A Heart for Freedom (32 page)

Confused, I took a few steps to follow him but then decided to return to my hotel instead. I’d grown accustomed to his unpredictable ways and had settled into a routine of my own. Later, Feng called to tell me he’d be coming by in the morning to pick up some of his things. “Don’t expect me to stay,” he said.

“Okay.” I felt I should no longer expect anything from Feng if I didn’t want to be hurt by him. Still, I did have a question. “How come you walked off like that without a word?”

“I thought you would follow me,” he said.

“In my heart,” I said, “there are two people I live for. One is my father. The other is you. Is there anyone like that who lives in your heart?” I don’t know where I found the courage to ask this question.

“No, no one,” Feng shot back without hesitation, and the phone went dead.

I had tried my best to show Feng I loved him. My involvement in the student movement had been for him. During my ten months in hiding, my one dream was to get out of China and live a happy life with him. But as soon as we got to Paris, he fell in love with a teenage girl. I blamed myself for not being pretty enough or smart enough or wise enough to understand his world. But now the answer was staring me in the face: Maybe he simply didn’t love me. Maybe he never had and never would.

As painful as this realization was, it was also a great relief. There was nothing wrong with me for having loved him.

27

The New World

I was unprepared for the blizzard of publicity that hit me when I arrived in the United States. I wonder if any human being could remain at peace in the face of such an onslaught. For me, it was a shattering assault on my fragile state of mind and health. I arrived friendless, with a broken marriage and lingering exhaustion, to find I had been scheduled, almost immediately, for a seven-city tour of the United States sponsored by the Tom Lantos Congressional Human Rights Commission.

The tour began in New York with a series of visits and public appearances. Everywhere I went, mobs of people awaited with cameras flashing. “Here comes the Goddess of Democracy!” they shouted.

I began to vomit during the car rides after each visit. On the morning of June 3, as I flew from New York to Washington, DC, I took one look at my itinerary for the next few days and immediately threw up into an airsickness bag.

By the middle of the following day, which was June 4, the one-year anniversary of the massacre, I really felt sick. I couldn’t eat. I kept having dry heaves. Liao Da Wen finally took me to see a doctor.

“You’re dehydrated and have a fever,” the doctor told me. “You should do no more work today. Just lie down and take it easy for the rest of the afternoon and evening.”

“I can’t do that, Doctor,” I said weakly. “It’s my responsibility—”

“Your responsibility is to take care of yourself,” he said. “If you were my daughter, I would tell you not to go anywhere. Just lie down, go to bed. You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

As I lay in the clinic and looked up at the white ceiling, my body felt as light as a feather floating free in the air. Away from the noise of traffic and the flashing cameras, the clinic had a familiar smell and quiet calm that reminded me of home.

“No, no,” Da Wen said to the doctor in a hurried voice. “She has to go. Her schedule this afternoon is full. She can’t let them down.”

“You are going to kill this girl,” the doctor said as he walked out.

Before I left, Da Wen put a big bottle of water in my hand. “Chai Ling is a symbol now,” she said. “If you use this symbol the right way, you can get a lot done for good.”

The medicine I took and the water I drank made me feel a little better. I stepped into the car waiting to take me to the next place. I was on the road again.

That night, at the June Fourth memorial ceremony, I sat in the crowd with Feng beside me. The woman who had called him in Paris after our press conference sat on the other side of him. I felt sad and worn out. Just then, one of the organizers handed me a microphone and asked me to make a speech. The lights blinded me, and my colleagues and Feng disappeared into the darkness. I could feel the resentment of the people with whom I had worked on the Square and the enormous distance fame and attention had opened between us. I also heard a voice rise within me, saying,
Speak for the voiceless; it is your responsibility
. I remembered what had happened one year earlier, and I began to speak.

After the ceremony, as I waited for a car to take me to my hotel, a young Chinese man holding a baby said to me, “Do you understand why I can’t join the movement? I have to take care of my wife and child. But you! You must continue the fight for democracy.”

These words were like a cold knife blade cutting straight to the wound in my heart.
How about my right to be a woman?
I wanted to say.
To be a wife and a mother? To be loved and cared for?
The pressure from the media and the tremendous responsibility I felt to speak for those left dead at Tiananmen Square had become a cross I would bear at the expense of my own needs.

* * *

In my interactions with the Western world, I was amazed at how easy it was to meet with American officials, especially after what the Chinese students had endured a year earlier just to have a dialogue with our government. What we got for our efforts were tanks and gunfire. In America, by contrast, officials seemed pleased when people wanted to meet with them and talk about the government.

“If I criticize the president,” one congressman told me, “the worst that can happen is the White House won’t give me a dinner invitation.” Life here seemed simpler, gentler, kinder.

At the end of my Washington visit, I met with a national security adviser and Vice President Dan Quayle.

Da Wen was happy. For her, the trip had been like a fairy tale, and each door we’d knocked on had opened magically. Everyone seemed happy. I watched in silence.

Many people find glamour in the spotlight, but to me it was sheer torment. Everywhere I went, it seemed, I had to address the century-old question about how China was going to make the transition to a more open, modern society. And when I least expected it, people peppered me with hostile questions. “How come everyone died except you?” stands out most in my mind.

I was glad the media hadn’t picked up on the trouble I had with Feng. I did not want our separation to become the focus of public attention. Several student leaders’ love affairs had created scandals that seemed to have damaged the democracy movement. I could not let my failing marriage overshadow the truth about the suffering in China.

After my seven-city tour, I returned to New York, to the apartment that Li Lu, Da Wen, and many others shared. After dinner we chatted.

“In life, only a few people truly matter,” Li Lu announced. “Only a few people are worth making a sacrifice for. Most people don’t matter. Do whatever you need to do with them.”

