A Heart for Freedom (10 page)

As I sat in my dorm room, Shen’s letter in hand, I began to understand what she meant. It occurred to me Shen might be a serial rapist, given the evident planning that had gone into what he’d done, with the drugs, the gag, and the blindfold. I was aghast. I wanted to find the strength to report him, even at the cost of humiliating myself, so he would not do the same thing to someone else. At the same time, I was afraid to say anything.

The next day, I saw Shen in the library. I went right up to him.

“I am ashamed to know you,” I said to his face. “I will never respect you again.”

From there I went to his dorm room to look for the bottle of pills he’d given me. I wanted evidence. I searched the bookshelf and his desk, but he had removed the bottle.

I went to a nearby hospital and waited in line. The receptionist was a young woman with a nasty temper. She was bossing people around. When my turn came, I told her I wanted to have my urine checked.

“Check your urine for what?” she asked in a loud voice.

“For sperm,” I whispered. “I think I’ve been raped.”

“How many days has it been since it happened?”

“About three days,” I mumbled.

“How can you check that?” she said loudly enough for everyone in the waiting room to hear. “Three days is too long.”

My face was burning as I quickly walked away. I could imagine all the people in line asking the receptionist what had happened.

I had to do something. I felt so isolated. I went to Wang to ask him for help, but he was cold and indifferent.

“I thought you would understand,” I said. “You are so strong, brave, and honorable. Besides, Shen comes from your hometown—”

“Strong? Oh, no, you have it all wrong,” Wang said. “I can’t protect anyone. I can’t even protect myself in a system like this. You are too naive. You’ll learn. You’d better go. Maybe one of your friends can tell you what to do.”

I looked at Wang, not believing what I was hearing. This was the noble and mighty Wang, the one I had admired for so long, the one whose calm demeanor had always soothed me. I never pictured him this cold and afraid. With one last look, I walked out of his room without a word. The image of the woman sitting peacefully on the sinking ship broke into pieces.

8

Feng the Revolutionary

On January 1, 1987, the Triangle was crowded with agitated students as I crossed through it on my way to lunch. It had just snowed, and everyone was wearing coats and hats. I asked a boy next to me what was going on.

“This morning the police arrested thirty-six students on the Square,” he said. “We’re all headed to the president’s house to demand their release. Come with us. We need you. The more students the better.”

Students in southern China had called for open elections, and the local Party leaders had complained when the students demonstrated publicly. “Haven’t we given you enough democracy?” they said.

When news of this fledgling democracy movement was posted in the Triangle at Beida, the mayor of Beijing issued an edict banning demonstrations in the Square unless the Public Security Bureau—the police—gave its approval. When three Beida students applied for the right to demonstrate, the Party chiefs told them they would jeopardize their prospects for good jobs after graduation. Unfazed, the students had gone to Tiananmen Square to demonstrate without a permit.

The enthusiasm of the crowd impressed me. Not much time had passed since the incident with Shen and the disappointment with Wang, and my relationship with Qing was hanging by a thread. I had been living under a dark shadow of loneliness. I didn’t know what the arrested students had done, but I was pulled along by the energy of the crowd to the president’s house, called the Red Temple Building. It gave me a sense of warmth and belonging, which was a welcome change from the isolation I’d been feeling.

The Red Temple was flooded with lights, inside and out. Thousands of students were packed around it on all sides. I could hardly see the building over the sea of heads in front of me. Soon after I arrived, the voice of Ding Shishun, president of Beida, rang out over the broadcast system.

“Students,” he announced, “after negotiations between our school and various departments of the central government, they have agreed to release our students. You may go now to welcome them back.”

A cheer went up. “We’ve won! Long live President Ding!”

We made our way to the South Gate of campus to greet our returning student heroes. After waiting for more than four hours in the cold, we learned that the students had been dropped at the West Gate, far from the waiting crowd, and most had already gone back to their dorms.

