A Heart for Freedom (27 page)

Three or four thousand students were seated on all four sides of the monument. They looked calm, yet helpless. Obviously tired, their faces showed the same emotions of farewell and defiance that I was struggling with. Girls and boys leaned against each other for support and warmth, like lambs awaiting the chopping block. No rah-rah rhetoric would work with a crowd that now faced its last hour. I was glad Li Lu spoke first as I gathered my thoughts.

“We members of the headquarters have spent so many days with all of you,” Li Lu said. “Today is the last time we will be together. I hope everyone will face the last moment calmly. We will stick to the principle of nonviolence to the very end.”

I tried to think of something to say that would bring them—and me—courage for the next, darkest hour. A story I’d heard about ants came to mind.

“A colony of ants lived on a tall mountain,” I began. “One day, the mountain caught on fire. The ants in the colony realized their only recourse was to roll downhill. All the ants formed a large ant ball and rolled down the mountainside. The ants on the outside burned to death, but the ones inside survived. Tonight,” I declared, “we are the outside ants. Out of our sacrifice will be born a new China.”

A loud and genuine applause arose among the students. At that moment, I felt a warm flood of emotion come into my body, a feeling I can only describe as
love
. As I looked into the darkness, I said to myself,
I wish they would know, including the ones who were sent to kill us tonight, how much we love them
.

* * *

Hou Dejian’s delegation returned around 4:00 a.m. with an announcement. The army, they said, would not open fire if we all withdrew before six o’clock.

Liu Xiaobo came to me and said, “Chai Ling, at last I understand. Wu’er Kaixi was not the right person.”

He was referring to the meeting on May 27, where he had advanced the proposal to appoint Wu’er Kaixi as student spokesman. Feng and I had walked out of that meeting in protest.

I was touched by Liu’s comment because he finally understood what was happening on the Square and the leaders who had stood by the students during even the most dangerous hours. To me, his words conveyed that the intellectuals and the students had at last achieved unification on a deeper level. The Tiananmen movement was not based on lofty ideals for democracy and freedom. It was rooted in a simple demand that all people be treated with justice and dignity. Liu gave me a big hug and went on with his preparations for the final hour.

It was time to vote for the last time on the question of whether we should stay or go. Soldiers at the edge of the Square fired their guns in the air to press us to leave. The bullets whistled over our heads. One bullet hit the loudspeaker next to me. There was no time, but we had to take the vote of all the students who remained on the four sides of the monument. We took a voice vote. Feng told the students to shout out in a clear voice in the order we enunciated either the word
leave
or the word
stay
. It was impossible to determine from the responses which one was the majority preference. We all turned and looked at Li Lu, who usually counted the votes and announced the verdict. But this time he stood in silence, looking down at the microphone in Feng’s hand. (Feng was kneeling on the ground.) I wasn’t sure what was going through Li Lu’s mind. His silence and inaction seemed to last a very long time.

Just as this historic moment of deliberation reached its climax, several gunshots blasted nearby, and I heard bullets whizz overhead and strike some part of the monument. Then a strong human wave surged around me, nearly pushing me backward.

“Soldiers!” someone shouted with a mixture of anger and fear. “The soldiers are here now!”

Immediately, a contingent of fully armed soldiers pushed aside the crowd and rushed to the top of the monument steps. I felt the blood rush to my face, and for a moment I thought that perhaps there had been no cease-fire agreement. Maybe this was how the final moment would arrive, with the soldiers coming up to take us all. I felt we should hold up each other’s arms to resist peacefully, just as we had planned.

In the midst of the commotion, Feng knew instantly he had no time to lose. With one final look at Li Lu, who still looked downward in silence, Feng shouted decisively into the microphone.

I couldn’t hear what he said. The gunshots had destroyed our loudspeakers. But immediately a wave of students who were standing nearby rushed down toward the bottom of the monument. By then, I had been pushed farther away from Feng and could no longer see him in the crowd.

As the surge continued downward like an outgoing wave, I heard Feng’s voice amid the roar.

“Where is Chai Ling? Get Chai Ling!”

An instant later, he was at my side. “Oh, here you are,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Feng and others grabbed me by the arms and rushed me down the stairs from the monument.

“Why are we leaving?” I asked.

“We voted to leave.”

“Really? If that’s so, there must be other students who did not hear this decision,” I said. “Let’s make sure all the students know.”

I started grabbing the shoulders of students who were still sitting on the ground as I went down the steps. They looked at me with fatigue and confusion.

“Let’s go,” I shouted. “We’ve decided to leave. Tell the others behind you.”

More students began to stand up and follow us.

“You go ahead,” Zhang Lun, the leader of the student marshals, said to me. “We’ll take care of everyone.”

He immediately set about lifting students off the ground, one by one, and sending them off on the withdrawal march.

Li Lu said that as commanding officers we should walk in front of the students because the soldiers might decide to fire at us as we left the Square. I thought that made sense. We were the ones who should die first. Together we sped up and reached the front row of retreating students. With arms locked, we walked along the narrow path formed by the soldiers and their bayonets.

Dawn was breaking as we reached the edge of the Square. The streets along that side were littered with rocks and debris. After a short while, we realized no troops had been stationed up ahead to ambush us on our retreat.

“This is bad,” Li Lu said. “This is bad. Someday they are going to ask us to take responsibility for this moment in history.”

“Who’s going to ask us to do that?” I said. “Who’s going to ask us to be responsible? We aren’t the ones who killed people.”

