Avenue of Eternal Peace (27 page)

Lenses chased the police who chased the students. A kid with glasses jumped from the crowd and stood his ground defiantly on a patch of ice, yelling out as his arms circled in an invocation of the breathing power. He was Philosopher Horse, instigator. As he was surrounded, thumped and rough-handled out of sight, Clarence, from the sidelines, got the shot.

4

Wally's friends met in a small privately run restaurant to farewell him. The doorway was hung with black matting to keep out the cold; inside it was hot and noisy, and ‘Wind of My Homeland, Clouds of My Homeland' blared from the tape-recorder. At the next table a slick chap in a Western suit presided over a lavish banquet while a chubby waitress from the countryside teetered back and forth with piles of plates.

Eagle proposed a toast to Wally, his brother.

‘We're all mates,' replied Wally, ‘and we'll meet again soon.' They laughed.

It was up to Wally to return to their world.

‘
Ganbei
!'

A man at the next table had his back rubbing against Jin Juan's. He turned to excuse himself, checking the group with a sharp grin. ‘How about it? What's her price?' he whispered to Eagle. His weight pressed against Jin Juan's shoulder.

‘Cut it out,' said Eagle.

Neither old nor young, the man had a pockmarked face and lank receding hair. He had a flat bony chest and his eyes were swimming with drunkenness. Putting his cigarette butt to his lips, he arched his body across the table of dishes to his companion in the Western suit and declared, ‘That pimp's selling our Chinese women!'

Eagle leapt up and glowered, ‘Say that again!'

‘Be careful of your leg,' said Jin Juan, tugging him to sit down.

The insults continued. Why wouldn't the pimp sell his woman to real Chinese men if he was prepared to sell her to the foreigner? Because the Chinese had no US dollars, that was why the pimp had come to like the foreigner's smell.

By now Wally had understood enough to be offended on everyone's behalf and rose to his feet. He was the tallest man in the restaurant and began to tell them off in comical elementary Chinese. The man in the Western suit stood and jeered in the foreigner's face, his own face red with affront and hostility. Through sleazy business in the provinces he had made stacks of money and was vain of his sophisticated ways. To be undermined while throwing his cash around in a cosy restaurant made him explode.

‘Throw the foreigner out,' he ordered the boss. ‘We don't want foreigners with our women. We are China. My father was skewered to death trying to keep the little Japanese out of our town. My uncle joined the Red Army to throw off foreign oppression. My grandfather was a Boxer for the Emperor. Am I not a Chinese man? Kill the foreigners!'

He had a babyish, well-fed face and nothing would stop him. People gaped nervously, their sympathies washing back and forth in confusion. A crowd was gathering. Eagle insisted on a fight and Mother Lin hissed at him. David tried to make Song leave. Everyone was laying down the law, and punchy arguments sparked around the room. Wally made fists with his hands as the big mouth continued to rave.

Then the wily boss calmly ushered the waitress forward to the man's table. At its centre was a huge fish in a sea of sauce, ancient symbol of fortune and prosperity and the meal's crowning piece of ostentation. The diners had been too full of drink and of themselves to touch it. The waitress picked up the dish and, from a height, overturned it and dropped it onto the table. Steadily she took the other dishes and smashed them down one by one, with whatever food remained, against the upside-down fishplate, until the table was a mess of shards and slops. In the awed silence the boss led the man outside, the crowd mildly making way. When the boss returned the place was tidy again.

‘Someone from out of town,' he said to Wally. ‘Please accept my apologies.'

‘It's nothing,' said Wally weightily.

‘What an idiot!' people began to murmur, ‘What a jumped-up fool!'

Yet they were viscerally impressed.

‘I'm lucky to be alive,' said Wally to Jin Juan when they were alone at the end of the night. ‘That same craziness. You understand that's why I want to give you a way out.'

‘That's why I'm staying. Do you understand?'

‘Because you're Chinese?' At this last moment he could no longer maintain his philosophical acceptance. ‘No, I don't understand. Is it me you reject, or my culture, my shape—what is it?' He held her and kissed her closed eyes, and she responded soothingly, with tenderness born of affection.

