Bullets and Opium

by Liao Yiwu

  Pu consoled me instead. “Don’t be sad. We’ll meet again some decades in the future.” Then he haltingly explained his medical condition. “My stomach gets bigger and bigger every day.” He squeezed out a laugh. “But I’m not pregnant. It’s just ascites.”

  “Can I do something for you?” I asked.

  “There’s no need now,” he answered.

  “The court verdict?” I asked.

  “The prison confiscated it. There is a copy in the files of the public security bureau in my old hometown. When you have time, go to the library and read the October to November 1989 issues of the Sichuan Daily. There are reports in it about my counterrevolutionary crimes.”

  Two days later, Pu, following my father, departed this world. Xu Wanping (just out of prison), Lei Fengyun (who had always wanted to dig up the tombs of Deng Xiaoping’s ancestors), and Hou Duoshu (just married) hurriedly got together and rushed to see him, but it was too late. All they saw were his ashes. When he was buried, the three cried by his grave, reading out names one by one and crying in bitter grief, to represent all who had suffered because of June Fourth. They heaped up flowers, burned incense, and set off firecrackers. Then in silence they wished him peace.

  But Pu Yong can’t possibly rest in peace.

  * * *

  When Yang Wei, from a poor family in Dujiangyan, was arrested at the age of seventeen, he was a callow student at a technical high school, with no prior involvement in national affairs. He had a heavy local accent and was no good at dealing with outsiders, but he was as alert as a civet cat and hard to keep tabs on.

  In the aftermath of June Fourth, filled with righteous anger, Yang wrote a proclamation, which he posted in several hundred places throughout Chengdu. The poster openly called for rebellion, blood for blood, and the overthrow of the dictatorship. To make it look more authentic, he signed it in the name of the “Sichuan Branch of the China Democracy Party.” The mention of that long-established democracy movement organization, based abroad, made it a big case, which local, city, and provincial authorities reported up to the Party Central Committee. A group of experts was assembled to analyze the information. Several hundred police were mobilized and given a deadline for solving the case.

  Absurdly, the footloose criminal Yang was able to remain at large for more than six months, carrying two large stamp albums and scampering around more than ten different southern cities as he sold the stamps off one by one. “I’ve been a stamp collector ever since I was just a few years old,” Yang Wei confessed after his capture. “Every time I got to a new place, I would first go roam around the stamp market for a few minutes and soon have enough money to eat for a few days.”

  The state mobilized an impressive and persistent police hunt, but the criminal they caught was just a big kid with eyes so clear that you could see right down to the bottom. Exhausted by their investigation, the police were disappointed. What irritated them even more was that the kid had had no contact at all with foreigners. He didn’t even know what the China Democracy Party was or where it was headquartered. When they asked about the “Sichuan branch organization,” Yang confessed: “I am the chairman, vice chairman, propaganda department head, and office worker.”

  This was too much for the public security bureau officials, the state prosecutor, and the courts to take. Yang was given a good beating and thrown into a prison cell. “I made mental notes so I would be prepared to argue in court,” Yang recalled, “but there wasn’t any courtroom. They decided my case in an office. The verdict was already sitting on the desk. The judge picked it up, handed it to me, and told me to scram. I wouldn’t scram. He picked up the case record in his two hands and slammed me on the head with it.”

  Yang was sentenced to three years in prison for incitement to overthrow state power. He worked sanitation in the prison workshop, hanging around all day with an extremely tall murderer from Henan Province. Whenever they quarreled, Yang would glower from under the armpits of the giant, like a small mouse protesting to a tyrannical old cat.

  One time, the criminal offenders, who were ten times more numerous than the political prisoners, ganged up on some political prisoners out on a hunger strike. Seeing his chance, the old Henan cat swaggered toward the little mouse and, with a swoosh of his hand, grabbed him by the collar and wouldn’t let him down no matter how much he struggled. The prisoners all laughed. That scene came to symbolize prison life for me. Years later, the sight of Yang hoisted up in the air by invisible hands and suspended in the void, his feet dangling in the air, still comes back to me in my dreams so vividly that when I finally wake up, exhausted, it’s as if I can feel the spasms in my own calves, too.