Li Lu did not reply to my questions, as if they were too naive to merit a response.

“It’s bad,” he said. “Very bad. No student leaders died.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Why should student leaders have died?

“Let’s go back to the Square,” Li Lu said as he tightened his grip on my arm. “None of our commanding leaders died.”

His statement cut short my feelings of relief that I was still alive. Still, I did not resist as Li Lu pulled me into an about-face and headed back toward the Square against the tide of retreating students. Almost immediately, however, residents and students began shouting at us. “The Square has been completely sealed off!” someone said. “They are aiming their machine guns at incoming people. Going back there is just going to waste lives for no reason. Get these students to safety. That’s your responsibility now—as leaders.”

Li Lu got the message. We reversed course once again and continued our march along Chang’an Avenue. As we approached an intersection just west of Xinhua Gate, we heard the blast of explosives. Soon we could smell tear gas, and yellow smoke began to cloud the air. We were forced to unlock our arms and cover our mouths and noses. Pressure from behind forced us to move faster. Students ran and screamed.

“They’re coming! They’re coming, and they are killing the students!”

We were marching in front of the retreating students, so we couldn’t see what was happening at the rear of the procession, which stretched out behind us along the bicycle lane. A metal fence ran between the bicycle lane and the pedestrian sidewalk. Eight vehicle lanes lay open and empty along Chang’an Avenue. In a panic, some students ran up to tell us the tanks were running along from behind and the soldiers inside were firing tear gas. We heard that one tank, in the bicycle lane, had rammed into the procession with no sign of slowing down. Dozens of students had clung to the metal fence, and others were killed instantly. The tank crushed their bodies to an unrecognizable pulp and rumbled on like a speeding beast. Fang Zheng, a strong and athletic student from Beijing Sports College, pushed to safety a girl who had frozen in the path of the oncoming tank; but in his heroic moment, Fang lost the precious seconds necessary to evade the tank himself. His legs were caught in the tracks and his body was dragged forward. Fang grabbed the metal fence with both hands and the tank roared on, severing parts of both his legs.

This news made our blood boil. But once again, when we turned back to rescue students at the rear, other students stopped us and kept us moving westward, toward the Beida campus. Along our route, the streets were littered with debris, and the air was thick with smoke and the smell of gunpowder.

As we marched arm in arm, we sang “The Internationale” and other songs, but no words could express our feelings at that time. We were powerless and we grieved, but without tears. We did not have the strength to weep. We wanted to shout, but we had no voice. We wanted to fight, but we chose to use no weapons. We were diminished to a sense of smallness, of utter insignificance. We were nothing. We were zero.

* * *

It was almost noon when we finally reached the south gate of Beida. A mere three weeks had passed since we had marched out of this gate to launch the hunger strike on May 13, but it felt as if we’d been gone an entire lifetime. I knew this: The world for me would never be the same.

23

On the Run

When Feng and I finally reached the dormitories, my body gave out. I fell asleep the moment I put my head down. I don’t know how long I was submerged in deep slumber before Feng’s urgent voice awakened me. I opened my eyes just as Li Lu and his bodyguard waved good-bye and disappeared through the doorway.

Over the loudspeaker, I heard the voice of a female student: “Students! Pay attention! A line of tanks is approaching Beida. Our campus will soon be surrounded. We urge all students to move to other locations.”

“But where can we go?” I said. I looked at Feng and his bodyguard, Liu Guang. At almost the same moment, we all said, “Let’s go see the president of Beida.”

Ding Shishun had committed himself to promoting reforms at Beida, and this had earned him the love and respect of the students. Ever since he had secured the release of Feng and the other students arrested in 1987, he had enjoyed a reputation as the protector of students.

When we reached President Ding’s house, his wife opened the door and led us into the living room.

“Did you leaders bring all the students back from the Square?” she asked with concern.

“Yes, most of them are back safely,” Feng replied, “except the ones lost during the tank attack.”

“That’s good,” the president’s wife said with evident relief.

When Ding appeared, he looked exhausted. “I have just received an emergency call,” he said. “As president of Beida, I cannot promise how long I can guarantee your safety on our campus. You probably know better than I do what’s going on out there. As to what you should do next, I don’t think that’s going to be a difficult decision. I’m sure you’ve read books about what happened to Communist Party members who fought the Nationalists.”

He paused to regain his composure.

“Forty years ago,” he said, “when my wife and I were students, we demonstrated and boycotted classes to convince the Nationalists to stop the civil war. The soldiers pointed guns at us and forced us to go back to school to take exams. I can’t believe that forty years later the Communist Party is using their guns the same way.”

President Ding was obviously pained. We decided to leave before we brought more trouble to his doorstep.

Outside, we realized we had no place to go. The advancing tanks seemed to have stopped before entering the campus, perhaps awaiting new orders.

Just then we realized how hungry we were. We could not recall the last time we had enjoyed a decent meal. The only restaurant on campus happened to be open, so we went there to fill our empty stomachs. The food looked delicious, but I couldn’t eat much. Liu Guang asked Feng what he planned to do. Feng didn’t want to run. “I’ve decided to stay on campus.”

Liu was surprised. “If something happens,” he said, “I don’t think I can be of any help. Maybe it’s time for us to go our separate ways.”

“I think you’re right,” Feng said, after a moment of silence. “How much money do you need?”

Feng gave him money for the road, and Liu gave us a Bible he was carrying.