Forbidden City (15 page)

Leave it to my dad, I thought, to break the law right out in the open, in the most conspicuous spot possible.

By midnight my body wanted to lie down and call it a day but my brain wouldn’t let it. I was worried about Dad. I kept thinking what a nut he is, and if he got arrested, he’d probably ask them to let him tape the trial.

About 12:30
A.M.
I found out that the guy who had been broadcasting from the Yan Jing Hotel that afternoon was an American from
ABC
. We talked for a minute or two after I heard him signing on with his colleagues. He was now at the Min Zu Hotel, which is a couple of blocks east of the Yan Jing. He said that ABC had four reporters covering the story — him, a woman in the square somewhere, a man near Zhong Nan Hai, which is just a bit west of the Forbidden City and is where the Party bigwigs live — and guess where their base was? The Beijing Hotel! Two floors below us! We agreed to keep in touch. He sounded almost as nervous as I felt.

I tried to get interested in the chess game Lao Xu and I had started. Lao Xu kept tapping his long thin fingers on the desk and flinching every time the radio crackled. I couldn’t concentrate. Finally we gave up the game. He sat on the couch and leafed through a
China Reconstructs
magazine — not too interested, obviously, because he didn’t even turn on the lamp.

After a few minutes he closed the magazine and tossed it onto the coffee table. He lay down in the shadows, his head resting on the arm of the couch. His narrow chest rose and fell gently. His brow was creased. His mouth was a straight tense line.

I thought about Lao Xu and what he’d been through the last couple of days. His beloved
PLA
didn’t seem to be acting the way he had told me it would. All his life he had believed in them. His dad had
been an army man who had survived the Long March. A hero. They were all heroes to Lao Xu.

And I knew he was walking a really tight line with us. Eddie might be right about him being a spy, but Lao Xu had stuck with us for more reasons than surveillance. I was convinced of that now. It was as if he wanted to help explain what was happening so that we wouldn’t get the wrong idea. Who was he trying to convince, I thought. Us, or himself?

As I watched him trying to rest, it suddenly struck me how much I liked him. He was intelligent and a scholar, but he wasn’t snobby about it. He had a great sense of humour. And he was really kind to all three of us, especially me. He was my friend.

I started doodling nervously on the pad, sitting in a little pool of yellow light in a hotel room in the middle of a strange city, thousands of miles away from home, waiting for something to happen. And mad, because if anything did happen, I wouldn’t be there.

“Shan Da,” Lao Xu said from the couch, “maybe we should turn on TV and …”

… armoured personnel carrier is approaching the barricade just outside the hotel. Red and white flares have been fired into the sky, giving off a harsh eerie light
.

I dropped my pen and turned on my tape recorder. “Lao Xu!” I hissed.

The couch creaked as he jumped up and hurried to the desk.

Thousands of people are in the street, some lining the sidewalks, some behind the barricade across Chang An Avenue. It looks like they are throwing rocks and bricks at the personnel carrier. The carrier has struck the barrier and climbed it. The crowd is parting like water as the carrier picks up speed. It’s heading towards the square now. Over
.

I snatched up the two-way and switched to channel one. “Dad! Eddie! Can you hear me? Over.”

They answered. I told them what I’d heard. I wrote 1:00
A.M.
on the pad.

“I see it — and hear it — coming this way,” Dad said excitedly. “The crowd here is massed across the avenue in front of the barricade of buses. They’re actually running
towards
the personnel carrier!”

I heard some scratchy noise and then Dad’s muffled voice came back on. “I’ve put the two-way in my pocket so I can use the camera. Hope you can hear me, Alex. The carrier … yes, the carrier has been stopped by the thousands of people in the street. They’ve surrounded it! Someone has tossed a molotov cocktail under it and the flames have already started to engulf it. The crowd is forced back by the heat. I can’t … a couple of students have climbed onto the carrier. Beautiful! I can see their white headbands. They’re helping the men inside the carrier to get out. This is great! I’m getting all of it!”

Dad was so excited he didn’t seem to realize that with his two-way transmit button locked on I couldn’t talk to him.

