—
That night, when Ai-ming came home in tears, Sparrow helplessly gave her the candy. He knew that Ai-ming stayed in the Square each day and passed herself off as a student. His daughter said that hundreds of students had lost consciousness, they were on IV drips. She had spent the day trying to keep a path clear for the stream of ambulances. How could he yell at her? More than three thousand had joined the hunger strike and some were threatening to set themselves on fire. But he saw, when he passed the neighbourhood television, that this confrontation with the government could not go on indefinitely. He watched clips of Gorbachev’s arrival in Beijing, all the members of the Politburo standing stiffly on the tarmac, their faces as grey as their colourless coats. General-Secretary Zhao Ziyang had met with Gorbachev, they had sat on chairs too large for their bodies. Comrade Zhao said that some young people had doubts about socialism, that their concerns were sincere, and for this reason reform was crucial. The anchor read without looking up. The grand celebration that had been planned for Tiananmen Square, intended to celebrate the first visit by a Soviet head of state since 1959, had been cancelled.
—
The following morning, Wednesday, Sparrow met his workmates at the Muxidi Bridge. Everyone was neatly turned out in their dark blue uniforms, while around them Chang’an Avenue swelled in a kind of euphoria and sadness. People from factories across the city arrived continuously in trucks and re-purposed buses. Fan was busy giving orders, she had a voice sharp enough to crack glass. Old Bi was there, too, with Dao-ren, who carried one side of a banner that read, “We can no longer stay silent.” Even the floor supervisors, managers and superiors were walking with them. He had heard that some, including Baby Corn, had children who had joined the hunger strike, and it was true, Baby Corn did not look well. An enlivening breeze made all the banners crease and ripple, and an expression of Big Mother’s caught in his mind, Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. At last they set out, behind the banner of Beijing Wire Factory No. 3. The sky was like a yellow curtain they could never quite pass through.
The air was tumultuous as Tiananmen Square came into sight. He saw banners announcing the Beijing Bus Company, Xidan Department Store and, shockingly, the Beijing Police Academy. Ling was here, too, walking alongside her co-workers at Radio Beijing. Men from Capital Iron and Steel waved orange flags that caught the sun. They were sturdy and mountainous, and had taken it upon themselves to direct traffic. Life was in flux, orchestral and completely unrecognizable. Through the loudspeakers a student was saying, “Mother China, witness now the actions of your sons and daughters,” while foreign journalists, having come to report on the Sino-Soviet summit, were so numerous they seemed to be replicating themselves from moment to moment. Journalists and editors from the People’s Daily walked under a red-and-gold banner, the colours of sunset. Everywhere, students, almost drunk with exhaustion, collected donations, and their plastic buckets and biscuit tins overflowed. The workers around Sparrow started buying up all the water, nourishing biscuits, popsicles and sticks of frozen fruit, and carting them to the hunger strikers. Sparrow felt as if all his past lives, all his selves, were walking beside him.
“Comrade Sparrow,” Fan said, taking hold of his arm, “are you okay? We should find some ice for your back injury–”
“I’m fine,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I never imagined so many people…”
Fan’s smile was so wide he was surprised to realize she was weeping.
On the loudspeakers, a scholar was addressing the crowds, “There are things that I can’t accept from the government, and there are extreme elements within the student movement. But history is this kind of process, it’s all mixed up….”
In two weeks, he would fly to Hong Kong to see Kai, yet he had neglected to tell Ling or his daughter this important detail, and the fact that he was hiding so many crucial things could no longer be brushed away. Chanting reverberated off all the bodies and all the buildings: Can lies go on forever? When he reached the Square, he thought, So this is what Tiananmen Square looks like when it is truly full. Even Chairman Mao never lived to see it like this. Mao’s portrait on the gate, so familiar it might as well be the moon in the sky, appeared smug and overdressed for the spring humidity. Despite the million demonstrators, the only visible police were the ones marching in support of the students. The student loudspeakers were exhorting the hunger strikers to be orderly, to “sleep neatly,” and to refrain from playing cards, because such behaviour would compromise the purity of their goals. The fasting students had no mats or tarps to lie on, only sheets of grubby newspaper. A sign read, “The Party maintains its power by accusing the People of fabricated political crimes.”
Sparrow could not imagine what this scene would like through Zhuli’s eyes, at the age she would be now. How many deceits had the Red Guards accused her of? How many crimes had the government fabricated? How could a lie continue so long, and work its way into everything they touched? But maybe Ai-ming would be allowed to come of age in a different world, a new China. Perhaps it was naive to think so, but he found it difficult not to give in, not to hope, and not to desire.
—
Everyday there were more demonstrations: a million people on Wednesday, and another million on Thursday despite rainstorms. By now the hunger strike was in its sixth day and even the official People’s Daily was reporting that more than seven hundred strikers had collapsed. When Sparrow went out, no matter the hour, he could hear ambulances racing to and from the Square. His factory, perhaps every factory in the city, had all but closed. His new composition was almost done. Reading it over, he heard a counterpoint to Gabriel Fauré’s Op. 24, a similar descending sweep, and the three twisting voices of Bach’s organ prelude, “Ich ruf zu dir,” which he had always loved. But perhaps, rather than a counterpoint, the other works were sounds overheard, lives within lives. He no longer knew. The structure of his sonata felt unbalanced, even monstrous, and even though he knew it was nearly finished, he had no idea how it would end.
He called it, tentatively, The Sun Shines on the People’s Square, a title that echoed Ding Ling’s novel of revolutionary China, The Sun Shines over Sanggam River. But the Square in Sparrow’s mind was not the Tiananmen Square of 1989. Instead it was multiple places from throughout his life: the Tiananmen Square he had walked on in 1950 with Big Mother Knife. The People’s Square of Shanghai. The square courtyards of the laneway house, the sheets of Zhuli’s music, the portraits of Chairman Mao, the bed he shared with Ling, the square record jackets he had burned, the frames of the radios that he built every day. The ancient philosophers believed in a square earth and a round (or egg-shaped) sky. The head is round and the feet are square. The burial tomb is square. What might cause something to change shape, to expand or be transformed? Weren’t the works of Bach, the folded mirrors, the fugues and canons, both square and circular? But what if the piece of music in his mind could not be written? What if it must not be finished? The questions confused him, he knew they came from that other life inside him.
Ai-ming appeared in the doorway. “Are you writing, Ba?”