She couldn’t help but wonder how the first-years among them had answered the examination question, “Leo Tolstoy. Discuss.” Turning awkwardly, she tripped over a schoolbag. The owner apologized and kicked the bag carelessly away from them, she thought she heard something snap. When he smiled the shadows under his eyes widened. The boy asked what department she was in and, when Ai-ming stared, he pointed to a pendant above his head (“Education Department”) and then, answering a question she hadn’t asked, he said, “An official re-evaluation of Hu Yaobang’s life and career. An end to the spiritual pollution campaign. That’s number one and two. And also…we’re asking the government to free those arrested in 1977 for speaking the truth. The heroes of Democracy Wall, you know. Twelve years later, and they’re still in prison!” It turned out he was speaking to someone behind her. Humiliated, she stepped sideways and out of his line of vision. His glasses had no nose rests and the frames were sliding down. She wanted, tenderly, to push them up. The students started shouting, “Yaobang forever!”
The sweetness of a piece of cake she had eaten earlier in the day persisted in her mouth. Bits of paper carnations were stuck to her shoes and Ai-ming tried to scrub them off against the grey concrete, not wanting to trail them, like evidence, back home. She found her bicycle and pedalled slowly back, against the constant stream of Beijingers moving towards the Square.
—
That evening, she crouched with Yiwen in the courtyard and they washed dishes together. “Okay, tell me,” Yiwen whispered, “what exactly is revolution?” Ai-ming coughed softly and said, “What?”
“Okay, okay,” Yiwen said, “just joking. I thought I would help you study! But, seriously, don’t you think citizens should own themselves, be their own people? Isn’t a self only a body combined with a system of thought?”
“A self?”
A plastic dish slid out of Yiwen’s soapy fingers and spluttered back into the water. She was wearing sneakers, a white T-shirt that served as a dress, and a pink bandana. She’d recently gotten a violently short haircut. Ai-ming had noticed that she carried a spray bottle and every now and then would squirt a big cloud of homemade insect repellent at her bare legs. When she got bitten, she roughly slapped her calves and thighs as if they belonged to someone else.
“My Beida boyfriend,” Yiwen said, as if she had other boyfriends at other universities, “says that thousands of wall posters calling for reform have gone up in the last twenty-four hours. His best friend carried a banner to the Square last night. You know what it said? It said, ‘The Soul of China.’?” She sighed and scrubbed her family’s rice pot. “The job assignments are pitiful these days…Who knows where they’ll unload us once we graduate? I have a cousin who works alone in a closed-down factory in Shaanxi Province. Completely alone! She’s supposed to be an accountant. What kind of job is that?”
“If you study at a Beijing university you end up with a good job. Don’t you?”
“Beijing!” Yiwen made a face. “We should all go to the West. America owns the past and they own the future, too. What do we own?” She slapped the water. “Hey, what kind of rock music do you like?” Her T-shirt dress had soaked over her thighs and soap bubbles slid down her knee.
“Are there different kinds?”
Yiwen giggled. “Like Northwest Wind style. Do you like that? Let’s sing something. You know anything by White Angel? Or Mayday?”
All afternoon, Ai-ming had been reading Let the Natural Sciences Contend and her head was full of geological disturbances. “I’m not good at remembering lyrics.”
“Ai-ming, little country girl. My father told me that your father used to be a musician! Is that true? Like a rock musician? Hey, come on, you’re not really this shy. Are you?”
This was worse than the national examinations. Ai-ming had no idea what the correct answer could be. Fortunately it didn’t matter because Yiwen had her own monologue going. Now she started singing by herself: “I’ve never stopped asking you, When will you come with me? But you always laugh at me because I have nothing! I’m giving you my aspirations and my freedom, too.”
One of the neighbours, a little boy known as Watermelon, started singing along. He was small but he had big, wet voice. “I want to grab your hands. Come with me…”
Yiwen stood up, the little dress too small for anything.
“Want to come to the Square, Ai-ming?”
“I can’t.”
“Tomorrow then.” Yiwen tipped over the bucket of soapy water, dumping it out, and then put the clean dishes inside.
“What’s your boyfriend like?” Ai-ming asked.
Yiwen got to her feet, swaying slowly, the dishes clattering like rattled birds. She smiled teasingly. “I like it when you leave your hair down.”
Ai-ming plunged her hands into her own dish water and said, “Yiwen, where did you get your cassette player?”
“From Fat Lips, on the corner. You want one? He always gives me a really good price.”
“I want one. For my father.”
“Sure, anytime. Knock on my window. We’ll go together.”
—
“We’re not Red Guards! We’re the surviving remnants of the May Fourth generation. Can’t you tell the difference?” Ai-ming’s alarm clock hadn’t sounded yet, it must be early. Or maybe it was late, the middle of the night, but Yiwen’s voice was instantly recognizable.
“Queen Mother of the West! We put aside every dream for you and look what a terror you’ve become.” Ai-ming sat up in bed. Yiwen’s father sounded exhausted. His voice seemed to split into three parts as he shouted louder. “Protesting the government at Zhongnanhai in the middle of the night! Getting arrested! You’re not really my daughter, are you?”
Yiwen’s mother kept repeating the same words over and over: “Calling the leaders by their first names!”
“So what if I call Li Peng by his name? They’re just people,” Yiwen shouted. “People have names! Why can’t you see that? You had the Revolution to believe in, but what do we have?”
A door slammed. Someone, it must be Yiwen, was crying. But perhaps it was Yiwen’s father.
Ai-ming sat up. Nobody talked like that so the whole interlude must have been a dream. Patiently, she waited to come to her senses. Shadows fell in waves across the bedclothes and nothing in the room seemed still. She hugged the sheet and remembered Yiwen’s pink dress which expanded, covering her, smelling of jasmine, even as the argument went on, fitfully, only partially overheard, lulling her back to sleep.
—
“If you can solve a physics problem, you can solve this.” The Bird of Quiet was looking over her shoulder, later that morning, examining the study questions on Ai-ming’s desk. “All you have to do in this essay question is demonstrate correct political understanding. I think you should do a more careful study of Mao Zedong–Marxist-Leninist thought, especially this chapter on methodology, and matter or materialism as objective reality….”
Two cantaloupe seeds had stuck to his hand, and she noticed two on her left hand as well. These four seeds blocked out everything Sparrow was saying.
After her father had closed the door again, she returned to staring out the window. Of course, the people outside, the neighbourhood aunties, Yiwen and Watermelon, could see her as well as she could see them. They were taking down the laundry before the rain resumed, and no one paid any attention to her sitting miserably between her stacks of books. Yiwen’s eyes were puffy. She was singing mournfully to herself,
I grew up beneath the Red Flag.
I took the oath.
To dare to think, to speak up, to act.
To devote myself to Revolution,
The air had the icy kiss of winter, which was perfect, really, for a funeral. Hu Yaobang would have approved. A week had passed since the announcement of his death, and today, a Saturday, the whole city was going to Chang’an Avenue to pay their respects. Sparrow, however, said they weren’t going, Tiananmen Square had been barricaded off, so they would watch it on the neighbourhood television. Television was better, he said. Her father had allowed one of his co-workers to give him a haircut, she didn’t know how much baijiu the comrade had drunk, but it all looked a little lopsided. She found it difficult to argue with him, that bad haircut evoked too much pity. Meanwhile Ma unexpectedly announced she was going to the funeral procession because it was the correct thing to do. “You can come with me, Ai-ming. If you like.”
To go or not to go? In the end, the bad haircut won.