made me lurch forward. They would bring a basin of water, have me step in it, and then poke their electric prods in the water. As the electric shock wave coursed through me, my whole body would spasm and collapse. After repeating this a few times, my nose turned black and blue and my face got all swollen up.
There was heavy rain during the summer of 1991, and the Peijiang River overflowed. One evening while I was sleeping, I dreamed that a snake was licking the sole of my foot. I instinctively pulled back my foot. There was a splash, and I woke with a start. Floodwaters were already on my bunk. The prisoners were caught in the flood with no way to get out. We all yelled, “Turn on the light! Turn on the light!” The lights that were normally on all night were off. Everybody was splashing in the watery darkness. Nobody dared move, since if they fell off their bunks they might drown. The water in the small yard where we exercised was already over ten feet deep. We stood on our toes to keep water from getting into our mouths.
We heard noises at the door. A policeman swam into our cell. He told everyone to move out, hand in hand. We kept at it until dawn. We were out of danger, but the water still hadn’t receded, so we were sent under escort to another place where we were packed in tightly—over seventy of us—into a 150-square-foot cell. The sky cleared and the hot sun appeared. In that steamy cell, people kept opening and closing their mouths like fish short of oxygen. That afternoon they drained the water out of the detention center and we returned to our cells, now full of mud that it was impossible to get rid of. We looked like a bunch of toads. But we could only make the best of our situation, and went on living. Afterward I was sent to Sichuan Provincial Prison No. 3 [in Dazhu County], where you and I first met, Liao.
Even after I was released, the police continued to harass me. My life was a mess. My family complained about me. To show that I had completely set aside my wicked ways, I got married and moved into my wife’s work unit dormitory. It was a tiny room, without enough space even to turn around in, and we cooked in the corridor. Maybe my face was to blame—my eyes always darted around like a thief’s—but no matter how much I nodded to the cops and kept my mouth shut around them, their suspicion of me never let up. Forced to be at their constant beck and call, I grew restless and rebellious again.
In the summer of 1995, when I heard that the Mianyang democracy movement figure X had gone to Shenzhen and fled the country from there, I was tempted. At the time, my son wasn’t even 100 days old. We were very poor and I was in despair, constantly under the “special care” of the police. I talked it over with my wife and decided to give it a try. I immediately went to Shenzhen, where my democracy movement friends told me someone would meet me at the Shatoujiao Bridge. I had a newspaper in my hand that was supposed to be a signal so they would recognize me. I walked back and forth, trying to look like a gawking tourist, but I never saw whoever I was supposed to meet. Suddenly I ran into my high school teacher; astonished, I called out: “Teacher Wang, what brings you here?”
The police noticed me and ordered me to come over to show my ID. I forced a smile, but I already had a cramp in my legs. In less than three minutes one of the policemen ordered me into the sentry post. He made a call and after another three minutes he sent me to police headquarters, where they locked me up. By that time the Mianyang police were already expecting me back home. Without even setting foot on capitalist territory, I had to go back.
I didn’t know until years later that a plainclothes policeman had been following me all the way to the border. Fortunately, I didn’t have anything incriminating on me. That time I was held for only fifteen days for trying to cross the border illegally. After I was released, they stressed to me over and over that before leaving the Mianyang area I would have to report to them first.
To make my minders feel more at ease, I worked for several days part-time at a friend’s company. In those days the democracy movement was more active, and many people were going to Beijing to file petitions. Liu Xianbin and other activists were operating openly in Chengdu and they often participated in discussions at Sichuan University. Wang Ming from Chongqing also got in touch. Wang wanted to make a “Citizen’s Declaration.” He only came a few times before our gathering place at Southwest University for Nationalities was shut down by the police. Call it rotten luck. I had just gone in there to rest at someone’s invitation and was lying down when the police came knocking at the door. That time they arrested quite a few people. Wang Ming and I were both locked up and interrogated all night. When dawn came, they brought us outside to take mug shots. My heart jumped and I thought, Shit. They’re taking a picture to make a positive identification, which means they’re going to send us away for reform through labor.
At the time I had in my pocket “A Letter to Hong Kong Compatriots,” which discussed the hoax of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China. I had waited for my chance to throw this piece of “evidence” out the window, but unexpectedly a policeman saw it and picked it up. Liao, you once wrote that “in those years, writing was creating evidence of your crime.” Time and again my ef
forts to destroy the evidence against me failed at the last moment.
Yet again I was escorted back to Mianyang, held for a few days, and then released, but Wang Ming got three years of reform through labor. He had been in prison for five years the first time and had only been out for two years when he entered “the palace” that second time. That mishap cost me my job, so I worked it out with some friends to open a hotel called the Spring Water Fish at Chengdu’s Beimen Bridge. Business wasn’t bad, except that groups of hungry democracy movement friends came every day, some of them moochers using scheming and plotting for the movement as their pretext to stay for long periods at the hotel. As a result, the police would come looking for trouble. Liao, I remember on the day we closed for good, you and Wang came for a free meal. A customer had ordered fish, but I wouldn’t sell it because I wanted to save the last fish for my friends in need.
My impression is that you have always been someone who comes and goes without leaving a trace.
People like us never feel safe. We’re always running, even in our dreams. I was almost never at home. My wife and child would feel strange if I was there for a while. I wasn’t a human being. I was a cornered “democracy beast.”
Finally, they put you away in a cage again.
While working on my writing, I was also studying people’s livelihoods. The old state-owned industries in the Mianyang region were in deep trouble. When a Mianyang silk factory was faced with bankruptcy, the heartless factory director took the funds the workers had raised for housing to invest in the stock market in Chengdu. He lost it all. People were furious. On the day things came to a head, in 1997, someone wrote on the blackboard, “Mianyang’s Mayor Feng will come to the factory today to solve everyone’s livelihood problems.”
The workers waited patiently until ten a.m. but there was still no sign of the mayor, so more than 4,000 workers walked out of the factory gates, shouting and blocking the Shaanxi–Sichuan highway. Then the demonstrations got bigger as workers from the Mianyang silk spinning factory and other state-owned factories joined in, yelling slogans and coming over to lend their support. More than 10,000 people sat in the middle of the highway in the hot sun, blocking traffic for several hours. Naturally, a dictatorship resolves social conflicts violently. The police came and detained more than 200 people, and a curfew was announced.