“The soldiers appear to have gotten out safely and away from the burning personnel carrier. The students have disarmed the soldiers and they seem to have disappeared into the crowd. I’m going to stop shooting now.”

I heard the scratching and scraping again and Dad’s voice came in, clearly now. “Did you get all that, Alex? Over.”

“Got it, Dad. Over.”

“Eddie? Over.”

“Yeah, I picked you guys up. Nothing here so far. Over.”

Lao Xu was seated beside me now, talking softly into the tape recorder and making notes to himself in quick, scrawly Chinese characters. I wrote down 1:10 and switched to five.

… at least fifty trucks filled with troops, moving slowly from the west. They are temporarily stymied by the hastily rebuilt barricades and by the crowds …

Back to one. Dad’s voice: “… setting fire to the buses that are ranged across Chang An just in front of me … I can’t tell who’s doing it. Over.”

“Dad, I just got a report that
fifty
trucks full of troops are headed your way. You’d better move out. Over.” I closed my eyes and added to myself, Dad, please, for once, be sensible.

1:20, channel five…. making their way slowly around the barriers. They are not stopping for the citizens in their way. I’ve seen at least two people crushed under the wheels of the trucks. I repeat. The
troop trucks are driving into the crowds! They are not stopping. The crowd is parting reluctantly, letting them by …

“Dad, get out! The troops are on their way! Over!”

“Yes, I see them, Alex. I can see the trucks coming. The crowd is surging west to meet them. I’ll be okay. Over.”

“Alex! Ted! I can hear shooting! I can hear shooting! It’s coming from somewhere south of the square! Over.”

Lao Xu’s strained voice cut in. “No, no. He must be mistaken. The
PLA
wouldn’t shoot at the people!’

I was already on my feet. I ran into the bedroom and grabbed my backpack. The camcorder was still in it. I rushed back into the living room and yanked battery packs out of the chargers and tossed them in the bag with some 8mm videotapes. I threw on my Mao jacket and pulled my cap on. I dashed to the desk, grabbed the tape recorder, and stuffed it into my jacket pocket. When I picked up the two-way Lao Xu finally clued in to what I was doing.

“Shan Da, no! You must stay here!”

“He won’t leave the square, Lao Xu. I know he won’t. The only way I can get him out of there is to drag him out.”

“He’ll come back soon, Shan Da. He will!”

“You don’t know him, Lao Xu. He’ll forget about everything except getting pictures. I’ve got to go get him out! I’m not staying here while he’s down there!”

Lao Xu searched my face for a moment. I guess he realized he’d have to tie me up and gag me to get me to stay. He went to the door and threw on his own sports jacket.

“Then I must go with you.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

“Wait. Tell Eddie and your father what we’re doing.”

“No way. By the time we finish arguing, I’ll be twenty-three years old.”

We tore out of the suite and down the hall. We got down to the lobby to find a couple of hundred people massed in front of the hotel doors gawking into the street, all talking at once. We shoved rudely through the crowd and ran out onto Chang An Avenue. Once there we found that running was impossible. So we threaded and shouldered our way through the masses of bodies as fast as we could. To the west of us we could see flames with wicked black smoke roiling up from them. That must be the buses and armoured personnel carrier burning, I thought.

We had almost reached the statue of the Goddess of Democracy when Dad came on the radio “The troops are dismounting from the long line of trucks and forming up. They have AK 47s with fixed bayonets. They look like they mean business. Over.”

I realized that I was holding the radio in one hand and the tape recorder in the other. I looked at my watch. 1:40
A.M.
I talked into the recorder.

“… coming towards me! I think they’ve seen the camera. “

Lao Xu and I stopped. We were opposite the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The Goddess stood to our right in a blaze of white light. Between me and my dad were thousands of people and a barricade of burning buses lighting up the western reaches of the square.

“… after me!”

I held the two-way to my ear. I could hear my dad running and a lot of yelling in Chinese. Then I heard a crash.

“No! Don’t!” A smashing sound. More yelling in Chinese. “Alex! They’ve —” Dad let out a blood chilling scream. The radio squealed, then went dead.

I barged through the crowd towards the burning buses. Lao Xu was right beside me.

“They got Dad!” I cried.

