On Ai-ming’s side of the police lines, two old men in white vests were holding a neatly written banner: “The way ahead is long and far, yet I will search far and wide,” but the two, who reminded her of Ba Lute, already seemed tottery on their skinny, grandfather legs.
Ai-ming locked her bicycle to a grate and squeezed onto the overpass. Looking down, she saw the students pressed right up against the police line, where the officers had hitched themselves together, arm in arm. The students were using the sheer mass of their numbers to slowly, tectonically, exert pressure. It was fierce and sweaty work.
I was a silly egg to think I would be able to find Yiwen, she told herself, blushing at the unexpected thought. The mass of young people disappeared into the horizon, as if the crowd stretched all the way to Beijing University itself.
A boy who had climbed up a lamppost called out that comrades from the University of Politics and Law had banded together and broken through a blockade at the Second Ring Road. Noise rioted up, vibrating the overpass. She watched as ladies coming to or from work, in factory blues, pink aprons, and green smocks, tried to sweet-talk the officers into letting the students through. Old people sat on their balconies as if watching opera, shouting at everyone to get on with it. Even as it grew increasingly tense, it was clear to Ai-ming that the police had no intention of pulling out their weapons. They were simply placing their bodies in the way.
Minutes passed, another half-hour, and still the agonizing pushing went on.
The students, all neatly dressed, attractive with their earnest glasses, began chanting the words of Comrade Deng himself: “A revolutionary government should listen to the voice of the People! Nothing should frighten it more than silence!”
On this side, the residents joined in, so that the police were pinioned between two tidal waves of sound. This went on for half an hour before everyone stopped to rest. Meanwhile up on the overpass, it was shoulder against shoulder, chest against back, with still more people arriving. Ai-ming was so sweaty she feared she might be squeezed, like a slippery fish, off the bridge.
The students were reorganizing. All the young women had been sent up to the head of the line. A few men around Ai-ming laughed dirtily. A soothing female chorus rose up:
“Raise the incomes of the police!”
“Brothers!” a young woman called. “You have been working hard all morning! Citizens of Beijing! Bring water to the People’s police!”
Amidst laughter and cheering, water materialized. Ai-ming scanned continuously for Yiwen. A few police lifted off their peaked caps, withdrew colourful handkerchiefs, and mopped the sweat from their faces. They smiled shyly at the girls, who giggled. Everyone exhaled, like a rest between sets.
The students managed to reformulate themselves so that boys and girls were mixed together once more. Meanwhile, the overpass took up the chant, “What’s so hard? It’s like cutting cabbages and melons!”
By now, Ai-ming had been on the overpass for almost three hours and she, too, felt the moment had arrived. She couldn’t stand to be further compressed. From the boulevard of protesters, more cries came, rolling forward with piercing intensity.
“Reject the verdict of the People’s Daily!”
“We are not a mob, we are civilized members of society!”
Under this sustained pressure, Ai-ming could see the sweating police beginning to fray. The students pressed their advantage, all the while chanting, “The People love the People’s police!”
The students heaved through the centre and the green police lines dissolved to the sides like a soft leaf curling open. Ai-ming heard an uprush of sound that felt as if it were coming from the concrete and the buildings themselves. Residents leaned so far out she was afraid they would all tumble off the flyover together. Her own shouts of both astonishment and relief were lost in the tumult. Even though the success of the students seemed inevitable, it also seemed impossible, and everyone looked mildly stunned. A police hat flew nonsensically up onto the overpass, and Ai-ming, finding it in her hands, gently tossed it down to a bareheaded officer, who gazed up into the sun, looking for her. She waved. Carts of water and icy tea appeared. Beside her, a toothless old man was throwing popsicles down to the crowd. A huddle of police were talking into radios, a few were grinning, and students patted their shoulders as they went by. A banner passed, “A new path is opening up: the path we long ago failed to take.”
The marchers moved forward, surrounded on all sides by student marshals with red armbands. Ai-ming ran to unlock her bicycle from the grate. Pushing it beside her, she slipped between the lines of students. Everyone’s clothes were rumpled as if they’d all been wrestling or turning over and over in their sleep.
They weren’t asking for anything impossible, Ai-ming thought. Just room to move, to grow up and be free, and for the Party to criticize itself. A red banner from Beijing University read in proud, golden characters, “Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China.”
The closer they came to the Square, the more the crowd seemed to become a part of her own body, so that Ai-ming herself expanded limitlessly as students from other universities continued to arrive, connecting at intersections between the First and Second Ring Roads. Cooks in tired hats and white aprons stood outside their kitchens, waiters smoked passionately, shopgirls teetered out of department stores, so that around six in the afternoon, when office and factory workers came off their shifts, they were all crushed together in the smaller roads. People her parents’ age kept pressing water, ice cream sandwiches, frozen fruit, and Inch of Gold candies into her hands. Sugar-struck, Ai-ming thought she saw the dazzling pink of Yiwen’s headband. She followed it as if following torchlight.