I was shocked. At first I was flattered to think I was part of the small circle of people who mattered. Then I thought,
What would happen to me if I were not part of this small circle but part of a great mass of unimportant souls?

Li Lu must have read my mind. “That’s bad,” he said, turning to me. “I’ve said too much.”

I changed the subject.

“Now that the first phase of work in America is over,” I said, “I’d like to talk with you about moving forward. How are we going to rebuild our leadership group to lead the overseas movement? I’ve also been thinking about applying to Princeton to study international relations and politics.”

Li Lu burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

Li Lu looked at me with amusement. “What part of it don’t you understand?” he said. “It’s over. When the massacre happened, it was over. Like the story in
Les Misérables
, the revolution is dead! Going to Princeton? to study politics? a naive little brain like yours?”

Li Lu laughed again and left the room.

I was confused. The Li Lu I thought I had known at Tiananmen did not match up with the Li Lu who had just ridiculed me.

If the democracy movement and the bond we shared surviving life and death together aren’t lasting and true, what is?

The new, free world had just become more confusing.

* * *

Feng joined us for the weekend after running around the country on his own for a few weeks. We all went to the country home of a friend of Mary Daly’s, a new acquaintance of ours. It was situated on a beautiful lake.

Almost immediately after we arrived, Li Lu jumped into the water. I soon followed. I had the sensation of utter freedom I’d experienced that day with Wang in The Sea of Good Fortune in Yuan Ming Yuan Park. For a few moments I was able to forget the torment in my mind.

That night, for the first time in a long time, Feng and I were together as husband and wife. The romance of a moonlit night and my celebratory mood at the end of a seven-city speaking tour made me drop my guard.

On the train back to New York City the next day, a deep anger rose within me. Why had I done that with him? Was I too weak to stand the loneliness? Had I fallen once again under the spell of his charm, his sweetness? Had I forgotten how much I’d suffered in Paris—one day happy, the next bereft? Did I want the past to continue into the present? I was only just beginning to learn how to be strong on my own, independent of that painful attachment.

Later, when Feng came into the room where I was staying and began to undress as if everything was fine between us, the sense of reproach I felt toward myself burst out.

“Don’t think you can sleep in another woman’s bed and then come back to me whenever you want,” I said. “It’s not going to work.”

Before I’d even finished speaking, Feng slapped my face.

“You’ve insulted me,” he said.

Instantly, a red-hot rage rose inside me. “How dare you do that to me after all I’ve gone through with you!”

All those days and months of patiently waiting, praying, and silently enduring, of giving and hoping to receive, combined into a single resolve. Screaming at Feng, I tried to push him away. But he began pummeling me with his fists. He was still beating me, grabbing my hair, and punching my face when Li Lu came in and pulled us apart.

“Let’s go, Old Feng,” he said. “You need to sleep in a different room tonight.”

As Li Lu steered him away, Feng continued to shout, “She insulted me! She insulted me! I don’t care what kind of celebrity she thinks she is, she’s still married to me, and I can beat my wife whenever I want.”

“This is America,” Da Wen said firmly. “You can’t hit a woman, even if she is your wife. It’s a human rights violation. If you do that again, we’ll have to call the police.”

Feng stopped shouting and left the room.

Da Wen sat beside me on the bed. “Are you okay?”

I nodded as the tears flowed down my face.

“Can you believe these men?” Da Wen continued. “They fight for democracy during the day and beat their wives at night.”

After she left me alone in the pale light of the evening, I curled up on my bed and sobbed. But in my heart I had never felt so calm and settled about this relationship.

As my tears gradually subsided, I looked back at all the key events I’d shared with Feng, as if I were an outsider looking at someone else’s life. Moments that had once seemed so bruising no longer bothered me, and I was able to look at the sweet moments with peace.

The monsoon season had ended at last.

* * *

I went to stay with a friend in New Mexico. While there I was able to telephone my family in China. That must have been quite a phone bill! After that I went back to Paris to await word from Princeton’s China Initiative, where I had applied to be a visiting scholar.

In Paris, while living alone in a hotel, I discovered I was pregnant with Feng’s child. This was the baby I had once yearned to have. Yet it was coming at the most vulnerable time in my life. Feng told me that if we had the baby, he would raise it with his French girlfriend. I could not imagine bringing up a child in that kind of arrangement, to suffer the same unpredictable heartbreak I’d experienced with Feng, who one day would tell me he loved me and the next day would ask, “What is love?” In my desperation and despair, I didn’t know if either the child or I could survive if I continued to be in any relationship with Feng. Many years later, Feng told me he had wanted me to get pregnant so I wouldn’t leave him.

At that point, I still hadn’t the slightest idea that a fetus was already a life. I only believed I had no other choice. Some friends in Paris made arrangements for me at the hospital and convinced me it was the best thing to do. I went in, and the doctors gave me full anesthesia. When I woke up, the baby was gone. I felt so empty. As I write about it now, I still feel a deep sadness. That child would be more than twenty years old now.

* * *

I was invited to attend an important conference in Oslo, Norway, titled “The Anatomy of Hate.” Many world leaders and Nobel laureates were also in attendance.

I had lived in a country so isolated from the rest of the world that when I found myself seated next to former president Jimmy Carter, I wasn’t sure who he was.

“What do you do?” I asked him, just to be on the safe side.

“I build houses for homeless people,” he replied.

“I mean before that, what did you do?”

“I was president of the United States.”

Václav Havel, the newly elected president of the Czech Republic, invited me to visit him in Prague. After all his sacrifice as a young man during the Prague Spring, it was encouraging that twenty years later a new democratic society had been born. It strengthened my hope for China.