When she was asleep, he lay thinking in the darkness. He would take the plane alone and fly to the other hemisphere. He was always restless and perplexed before long-distance flights, as if part of him had already lifted off. He thought of his dead wife and wondered how her existence in any other world might compare with the life she had led with him. He had come grieving to China, and through all its layers—his searching for a treatment, a past, a lost old man, a lover—had been his quest for Bets, for a body to wear her shadow. What Jin Juan had done was to refuse his offer. She had profited from his kindness only so far as suited her independence and dignity. He felt cold and lonely, and tossed over onto his stomach in a spasm of rage. The woman sleeping beside him did not stir. There were political struggles and human struggles and a compulsive groping for sense. People were running forward with their arms open. But like the supernatural visitor of old legend, Jin Juan was gone. He screwed up his eyes. It was Bets who had gone, and all of China could not take her place. Jin Juan was there, outside his personal equation, and China was there, part of the great world in and for which he must continue to work and strive. And slowly his grief would be turned to loving memory. How he looked forward to landing back on the solid routine of work and science, as the plane pointed for home.

At the airport Director Kang and Mrs Gu, Jin Juan and Eagle managed a united front. The Doctor promised to return, shook all their hands and passed through the barrier. Later, when the plane was flying, he put the headset on.
You must dance for two instead of one
. The music surprised him. It was no longer ghostly, just a song. He would go on dancing for two, with China's bony arm hooked round his.

Director Kang and Mrs Gu had use of an official car for the ride back from the airport. With her new position and her new flat at the Medical College, Jin Juan was also entitled to the privilege. She chose, instead, to accompany Eagle in a taxi they would have to pay for. He had to be careful of his leg, deprived of the Doctor's protection. He was no one's responsibility but his own now. Jin Juan helped Eagle into the car, and held his hand on the long ride into town, for miles, approaching the capital down the straight bare avenue of flashing trees.

5

The world's feathers were scarcely ruffled when, two weeks later, in the wake of the demonstrations, a foreign news photographer, Clarence Codrington, was deported at twenty-four hours' notice on a trumped-up charge of ‘activities incompatible with his status as a journalist'. He was found to be in possession of a proscribed cultural relic, a Han dynasty vase. In the wake of the incident a young and over-rich trader in fake Tang horses was investigated for corruption, along with the management of the New Age Bar. Egregious Party Greenhorn was commended for doing his duty in drawing the matter to the authorities' attention and the bar was demolished. The world was also unaware that an impassioned young man called Philosopher Horse, who had been detained without trial until the fun died down, was branded a counter-revolutionary and locked up for fifteen years, along with his democratic dreams. But it was not over. In Tiananmen Square the crowds continued to tramp across the frozen moat, under the red arch and the dead leader's portrait, and the surveillance cameras installed by the security forces, to visit the Forbidden City. And in a few years' time their numbers would surge again down the Avenue of Eternal Peace, a million or more, as the citizens massed together to demand change. Terrible would be the sacrifice as fire filled the night, and great would be the future.

Postscript

Emeritus Professor Wally Frith addresses a ceremony at Peking Union Medical College (Beijing, 2008).

Ladies and gentlemen. Colleagues. Friends. I am honoured to be invited back to speak to you as we celebrate the award of the prestigious Heilmann Award for Medical Advancement to Dr Song Weihong. Over the past twenty years China's international research collaboration has produced significant results in many areas—nowhere more so than in medicine. The cooperation between PUMC and my own research institution in Australia is just one example. My old friend, Dr Song, leads one of the world's great research teams, working with her colleagues at the Harvard Medical School to unlock the human genome and to apply that knowledge to cancer treatment. Hers is a major contribution to the unending human quest for understanding and well-being. We acknowledge that contribution tonight.

Applause.

As a retired professor, I am something like a veteran of the Long March. Medical progress in my own generation has been extraordinary. But it takes a young person's imagination even to think about what might be possible for the next generation. To the students here tonight I say, ‘That is your task.'