A few days later, I went to the library to study. On the steps out front, I saw Feng Congde, one of the Beida students who had been arrested. He was one class above me, and I had seen him here and there. He was tall and slender, with a dark, tanned complexion, strong shoulders, and muscular arms and legs. His angular face, with a straight nose and flared nostrils, gave him a look of perpetual intensity. He was talking to some girls at the door, and it was impossible not to linger on the threshold to listen. I couldn’t ignore his passionate, deep vibrato as he spoke about the incident. Here was someone who believed in something—to the point he was willing to go through a terrifying experience.

Before long, the other girls drifted away, and Feng was talking to me alone, telling me about the entire experience in a way that was both earnest and charismatic.

All sense of time vanished. My curiosity and admiration seemed to encourage him to talk more. Though I could never have imagined we would soon be lovers destined to marry and lead a student revolution, I was attracted to his spirit—sincere, pure, and brave.

He said he had gone to the Square only out of curiosity, which I later learned was an ingredient at the core of his being that seemed to pull him into crazy situations.

“Thousands of people had gathered there,” he said. “There were students, curious citizens, tourists, and casually dressed secret police. It was odd how all these people had randomly assembled. Plainclothes policemen were filming us with camcorders, and as the insatiable, prying, greedy eye turned on one individual after another, they each would turn away, with their arms over their faces, because no one wanted to be identified and later punished.

“It was tense. People darted back and forth. No one knew what to do. Then an old man from the countryside, who was carrying his wares strapped to a basket on his shoulders, began shuffling around like someone who had wandered onto a movie set by mistake, oblivious to his surroundings, completely relaxed. As he meandered about, people unconsciously followed him, until a slowly moving tornado of bodies had formed behind him. By the time the poor man realized he was being filmed, he was scared like an animal caught in a net. Finding a small gap, he sneaked away from the crowd. A loud laugh burst out from the crowd.

“We were all embarrassed and wanted to do something,” Feng said, gripping my arm, “but we couldn’t. Those cameras were following us, whirring like insects. That’s when someone began to hum the tune of ‘The Internationale.’ You know the song: ‘Arise, you prisoners of cold and starvation!’ It was bitter cold, you see, and we were all bundled in winter garments, and if you kept your head down, you could hide your face enough so they couldn’t see if you were singing. So, in this muffled way, this strange crowd began to sing that somber anthem to revolution.”

Feng grabbed both my arms and sang the entire song to me in his deep, low voice, intoning words that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up: “The blood in our bodies boils, we’ll fight for the liberty of all people and destroy the old world we know.”

That’s when some students had unfurled a banner that said, “Support Deng Xiaoping, Continue Reform.” Feng had held one corner of the banner as the students marched together to the People’s Congress—which, under the mayor’s edict, was strictly off limits. Within fifteen minutes, he’d heard a strange whistling and was forced into a police car.

“They were police,” Feng said, in almost a whisper, his face close to mine as he spoke, still urgently gripping my arms. “The people marching beside me, behind me—they were all plainclothes cops. I’m telling you because I want you to help me. I want you to tell everyone you know. Tell them what I’ve told you. I want them to see the true face of our national machine. Promise me you’ll do that.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “I will.” And I did.

* * *

Feng opened a whole new world to me, a world both refreshing and different, a world in which there was hope for a better and freer society, a world where I felt I could breathe. This glimmer of hope gave me the courage to formally end my relationship with Qing. He and I hadn’t talked much since he discovered my diary, but I knew he disapproved of the recent student demonstration. I didn’t know what lay ahead, and it was scary to break up with a man of such stability and a bright future, but I could no longer pretend to fit into his world. To all outward appearances we were a model Chinese couple with great promise, but I knew—and maybe we both knew—it wasn’t going to work. No matter what the future held, I was ready to move into the unknown, to start over.