  Yang returned home after his release in the spring of 1993. He worked as a laborer transporting beer for small merchants along the river with a tricycle cart. After he earned some money, he got restless again and started traveling up and down the country.

  Later, he shut himself indoors and pored over banned democracy movement books as well as modern and ancient detective novels from both China and abroad. His thinking and his skills advanced rapidly. Not only did he find ways to fight the enemy through surreptitious communications by pager, fax, and public telephones, but he also managed to master, by persistent experiments, the extremely difficult art of using special chemicals to make invisible ink for secret communications. (In the novel Red Crag, set in the revolutionary era, using invisible ink to write characters that appear after the paper is immersed in water for a few minutes was the special trick of underground Communist organizations.) Unfortunately, up to this day, no one in the democracy movement recognized Yang’s talent for using these secret techniques. “The police have become like roundworms in our stomachs!” he said. “They even know if you fart or have an erection.” Yang was discontented, as men with unappreciated talents are.

  For some time Yang stayed in secret contact with Liu Qing of Human Rights in China, based in New York City, exchanging information. He had also worked with me in helping fellow prisoners send out letters to the international community, asking for support. Unfortunately, the authorities found out about our activities and the two of us were caught and held for more than twenty days. Yang started worrying excessively that there were enemies everywhere, and his espionage skills became more elaborate than necessary. Once, choosing a time when I was away, he gave a pot of camellia flowers to my father, moving the old man to tears. My father watered and fertilized the plant and took extremely good care of it, never realizing that at the bottom of the pot was a letter of warning. Two months passed before Yang dropped a hint about it. Realizing that I hadn’t understood him, I dug up both the soil and the plant. All that remained of his cry for help was a ball of paper nearly turned to mud, and a few earthworms.

  In the fall of 1998, the actual case of the Sichuan Branch of the China Democracy Party erupted. Yang’s old prank had come to life. The main culprits—Liu Xianbin, She Wanbao, Hu Mingjun, and Wang Sen—were arrested and sentenced to ten or more years in prison. Yang, as one of the seven core members of the group, was in his family’s seventh-floor apartment, home-brewing Chinese medicine for his ailing father, when plainclothes special agents blocked his door.

  The corridor outside their apartment was filled with black smoke and foul odors. The Yang family was very poor. Everything was in plain view. It only took the special agents a few minutes to turn everything upside down in their home. Yang knew he had been caught. He put down a bowl of Chinese medicine and laughed derisively. “I’m off to eat at government expense!”

  With special agents pushing and cajoling Yang, the group twisted its way down many flights of stairs. Trapped in the middle, Yang staggered along, holding a metal bucket of coal ash and scattering irritating dust powder in the air as he went. The special agents couldn’t dodge out of the way. When they ordered him to stop, Yang begged pitifully, “Let me first fulfill my duty to my father. Once I leave, I don’t know how many months or years it will be until I can return home!”

&nbs
p; “If you knew that before, you shouldn’t have committed a crime,” said the special agent in charge.

  Yang kept on dawdling. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he pounded on the ash bucket, creating thick clouds of dust. “Are you trying to cause trouble?” yelled the special agents. Paying no attention, Yang crossed the street and dashed into a trash collection station. At just that moment, a whirlwind’s gust swept close to the ground. In an instant, the smoke from the knocked-over ash bucket blotted out both sun and sky. Yang seized the moment to run for it, and the pack of special agents had no way of chasing him. They could only stare at their own shadows and gnash their teeth in dismay.

  Yang wandered aimlessly, like a dog without a home. He traveled north alone, trying to sneak into the Russian Far East at Jiamusi, in Heilongjiang Province. That didn’t work, so he went back home, following the ancient principle that “a smart rabbit has three holes.” He played hide and seek with the police in the Chengdu area for a while. Soon after that, Yang took a big chance. Using a counterfeit national identity card, he joined an international tour group and arrived in Bangkok. He pretended to be a sex tourist and kept insisting on going to the red-light district. He switched cabs on the way and, without knowing anything about his surroundings, made his way to the U.S. embassy, where he wept, soaked with sweat and overwhelmed by the smell of freedom.