Dr Song Weihong's success continues the great traditions of this College. She draws on the pioneering work of your renowned early researcher, Professor Hsu Chien Lung, who passed away in 1988. I was fortunate enough to meet him a couple of years before he died, at his home in Shaoxing. I owe Dr Song a personal debt for that. She also introduced me to my wife, Jin Juan, who is old Professor Hsu's granddaughter. Her daughter—our daughter—his
great
-granddaughter—is also here tonight, and also wants to do medical research.

Wally looked up from his text to see Jin Juan and nineteen-year-old Jojo seated in the front row, each elegant woman watching him with a version of the same clear, calm intelligence. Beside them were Song and Rong, and their daughter Claudia, and an empty seat for his grown up son Jerome, who was hiding behind his camera as he recorded the proceedings from the aisle.

How much more should he say? He remembered Eagle at PUMC, in a hospital ward, and Jin Juan beside the bed during the young man's convalescence. After Wally was gone, she and Eagle had become lovers. Then, after her grandfather died and she was free of family responsibility, Jin Juan and Eagle had married. Wally received the news with mixed feelings, but he appreciated their resilience. Jin Juan was pregnant with Eagle's child when Tiananmen happened and Eagle answered the call. Eagle had experienced too much obstruction of his natural hopefulness not to vent his passion when the moment came, though his wife and his mother had warned him repeatedly. It was what he must do, he insisted, all he
could
do, as a citizen of Beijing. After the night of June third, when he went to the square, they never saw him again. His daughter, Jojo, was born that Tiananmen autumn.

Wally wrote letters of condolence, and then of congratulations, in both instances offering whatever help he could. Even at a remove of continents and oceans, he was unable to detach himself. But he would not cast himself as a friend of the Chinese people in general; he was not on that journey. He had some particular friends and he was willing to want what they wanted. That was all. He had returned to Beijing in a later grey year to see Jin Juan. Her agreeing to marry him meant she and her child, then one, could escape to Australia. Wally wanted that. She could continue her work as a specialist translator in Sydney, he promised, and they would take it from there.

Standing now at the garlanded podium, Wally felt a surge of emotion in his love for Jin Juan. They had found happiness together, their feelings for each other holding together all that had gone before, China and Australia, the dead and the living.

The audience stirred. He cleared his throat.

Maybe she will work here one day, as a medical researcher, just as Dr Song's daughter, Claudia, who is also with us tonight, hopes to practice in Beijing when she completes her law degree in America. I remember her as a precocious kid, reciting all the capital cities of the world—in alphabetical order. She was the first really global person I knew.

Wally felt moved to open his arms, like a preacher.

And now that applies to all of you, as the world comes to Beijing for the Olympic Games and life puts the future in your hands.

The applause surged as he stepped down from the podium. He was relieved by its warmth. The banner across the stage read:
Smile Beijing. Volunteer for the Olympics. Build a Harmonious Society
.

When the ceremony was done, there was a celebratory dinner. Jin Juan thanked Wally again for mentioning her grandfather and they all toasted the old man's memory. The College had been skilful in resisting the real estate development that plundered Beijing after Tiananmen. Shopping malls lined the Avenue of Eternal Peace through this part of town, yet, one block back, the graceful buildings of PUMC remained, somewhat overshadowed, with stubborn dignity, which allowed them this night to dine in a grand hall of red and gold.

Afterwards, as Wally walked with Jin Juan and Jojo across the dark courtyard toward Goldfish Alley and their hotel, it was easy for him to recall his feelings of arrival in that frozen world so many years ago. As they turned the corner into Wangfujing, into a city transformed by the present, with spring in the air, the personalities of that earlier time swept across his memory.

‘Hey, how about we eat at Jumbo's restaurant tomorrow?' Jojo suggested.

‘If we can get in,' said Jin Juan.

