“Ai! These kids…” The stranger’s badge, stamped with the words Capital Iron and Steel, trembled from a clip on his shirt. “It’ll be over in a few hours. Old Gorbachev will be escorted into the Square tomorrow and the Party will shake the kids off Tiananmen like ants from a stick.” He folded the paper in half. “That’s what my son tells me anyway.”
“And all these people?”
“Exactly. I came to see what’s gotten everyone so worked up. Of course, I admire their ideals. Who doesn’t? But even a nothing like me can see that the students and the government aren’t speaking the same language. Everyone wants to fix the country, but everyone wants power, too, don’t they? That’s what we’re talking about in my danwei….” He tapped his badge. “Our work unit alone has over 200,000 workers and if we support the hunger strike, that changes everything, doesn’t it? That’s a bloody revolution.” He took a bag of buns, as if by magic, from his other hand and offered one to Sparrow, who accepted. The man ate half of one in a single bite. “Any kids, Comrade?”
“A daughter.”
“Not a university student, I hope.”
“Thank heavens, no.”
The man swallowed the bread in his mouth and washed it down with a gulp from his tea thermos. “Frankly, I don’t understand what’s wrong with us. The stupidity we went through, a whole generation slapping its own head…how come we keep arriving at the same point?” He screwed the lid back on his thermos. “Hey, you’re not a plain coat are you? Someone told me there are thousands of plain coats snooping around.”
“A spy?” Sparrow smiled. “No, but other people have thought the same.”
“Because you’re so unthreatening,” the man said. “Don’t take offence. It’s just that you’ve got such a listening face.”
—
It was twilight. Behind the Monument of the People’s Heroes, hundreds of students were lying on the ground. They were guarded by other students, wearing red armbands, who made a kind of human barricade around them. Sparrow felt that a world he had been living inside was being forced open. But weren’t these students also living inside a world of their own construction? The hunger strikers had the brightest futures in the entire country. As Beijing university graduates they would be responsible for their parents and grandparents, for their siblings if they had any, yet here they were, lying on the bare concrete. He felt a gnawing fear scraping against his lungs. Three boys on one bicycle rolled by, acrobatic, joyful. They shouted, “We won’t eat fried democracy!” and a ripple of laughter came from the pyjama-clad students. Where were their parents? he wondered. But now a boy with a red armband came to him and said sternly, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Comrade, but only we are allowed here. It’s for the security of our hunger strike revolutionaries.” Sparrow nodded, backing away. The recording on the loudspeaker began again, it was the same fragile voice as before, “Today freedom and democracy must be bought with our lives. Is this fact something the Chinese people can be proud of?”
Sparrow looked up, trying to find the source of the broadcast, but the endlessness of the sky made it difficult to see what was near.
I have grown old, he thought. I no longer understand the ways of this world.
—
The following morning, as they stood beneath Fan’s flowery umbrella outside the factory gates, Fan gave Sparrow a pamphlet that listed the demands of the hunger strikers. There were just two: immediate dialogue on an equal footing, and an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the student movement. Fan told him that the workers of Beijing Wire Factory No. 3 would be marching in support of the students on May 16. She had heard that almost all of Beijing’s factories, as well as scientific and educational institutes, were planning the same. Fan was unusually subdued, and when Sparrow asked if she was well, she told him that her sister in Gansu Province had suffered a work accident but Fan didn’t know the severity. “And I’ve been going to the Square every night after work,” she said, “to help out where I can, because these skinny kids haven’t eaten in three days, and the government has yet to lift a finger. How did we come to this?” Fan’s troubled face turned away from him. “And I don’t want to make radios anymore.” She looked back and laughed, a lost, unhappy laugh. “Does anyone want to make radios?” she said. “Oh, damn your second uncle!”
This was a special Beijing curse and it made Sparrow smile.
Fan raised her eyebrows, which made her ears wiggle slightly. She leaned mischievously towards him, so close their noses nearly touched. “What would you like to do, Comrade Sparrow, if you were free to choose a vocation?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I’d like to play the piano.”
Fan let out a honking laugh. Someone coming up the stairs dropped their lunch tin in surprise and let out a sad, soft, Waaaaa! “It’s never too late to learn!” Fan shouted.
Sparrow smiled. “I suppose.”
“But the piano kind of thing, Comrade,” she said, turning serious, “is a hobby and can be done in addition to a steady job and what I meant with my question is the kind of vocation that requires a lifetime’s commitment. I wanted to be a doctor, I think I told you once, I wanted to open a clinic in my sister’s town but you know how it was back then. It wasn’t up to me.”
Rain battered dully on the umbrella. I want to see my daughter grow up, Sparrow thought. The premonition scared him so much he reached out his hand, intending to grasp the wall, and caught only air.
Fan didn’t notice. Her fingers were idly tapping the handle of the umbrella, playing an imaginary instrument. “Speaking of pianos,” she said. “Remember that musician in 1968, the composer from Shanghai, the tall one with the long face, what was his name? They locked us in a room and made us watch his struggle session. Old guy was being kicked around on live television and we still had to call him names.”
“He Luting.”
“That’s it! Right on television, they were going to make a big example out of him. I haven’t thought of him in years. Do you remember it?”
“I remember.”
“Oh, boy. Everyone had to watch, it didn’t matter whether you worked upstairs or in the basement. So we all heard it when he shouted, ‘How dare you, how dare you….Shame on you for lying.’ That’s what he said, he kept yelling out, ‘Shame! Shame!’ Those Red Guards couldn’t believe it. I can still see their faces, big eyes and dumb-dumb mouths. Nobody could believe it, the nerve of this guy. I wonder if he’s still alive.”
“I think so,” Sparrow said.
“Shame on you! I’ll never forget.” She disappeared for a moment into her own searching. “We all knew that, once the cameras were switched off, pow, that would be the end of him. They wouldn’t let him get away with it.”
“But afterwards, were you yourself different?”
Fan looked at him, startled. “Comrade Sparrow, what kind of question is that?…how could anyone be different?” She gave an irritated sigh. “Sure this He Luting proved that it was possible to fight back, to stand up…but I still didn’t know how it was done. The Red Guards back then, the youth, you know how vicious they were…” She reached into her pocket and took out a handful of candies. “You like these, don’t you? White Rabbits. Have a few of these and don’t ask me any more questions. All right, I’m a coward! But damn your questions, they make me feel like I belong in a factory and will never deserve better.”
“Don’t be upset,” Sparrow said, accepting the candy. “I’m the same as you. I had the desire, but never the will.”
“And now?” Fan asked.
He shook his head, but it occurred to him that now, finally, when he had the will, desire itself might have disappeared. For twenty years, Sparrow had convinced himself that he had safeguarded the most crucial part of his inner life from the Party, the self that composed and understood the world through music. But how could it be? Time remade a person. Time had rewritten him. How could a person counter time itself?