—
It was nearly ten at night by the time Ai-ming found Yiwen, huddled with two other girls. One was called Lily and one was called Faye. The girls were draped over one another and looked like a single body with three heads. Yiwen’s father had told her that, until she quit the student demonstrations, she was no longer welcome at home. She had been sleeping in Faye’s dormitory room.
After learning that all three had been part of the hunger strike, which had officially been called off this afternoon, Ai-ming coaxed them to a nearby noodle stall.
The vendor was a sleepy-eyed woman with a thick northeastern accent. “Take your money back,” she said to Ai-ming, after the other girls had floated away to a table. “No, no, I mean it. I’ve got nothing to offer you kids but these noodles. They’re good noodles but they won’t change the world.”
Embarrassed, Ai-ming thanked her.
“So, what do you study?” the vendor asked.
Ai-ming looked into the woman’s puckered, hopeful face. “Um, Chinese history.”
The woman pulled her head back like a bird. “What’s the use of that? Well, at least you know that my generation was tossed around by Chairman Mao’s campaigns. Our lives were completely wasted…We’ve pinned all our hopes on you.”
“The other girls study mathematics,” Ai-ming said, trying again.
“That’s what we need!” the vendor said, smacking her chopsticks against the metal pot. “Real numbers. Without real numbers, how can we fix our economy, make plans, understand what we need? Young lady, I don’t mean to be rude but you should really think about studying mathematics, too.”
“I will.”
She carried the noodles to their table. There was something wary in the girls’ eyes, but they softened when they saw the food.
“What will you do now?” Ai-ming asked.
Lily swallowed a mouthful of noodles. “What can we do? I’m afraid to go back to the university. Maybe it’s all a trap and they’re waiting to arrest us on campus. In 1977, Wei Jingsheng got seventeen years in solitary confinement for writing one wall poster.”
“We can’t let them take the Square.” Yiwen’s voice seemed to come from the plastic tabletop. “We have to stop them here, in the streets, we have to fight the army. We can’t let them through.”
“The Square is our headquarters,” Lily said. “If we lose the Square, we lose everything. Everything. Do you even know what they did to the protesters in 1977? That’s what scares me. Nobody even remembers.”
The table was low compared to the height of the chairs, and it made them all lean forward as if they were planning a conspiracy. Lily, Faye and Yiwen kept talking, using other military terms. How could they talk about fighting the army? Ai-ming found her thoughts drifting nervously; if she didn’t hear them, she wouldn’t be implicated. Yiwen picked up her hand and held it, squeezing it so hard that a jolt of pain flashed in Ai-ming’s eyes. On the public speakers, the grating repetition of the martial law announcement had started up again. In accordance with Article 89, Item 16, of the Constitution of the People’s Republic…Waves of sound broke through the street, “Down with Li Peng! Down with Li Peng!” Still the voice on the loudspeaker crept out, insistent: Under martial law, demonstrations, student strikes, work stoppages, are banned…
“We’ve got to sleep here in the road, right in front of the trucks,” Faye said. She had sleepy eyes and a demure chin, making her words all the more shocking. “I don’t care what happens to me anymore. I don’t care. What future is there for us anyway?”
“I’m so tired,” Yiwen said. “Doesn’t it seem a lifetime ago that Hu Yaobang died and we all brought flowers to the Square? That was April 22. All we wanted was to deliver a funeral wreath to the Great Hall of the People. That was the beginning, wasn’t it? What’s the date today? May 20. Only four weeks since Comrade Hu’s funeral.”
Was that really how it had begun? Ai-ming wondered. Could it have been so simple?
Girls at a nearby table sang an old Cultural Revolution song, and the words seemed both to lull the students and rouse them.
“All these songs,” Yiwen said. Her hand felt small and damp. “I never understood. I thought they were real.”
“They were just words,” Ai-ming said.
Lily looked at her, forthrightly, calmly. “But what else did we have?”
When they finished eating, Lily and Faye went off to look for friends from Beijing Normal, and never returned. Ai-ming and Yiwen joined the other students sleeping on newspapers on the ground. Ai-ming lay on her back. From here, the tanks appeared even more monstrous. Frightened, she closed her eyes against the increasing clarity of the stars. The most important people in her life were Sparrow, Ling, Big Mother Knife, Ba Lute, and now Yiwen, and it was like they had all been raised on different planets.
“It’s easy to say we’ll sacrifice our lives for the country,” Yiwen said quietly. “At the beginning it feels very brave. Is that what you meant, Ai-ming? You said it was just words. You think that the things that matter are more difficult than words–to retreat from a confrontation, for instance, to work at changing something, truly changing something.” She lifted her hand towards the bodies and the tanks. “Ai-ming, you’re studying history to prepare for the examinations. What if revolution and violence are the only way?”
Beside them, army soldiers were speaking softly in their uncomfortable trucks. They were so crowded that the soldiers had to take turns even to sit down. Ai-ming tried to clear her thoughts. All these slogans and songs had been handed down, she thought, and if the words were not theirs was the emotion that propelled them borrowed, too? What about the students’ desire, their idealism, their righteousness, how many contradictory desires did it serve? Once idealism had belonged to Chairman Mao, the revolutionaries, the heroic Eighth Route Army. Had their generation inherited it? How could a person know the difference between what was real and what was merely illusion, or see when a truth transformed into its opposite? What was theirs and what was something handed down, only a repetition? The loudspeakers kept cutting into the air: Under martial law, soldiers are authorized to use all necessary means, including force….Hadn’t the government, too, stolen their words from somewhere else? People are forbidden to fabricate or spread rumours, network, make public speeches, distribute leaflets, or incite social turmoil….As if words alone could make reality, as if there were no people involved, as if words alone could make someone a criminal, or conjure crimes from the air. Hadn’t the Red Guards tried to destroy the old language and bring to life a new one? What if one had to create a whole new language in order to learn to be oneself? She said to Yiwen, “I think we keep repeating the same mistakes. Maybe we should mistrust every idea we think is original and ours alone.”
Yiwen’s head nodded against her shoulder.
They both smelled the same, like the noodles they had eaten and also the ashy ground. How did Yiwen see her? Was she a sister, a friend, a confidant, something else? Here is the one thing in my life, Ai-ming thought, that has no parameters. She wanted to tell Yiwen how she felt, but she was afraid to damage everything they had.
“I can’t sleep,” Yiwen said. “Tell me a story.”
Ai-ming could think of nothing, no words that belonged to her. I’m eighteen years old, she thought, and I still haven’t begun to know my own thoughts. She felt as if a part of herself was being left behind. She squeezed her eyes shut and recited the only words that came to her, the poem at the opening of Chapter 41 of the Book of Records: “?‘Of course, no one knows tomorrow. Tomorrow begins from another dawn, when we will be fast asleep. Remember what I say: not everything will pass.’?”