  That winter I got a fax from Yang. He wrote that the U.S. embassy had thrown him out and that he had nearly become homeless on the streets of Bangkok. Apparently, a Buddhist monk had taken Yang in. Every day he swept the temple grounds in exchange for vegetarian food. Out of compassion for a friend in need, I contacted many foreign friends, trying to get help for him, but political asylum cases cannot be rushed.

  Four or five years went by. Then one day Liu Qing, the human rights activist in New York, told me on the phone that Yang’s status as a democracy activist had been formally recognized. The office for political refugees at the United Nations had accepted his case and arranged to send him 8,000 Thai baht, around $200, every month, just enough to pay for room and board. “Needless to say,” Liu Qing said, “Yang won’t be able to eat very well.”

  “What happens next?” I asked.

  “I’ll help him get in contact with a country that is willing to accept him. It’s very difficult. There are many rules and regulations involved. After that, he’ll have to rely on himself,” Liu replied.

  More time passed, until one day I was having tea with a writer named Wang, who told me that Yang had reached Canada.

  “What else?”

  “He says that your old phone number doesn’t work.”

  “What else?”

  “He wants me to give you his new telephone number.”

  At the end of 2011, after I, too, had followed Yang into exile, I was surprised to get a phone call from Sheng Xue, a friend in Canada, who told me that Yang’s depression had developed into mental illness and that he was in a psychiatric hospital. “I’m on my way to visit him,” said Sheng. “As his fellow prisoner and friend, do you want to say anything to him?” he asked.

  “Please ask him not to be crazy.”

  “But nobody wants to be crazy. It must be that Canada is too cold and he can’t get used to it.”

  “Even if it’s hard to get used to, it’s much better than living under the Communist dictatorship.”

  “He kept asking to go back to Thailand,” said Sheng. “He believes that temple is his home.”

  * * *

  Lei Fengyun, from Guang’an in northeastern Sichuan, is a tall, solidly built man full of poise and integrity—indeed an overall magnificence—incomparably greater than that of a much shorter man from the same county named Deng Xiaoping.

  Young Lei was precocious and patriotic, and a great supporter of Deng—who had been championed by hot-blooded students in Tiananmen Square just thirteen years before June 4, 1989. When Deng came to power, he launched Reform and Opening and revived the university entrance examinations. Lei, from a humble background, rose with the times and passed the higher education entrance examination. He became a graduate student in English literature at Southwest China Normal University in Chongqing, which was something extremely rare in the 1980s, when very few people had any higher education.

  Full of gratitude for these opportunities, Lei nonetheless cast aside a brilliant career out of righteous anger over the June Fourth massacre—and he held Deng responsible, feeling personally humiliated. “I wanted to avenge that humiliation,” he told the writer Zhou Fengsuo, “but I couldn’t get close to him. I felt the urge to dig up the graves of his ancestors. In our Sichuan, if someone commits a terrible crime that enrages both heaven above and mankind below, people would traditionally punish that person by digging up the graves of their ancestors.”

  So, on June 5, 1989, when the whole country had turned into an armed encampment, Lei and several other students from his hometown took a three-day train ride home. In the station waiting room in Guang’an, in front of some shocked fellow passengers, the group proclaimed their “Grave Digging Declaration” and promptly exited the station to buy shovels, spades, and the other tools they needed to carry out their plan.

  They tried to board a bus, but the driver wouldn’t let them get on. Cabs refused to take them. Passersby came and went in a hurry, casting very suspicious looks their way. Lei felt something was wrong. He left his comrades, deciding to walk alone somewhere where he could get the lay of the land. A traffic policeman blocked his way, informing him that everything within a six-mile radius of Deng’s home and his ancestor’s graves was now under military control.

  Lei was astonished. He didn’t know yet that one member of the group had already betrayed them and that the police were onto them. To display loyalty to that iron-willed dwarf bandit Deng, the provincial government had even transferred an army battalion to the scene. Soldiers had already taken up positions all around, swords ready and guns loaded, prepared to annihilate in an instant any enemy who might dare to strike.

