Forbidden City (12 page)

I woke up before dawn. I had been tossing and turning, having bad dreams that I forgot as soon as I woke. I felt wrung out and low, like nothing good was going to happen that day and I might as well stay in bed.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t get back to sleep no matter how much I tried.

So I got up and wandered into the office. The little red lights on the battery rechargers glared angrily at me
like vicious insects. I turned on the light and the red eyes almost disappeared. I shut the door behind me so I wouldn’t disturb Dad and Eddie. They were both whacked. They had been working like madmen for the last while.

I made some tea — there’s always a big thermos bottle or two full of boiled water in the office — and turned the light off again. The red insect eyes came back to life but I ignored them. I cleared a spot on the top of the desk Lao Xu uses and climbed up, sitting cross-legged with my knees almost touching Eddie’s plants, and looked out the window. The street below glowed with pools of amber light from the streetlights. Bikes drifted by. Joggers trundled along in the bike lanes. The odd taxi swooshed past. It was nice and peaceful and quiet.

But I couldn’t get rid of the feeling of — I don’t know —
dread
is too strong a word, I guess, but that’s the idea. I don’t even know what caused the feeling. Maybe it was just hangover from whatever nightmare woke me up.

I sipped my tea and watched the street. People. I remembered that impression I had had on the way to see the Great Wall. People. You couldn’t look anywhere, across a field in the afternoon, down an alley at night, into a street before dawn, without seeing people. I followed the tail-lights of a taxi speeding west toward the square. There, I knew, thousands of students were camped out, lying on narrow cots or cold concrete, waiting for the dawn. And the soldiers
they knew would eventually march on them. It came into my mind again that many of the students are only a year or two older than me. They’re trying to change things. People like Lan and Hong are sacrificing a lot to change things. I remembered, too, stories my Dad had told me about his days in university. He had demonstrated, too, about South Africa, environmental stuff. What have I done, so far? Watched TV, listened to the radio, gone to school. Played with toy soldiers.

I stayed perched on the desk, sipping green tea, watching the light leak onto the street from my left, turning it grey, then grey-white. I could tell by the red flags on top of the Great Hall of the People in the distance that the wind was stiffening.

The street below me stepped up its life. Buses snorted along, the bikes came out in force, pedestrians hurried here and there, taxis turned into the hotel parking lot or slipped out into the street and away.

It wasn’t too long after that when I realized that something was going on. What tipped me off was that a lot of the pedestrians had stopped moving and soon the sidewalks on both sides of Chang An Avenue were jammed.

It was another demonstration. The marchers came into view from my left along with the bright sunlight. They filled the street, walking slowly under huge banners which bellied and dipped in the wind. As the procession came by, people from the sidewalks joined in.

I got off the desk to wake Dad and Eddie.

The demonstration turned out to be the biggest yet. More than a million people took part, students, factory workers, women pushing bamboo baby strollers. The banners shouted
Democracy Now!
and
Support the Students!
and
Stop the Corruption!
There were a lot of what Lao Xu called “rude” posters, too — what I call Down Withs. And there were posters with cartoons on them, showing Deng Xiao-ping and his two sons driving Mercedes Benz cars, and other guys I didn’t recognize counting stacks of money.

In the afternoon I was up on the roof with Dad, who was, naturally, watching everything through the lens of his Betacam, when the big wind — the
da feng
— started to blow. Then the rain came. The storm turned vicious fast, driving the rain like nails, drenching us in minutes. We went back to the suite and watched from the windows, wiping the steam away with wet hands. The marchers didn’t quit. They kept it up, flowing slowly, like cold syrup, towards the square, hanging on to their posters and banners like drowning sailors.

Today Beijing Radio broadcast a report on yesterday’s big demonstration. Lao Xu translated for us and I taped his translation. The report was telling about the demonstration as if only a few thousand people had been involved. It didn’t say that workers from the factories took part, or ordinary citizens. It gave the impression that the demonstrators were all rebellious students and “bad elements” and “hooligans.”

I was laughing at those 1930s gangster-movie
terms when I noticed Lao Xu’s face go pale. His mouth dropped open and he stopped translating.

He just stared at the screen for a moment, then he whispered, “No, no.”

Dad noticed before Eddie did. “What’s the matter, Lao Xu?”

Lao Xu gulped and said so low I could barely hear him over the voice on the TV. “The government has said that the student demonstrators are counter-revolutionaries!”

“My god,” Eddie gasped. “My god. Now they’re really in for it.”

Dad looked as confused as I felt. But he and I had been in China long enough to know that propaganda labels mean a lot. “What does that mean exactly?”

“It means,” Lao Xu answered, “that the student demonstrators are enemies of the state. It means that if they are arrested they can be shot.”

“What?” I shouted. “Enemies? Shot? That’s dumb! They haven’t done anything wrong! They’re just trying to improve things!”

Dad chimed in, “But all the demonstrations have been remarkably peaceful, Lao Xu.”

Lao Xu suddenly looked tired. “I know, Ted. But none of that matters now. If the students don’t leave the square …”

Eddie was already banging away on the computer. He talked while he typed, his hands a blur. “They’d better leave,” he said. “They’d better. Ted, get the fax ready, will you?”

Rumours, rumours, rumours.

It’s hard to sort out all the rumours. One says that Deng Xiao-ping is seriously ill and the Chinese embassies around the world have been notified to expect an announcement of his death. Another says he’s already dead and the power struggle to replace him has started and the hard-line conservatives, headed by Li Peng, are in control. Another
says he’s healthy and is hiding in Sichuan, his native province, to keep distant from the turmoil so he doesn’t get his hands dirty if something bad happens.

Two rumours are solid. One, the army has Beijing surrounded. Soldiers have been moving into the area again since martial law was declared six days ago. I got out my map of the city and showed Dad and Eddie where soldiers would probably be massed. One place would be the main railway station on East Qian Men Street, not too far from Tian An Men Square. Another would be the Wu Lu railway station to the west of the city. I figured this because, in China, there isn’t a big network of highways like there is in North American cities, so the main way to move people and produce and stuff is the trains. They’d probably use military airports, too, but they were too far away to be on my map.

I hopped on my bike and checked out the main railway station myself. I came at it from the south and scanned the huge network of rails with binoculars. Sure enough, there were dozens and dozens of railway cars resting on the sidings with thousands of soldiers sitting outside cooking noodles on open fires, washing clothes in little wash basins, doing what all soldiers have to know how to do — wait. It was awesome. I almost wished I could be one of them. Then I remembered Lan and Hong and why the army was in Beijing.

The Wu Lu station was too far away to reconnoiter, but I was pretty sure there would be the same scene there.

Eddie and Lao Xu went down to the square to see how the students were responding to the news. The demonstrators were shocked that the government had said they were counter-revolutionaries. There were lots of meetings going on to decide what to do.

“A couple of thousand students have vowed not to leave the square until the government reforms itself,” Eddie told us, “but a lot of the students — maybe most — have already left. Who can blame them?”

Things were pretty quiet today. We heard more rumours that tanks and armoured personnel carriers have massed on the outskirts of the city but, as Eddie says in his newspaper-ese, we haven’t been able to confirm these reports.

As soon as he said that, though, he added, “There’s something going on here that’s a lot bigger than student demonstrations.”

How come the heavy-duty hardware? When I saw the
PLA
on the twenty-third they weren’t even armed. Tanks? Armoured personnel carriers? Seems pretty demented to me.