Nearer the Great Hall of the People the crowd was thicker, if that was possible. We pushed through, got onto the sidewalk and stopped in front of the huge building. We could see the troops lined up right across Chang An Avenue. I looked around frantically, thinking I might see Dad somewhere. Lao Xu was talking rapidly to people around us and they were shaking their heads.

I keyed the radio. “Eddie? Alex here. Over.”

“Got you, Alex. Hey! You’ll never guess what I saw a minute ago. A guy walking around with a kid up on his shoulders, sight seeing. You’d have thought he was at Ontario Place! He —”

“Eddie,” I heard my own voice shaking, “I think Dad’s been arrested. He might be badly hurt. Over.”

Eddie was all business. For once I was glad of his take-charge tone. “Alex, you stay put, you hear? If he’s been picked up, Lau Xu and I can make a call. I’m going to head back now. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Over.”

Eddie thought we were still in the hotel. As soon as he signed off we heard gunfire coming from the south.

I’ve heard a lot of gunfire on TV and in the movies and it’s mostly pretty exciting, with a lot of
pow
and
rat-tat-tat
and the
zing
of ricochets. It doesn’t sound anything like what we heard echoing through the dark troubled city that night. The machine-gun bursts sounded as if someone far away was beating rapidly on hollow log with hard batons.

There were two long bursts that seemed to go on forever. Probably they lasted five seconds each. The crowd around us started screaming in rage. You didn’t need Chinese to know what angered them. Guns, used by Chinese against Chinese. Out in the street the phalanx of
PLA
began to move towards the square, slowly, stepping in unison. The long wide column was lit by the eerie orange-red light from the flaming buses. They held their AK 47s at waist level, bayonets forward. The flickering orange-red light made them look cold and mechanical.

The crowd let them get about twenty yards, then started throwing things — stones, bottles, anything.
Individuals would burst from the crowd in the street and hurl something, then disappear back into the mass of people.

“Shan Da, we must leave!”

I stuffed the radio, still on receive mode, and the tape recorder into my pockets and struggled out of my pack. I pulled out the camcorder and shouldered the pack again. I looped the camcorder’s strap tightly around my wrist and started to record the machine-like advance of the soldiers, not thinking, possessed by the idea that I had to get this on tape, thinking, people have to see this, people have to know this happened.

Lao Xu was yanking at the back of my coat, trying to pull me away. I shrugged him off.

Through the viewfinder I saw the soldiers stop.

They raised their AK 47s to their shoulders.

Then the night was split open as if a long earsplitting roll of thunder had burst in the sky above us.

I could see it all through the viewfinder, as if I were watching under water. Long spears of flame shot out of the ends of the AK 47s. People dropped away from the crowd in the street. Some fell in heaps like sacks of grain pushed from the back of a truck. Some seemed to leap backward as if yanked on ropes, to collapse on the road, unmoving. The deafening volley continued for at least ten seconds.

The people surged away from the guns, roaring, screaming as the crowd rolled backward to the east. People around me on the sidewalk shouted in rage
and terror, waving fists in the air, shrinking back towards the Great Hall a little, but not turning and running, holding on as if they were numbed by what was happening. One voice separated itself from the din. It was Lao Xu.

He had stopped pulling at my coat. “What are they doing?” he screamed. “What are they doing?” His face was ghostly red from the flames, his eyes wide, unbelieving.

A tiny blob of flame separated from the crowd on the sidewalk across the avenue from us, arched gracefully into the air towards the soldiers, then fell to the road, bursting and sending a miniature river of flame towards them The snouts of the AK 47s came up in unison, spit flame, and the gunfire roared again. Bodies fell by the dozens.

Lao Xu was still screaming, in Chinese now. He pushed his way through the crowd, elbowing his way towards the soldiers. I followed him to the curb. This time it was me clutching the back of his coat.

“Lao Xu, no! Stay here!”

We had a clear view now. We were on the front rank of the people on the sidewalk. The soldiers had lowered their guns and were standing still.

Suddenly Lao Xu burst from the curb and into the street, running towards the soldiers just as they started to move forward again. He raised his hands in the air as if he imagined he could hold them back all by himself. In spite of the noise I could hear his enraged yelling.