  Lei hoped to hide out in a hotel, awaiting an opportunity to carry out his plan, but every hotel in the area refused him. There was nothing to do but go home. Some ten days later, Lei was arrested in his dorm room at the university and immediately placed on death row, where he was interrogated day and night.

  The speed and severity of the sentence had everything to do with Sichuan Party secretary Yang Rudai. Yang, a trusted follower of the protesters’ political hero Zhao Ziyang, had maintained an ambiguous attitude toward the student movement. Now he was protecting himself by demonstrating his loyalty to the government and distancing himself from Zhao. Yang intervened in matters not normally within his jurisdiction. He personally ordered that Lei be swiftly condemned to death and executed. His decision was reported to Beijing for approval.

  “What saved us was that it dragged on for days and days,” Lei told me three years later in our prison cell. “Once the peak had passed, the authorities ordered that the sentence be changed according to the law to twelve years imprisonment for counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement.” When I met him at Sichuan Provincial Prison No. 3, he was plotting to create a secret organization inside the prison, but someone seemed to inform on every move he made.

  One time, the loudspeaker blared an announcement immediately summoning all prisoners to a meeting. We had barely squatted down, when we saw Lei being brought, all tied up, onto the platform. He had written a letter in English and paid a large bribe to a released former prisoner, who was still at the prison as a laborer, to sneak it out and put it in the mail. That man had informed on him and thereby won a little credit for himself. The prison’s political commissar waved the letter and shouted at us: “We caught him red-handed. Bandit Lei is so shameless that he dared to get in touch with foreigners and betray the secrets of this prison. His counterrevolutionary nature is really hard to change. What else can we do but gather evidence and increase his sentence?”

  Cries of “Down with him!” and “Smash him
to a pulp!” resounded in the air, but Lei refused to give in. He tried to argue, but his mouth was sealed. He tried to get up, but his back was bent. Afterward, he was put in the doghole to await a decision about his fate. Nobody at the prison could read English, and they were afraid that the news would get out, so they secretly sent the evidence of his guilt to the Sichuan provincial reform-through-labor bureau, asking experts to decode the letter in the dead of night. What they found was that Lei had sent a New Year’s greeting card to a foreign-language professor named Peter, who had once been Lei’s teacher. In the letter, he asked Professor Peter about the differences in the pronunciation and spelling of some colloquial expressions in British English and American English. The letter did not mention the prison at all.

  I didn’t have a diploma, but my worldly experience was at least at the postdoc level. I wouldn’t make the kind of mistake that academic types like Lei make of being too credulous and underestimating the enemy. Even though I had taken part in the June Fourth prison group’s collective hunger strike to oppose Lei’s confinement and had represented everyone in negotiations, I just used the same stubborn phrase over and over: “If you don’t release him, I’ll jump from the second floor.”

  Just then the United Nations released its White Paper on Reform Through Labor and the prison authorities wanted to show that they were keeping up with the times, so they let Lei out of solitary early. Soon after, the prison authorities responded to Deng Xiaoping’s call to “stimulate the economy” by allowing prisoners to have their photographs taken, albeit at five times the price of what it would have cost outside the prison walls. Nearly every one of the 3,000 prisoners, including the June Fourth political prisoners, rushed to sign up for photos.

  The trickster in me saw an opportunity, so I had several photos taken, including a kind of prison graduation photo featuring six of us high-spirited June Fourth counterrevolutionaries in our prison uniforms, all of us with our arms behind our backs, three in the back wearing turbans and three in the front wearing glasses. Soon after, I smuggled them out through my mother and sister, and after I was released I sent them in a package to Hong Kong. All our “reactionary” magazines like Baixing and Kaifang ate it up, putting it on the cover, and a lot of innocent people got in trouble. The prison did a thorough search, immediately confiscating all photographs and letters, and interrogating each of the June Fourth political prisoners separately. It was the first time in decades of Communist Party rule that a group photo of political prisoners had made it to the outside world.