I had reported the Shen Liang incident to the campus security department, though as far as I knew, they never investigated it, and once I finished my graduate school exam, I was ready to enjoy my last few months at Beida. I felt the dark clouds were finally clearing and I could return to the happy and cheerful disposition I’d had during my early days at the university.

Several weeks later, I was astonished when Feng walked through the door of the dance club where I’d been selected to perform on the dance team. It turned out this passionate revolutionary also had an interest in dance—which, as he later confessed, provided him with an opportunity to meet girls.

Before our first dance rehearsal, Feng showed up uninvited at my dorm and asked if we could walk together to the dance club. While I was getting ready, he picked up my roommate’s guitar and started strumming. Beautiful music flowed from his fingers as he played “Love’s Romance.” In the middle of the song, his fingers suddenly stopped strumming, and I looked at him. Our eyes met for an instant before we both looked away, embarrassed.

On the way to the dance club, we chatted casually and talked about philosophy.

“Ideals and theory are supplements for the flaws and imperfections in reality,” I heard myself say, as if some invisible force had supplied the words.

“I had no idea girls could be so intelligent,” Feng said.

After class he escorted me back to my dorm. From my third-floor window, I watched him hurry away into the night. Something about him was special.

The following Monday night, Feng came to visit again. I was boiling a few eggs and invited him to join me. He seemed troubled, and he struggled to talk about the difficulty as I listened intently.

The night we had met at the library, he’d returned to his dorm to find the area alive with the flashing red lights of police cars. He was certain they were there to arrest him, and his legs had frozen in fright. With great effort, he was able to climb the stairs to his room. Inside, he expected to find a plainclothes policeman waiting with handcuffs; instead, it was only his roommate, playing guitar in the mellow lamplight. He realized he was shaking—and how helpless it made him feel, how powerless against the specter of arrest. He later learned the police had come to his dorm because a boy had killed himself that night by jumping from the roof.

Feng sat forward on the edge of the bed as he told me the story, with his elbows on his knees and a blade of fine black hair hanging across his forehead. As he spoke, he occasionally glanced over at me with his serious, dark eyes to make sure I understood—and he’d crack his knuckles.

My heart ached for him. I knew that unspeakable sense of terror and loneliness. For marked men or women in Chinese society, the whole world as they knew it disappeared and all that was left was isolation and an endless fear of the unknown.

As I looked at this once brave, now troubled man beside me, a flood of compassion rose up in me. Almost like a mother wanting to comfort her frightened child, I wanted to brush back that stray lock of hair, soothe his disquieted spirit, and let him know I understood and that he was no longer alone.

In the past I had looked to Wang or Qing as my source of strength and protection. This time I was the strong and protective one. Feng’s vulnerable confession made me want to hold him in my arms, comfort him, heal him, and make him whole again. As we sat in silence, my eyes told him everything.

Soon after that evening, Feng and I became a formal couple.

For two young people in love, Beida in springtime was a garden of enchantment. The singing of the birds, the blooming of the flowers, and the sunsets filtered through the trees around No Name Lake were all tinged with new meaning as we walked or rode our bikes together across campus. Together we raised two white rabbits as pets, and they would stand on their hind legs in the front baskets of our bikes as Feng and I explored the parks and rode alongside the lakes. In the evenings, as we rode back to the dorms together, our hearts were filled with joyful laughter and limitless dreams.

* * *

My fourth year at Beida would have had a picture-perfect ending if not for one unfortunate event. One Sunday afternoon, Feng and I stepped inside the university store to buy some snacks. I placed a twenty renminbi (RMB) bill on the counter and waited for the saleswoman to come and take our order. She was talking with someone and gave me a look that conveyed annoyance at my presence. This was not uncommon at Beida. The staff resented college students. We waited for a long time as the saleswoman continued her conversation and deliberately ignored us, even though she was only a few feet away.

Finally Feng grew impatient. When he caught the woman’s eye, he indicated we would take the merchandise and leave our money on the counter. The saleswoman’s eyes grew wide, and she began to shout, “Thief, thief!”