Jumbo, the artist, had ridden the contemporary art wave on his return to China, without Dulcia. He lived in a New York-style studio in an artists' community and owned a popular city restaurant that specialised in gourmet insects and weeds. Through Jumbo, Wally heard about the two guys who had hung out in the New Age Bar where the expats used to drink. The rebuilt New Age just got bigger and bigger. Its clientele was at the centre of every scam in Beijing throughout the 1990s. The kid they called Party Greenhorn, on account of his connections, got to the top of Twenty-First Century Realty, the property group responsible for turning farming villages into residential developments. Along the way, he broke with his buddy, the one they called Foreign Trader, who became a scapegoat during an anti-corruption purge and was executed, a bullet in the back of his head, after a televised confession. Barman Bi had been looked after—he now managed China's most exclusive golf club.

Philosopher Horse was still in jail when Tiananmen happened in 1989, and had served ten of his fifteen-year sentence when he was released on medical grounds, broken in body and spirit. He returned to his home town in the south and lived on charity. People who were prospering in the boom economy were happy to put some money his way. They knew the poor fellow was right about the just society, that he was the one who stuck his neck out when no one else dared. Wally had followed the case through Amnesty International. The fiery poet Build-the-Country was also in the thick of things at Tiananmen. He was rounded up and charged with ‘inciting counter-revolutionary turmoil'. After a couple of years he was released, but kept under surveillance, and when he spoke out again he was again detained. He could have left China—the authorities would have welcomed that—but he stayed and joined other committed and outspoken writers to form an International PEN group and made themselves heard.

Clarence had been at Tiananmen. His photographs were a sliver of history. Two years later he succumbed to AIDS, in the last months of his life setting up a medical research fund with his own money and what he had received from his famous novelist mother's estate. Clarence reconnected with Autumn's sister in Beijing—she had a small son—and looked after the family. Through his intervention, though they did not meet again, Autumn now lives in England, a chubby middle-aged man, pleased with his vintage-clothing business. He is intending to visit his family in Beijing this August for the Games.

Mother Lin's promised new flat did not come through by the time of Tiananmen. Her old brick home was not far from the square, which made it easy for Eagle to come and go in those fervent weeks. After she lost her son, her home became part of her curse. If she had been moved to decent accommodation—her right as a long-time resident—her son would have had no base from which to join the protests. To be relocated afterwards was little solace. By then she had become one of the Tiananmen Mothers, campaigning for recognition for their sacrificed children. ‘Getting on for a hundred years I've lived in the capital,' Mother Lin told Wally with bitter humour, ‘and I've learned one thing. The government always makes the wrong decision.'

Wally, Jin Juan and Jojo laughed with the old woman. Jojo delighted in her Beijing grandmother. As long as she could remember they'd always been laughing together, picking up where they left off each time she came back. When Mother Lin looked at Jojo, she saw not only her missing beloved son, but also, through her tears, a girl full of her own sunny energy, full of a new enthusiasm for life, and she loved her with pure sweetness.

Earlier that day, Wally and Jin Juan had strolled around the construction site where the landmark edifices of the Olympic Games were growing to completion. With the other sightseers they gawped at the stadium, as conceived by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a gigantic bird's nest bound in shining steel, beside it the bubbly blue box of the translucent water cube for the swimming, designed by German-Australian Chris Bosse. Landscapers—work teams from out of town—were in their own race against the clock, planting the root balls of severely pruned trees in the orange earth, their spring growth already bursting in a jade blush on the topmost fronds. The wind overnight had cleared the air of pollution, and the distant hills were outlined like glass against a blue sky.

For Wally's benefit, Jin Juan quoted some lines from Du Fu, great poet of the Tang dynasty. He had almost used the same words in his address at the College.

Even if the country collapses,

mountains and rivers remain.

Spring in the city:

grass shoots and new leaves grow.

But the irony of renewing life was not quite the right note. The mood he detected all around was a starker optimism. He had let the quote go.

Their taxi flew above the old
hutong
on a clean, new overpass as they took the Fourth Ring Road back to Mother Lin's new flat. Wally and Jin Juan looked down at the low brick walls of yesterday with passive, passing attention, clasping hands. Their driver turned to them with one of those pasted-on, tip-me-big grins and quipped, ‘Things just keep on getting better and better.'